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The name Teddy Ferrara won’t ring any bells with you – he’s fictional – but Tyler Clementi might. He was the gay US student who jumped to his death in 2010 after his college roommate surreptitiously filmed him kissing a man, humiliatingly broadcasting it live on social media.
It’s pretty apparently why US playwright Christopher Shinn created a fictionalised version of Clementi. In ‘Teddy Ferrara’, his rambling but often penetrating insight into LGBTQ American student life, few of the thousands of people outraged at Ferrara’s similar suicide knew him at all – his death is appropriated and exploited by a minority of students who see this tragedy as legitimate means to further a radical ‘social justice’ agenda on campus.
It’s near to the knuckle stuff. But certainly much of ‘Teddy Ferrara’ tallies fascinatingly with what I’ve heard about the rise of militant political correctness in US colleges (and to a lesser extent over here, with recent kerfuffles over zealously interpreted No Platform policies making the national news).
Ryan McParland’s oddball Teddy is a minor character in the play that bears his name. Instead it’s a sprawling snapshot of gay life on an unnamed US university that hinges on Luke Newberry’s affable but ambitious Gabe, head of the college LBGTQ group, and on-off boyfriend to Oliver Johnstone’s narcissistic student newspaper editor Drew.
Though Dominic Cooke’s production – his first since leaving the Royal Court a couple of years back – has a lucid minimalism to it, the biggest problem is that he can’t tame Shinn’s over-ambitious, thesis-like play. In fact, it’s practically two different plays linked only by Gabe: one a slightly overcooked drama about young gay men trying to come to terms with the freedoms of adult life; one a satire, of sorts, on radical campus politics that revolves around Matthew Marsh’s amusingly Frasier Crane-alike turn as the university president. The two strands are interesting, but rarely gel.
It might be less of a problem if the dialogue wasn’t so frequently wretched, all earnest young men making bland, expositional statements about their feelings that sound like they were plucked straight from a scripted reality TV show. I have an inkling that this is in fact exactly how a lot of US college students do speak, but I wonder if Shhinn could have conveyed a sense of that without giving me crippling ‘Dawson’s Creek’ flashbacks. Like poor Teddy, the play that bears his name is compelling, but a little too awkward to quite work.