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Larry Powell’s “The Gaze … No Homo” is difficult to classify. It started as a play, morphed into a web series and now is being presented by Center Theatre Group in a repackaged form for the digital stage.
The question isn’t simply academic. Understanding what you’re watching is important because a play isn’t streaming television or cinema, and even a hybrid has to make artistic choices that are medium specific.
“No Homo” centers on a 28-year-old Black queer actor named Jerome Price (Galen J. Williams), an ambitious talent fresh from grad school, who’s trying to navigate his way through the white power structure of the American theater. Jerome has been cast in a play at the exalted Evergreen Festival, located in a “WASPY, woodsy, white” community that, despite the elaborate welcome wagon, doesn’t feel especially inviting to someone who has been tagged “from the ’hood.”