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Sweet Tea
For his 2008 book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, academic Johnson interviewed 72 men, presenting their responses as an oral history of the Southern experience for gay men of color. In this new solo performance based on the same set of interviews used for the book—copresented by About Face and the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago, of which Northwestern faculty member Johnson is a fellow—the writer-performer draws on 14 of his subjects for stories about coming out, sex and relationships, and the phenomenon of the “church sissy.”
The result is an empathetic, often hugely entertaining collection of personal anecdotes that suffers from a scant sense of the people they belong to. Like the chapters of his book, Johnson’s play is divided thematically, which makes it difficult to track his narrators; as valiantly as Johnson (a charming if occasionally shaky performer whose vocals can get lost in the Viaduct’s cavernous mainstage space) and director Jones try to delineate them, assigning each a voice, a gesture or an area of Grant Sabin’s inviting front-porch set, 14 is a lot to keep track of without much context. What’s more perplexing is a character that seems promised but hardly shows up: the South. The cuttings Johnson’s chosen for this version of Sweet Tea represent a range of black gay male experiences, but they offer little comment on the peculiarities of the regional culture that fostered them.
