Broadway and Beyond: Plays on Broadway and off put LGBTQ+ stories center stage
NEW YORK -- This New York theater season features several productions exploring LGBTQ+ characters and storylines.
CBS2's Dave Carlin reports on how these shows are changing narratives in ways that are fresh, hopeful and full of pride.
Broadway's "Take Me Out" has extended its run at the Hayes Theater. The revival of Richard Greenberg's play about a star centerfielder abruptly coming out as gay to his teammates and the press again finds a wide audience.
READ MORE: Exploration of homophobia in "Take Me Out" just as relevant now as it was 20 years ago
"Everyone needs to be seen and that's what Broadway and off-Broadway is about," actor Bryan Batt said.
Batt is out and proud, and he's in a different play with an all-male cast, "To My Girls" by JC Lee. The team visited the red carpet for opening night of "Take Me Out" on April 4.
Britton Smith, who plays Leo in "To My Girls," sat down with CBS2's Dave Carlin inside the Tony Kiser Theater, where the show is running off-Broadway.
"It's nice to bring my views about the Black queer experience into this play, and so it's all love, all excitement," Smith said.
Palm Springs is the setting as gay friends reunite in a rented house and find out the pandemic changed them.
"I think beyond just the queer friend group, I think people are going to see themselves and how sometimes friendships don't last, particularly after a global pandemic," Smith said. "It shifted so many of us, and so you're seeing characters in 'To My Girls' who are meeting after the pandemic, at the tail-end of it, and they're just different than who they used to be, and they want to be so badly who they were, but evolution is in yourself, it's hard to ignore, and they come to a head."
At Lincoln Center Theater's Claire Tow Theater is "At The Wedding," which puts women front and center.
"She's complicated and at times unlikable and doesn't always make the right choice," actress Mary Wiseman said.
Wiseman plays Carlo, who we see up-ending the wedding of a woman she lost but still loves. Wiseman says playwright Bryna Turner gives her a loud, sparky role and a journey.
"The uglier she is, the more impactful the message at the end that she too deserves love and forgiveness and self-love. I mean, it packs an even more powerful punch," she said.
Wiseman, who you may recognize as Cadet Sylvia Tilly on the Paramount+ series "Star Trek: Discovery," says the world needs more of these works giving LGBTQ+ characters and storylines depth, hope and humor.
"It does feel like there's a bit of an absence when it comes to queer work for women, queer work for trans folks, so this feels like the beginning of something very exciting, I think, for everyone who kind of gets to touch it," Wiseman said.
She continued, "We want to see queer women, non-binary people, trans people centered in all sectors, not just new play development. But getting out in front of more audiences, I think, is very, very powerful, and you can see how successful it is just once we're kind of given the opportunity ... These are really worth investing in, these stories."
These are some of the different stages of pride across New York City.
