Viva Denial!
The stars of Here Lies Love on their personal journeys of self-acceptance
For Ricamora — playing Marcos’s political rival, Benigno Aquino — coming out was complicated by his background, growing up on air bases, where he funneled his energies into learning to be a tennis pro. “It was such a machismo culture I grew up around,” he recalls. “There was never an encouragement of a life in the arts. I wasn’t even exposed to that world, let along being gay or out. None of those things occurred to me, that they even existed.”
Ricamora visited the Hamptons in 2001 for an under-the-radar tennis tournament. He failed to make the cut and found himself back in New York before flying home to Charlotte, N.C. It was Pride weekend. “Here I am walking through New York City during Gay Pride, and it’s like this
huge explosion of gayness and acceptance, and all these things I’d been ashamed of for so long,” he says. “I remember seeing Hillary Clinton — she didn’t have this big float, just a small entourage and no signs — and thinking, Oh, wow, the world is going to start changing.”
Instead of returning to Charlotte, Ricamora extended his stay in New York by three days, before flying to Atlanta, where he bunked with a friend and quit tennis. “I got a job waiting tables, wrote in my journal every day, and went through a discovery of who I was and what I really wanted to do in life,” he says.
It was in Atlanta that Ricamora recalled an acting class he’d taken as a psych major, where he’d discovered a monologue from Lemon Sky by Lanford Wilson. Its central theme, of meeting a biological parent for the first time, spoke to Ricamora, whose mother left his father when he was 7 months old. “I’m not really an extroverted guy, but I felt I could stand onstage and speak with complete certainty and authority through this other person,” he says. “I just felt the electricity of telling this story that was similar to mine but wasn’t mine.”
+ Fil-Am actor terrific as Ninoy Aquino
“My dad used to DJ the Friday night youth center dances on the Air Force base,” recalled Conrad, who was in the cast of Lea Salonga and George Takei’s “Allegiance” at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. “I would always enter the dance contest with friends. My biggest inspiration was my dad. He was always goofing off with my older brother and me and doing silly voices and impressions. That sense of play stays with me in everything I do.”
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28.10.2014 в 21:07-
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28.10.2014 в 21:13-
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28.10.2014 в 21:23спс
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28.10.2014 в 21:23-
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28.10.2014 в 21:25вот откуда такое тело!
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28.10.2014 в 21:28-
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28.10.2014 в 21:29