Playwright Imagines Life Beyond the Headlines

by Jim Farmer, Southern Voice

ATLANTA PLAYWRIGHT TOPHER PAYNE never expected it. Neither did Process Theatre artistic director DeWayne Morgan. But starting next week, the Process Theatre Company presents the “3 by Topher” Play Festival, a trio of world premieres penned by Payne. According to Morgan, the company mounts a festival each spring, and the timing was perfect, but it wasn’t planned.

“It wasn’t that we were looking to do a play festival of Topher’s work, but he had three plays written at the time,” he says.

“The Perfect Arrangement” is the gayest of the trio. In it, state department workers who have just helped get rid of communists are asked to now take care of “deviants” — in other words, homosexuals. What no one knows is that two of the employees are gay themselves, with marriages to cover their secret.

Payne got the inspiration from the Lavender Scare, which began in 1950 when 190 gay employees were fired from the government for security reasons.

“I’d never heard of it, and I consider myself reasonably savvy,” Payne says. “It seemed so ripe for a story. I did research, watching a lot of ‘50s sitcoms, getting that vocabulary down.”

“ABOVE THE FOLD,” WHICH PAYNE describes as “dark and twisted and fabulous,” also contains gay content. “It’s about people on the periphery of news events no one ever bothered to interview,” he says. “They are hiding or ignored.”

Among the characters are two lesbian co-workers of a young man who later goes on a high school killing spree. Others include the gay makeup artist for a young woman in a coma about to make her TV debut; a woman who loses a beauty pageant; and a young man who has kept quiet about his relationship with a pop star.

Originally, “Above the Fold” was supposed to premiere in New York last year at a theater Payne tactfully refuses to name. According to Payne, the company loved the script and was anxious to produce it, but a donor who was a graduate of Virginia Tech felt uncomfortable with the shooter piece, claiming it was too sympathetic to the killer.

The theater wanted to cut that segment, but Payne balked and decided he would rather have it produced elsewhere. “These people do horrible things, but they are people,” Payne says. “Where did it come from? How do we understand that? I felt that scene drove the whole point home of what it was trying to communicate. I didn’t want to lose that.”

Besides directing “Above the Fold” and “Don’t Look at the Fat Lady,” Morgan is appearing in “The Perfect Arrangement.” He has long been a fan of Payne’s work.

“I think Topher’s main gift is that he is able to make his characters and their words sound so real,” Morgan says.

THE FINAL SHOW is the comedy-drama “Don’t Look at the Fat Lady,” which is loosely based on the real life story of Gail Grinds, a 40-year-old woman who was confined to a sofa for two to five years, weighed 600 pounds and whose skin was literally stuck to the sofa. She died just after emergency workers rescued her.

“Her whole life was reduced to a punchline, but she had a life,” Payne says. “I felt she deserved better. When I see someone who is overweight, [the tendency] is to say ‘how can you do that to yourself.’ It makes us look at our own prejudices towards fat people. I come from Mississippi, the fattest state in the country. We work hard to make fat people invisible,” he says.

Payne is also a weekly columnist for David Atlanta Magazine, a sister publication to Southern Voice.

Return of the Sissies

By Rob Beck, Southern Voice

THERE’S TRUTH IN THE old adage that there’s never too much of a good thing. Note the Process Theatre's presentation of the local return run of Del Shores’ “Southern Baptist Sissies,” in repertory with Shores’ cult classic “Sordid Lives,” less than six months after “Sissies” concluded its initial Atlanta run in May.The shows kick off on Oct. 3 at Whole World Theater’s Third Space.

The overlapping casts feature most of the original “Sissies” cast, with “Sordid Lives” director and “Sissies” co-director DeWayne Morgan stepping in to fill the role of the Preacher. “Sissies,” co-directed by Morgan and Barbara Cole Uterhardt, tells the story of four boys growing up in a small southern town and coming to terms with their sexual orientation. “Sordid Lives” recounts a Texas family’s misguided but hilarious efforts to get through the funeral of its recently deceased matriarch.

Morgan says both “Sissies” and “Sordid Lives” are such hits with gay audiences — as indicated by the sold-out final three weeks of the initial run of “Sissies” in Atlanta — because Shores’ work resonates with experiences and people familiar to Southern gay men and lesbians.

“Del wrote about who he was growing up in Texas, and Atlanta, while not Texas, is Southern. A lot of the stigmas that he experienced there, gay people experience here,” Morgan says. “Plus, he writes Southern so well, in terms of the comedy and the characters and people. Some of the characters you see in ‘Sordid Lives,’ like Sissy, Latrelle, and Lavonda, are women that you know. When they walk in and start talking, you realize you knew them growing up or you had an aunt who was like that. He captures them so well.”

