I've toured all over the world with Immediate Family, a play about Virginia at the bedside of her comatose wife Rose. Although they've been together over 20 years, Virginia has no legal right to any say about Rose's medical treatment. The play consists simply of Virginia's monolog to the silent and still Rose, as Virginia sits by her wife's bedside, trying to figure out how to get Rose removed from the ventilator that prolongs her suffering.
Immediate Family has been produced in Pittsburgh, Billings, Montana and San Francisco when there were anti-gay initiatives on the ballot. I'm proud that my play was used to raise money and consciousness in the battle for gay rights.
The last time I performed Immediate Family was at El Mejunje, the "diversity" (ie. gay) center in Santa Clara, Cuba in 2017 (I think). I cut the play quite a bit. My friend and director in New York City, Arcadio Ruiz-Castellanos, translated it into Spanish. This was a labor of love for Arcadio, as he had left Cuba decades earlier as one of the Marielistas.
The Marielistas were people who were considered undesirable by the Cuban authorities and were told to go to Mariel Beach and get in little boats and go to the U.S. Arcadio had a successful career in Havana as an actor and director when he was called in to the police station and told to leave because he was gay. I mean, he wasn't a gay ACTIVIST. He was just GAY. He has never been back to Cuba since then, but he and his husband Ruben are one of the main economic supports of Arcadio's family.
So I printed up scripts, with the English running down the left side and the Spanish on the right side, so that people could follow the play, which I performed in English, very closely. Here are some photos from that performance:
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