Bare Theater: Timon of Athens

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Graphic design by Khoa D. Pham. Photography by Dustin Britt.

Digital poster

Director Dustin Britt had long been looking for a theatrical narrative to counter the themes of gay martyrdom and victimhood arising from the AIDS crisis. “I wanted a story where we fight back, come back, and win,” he says. After finding that the title character in Shakespeare and Middleton’s unfinished 1605 tragedy, Timon of Athens, had been betrayed and rejected by the people he’d trusted and loved, Britt thought of a group with similar experiences: queer and trans teenagers thrown out by their families. In his splashy, flashy, eighties-set adaptation for Bare Theatre, those teens form an army and exact revenge. Britt hopes the production “creates a catharsis that the queer community never gets to see in the arts.” Club shows at The Wicked Witch are interspersed with pay-what-you-can community performances at St. John’s Metropolitan Community Church; see the Facebook invite for dates and times. —Byron Woods