Feb 15th, 2006
Beauty of the Father
Nilo Cruz’s play “Beauty of the Father” is about to wrap up its New York premiere. The plot revolves around a gay man whose estranged 25-year-old daughter visits him in Granada, only to fall in love with her father’s 20-year-old houseboy and sometimes-lover.
Interestingly, the plot description in listings such as Playbill and Newsday make no mention of the queer part of the plot. (From Newsday: “Play by Nilo Cruz about a young woman who visits her estranged father in Spain.”) Picking this play based on that description could make for a rather surprising matinee experience for the unsuspecting tourists from Omaha who want to see a show or two during their Big Trip to the Big Apple.
(It reminds me of when a calendar page listed the book signing for Dress Codes by Noelle Howey. The newspaper [can't remember which] described the book as “a memoir about growing up in Ohio.”)
I’ve joked with other daughters about scoping out guys when we are hanging out with our gay dads, but I’ve never heard of it going farther than that. What if it did? What if a dad and daughter actually fell in love with the same man? Do we dare let ourselves wonder about that? Or does the fear of the hyper-homophobes watching our every move make us monitor even our thoughts?
Nilo, an out gay man, is the father of a 16-year old daughter. In a recent Advocate (1/31/2006) article, Gerard Raymond quotes Cruz: “I’m certainly investigating my own relationship to being a father in this play…Sometimes we have to sacrifice a little bit of our lives in order to get something else. There is beauty in that generosity of spirit.”
I can honestly say I’ve never entertained the thought of falling for the same guys. My father was always pretty guarded around me when it came to his sexuality. I cannot recall him ever commenting on another man, even when I said something like, “Hey, he’s hot!”
I think he had so much shame inside about who he was, that he couldn’t be open even when it came to someone who accepted and loved him regardless of his sexuality.