Topher Payne, who reprises his “Sissies” role as Mark Fuller, concurs that audiences relate to the stories on a personal level, which keeps them coming back for more.“Atlanta is made up so much of a community of transplants,” he says. “You think of all the people that moved to Atlanta from smaller towns throughout the South, and that’s why the experience of seeing the show for so many people speaks to their personal history. It validates the choices that we made, and kind of honors that that sense of community happens a lot earlier in life than we’re often willing to admit.”

For his part as the playwright, Shores is thrilled to hear about the return of his plays to Atlanta, though he admits to surprise at the impact of “Sissies,” the tear-jerking and personal, yet still funny, cousin of the raucous “Sordid Lives.”

“I felt like I was just telling my story,” he says. “I soon found out that I was telling a lot of gay men’s stories, as well as those of gay women and beyond. My producing partner, Sharon Lane, who is no longer with us, always said it was about anybody that felt different, and I think that’s why it really resonated with so many people.”

Payne looks forward to the chance to allow more people to see “Sissies,” which was hard to get into at the end of its run. “We were hoping to provide an opportunity for anybody who wants to see the show,” he says. “Well, dammit, we’ll let you see it.”

FANS OF BOTH PLAYS can look forward to the same trademark heart and humor of previous runs, but with marked improvements, according to cast and crew. Most notable is the addition of Juanita, the wisecracking barfly who was created for the “Sordid Lives” film in 2000 and was much missed by audiences during the play’s 2004 Atlanta production.

“This version has Juanita in it,” Morgan says. “That’s the one thing that is going to delight the audiences, actually getting to see that character.”

Payne is excited about the chance for the cast and crew to refine the production as a whole.

“To be able to come back and say, ‘Okay, let’s try it again,’ is exciting,” he says. “So much of the rehearsal process is taken up by the business of doing theater: learning the blocking, learning the lines, getting to know the cast. We already have that. We have been able to delve deeper into the characters and what the playwright wanted to express, so that’s been a really unique experience.”

Morgan says that at first, the prospect of taking on both plays at the same time was daunting. But the fact that “Sissies” was done so recently, combined with the efforts of Uterhardt as co-director, made the process smoother than expected.

“We’ve saved everything,” he says. “It’s going to be a little different, because we’ve kept the same blocking, and Barbara’s just tweaking the show, making any changes from last year.”

Payne welcomes the infusion of new blood to the production.“[Morgan and Uterhardt] are kind of taking what DeWayne originally did with the show and honoring that, but having a fresh set of eyes on it has kind of challenged us all,” he says. “A different director will say, ‘Let’s look at it this way,’ and then you suddenly explode with ideas.”

FANS OF THE shows tend to overlap, but comes with its own distinct feel. “Sordid Lives” tends towards non-stop “rip-roaring” humor, according to Morgan, and “Sissies,” while not without its funny moments, leans to the introspective.

“The thing about ‘Sissies’ is it makes you think about how you feel about yourself and accepting yourself for who you are,” Morgan says.

Shores says that “Sissies” is ultimately about the various paths in life he ended up taking along with his characters.

“There’s a scene [in ‘Sissies’] where Mark’s talking to TJ, who was once the love of his life, and he says, ‘I'm going on a journey. A quest,’” Shores says. “That’s what happened with me writing it: I went on a journey to try and find some answers for me, and they’re not all there yet. That’s the way life is. It’s about a journey.”

Through the Years

Process Theatre stages decades of four gay men's lives with Baptist roots

by Jim Farmer

Southern Voice

If you thought growing up gay was hard on its own merits, try growing up gay in the Baptist Church. That’s the dilemma in Process Theatre’s “Southern Baptist Sissies,” now playing at Whole World Theatre.

The latest play by Del Shores (“Sordid Lives”) follows four men over a few decades after their eventual realization that they might be gay. The main character is Mark Lee Fuller (Topher Payne), who in his teen years develops a crush on T.J. (Matt Sutter). T.J. shares the feelings, but he can’t handle the situation and decides to start dating women. The confident Benny (Greg Morris) becomes a drag queen named Iona Traylor. Andrew (Marcelo Banderas) is the most introspective of the group — and the one most racked with guilt.

“Sissies” flip flops between the men’s stories and those of two barflies who meet and form a friendship. Peanut (George Deavours) is a wisecracking middle-aged gay man who befriends Odette (Jo Howarth), a saucy redhead. Shores’ “Sissies” has its share of patented one-liners, but it ultimately offers more depth and emotion than the popular but lightweight “Sordid Lives.”

