United SoloShow Festival Presents THIS GARDEN PLOT

United SoloShow Festival presents This Garden Plot Sunday October 31 at 3pm, at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, NYC. Tickets at the box office or on the web at: https://nitedsolo.org/shows/this-garden-plot/.

The play, devised and performed by Gil Cole, grew out of life in a pandemic. A sequence of poems by Walt Whitman and Thom Gunn forms a story of love, loss, mourning, healing.

The piece opens with the entrance of the figure of the Would Dresser, the narrator of Whitman's great poem about the trauma of tending to the wounded in the Civil War. The man we meet carries his few belongings with him, and he creates a place for himself to live as he responds to being asked "what was it like?" He tells us about war and the young men he cared for. Through a selection from Whitman's "Calamus" poems, he tells us a story of determination to live and love freely as a Gay man in a time when the clinical term "homosexual" had only just been invented. He challenges us with his radical ideas about wht it means to live in community with others, and about death. His story is still urgent and evocative as we emerge from life with COVID-19.

Shifting forward a century, Part Two is built from the poetry of Thom Gunn. The narrator brings us to a leather bar in the early 1960's, a part of Gay culture that was hidden from the attention of most people. He shows us his renegade sexual life but also his intimate domestic life with a long-term partner. All too quickly his life is taken over by AIDS as, 11 years after the Stonewall Riot, a virus emerged and changed our lives. He must find a way to go on, to mourn, and to let go. For many of us who have been around awhile, COVID-19 was our second pandemic. Gunn's descriptions and lessons are as potent today as they were when he wrote them 25 years ago.

Linked together, the work of Whitman and Gunn form a diptych of the life of Gay men in American, from 1895 through 1995. This Garden Plot is an expression of the experience and wisdom of previous generations. It is a work that grew out of a time of trouble that, in the end, offers its audience the hope of healing and love.

Gil Cole trained as an actor at The Juilliard School and worked in the theatre for 9 years, appearing on Broadway in Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy's "A Meeting by the River," Off-Broadway in the Roundabout Theater's revival of William Inge's "Dark at the Top of the Stairs," and in "Henry V," directed by Joseph Papp in Central Park. Toward the beginning of life with AIDS, he returned to school and eventually trained to be a psychoanalyst. He was in practice for 30 years before he retired in February 2021. He is the author of Infecting the Treatment: Being an HIV Positive Analyst, and many articles on sexuality and gender. This show marks a longed-for return to work in the theatre and a debut as a playwright.

This Garden Plot wil be performed on Sunday October 31 at 3pm. The performance on Sasturday November 20 has sold out.

Tickets can be purchased at; https://unitedsolo.org/shows/this-garden-plot/.

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