Review: WE ARE GATHERED at Arena Stage

Live theater is one of the oldest and best art forms for exploring inner conflict. When it follows in this tradition, Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s newest work, We Are Gathered, is interesting and effective. 

McCraney is an award winning playwright known for co-writing the film Moonlight, which won Best Picture at the 2016 Academy Awards. We Are Gathered, playing at the Arena Stage through June 11, deals with similar themes. Like Moonlight, it centers around a queer Black man dealing with both external and internal pressure to define his sexuality and identity. 

In the first act, the main character, Wallace Tre wrestles with the idea of marriage. He struggles to reconcile conflicts between individual freedom and commitment, between queer culture and traditional social structures, between his own needs and the needs of others. These tensions are resonant and thought-provoking. 

However in the second act, things get confused. A hodgepodge of other themes and minor characters compete for attention, bringing the play to an exhausting 2 hours and 40 minutes. Thankfully, phenomenal acting helps carry you through. W. Tre is played by Kyle Beltran. His partner, Free, is played by Nic Ashe. Both have Broadway credits and indisputable talent. The rest of the cast matches their abilities, switching between multiple roles from scene to scene. 

From the start, we can see W. Tre is at a difficult decision point. Will he or won’t he ask Free to marry him? What might seem a simple question, spirals in W. Tre’s mind. For obvious reasons, he's never thought of himself as a traditional guy. He’s not even sure he can be one if he tries. Given what he’s been through, what he’s done, does he even have a right to try? And anyways isn’t entering a monogamous marriage just conforming to out-dated institutions that have deliberately shut queer people out? Is it possible to participate in a system that wants to negate your experience? Is it wrong to engage with a religion that calls your life and your love, a sin? 

The playbill for We Are Gathered claims this is a story about love and joy. I’d say it’s a much more important one about love and sacrifice. There is no one right answer to W. Tre’s questions. It’s to McCraney’s credit that he doesn’t pretend there is. Instead, both W. Tre and Free, and all the characters at different points, have to make difficult decisions and come to terms with trade-offs. They have to sacrifice certain beliefs about the world, themselves, and each other. They have to wrestle with tensions that in the end cannot be fully resolved. 

Much of the best writing in the show sits within the two main characters’ monologues as they take this challenge on. The monologue, which never quite works in movies and tends to drag on in books, is what makes live theater uniquely great at getting into the mind of a character. As they speak aloud, the characters’ questions and anxieties become our own. 

This effect is multiplied and modernized through McCraney’s creative approach to audience involvement. There is no fourth wall in We Are Gathered. Before the show even begins, the audience is primed to act as interlocutors. So when W. Tre enters the stage, he is not speaking aloud to himself, he’s speaking to us. Or perhaps, at us. He addresses us directly, yet from a distance. It’s as if, reminiscent of our times, he’s speaking into a camera or on a live stream, the way most of us experience monologues in the age of social media. As the audience, we can express our appreciation, approval, or disapproval, but not engage in a full conversation. The actors play off these reactions while adapting timing and rhythm to keep the flow. This approach works well. It strengthens the feeling of community that live theater provides without too much pressure on the crowd. It’s a smart strategy in an era where art can be live-streamed from the comfort of our homes.

 It’s unfortunate that the power of this timely approach was muted beneath the check-the-box approach to cramming in every politically relevant topic. A stronger focus and a shorter script would have better served the emotional, and important, questions of what love looks like in the modern world. 

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