“I’m always wrestling with things. They don’t usually become a play until I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a good wrestle! It’s not leaving me alone. I feel well matched.’”
Lately, Tarell Alvin McCraney has been wrestling with “the fact of a wedding.” As he’s gotten invites to friends’ nuptials over the years, he said he didn’t necessarily enjoy going, didn’t love the way capitalism inflates the whole affair, and didn’t always feel that marriage equality should be at the forefront of queer activism when there’s anti-trans violence and queer youth homelessness to worry about.
Those views changed a couple of years ago when he went to a friends’ 10-year vow renewal. There, surrounded by people who were gathering to bear witness once again to the union of two souls, McCraney found it finally coming into focus. “I started crying,” he recalled. “I still don’t really know why I’m crying, which is why there’s a play.”
That play was announced as part of the Arena Stage season last April with no pages, no treatment, and no title. Now, the story of Wallace “W” Tre and Free Dominic Mann, two gay Black men who meet cruising in the park only to fall into a long-term relationship, is in previews in Washington, D.C., with the title We Are Gathered—just in time for WorldPride, a citywide celebration that began on May 17 and runs through June 8.
Debuting a play during WorldPride is a full-circle moment for McCraney. After attending the Sydney, Australia, edition back in 2023, he put in a call to Hana S. Sharif, Arena Stage’s artistic director, with an idea for a play that would chime with the global celebration coming to the capital in 2025.
That was enough for Sharif. “When he has an idea, you say, ‘Let’s play,’” she said. Still, Sharif knows that her priority is serving the Arena community, and that plugging in what was then “Untitled Tarell Alvin McCraney Play” was a gamble.
“I recognize that every time I make a bold decision artistically, I am leveraging my reputation, my credibility, and my artistry on that,” she said. “I would only make that bet on an artist I know has a track record of delivering and who’s got a process that has rigor and clarity.” As far as she was concerned, it was a safe bet.
In addition to its fortuitous timing, We Are Gathered comes with an especially eye-catching feature: Real-life marriage and vow renewal ceremonies will take place onstage as part of the drama. The idea bloomed into an activation that, according to Sharif, has had couples of all definitions—queer, interracial, older, younger—applying for their moment in the spotlight. In addition to exchanging nuptials, participants in the “Love Takes Center Stage” program get complimentary tickets and a lobby celebration complete with food, drink, music, even their own sweetheart table. Applicants take note: You must certify “that marriage is a right that all people, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, race, ethnicity, creed, or class should have equal access to” in order to proceed.
Even at a company where community engagement is prized (Arena’s department has doubled in size under Sharif), staging real-life marriages is an extraordinary leap. It helps that McCraney is driving the initiative and integrating it into the dramaturgy. While Sharif is keen to see theatre fostering community, she said she’s careful not to “futz” with the art (she also recommends briefing Grandma on cruising before bringing her to the show-turned-ceremony).
Of course, before the “I dos” comes the small business of putting on a play. For director Kent Gash, real-life nuptials are the cherry on top of a piece that is already forging connections in the hazy space between real and pretend.
“We’re called to witness at the very beginning of the play,” he said of the opening sequence, when W. Tre recounts his own struggles with the concept of marriage while engaging the audience for their input. It’s a crucial moment that Gash likened to the opening chorus of Henry V. As he put it, “If the first one doesn’t work, you don’t have a show.”
Invoking Shakespeare is in tune with the play’s classical resonance. The Bard’s marriage comedies, including As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have been frequent touchstones for the team. So too is Into the Woods, a favorite for a cast full of musical theatre nerds, and another tale in which going into the forest one way invariably means coming out another. The park where W. Tre and Free meet, and where W. Tre frequently returns in search of answers, is a place of discovery in the same spirit.
It’s no surprise to see Gash, a steady hand with classical chops and fealty to the text, helming a McCraney premiere. The pair have worked together several times, including on a production of Choir Boy at Steppenwolf featuring a baptismal sequence, conceived by Gash, that even McCraney still remembers with awe. Gash is clearly an admirer of McCraney’s command of language and commitment to putting otherwise unheralded figures onstage, but staying rooted in the script is central to his ethos regardless of the project.
“It’s like relationships,” he said of directing new plays. “You can’t make people pay for the fact that you might wish they were someone else. If you really wish they were someone else, you should go be with someone else, and leave the other poor person that you’re torturing alone.” In other words, you have to direct the play in front of you, not the play you wish it was.
New plays also benefit from actors who are quick studies. Gash called leads Kyle Beltran and Nic Ashe “incredibly fast. They’re always reading for depth of character, what’s actually occurring in the human event here. They drop in and always rehearse at that level, which makes my job a little bit easier, because there’s a number of things I don’t have to say to them.”
