{"id":369074,"date":"2025-06-05T17:43:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T21:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dctheaterarts.org\/?p=369074"},"modified":"2025-06-05T17:43:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T21:43:04","slug":"my-queer-coming-of-age-with-tarell-alvin-mccraney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dctheaterarts.org\/2025\/06\/05\/my-queer-coming-of-age-with-tarell-alvin-mccraney\/","title":{"rendered":"My queer coming of age with Tarell Alvin McCraney"},"content":{"rendered":"

M<\/span>ost of the time, life changes incrementally. Bodies sag and falter slowly. Political action takes one step forward and two steps back. Light fades on a summer evening before you realize darkness has settled in, and days fade before you realize years have settled in. But there are also rare times when life transforms dramatically. The world opens up, and can\u2019t be closed again.<\/p>\n

Watching Moonlight<\/em><\/a> as a teenager was one of those rare times for me. The film, written and directed by Barry Jenkins and adapted from the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue <\/em>by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is a coming-of-age triptych. The film\u2019s first act follows the young Black boy Chiron as his community struggles to raise him; the second act sees a teenage Chiron discovering his queerness and attraction to his friend Kevin; the third act has an adult Chiron undoing the hardened masculinity he\u2019s used as protection. When I was 17, I stumbled across Moonlight<\/em>\u2019s hypnotic trailer<\/a> ahead of its release in the fall of 2016, and convinced my mother to watch the film with me on a rainy Thursday. Despite it being a school night, she relented.<\/p>\n

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LEFT: Culture critic Nathan Pugh (photo by Paper Monday, courtesy of the author); RIGHT: Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (photo by Jeff Lorch, courtesy of Arena Stage).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Up until Moonlight<\/em>, the world of bodies seemed strange to me. I\u2019d watch guys on the sports field or stage, and overhear stories about them in dimly lit basements. I\u2019d imagine their exhausting movement of spit and limbs, but never taste them myself. Instead, I lived in my head. I\u2019d read novels with nerdy, metaphor-inclined teens like Hazel Grace Lancaster<\/a>, Dante Quintana<\/a>, and Oscar Wao<\/a>. They seemed bursting with ideas. I\u2019d pore over Alison Bechdel\u2019s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic<\/em><\/a>, especially when she considered the different definitions of the word \u201cqueer.\u201d For Bechdel, queerness was a site of theoretical exploration, and I was eager to jump into the discourse. I didn\u2019t want to just come out. I wanted to write about queerness like Bechdel did, with methodical evidence and annotations. Instead of just being <\/em>myself, I needed to present <\/em>myself.<\/p>\n

Moonlight <\/em>was the queer rupture I needed at 17. Instead of dissociating in the cinema, I arrived into my body for the first time. The film is composed of poetic, sensual images. Water caressing the head of a boy. A hand grasping at sand. A mother fumbling with a lighter. An ocean breeze dancing across a white shirt. A hand caressing the head of a man. To this day, Moonlight<\/em> is my favorite film. But as a teenager, the film\u2019s imagery proved that my queerness didn\u2019t need to be researched or justified to be beautiful.<\/p>\n

Moonlight <\/em>was my gateway into physicality. Watching the film quieted the overwrought, anxious, analytical madness that defined my life \u2014 replacing it with a calm, warm, embodied presence. I realized I didn\u2019t want to find love with just any guy. I wanted to find love like Chiron\u2019s. Moonlight <\/em>consecrated my abstract queerness into flesh and blood.<\/p>\n

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Nic Ashe (Free) and Kyle Beltran (Wallace Tre) in \u2018We Are Gathered\u2019 at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. Photo by T Charles Erickson Photography.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I<\/span>t\u2019s a surreal twist that while I watched Tarell Alvin McCraney\u2019s latest play, We Are Gathered <\/em><\/a>(making its world premiere through June 15 at Washington, DC\u2019s Arena Stage), I felt trapped in my head again. The play\u2019s protagonist is actually similar to the characters I idolized as a teenager: he\u2019s nerdy, metaphor-inclined, and bursting with ideas.<\/p>\n

His name is Wallace Tre \u2014 but his friends call him both \u201cTre\u201d and \u201cDubs.\u201d As played by Kyle Beltran, Tre opens the show directly addressing the audience, explaining that he\u2019s anxiously considering a marriage to his gay partner Free (Nic Ashe). Tre expresses himself through neurotic, stream-of-consciousness monologues. But Free is a boisterous musician, the life of the party. Free just is<\/em> himself, while Tre presents<\/em> himself.<\/p>\n

