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For the Record

Dear Editor,

As the playwright of Cell Phone Funeral, I wish to take exception with the recent Les Spindle review [Issue 11.6] which characterizes the play as promoting pedophilia. He states the following when he spoke about the characters presented in the play: “a priest who unashamedly admits diddling the boy when he was young.” I’m not sure what play Mr. Spindle was at, but this does not happen in mine. We do have a scene in which a priest shows up to mourn his 30-year-old deceased “friend with benefits,” but they are clearly both consenting adults. The message, apparently missed by Mr. Spindle, is that there are gay priests with normal gay sexual urges. I think it’s important to make this distictinction as the gay community has already fought hard to remove the misperception that gays are automatically pedophiles. I do not, and would not, support pedophilia in any form of my work, and I think I can speak for my director, Ms. Nunis, who has two little girls, that she would not either.

John Trapper
Writer, Cell Phone Funeral

Reviewer response:

If Mr. Trapper says that this plot point was misunderstood, I’ll take his word for it, and I apologize for that. ... As the play seemed determined to offend human beings at many levels, it wasn’t much of a leap to believe there was another outrageous instance of such.

... I too am, of course, appalled by child molestation, and I do not want to minimize its seriousness. However, I wonder why the playwright is so concerned about this particular issue when the play is filled with amoral and irresponsible behavior of all sorts. I would rather not say that one heinous bit of human behavior is more detestable than another. It’s all unsconscionable.

There were distasteful lapses in morality and good character everywhere one looked, such as condoning and making light of murder. The story treats, as as a farcical matter, a young man recklessly running over another man because he is so distracted gawking at other men, deliberately backing up to run over him again, giggling over the occurence like a bubbleheaded, amoral schoolgirl moron (which is the play’s recurrent condescending image of gay men), showing no remorse, and going to the funeral parlor to ogle the corpse and steal the man’s jacket right off him from the coffin.

... I should add that I have always enjoyed good pitch-black comedy. Over the years, I have seen many plays—gay or otherwise—that can be trenchantly sardonic and explosively funny at the same time, and I have written about them. In my view, this was not one of them.

—Les Spindle

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