It also helps that both actors have a long history with both Gash and McCraney. “These are people I’ve been working with for most of my career,” said McCraney (who in addition to his career as a playwright currently serves as artistic director of L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse). “I think of them as real colleagues and muses in a way.” Indeed, he wrote the lead roles with them in mind (it’s rare for him not to write with an actor in mind, he said), and the two of them were brought in for the first exploratory workshop.
At the last rehearsal before tech, I got to see this quartet and the rest of the company working with ease and candor through one of several birthday scenes that illuminate how long W. Tre and Free have been together. Beltran and Ashe were unafraid to ask for more lines to help them carry off an exit or to take instruction from both director and playwright. Gash and McCraney, meanwhile, took turns clarifying and shaping.
At one point, Free freaks out when the subject of whether he and Free are top, bottom, or vers is raised in front of his grandparents. “Eek!” he cries. McCraney stepped in with a note to Ashe to hit the “k” in eek.
When I asked McCraney about this later, he said the note was not about the word itself. “There’s a rhythm that that ‘eek’ needs,” he explained. “It doesn’t have to be ‘eek,’ but it has to be punctuated by this thing before you can go into the next thing. It has to peak before you can turn around and try to smooth it out.” Actors often ask him why he puts a question mark at the end of a statement: It’s for the up-glide at the end to keep everything in tune, he tells them. That’s a product of the oral tradition in which he was raised, he told me. It’s the rhythm of the thing that really matters.
For all its musicality and philosophy, We Are Gathered keeps a steady comic backbeat. In that same birthday scene, Free’s Nana Jae (Jade Jones) chimes in with queer factoids for the benefit of his Pop Pop (Craig Wallace). “Five years an eternity to the boy gays,” she says. Later, W. Tre’s friend Chauncey (Kevin Mambo) waxes poetic to W. Tre about why he continues to be drawn to the park where he used to embrace the liberation and danger of casual sex. “Chauncey, why are you talking like Aslan?” W. Tre complains. “Are you drunk? Are you high?”
“Humor is so often how we survive a wide range of things that might otherwise be crippling,” said Gash. “Certainly, the many communities this play is intersecting—the Black community, the Queer community, all of the LGBTQIA community. We better keep our ability to laugh, because it may be the thing that powers us through these unusually dark political contexts.”
“Folks who will be interested in seeing this will appreciate the amount of joy as a form of tending to the wounded,” added McCraney. “I have walked into the room a few times not good and left better.”
In a landscape full of theatres tending to their wounds, Arena Stage is one of the lucky ones. Yes, they too received a letter from the National Endowment of the Arts informing them that a recent grant had been rescinded, but the money had already been spent on a developmental workshop for a musical adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, which will close the season. Sharif and her counterpart, executive producer Edgar Dobie, aren’t leaving it there, though. They’ve already eliminated a line of federal funding worth over half a million dollars from next season’s budget, the lion’s share of which would have come from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH), the District’s closest thing to a state arts council. Like all of our local government, it answers to federal budget masters.
Forgoing federal funding means not having to comply with executive orders against DEI, so-called “gender ideology,” and whatever else is coming down the pike. But it also means fundraising independently to seal that gap. Drastic? Maybe, but for Sharif, the artistic leader of an institution that prides itself on having been founded in 1950 as the first racially integrated company in Washington, DC, it’s a no-brainer.
“The real question we have to ask ourselves is, when we get the other side of this, however battered and bruised the republic might be, will we be able to say that we, as leadership, have stewarded this company that allows us to stand with integrity, ready to lead for the next 75 years?” she said. “There’s no world where we can align ourselves with anything that suggests we have to ignore or erase the lived experience of people who work with us and for us every day. That’s just not possible.”
Sharif thinks of a theatre’s season programming as a long conversation, in which the plays speak not only to the audience but to each other. This past season at Arena has brought everything from the opulence of The Age of Innocence to the bustling ensemble of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, from the edgy comedy of The Bedwetter and Fake It Till You Make It to the multigenerational drama of John Leguizamo’s The Other Americans. Now, as the national conversation has intensified since January, the need to bring something about love—indeed, something about Black, queer, contemporary love that nevertheless calls everyone in—with this season’s penultimate entry has felt more urgent than ever.
“It is a joyful bomb that is an act of resistance,” Gash proclaims. “Also a declaration of celebration, no matter what. We’ve got to hold onto each other and hold onto our capacities for love and our capacities to celebrate each other. And that really belongs to everyone. You don’t have to be in the queer community to celebrate, and you don’t have to be Black to celebrate it. Our need for it may be different, but it’s a fundamental human need, and we can never lose sight of that. The play doesn’t state that as polemically as I did, but it’s there.”
Jared Strange (he/him) is the director of education and community programs at the National Theatre Foundation, as well as a writer, dramaturg, scholar, and educator based in Washington, D.C.
