It’s 2015, and 16-year-old Mike is planning to come out as gay to his family and high school friends. It’s a momentous day in many ways: First, it’s his late mom’s birthday. Even more significantly, it happens to be the day the Supreme Court is arguing the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which will legalize gay marriage in all 50 states.
That fateful day is the setting for Ten Brave Seconds, a new musical running Jan. 30-Feb. 14 at Pioneer Theatre Company, with music and lyrics by Will Van Dyke and a book and lyrics by Jeff Talbott. One can’t overlook that it’s being produced in Salt Lake City, a blue spot in a red state where it’s now illegal to put up a Pride flag on public property, or that Kim Davis’s case to overturn Obergefell made it to the Supreme Court (though it was denied a hearing). The personal and political are intersecting in ways the authors hadn’t anticipated when they first began writing in 2019, and the show feels “like a period piece now,” Talbott said.
As the show developed, it became about “how you navigate difficult things with your family in times of pain, how we talk to each other, and how we take care of each other,” Talbott said. It centers community and bravely being your authentic self. This feels personal to Van Dyke, whose “tragic flaw is that I’m almost incapable of not saying how I feel, and it is the best part of me, but also the hardest part of me.” His pop-rooted yet story-driven score is an “invitation to live like that.”
Despite the rise of young adult musicals, coming-out stories are rarely represented in the genre. Comparable properties might be Bare: A Pop Opera and the Trevor musical, but unlike those shows, Ten Brave Seconds doesn’t depict coming out as traumatic or violent. It normalizes the experience, where “it’s a big deal emotionally, but in the grand scheme of things, who cares?” as Van Dyke put it. And it’s “messy,” Talbott said. Here, Mike hides his sexuality not out of fear of rejection; he was simply “tired of defining himself to everybody every day,” and his secret was “this one thing he’s just keeping to himself while he figures it out.”
As for doing this musical in a state where gay rights are under fire, Van Dyke said, “We’re not setting out to shake up Utah. We’re just trying to tell an authentic, human story and hope that people respond to it.” Still, they know it’s important to tell it here and now. “If we only tell it in spaces where people react to it with a shrug, we’re not going to keep moving forward,” said Talbott. “There are definitely places where it’s still very unsafe to come out. We should all keep telling those stories so that it gets to those places.”