And this production is also very well played. Payne handles his lead role easily, going through some tricky emotional material. Payne is matched by Banderas and newcomer Sutter. Banderas’ Andrew is the saddest of the characters, and the actor is able to convey a world of pain in his eyes. Sutter convincingly tries to hide his character’s true self. In a stock role, Deavours also brings energy to “Sissies.”

Probably the best performance is that of Greg Morris. He is really the only one of the four main characters who seems to age at all. At first, he is the kid singing in the choir. A number of years later, he is a fiercely independent grown-up, comfortable in his own shoes.

Process Theatre artistic director DeWayne Morgan makes the backdrop of the church a believable, scary world. He is not afraid to be erotic. A sequence where two of the characters sexually interact while a preacher is mid-sermon is pretty darn steamy.

Perhaps most surprisingly, “Southern Baptist Sissies” proves to be a bleak, cynical piece of work. It features vivid characters dealing with gay issues, yet in the end, it seems unfairly grim, almost retro in its outlook. The show may make for powerful theater, but is this progress?

It’s always easy to cut The Process Theatre a little slack, since they are one of the only troupes in town to go after gay material with such fervor on a regular basis. This is a well-written play that deals impressively and honestly with the pressures of gays and the church. It’s truly worth seeing.

"Babylon" Breaks Taboos and Tradition

By Noreen Lewis Cochran, GSU Signal

Once again- just like in "Relations Unknown" when Chris says goodbye to his friends-I find myself at the Whole World Theatre's Third Space, fighting back tears. It's the way Topher Payne as the transvestite prostitute Virgin Mary looks at his imaginary reflection in a cathouse mirror. I can't tell you why it bust me up inside or how he does it. It's the magic of theatre. It is also some kind of magic that keeps playwright Marki Shalloe's characters from being stereotypes, even though she gives us characters like the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans (Barbara Washington as Madame).

If Madame were a Tarot card, she would be the Queen of Coins. She reads the cards to find a missing negligee, conjures a spell to find lost money and asserts her dominion over her famous house of ill repute like Cajun royalty. Ms. Washington wears the role as naturally as she does her flowing caftans and her Creole accent is flawless.The Two-Faced Do-Gooder (Barbara Cole as Persephone) is also potentially a stock character, but Ms. Cole turns it into a continual unveiling of the beige persona she wears like her beige costume.

Gradually we learn the truth behind her concealed charms, her hidden intentions and her easy seduction by the gin that flows like water.We've all seen Wisecracking Hooker with the Heart of Gold before, and Virgin Mary is no exception."You're more screwed up than the whore next door," she says to Persephone, "and she hits men with a riding crop for $20."

Payne, however, transforms himself into a woman deploying wit like a weapon against the stings of the world's cruelty. As a man, he uses the world's own prejudice against it to fool the police and protect his savior.

Ms. Shalloe also gives us the Lecherous Musician. Once again (see "Urinetown"), I am glad to see the leading man killed off. This is not a spoiler alert: the show closed March 25 and you have my abject apologies for not getting to it sooner. However, DeWayne Morgan as the decadent harmonica player, brothel customer and drug pusher stands out as a symbol of evil even as the women around him break the law on a daily basis.

They break taboos, too, using a two-way mirror to spy on each other. Director Betty Hart guides the production, lit with subtlety and naturalness by Nina Gooch on a lush set designed by actor Payne, until the audience feels like it, too, is spying on the occupants of Babylon.

There's one more break that cannot go unnoticed, like an 800-pound gorilla in the room. When a leading lady breaks her leg, custom demands that the understudy fill in. Yet Ms. Cole walks the stage in a prescription boot to which no character, even the immensely curious Virgin Mary, refers. Maybe like Ms. Shalloe, Ms. Hart has also refused to give in to stereotype.

