Editor’s Note: The 35th Annual Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival will be held May 13-26 at different venues in and around Loch Haven Park and downtown Orlando. Freeline Media will be previewing the shows right up to the festival date.

ORLANDO — Queer-themed theater has been a staple for years during the Orlando Fringe Festival, with the creative talents of gay playwrights and actors giving the Fringe audience productions from a gay perspective.

David John Phillips will be doing the same next month, when his play Oh! I Miss the War will make its Orlando debut during the festival, with 7 performances of this one-man show at The Savoy bar in Ivanhoe Village.

It’s a show, David notes, that has a unique perspective, examining the generational shift between older gays like himself, and younger ones who may have a very different perspective on queer identity.

Calling his show “raw, radical, and resonant,” he notes that it spans five decades across two continents as it “brings to life two generations of queer men.”  

What the story behind Oh! I Miss The War?

As David notes, the play opens in London in 1967 with the artist portraying Jack, an “aging tailor to the chorus boys of the West End.” The local gay community is celebrating the fact that England just voted to decriminalize homosexuality, but Jack has a slightly different reaction.

He soberly “watches the new generation celebrate the decriminalization of sodomy, and laments that they will never know the outlaw happiness he knew as a youthful rentboy,” David notes. “Holding court hilariously, he re-affirms the power of transient love and outsider community.”

David also portrays Matt, a resident of Toronto in 2024. As David notes, much has changed since 1967.

“Matt, service bottom with failing knees, seeks connection with puppies and pronoun-adept Gen Zs. Remembering the erotic, political, and spiritual transformations of S&M, AIDS, and the Radical Faeries, he returns to the ever-unfolding present, and celebrates the continuing project of queer world-building and erotic possibility,” he notes. 

These two characters, David stressed, “each bring the past to the present and celebrate the future.”

Suitably intrigued, Freeline Media reached out to David to learn more on this show.

Freeline Media: Tell us about the genesis of Oh! I Miss The War.

David John Phillips: A few years ago, I saw the script for Queers at the National Theatre bookstore in London, and of course I had to buy it.  It’s a collection of monologues commissioned by the BBC in 2017 to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Sexual Offenses Act, which partially decriminalized of some kinds of sodomy in parts of the UK. Matthew Baldwin’s I Miss the War is one of those monologues. It’s set in a gay bar in London in 1967, during the week of decriminalization. Jack, an aging and hilarious queen, watches the new generation celebrate, but worries that they will never know the outlaw joys he knew in his youth. I read it, and fell in love. It’s a beautifully written monologue for a queer man of my age. He’s kind and sexy and thoughtful and dishy and hard-assed. I’d never read anything like it. I had to perform it, which I did at Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto in 2023. That experience was so rich, so evocative, and so much fun that I knew I had to write something to extend and respond to Matthew’s work, and to bring the evening up to an hour. So I wrote Oh! as a companion piece.

FM: How did you decide to approach the show by dividing it between 1967 London and 2024 Toronto?

DP: Apparently I have very little imagination.  When I decided to respond to I Miss the War, I had to do it from my own experience. Like Jack, I was wary and ambivalent when gay rights organizations targeted marriage and military service as goals in the struggle for equality. Is that kind of equality really what we want? It irks and frightens Jack that the rentboys are going to want to get married, for God’s sake. Where’s the fun in that? Even as I myself got married, I shared Jack’s concerns about creeping normativity. Then I performed I Miss the War at Glad Day. While interacting with the staff, the customers, and the hangers-on there, I realized we remain delightfully, unclassifiably queer. The celebration of that informed my writing of Oh!  Oh! is quite autobiographical, and the questions it explores were all posed by Jack in I Miss the War. I just wrote as honestly as I could about my experiences – of discovering my place in a sexual subculture; of navigating erotics in a battlefield; of wondering what the young queers I see around me now are thinking and desiring; of eschewing the normal. At first, I performed both monologues back to back. But then Tony Misiano, a wonderful director with whom I had just worked in New York, suggested that we interleave them, and let them really speak to and build upon each other. That structure works beautifully to reveal resonances between the two monologues that surprise even me. 

FM: What are some of the challenges, and benefits, of performing a one-man show?

DP: There’s nobody else on stage to look at you funny when you fuck up, nobody on stage to keep you honest, so you really have to keep listening to the audience to keep yourself on your toes.  And sometimes I think “Hell, I wrote this myself; I have the author’s permission to do what I want with the text.” And the director’s not here! Wheee! That, for me, is deadly. I have to remember that we spent lots of time and thought putting the right words and the right actions in the right places, and honor that. But on the whole, it’s a pleasure, a blast, very ego-feeding and very freeing. And it allows me easily to pick up the show and take it wherever it needs to go next.  

FM: What kind of audiences have embraced the show in the past?

DP: I’m proud of the way this show reaches across generations. I turned 70 this year. I have financial and emotional resources. I have a certain stability. I have history. I don’t nearly give a shit like I used to. I’m realizing that this position, this role, is real and it’s valuable. There is a value in continuing to be present in an evolving community. Young queers have responded to the show avidly. The show points to a past, and welcomes them into a history, that they are absolutely, right now, a part of creating. I’ve held young queers sobbing in my arms after the show, and I’ve read their comments: “Begging all my fellow gen-z queers to see this;” “When Matt stares into the audience and thanks the new guard for keeping gender in the public conversation, we cried;” “As a younger queer person, the stories of queer elders are so affirming and so, so important.” I had one young fae tell me how wonderful it was to meet someone who’d been in the trenches. All I could say was “Honey, look at yourself! You are *so* *completely* in the trenches! Thank you!” Older queers, too, are moved by the evocation of the past as part and parcel of the present and future. “The camp, the activism, the losses and the gains, the joy and pain brought my role as a queer elder into focus.” “Who are we as gay men of a certain age? How far have we really come? What does it mean to be ‘radical’?” And the question “How did we get here?” seems to resonate with audiences across the landscape of gender and sexuality.  Critics have loved it. S. Bear Bergman loved it “unreservedly,” giving it 5 stars in Next Magazine, and calling it “delicious, sweet, and startlingly kind.” For Glen Sumi of the Toronto Star it was a Critic’s Pick, and “a treasure trove of queer history.” Colin Thomas, of Fresh Sheet, found that it “explores queer themes with depth, tenderness, and audacity.” 

FM: Where are you taking the show next, after Orlando Fringe?

DP: On to the Edmonton Fringe in August!  Then, who knows? Got a venue? Call me!

Where Can I See Oh! I Miss the War at Orlando Fringe?

Oh! I Miss The War is being performed during the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival at the Starlite Room at The Savoy, 1913 N. Orange Ave. To purchase the $15 tickets, log on to the Orlando Fringe online box office. The show runs for 60 minutes and the performance dates are:
* Friday, May 15 at 5:30 p.m. (Tickets are $6 for this performance)
* Saturday, May 16 at 7:30 p.m.
* Sunday, May 17 at 1:30 p.m.
* Monday, May 18 at 7 p.m.
* Wednesday, May 20 at 7 p.m.
* Friday, May 22 at 5:30 p.m.
* Saturday, May 23 at 6 p.m.

Michael Freeman is an Orlando journalist, playwright, and author of the book A Christmas Eve Story. Contact him at Freelineorlando@gmail.com.