The party at hand is Tre\u2019s 40th birthday, a celebration that includes his playful friends Chauncey (Kevin Mambo) and Xi (Jade Jones), but also surprise guests: his astronaut sister Punkin (Nikkole Salter) and their somewhat estranged father, Sr. (also played by Mambo). Sr. starts asking about his son\u2019s sexuality, blaming Tre\u2019s queerness on his own absence during Tre\u2019s childhood. In response, Tre furiously reveals his self-loathing and fear of commitment with Free:<\/p>\n

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TRE: <\/strong>And now that life is in front of me, I don\u2019t know! And he wants a life! And I don\u2019t even know if I can give him that. Or if I will be able to get over my \u2026 self to. And is that enough to do it, just because they might take it away from us? Should we do it \u2019cause we can because when we can\u2019t? All these questions in my fucking head and you wanna add more?!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s only after this exchange that the dramatic stakes of We Are Gathered <\/em>come into focus. Can Tre accept that he\u2019s deserving of love? Can queer millennials like Tre reconcile their painful childhoods with the tenuous freedoms of adulthood? Answering these questions takes We Are Gathered<\/em> on discursive paths. Tre wanders obsessively through the park where he first encountered Free while cruising<\/a>. McCraney wanders through many dramatic forms over the two-act play.<\/p>\n

Audiences yearning for the poetry of Moonlight <\/em>will find it in Tre\u2019s beautiful descriptions of sex (he pays attention to details like \u201cbit lower lips, spit curled tongues, teeth gnashing as fingers find forever\u201d). However, for most of its runtime, We Are Gathered <\/em>stages the tension between physicality and intellect. Tre feels safe when holding Free, but he\u2019s prone to overthinking how marriage is \u201ca cultural norm made worse by late-stage capitalism.\u201d It\u2019s as if before Tre can love, he must formulate the proper theory for his queerness. Moonlight <\/em>may have welcomed me into physicality, but We Are Gathered <\/em>now challenges me with the analytical madness I felt as a teenager, and feel today as a writer. The difficult union between body and mind: that\u2019s the real marriage under question.<\/p>\n

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Kyle Beltran (Wallace Tre) and Nic Ashe (Free) in \u2018We Are Gathered\u2019 at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. Photo by T Charles Erickson Photography.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

W<\/span>e Are Gathered <\/em>is a significant departure in McCraney\u2019s playwriting style. His Brother\/Sister Plays<\/a> took place in what he calls the \u201cdistant present\u201d \u2014 an anachronistic space of Black Southern vernacular and dreamy Yoruban ritual<\/a>. Scholar David Rom\u00e1n argues<\/a> that the distant present \u201cforces us to consider when the contemporary moves from now to then.\u201d Moonlight <\/em>similarly plays with time, evoking a familiar yet strange world. \u201cI never want to make something that feels so finite that we can only do it at that point, and that\u2019s it,\u201d McCraney stated in a 2017 interview<\/a> about the film. \u201cI want to make something that feels like we started in a specific place, but we can keep unpacking it for years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a difference eight years make: We Are Gathered <\/em>takes place in the finite here-and-now. Tre\u2019s anxieties about gay marriage are only legible in a 2025 America that passed Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em><\/a> but also overturned <\/a>Roe v. Wade<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> His politics also take on a sharp tone when staged in the nation\u2019s capital. McCraney doesn\u2019t name names, but everyone at Arena Stage knows Tre\u2019s talking about Trump when he tells his father, \u201cYou voted how you feel about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the more tangible world of 2025, McCraney luxuriates in contemporary media. Characters reference Pok\u00e9mon, How to Get Away with Murder<\/em>, and Sally Field. They ponder Caryl Churchill, quote Shakespeare, reference fairy tales, and close-read Bible passages. McCraney himself alternates between genres \u2014 from the marriage plot<\/a> to the trauma plot<\/a>, from call-and-response to realist drama, from broad comedy to prayer.<\/p>\n

At their best, these dramaturgies create a fascinating friction when brushing up against each other. It\u2019s a riot when Kyle Beltran asks the buttoned-up DC audience to define cruising, or when Free\u2019s grandparents (Jade Jones and Craig Wallace) endearingly ask for details of their grandson\u2019s sexual exploits. McCraney\u2019s arguing that queerness doesn\u2019t belong just in the nightclub or the bedroom \u2014 it belongs everywhere, even in the family function.<\/p>\n

