Out in the Mountains
Theater of Empowerment:

An Interview with Craig Cabot and Michael Evans

Hugh Coyle

BURLINGTON -— For actor Craig Cabot
and director Michael Evans, there is no
reprieve from the work of theater, not
even sitting on the third ﬂoor of
Bruegger's Bagel Bakery on a
sun-drenched Sunday afternoon. Though
they have come to meet for an interview,
the three hours that follow develop into
something more like a rehearsal. They
discuss motivation, wrestle with inner
demons, and test new insights into
character as they talk about their
collaboration on the play Jeffrey and the

upcoming The Night Larry Kramer
Kissed Me.
In January, Cabot, who captivated

audiences with his recent performance as
the title character in Jeffrey, will take the
stage alone in the Vermont premiere of
David Drake's popular one-man play.
Evans will once again direct.

"I've never learned so much so fast,"
Cabot says, referiing to his time spent in
rehearsal. "You're looking at a Craig
that's going through tremendous changes.
I'm learning things about myself that I
hadn't learned, ever. I'm learning a new
sense of conﬁdence that I've never ever
had as a direct result of doing plays that
validate myself as a gay man."

For Cabot, this validation has become
crucial to understanding plays like Jeffrey
and The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me.
Moving beyond the scope of theater, he
observes how years of oppression have
shaped gay identity, offering positive and
negative possibilities for the creation of a
healthy community. "It's very troubling to
come to this realization, that you are who
you are in part because you have been

oppressed, because people have hated you.
So part of your identity is based on that
hatred. I think that manifests itself in the
way we treat each other."

Plays like Jeffrey, which deals with a man
re—learning how to love in the age of
AIDS, allowed Cabot to meditate on what
it meant for a gay man not only to love
another man, but to love himself as well.
"As gay men we are victims far more than
we know," he explains. "Without
examining who we are, and questioning
who we are, we can find ourselves
exhibiting behavior as a result of being
oppressed. By examining that process,
you can turn it into a strength."

Cabot is quiet for a moment, then talks
more openly about his own process of
self-exarnination in rehearsing for the part
of Jeﬂrey. "It was the first time in my life
to realize as a gay man that I harbored a
low self-esteem in myself that I never ever
recognized. It was very latent, and very
subliminal, and part of that was the words
and terminology I had learned and that I
had been accustomed to using for gay
people."

Cabot thinks back to his participation in a
workshop on homophobia at November's
Queer Town Meeting. "That workshop
meant everything in the world to me," he
says with a serious severity. "These are
things that I've been feeling for so much
of my life. I've known that the concepts
that I have are not entirely ones that I
made up. They were given to me by my
folks, by my society. You can't go through
life blindly ignoring where you came
from. You have to come to tenns with that.
That makes you a better actor, that makes
you a better doctor; that makes you a better
social worker. We as a gay community

have a long ways to go, and we're finding
that out now."

Evans nods his head in agreement. He
then relates how Cabot ﬁrst approached
his role as Jeffrey, infusing the character
with a great deal of bitterness and
contempt. Once they both recognized that
and examined it more closely, the play
opened up and revealed to them much
more than they had expected.

For both Cabot and Evans, the work has
come to encompass a great deal of that
examination. It serves as an effective
means of reﬂection and, subsequently, of
empowerment. Evans elaborates, stating

"'larry Kramer is about an individual

dealing with the empowerment of himself
and of the whole gay culture, with the
transformation from victimization to
empowerment. Every scene starts out in a

-place of disempowerrnent and ends up

with empowerment. Jeffrey and Larry
Kramer say you are real, that your
experience is real. It's a positive reﬂection.
The message isn't one of us/them. The
message is we're all human; we all love.
The power of the plays isn't just for a gay
community; it's for everybody."

The fact that Evans, a straight man, is
directing Cabot, a gay man, in a
gay—themed play leads to a number of
interesting discussions. As the two men
talk, they constantly push at the
boundaries of interpretation, resisting easy
classiﬁcations and revelling in the
expansive breadth of the works in
question.

"I don't want the audience to think that this
is a gay play," Cabot explains. "I don't
want them to think that the name ‘Larry
Kramer’ makes this a political play, either.

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