Review: Oh! I Miss The War.
Photo of performer David John Phillips by Kryshan Randall
I saw Oh! I Miss The War over the summer, during the Toronto Fringe Festival, during a really superlative week of queer theatre - I saw the SoHo Rep production of Prince Faggot in Manhattan the same week and I felt like the luckiest homosexual in two countries.
I often feel lucky after a great piece of theatre. There’s something that so to have seen something that made me have so many feelings — to have been in the room for it, live.
Oh! I Miss the War is two solo plays, twisted together into one rope: the original monologue I Miss the War by Matthew Baldwin, written as part of an evening called Queers, commemorating the decriminalization of homosexuality in the U.K., and a collaborating monologue called Oh! by performer David John Phillips, who was so taken with the first piece he figured out — to all our benefit — how to be in conversation with it.
In both monologues, questions of and love and community (and the ways they rise and fall together) are troubled — not about whether we should be doing it, but about what the new era is going to mean. As Jack in I Miss the War, Phillips is contending with a sense of loss as gay men lose the excitement of , the insider language of Polari and the sense of being utterly constrained and totally free at the same time that comes with being largely beneath the interest of the state. As Matt in Oh!, Phillips grapples with having survived the AIDS pandemic only to end up feeling uncertain about his place in the queer community of today.
I’m also absolutely fascinated by the fact that we used to have a secret queer language and (for no reason in particular, I’m sure) I am starting to think we may want to consider bringing it back. Paul Baker’s book on Polari is really fun, highly recommend.
There’s a synchronicity between the monologues that’s very pleasing — two men, in two bars, in two big cultural and personal moments. It is worth mentioning that both pieces, performed in sections with just a light cue and a posture change to note crossing back and forth, directly discuss queer sex, including sex work, BDSM, cruising, hookups and sex parties. In a queer cultural context, the show doesn’t feel explicit at all, but some of the straight people in the audience seemed a little startled to be considering exactly why we’re leaving the bottom buttons of our Levi’s 501s undone.
Phillips is a compelling performer, who invests himself the whole way in every moment — every joy and every disappointment, every confusion and every revelation. It’s just delicious, honestly (and I am still thinking about the power of “a daytime look”). I unreservedly loved this show, for far more reasons than I have room here to explicate. But some deeply good and true and satisfying work happens on stage during Oh! I Miss the War, and I really encourage you to go and be there when it does.