Grace Under Fire

Two local playwrights examine the soul of the South
by Curt Holman, Creative Loafing

Supposedly, whenever you meet new people in the South, the first question they ask is, "What church do you go to?" Which is not to be confused with asking what religion you are. In the rural South particularly, church takes on a social significance arguably equal to -- if not greater than -- a person's spiritual well-being.
Two new plays peer into the soul of the South, one from the godly side, one from the civic side. At the Process Theatre, Marki Shalloe's Babylon airs a moral debate in a New Orleans brothel in 1961. At Onstage Atlanta, Topher Payne's The Attala County Garden Club uses a supernatural twist to satirize gossipy small-town class dynamics in 1987 Mississippi. Both plays have rough patches, but together they imply that in the South, people pray with their fingers crossed behind their back.
Set in New Orleans, Babylon can't help but evoke Hurricane Katrina and the city's struggle to rebuild (although Shalloe wrote the first drafts more than a year ago). Taking place in a whorehouse called Babylon, the play contains an evocative passage about the city on the verge of an earlier flood, which doesn't deter the regular johns from keeping their appointments. Throughout the play, people's primal impulses supersede their self-preservation.
Babylon's plot seems less influenced by Katrina than Blanche DuBois. Comparable to a more decadent A Streetcar Named Desire, the plot concerns a righteous but haunted woman living under the same French Quarter roof as some confrontational hedonists. Persephone (Barbara Cole) takes a job at Babylon as a housekeeper and manicurist, although the Madame (Barbara Washington) also instructs her to keep tabs on the brothel's star attraction, a transvestite and heroin addict nicknamed "Virgin Mary" (Topher Payne).
Persephone's piety collides with Madame and Mary's pragmatic attitudes toward pleasure. Resorting to some overly formal debates on the sacred vs. the profane, Babylon risks being heavy-handed, but the play's pungent whorehouse atmosphere and credible slang terms give the material some grounding.
Babylon's lurid subject matter doesn't lend itself to underacting, but the players, directed by Betty Hart, keep their roles restrained enough to be realistic. Cole's intensity unifies Persephone's bizarre traits while Payne reveals the transvestite's melancholy shadings beneath a jailbait pout.
If Payne's play, The Attala County Garden Club, proves more efficient than Babylon, it also plays for more modest takes. The droll Southern-women comedy, explicitly written in the Steel Magnolias mode, begins with Rose Chipley (Amanda Cucher) moving into her first house with her young husband (an amusingly nonplussed Mark Russ), new baby and beloved "heirloom dining table." Like many a young Southern belle, Rose reveals anxieties about being downwardly mobile and that "the people we are" don't live up to "the people we came from."
When the city garden club (including Rose's own mother) rejects her membership application, Rose considers an offer to join the Attala County Garden Club, despite its reputation as a group of misfits. The play is an insider's view of gardening, status and conformity. The county club's members include African-American Danita (Cheryl Rookwood) and "white trash" Effie Joe (a hilarious Kellie Fortner), setting up a potential snobs-against-underdogs conflict.
Rose learns more about the club's eccentric approaches to gardening, the strange misfortunes that befall its rivals, and its seemingly mystical ability to cultivate hybrid plants. When Rose discovers the garden club's more sinister attributes, the airy play builds to effective moments of both horror-flick suspense and kitschy Southern comedy. Rose's wisecracking hairdresser (Patty Siebert) uses a comical, Sunday school-style felt board to lay out some of the folklore backstory.
Babylon and Attala each build to characters enacting a non-Christian ritual. With Madame's voodoo practices in Babylon and the echoes of Native American lore in Attala, both plays provide reminders that in Dixie, the white Christian culture lays atop other races and religions.
As writers, Payne and Shalloe have little in common besides being attentive students of comic timing, but they both are representative of rising regional playwrights. Neither seems to chase the trends that come out of New York or other, bigger theater cities. They don't dabble in the austere archetypes of the Sam Shepard model, or resort to dysfunctional dark humor like David Lindsay-Abaire or Nicky Silver. Payne specializes in light, accessible comedies while Shalloe relishes delving into strange historical factoids or provocative issues like suicide or masturbation.
Both writers have room to build on their strengths. Payne can explore challenging his audiences and himself more deeply, and Shalloe could benefit from more ambiguity and a willingness to leave points unsaid.
Babylon and The Attala County Garden Club both showcase the playwrights' enthusiasms. The playwrights show affection to eccentric characters while exposing Southern hypocrisies. They hate the sin, but love the sinners.

