![]() ![]() ![]() The victim was fourteen-year-old Leonard Pelkey, a genderqueer young man described by his aunt/adopted mother Ellen as “TOO MUCH.” Leonard was an iconoclast of a kid, one for whom flamboyant expression of his unique individuality was both an existential and political necessity. Or do I? In The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, Chuck Desantis (Keith Randolph Smith), a former detective in a small town on the New Jersey shore, relates the details of a life-transforming crime that occurred a decade ago. I guess the investigation of toxic masculinity is simply in the air nowadays (gee, I wonder why?).īut I begin to digress. Yet the two plays share a central conflict: in both, a person who is deemed insufficiently masculine is targeted for violence by a bully who has abrogated to himself the privilege of defining what it takes to be a “real man”. Where the former features a spectacularly aggressive display of alpha-male peacocking, the latter centers on the story of a gentle teenager who, given the chance, would adorn himself with peacock feathers and flutter through the school hallways kicking up his custom rainbow platform sneakers. ![]() On the other end of the spectrum from Rules of Seconds is the one-person show The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, by James Lecesne. ![]()
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