But at their worst, these dramaturgies compete with each other, rendering the staging and story tedious. The bare scenic design, mostly lamplights, hardly evokes the sweaty erotics of cruising. Even in this highly detailed world, we barely know anything about Punkin\u2019s and Xi\u2019s inner lives outside of their devotion to Tre. We Are Gathered <\/em>also feels too reliant on monologue. Tre and Free elucidate on pleasure and danger, but the play rarely feels viscerally pleasurable or dangerous. We don\u2019t even get to relive Tre and Free\u2019s meet-cute; Xi just quickly narrates its story.<\/p>\n

Of course, staging the past might be antithetical to McCraney\u2019s project here. His pinballing dramaturgy seems like a challenge: can he write beyond<\/em> an origin story? From Wig Out!<\/em><\/a> to Choir Boy<\/em><\/a>, McCraney\u2019s writing has primarily centered on teens or twenty-somethings wrestling with identity. Even when his TV series David Makes Man<\/em> focused on adult characters in its second season<\/a>, it also employed a generous flashback structure. We Are Gathered <\/em>is still obsessed with origins: Tre shares his first time encountering \u201cfaggots\u201d in literature; Free discusses his first cruisings at a college gym. But the play never flashes back to youth for an extended period of time. This is a show resolutely about middle-aged men.<\/p>\n

Maybe as McCraney gets older, his \u201cdistant past\u201d will age with him (he\u2019s 45 now, writing characters slightly younger than himself). As more millennial playwrights mature<\/a>, and cash in \u201cblank checks\u201d<\/a> to write whatever they want, their styles chaotically expand into the chaotic present. We Are Gathered <\/em>reminds me of recent plays by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: The Comeuppance<\/em><\/a> and Purpose<\/em><\/a>. All three of these shows center on middle-aged Black male artists, self-inserts for their authors. All three shows follow rituals (a high-school reunion, a family dinner, a wedding), with large ensembles debating social issues. All three shows are sprawling, overly verbose, intricately plotted, and messy. Honestly, same.<\/p>\n

Watching these plays, I see brilliant minds set loose. Overtaken with ideas, my body slips away. I wander across the endless realm of my mind, creeping toward the future. McCraney and Jacobs-Jenkins acknowledge that they\u2019ve finally come of age. Now what?<\/p>\n

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Nic Ashe (Free) and Kyle Beltran (Wallace Tre) in \u2018We Are Gathered\u2019 at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. Photo by T Charles Erickson Photography.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

T<\/span>his past February, theaters across the country screened a one-night-only IMAX version<\/a> of Moonlight<\/em>. Rewatching the film for the first time in years, I was undone all over again by Moonlight\u2019<\/em>s aching images.<\/p>\n

While a film will always stay the same, its viewers will inevitably change. When I watched Moonlight <\/em>at 17, I had never touched another man, never expressed my sexuality on the page, never been heartbroken, never pleaded for forgiveness when I didn\u2019t deserve it. The romantic scenes between the teenage Chiron and Kevin unfolded like a premonition: here is your near future, if you\u2019re willing to claim it. I did. Yet watching Moonlight <\/em>at 26, I realize I\u2019m currently much closer to the Chiron and Kevin of the film\u2019s third act. Like them, I\u2019m an adult toughened by my younger self\u2019s choices, secretly believing grace might be possible for me. I can\u2019t let the past go.<\/p>\n

Moonlight <\/em>has become my distant present. It\u2019s my queer origin story \u2014 the kind of origin that McCraney now encourages his mature characters to move beyond in We Are Gathered<\/em>. \u201cYou found him,\u201d Punkin tells her brother, asking him to let go of the shame of his first encounter with Free. \u201cYour search for intelligent beings yielded a life you could form; a full life. You found it existed. Fuck how.\u201d<\/p>\n

Punkin may as well be talking to me, and my obsession with the first time I basked in Moonlight<\/em>\u2019s glow. I\u2019ve been chasing that transformative feeling ever since, always thinking that I\u2019ve failed. When I write about McCraney\u2019s art, I feel the magic of his words slipping away through explanation. Maybe, like Tre, I\u2019m overthinking things. As a teenager, I miraculously discovered that queer life was possible. How I received that message ultimately doesn\u2019t matter. It came from the body and the mind; from poetry, prose, film, and theater; from academia and love. Fuck how.<\/p>\n