No Payne, No Gain

Columnist works it out on three concurrent theater projects
by Jimmy Hilburn, David Atlanta Magazine

IF YOU'RE A REGULAR David reader, then you know Topher Payne's face, with the quirky wit with which he chronicles his trials and tribulations as a twenty-something gay man living in Atlanta in his column Maybe It's Just Me.
But, if you knew what else is on Payne's plate, you'd be amazed he has any time to reflect on his life, let alone laugh about it. Just for starters, the month of March sees the world premiere of a play Payne wrote at Onstage Atlanta, his acting in another play across town, and his set designs for yet another play.
And as the life of a playwright/ actor/columnist goes, he still finds time to squeeze in the proverbial day job - restaurant managing at Metro Fresh, the new Midtown café owned by fellow thespian Mitchell Anderson.
Payne's newest script, "The Attala County Garden Club" marks a unique milestone. After more than half a dozen plays - including productions in Atlanta and New York - he is finally setting this one in his hometown of Kosciusko, Miss., at the time of his childhood.
Payne describes "Attala" as a comic thriller that is "Steel Magnolias meets Buffy The Vampire Slayer." Be prepared for an evening of ruthless social climbing, cryptic spells and rituals, and, of course, handy gardening tips.
In the small-town setting, a woman named Rose has only one avenue to the top tier of society: Membership in the City Garden Club. When Rose is shunned by the club, she has no choice but to join the less esteemed Attala County Garden Club, where a bevy of scorned women engage in witchcraft to exact their revenge.
Rest assured, all the witchcraft is "witch-approved," according to Payne.
"I talked to witches," he says. "I had a friend who hooked me up, because I didn't want it to be like an episode of 'Charmed.'"
GROWING UP IN KOSCIUSKO, mixed with adolescent and teen years in New England and California boarding schools, definitely gave Payne a unique perspective. He found the South to be a fount of source material for his writing.
"Southerners are more interesting than other Americans," Payne says, "because we have the gift of gab. Storytelling is part of our culture. You always have the person that is elected to tell every family story. 'No, no, no, you have to hear Mary Ellen tell it. She tells it better.'
"Southerners have such a casual relationship with the truth," he adds. "What happened isn't as important as the story that comes out of it later."
Let's hope Oprah Winfrey doesn't hear him say that. "Attala County" is undeniably fiction, but its real life setting isn't just Payne's hometown; Oprah was born in Kosciusko too.
"How much do you love that the most notable citizen to come out of this small, very conservative community is a single black billionaire woman," Payne laughs.
CERTAINLY ANOTHER OF PAYNE'S current projects would raise the eyebrows of those hometown conservatives. The day after "Attala County" opens, Payne begins portraying an aging transgender prostitute called Virgin Mary in Marki Shalloe's "Babylon," produced by the Process Theatre.
With high heels and wig, Payne's drag persona measures a towering 6'5" - making sure his first entrance onstage is a showstopper.
"It is absolutely the hardest work I've ever done as an actor because I want to get it right," he says. "This isn't camp drag. There's this simplicity and this beauty to the character that I've never had to tap into before."
Will Topher Payne ever get a week off? Not likely. With 32 relatives coming to town for opening weekend, several new scripts in the works and a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in his near future, he makes Oprah look like a couch potato.

March In Like a Lion

by Jim Farmer, Southern Voice

Topher Payne is one busy playwright these days. Two of the local gay thespian’s works were staged in the last year, and his new show "The Attala County Garden Club" receives its world premiere next week at Onstage Atlanta.
"Attala" takes place in Kosciusko, Miss., where Payne himself grew up. In the play, young Rose Chipley decides to join the City Garden Club. Rose is a woman in her 20s who just had a baby. Joining the high society club is part of an effort to stake out her own identity. But she is rejected by the garden club president, who ironically is her own mother. Rose is told it is too early for her to join, that the responsibility is too large.
In retaliation, Rose decides to join the Attala County Garden Club, which is unofficially known as the Reject Bin. Inside the new group, the young woman finds a few surprises, including witches who plan to avenge the town that rejected them.
Payne wanted to write a piece about his hometown, but the format strayed a little while he wrote it.
"I haven’t been back in 10 years now," Payne says. "… The child in me has wonderful memories, but the person I’ve become could never live there. As I started writing this, the show changed from being a Southern comedy, a love letter to my home, to something a bit darker."
As part of his research, Payne talked to witches.
"The one thing I wanted to do is respect their world," he says. "So many of the people I interviewed said that often it’s done wrong- I know how I feel when I see the gay community represented on stage or screen and they just get it wrong."
With the Internet, the playwright feels small towns aren’t as isolated as they once were.
"For teenagers growing up in small towns 20 years ago, there was the sense of not being in the norm," he asserts. "They didn’t feel the sense of belonging, and weren’t able interact with anyone outside your immediate environment. It was a time without much connection for those of us who felt different."
Payne says that "Attala" fits well with his other works.
"My plays have a theme: that of finding a common bond, acceptance in unlikely places," he says. "In this show, women who probably would never as much as have conversations with each other find they need each other. One is called white trash, another a home wrecker, another is black, but they unite and join forces."