E<\/span>ven though We Are Gathered <\/em>and Moonlight <\/em>tonally feel worlds apart, they\u2019re bound together by McCraney\u2019s collapse of linear time. In the program for We Are Gathered<\/em>, Arena Stage Literary Manager Otis Ramsey-Z\u00f6e references Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity<\/em><\/a>. He specifically cites Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s configuration of sexuality as an optimistic gesture toward the future: \u201cQueerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s ironic is that academics have used McCraney\u2019s art to critique Mu\u00f1oz, especially his hope that the future will be better for Black and queer Americans. Scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman uses Moonlight <\/em>as a primary example of what she calls \u201cthe black ecstatic,\u201d<\/a> a representational mode that celebrates Blackness in an abstracted present, not<\/em> an imagined utopia. \u201cA post-civil rights expressive practice, the black ecstatic eschews the heroism of black pasts and <\/em>the promise of liberated black futures,\u201d she writes, \u201cin order to register and revere the rapturous joy in the broken-down present.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m overwhelmed with the beauty of Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s and Abdur-Rahman\u2019s arguments, even if their theories are incommensurable. Which queer movement will I follow? Will I imagine a future beyond<\/em> \u201ctoiling in the present,\u201d or will I ecstatically revere<\/em> the \u201cbroken-down present\u201d?<\/p>\n

By blurring adolescence with maturity, McCraney tries to move in both directions, to affirm both theories \u2014 to have his wedding cake and eat it, too. Especially in its third act, Moonlight <\/em>celebrates the broken-down present by staging intimacy in real-time. But the film ends right as Chiron and Kevin have their long-delayed unification. We\u2019re allowed to imagine their future without having to experience its likely excruciating path forward. If We Are Gathered <\/em>is overstuffed, it\u2019s because McCraney wants us to feel<\/em> that excruciating path forward. Tre and Free arduously propel themselves into the future, through the mess of daily life, overanalysis, political threats, and yes, references to Sally Field.<\/p>\n

Even more than championing marriage, We Are Gathered<\/em> champions resilience. Queer life might not \u201cget better,<\/a>\u201d but it will be<\/em>. Many audiences will talk about the play\u2019s ending, a satisfying conclusion where lives change dramatically. But in the preceding hours, McCraney celebrates incremental change, the accumulation of love that forms the foundation of a dramatic moment. You can\u2019t achieve the rupture of Moonlight <\/em>without the personal and artistic processing portrayed in We Are Gathered<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The present moment in We Are Gathered <\/em>is not distant, but so close \u2014 and maybe for me, it\u2019s upcoming. If I survive long enough to see 2039, I\u2019ll be 40. I might taste the mature love seen in We Are Gathered <\/em>instead of just witnessing it. The play will have become a period piece, a curious time capsule of our anxieties in the distant present of 2025. But I hope the accumulation of years has made the show more urgent.<\/p>\n

Every piece of art can be an origin story for our lives, if we\u2019re willing to claim it. I did with Moonlight<\/em>, then. And I do with We Are Gathered<\/em>, now. I do.<\/p>\n

We Are Gathered <\/em><\/strong><\/a>plays through June 15, 2025, in the Fichandler Stage at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, 1101 6th St SW, Washington, DC. Tickets are available online<\/strong><\/a> (starting at $59) or visit TodayTix.<\/strong><\/a> Tickets may also be purchased through the Sales Office by phone at 202-488-3300, Tuesday through Sunday, 12-8 p.m., or in person at 1101 Sixth Street SW, DC, Tuesday through Sunday, 2 hours prior to each performance. Groups of 10+ may purchase tickets by phone at 202-488-4380.<\/p>\n

Arena Stage\u2019s many savings programs include \u201cpay your age\u201d tickets for those aged 35 and under; military, first responder, and educator discounts; student discounts; and \u201cSouthwest Nights\u201d for those living and working in the District\u2019s Southwest neighborhood. To learn more, visit\u00a0arenastage.org\/savings-programs<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Running Time: Two hours and 40 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission.<\/p>\n

The We Are Gathered<\/em> program is downloadable here.<\/a><\/p>\n

COVID Safety:<\/strong> Arena Stage recommends but does not require that patrons wear facial masks in theaters except in designated mask-required performances (Tuesday, May 27, 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, June 14, 2:00 p.m.) For up-to-date information, visit arena<\/a><\/span> stage.org\/safety<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n