BEING GAY, as writer David Schmader likes to point out, is often absurd. But the alternatives offered by so-called “conversion therapists,” who promise to “cure” gays and lesbians of their single-sex attraction and make them “normal,” is absurd in a way that would make Tristan Tzara’s head spin.

Straight

Re-bar

ends May 9

Schmader’s undercover inquiries into this strange counter-counterculture is the subject of Straight, a new one-man show he performs at Re-bar. While I wouldn’t agree with the playwright’s claim that he’s a “terrible actor,” only capable of faking an emotional response while under the influence of various substances, Straight is closer to a dramatic reading than to a traditional evening of theater. (In fact, in its current incarnation, Schmader reads most of the second half from an incongruous music stand placed center-stage.) But under the influence of the performer’s dry delivery, it’s actually the better for it—a compassionate, funny, but ardently intelligent exploration of the basic concepts of gender identity.

The idea for Straight was hatched from a piece of hate mail Schmader received after writing an article about prostitution. What he found strange was the writer’s shock not at Schmader’s nonjudgmental take on selling sex, but at his admitted homosexuality. Where does all this hate—often by people who profess to be Christians—come from? As Schmader points out, the Book of Leviticus—the primary source for what have been called the biblical “clobber passages” on homosexuality—is primarily concerned with rituals of purification and women’s menstrual cycles. It’s sort of a “Martha Stewart Living, BC” he says.

To find an answer, Schmader ventures forth from the cozy and tolerant confines of Capitol Hill, a gay-friendly neighborhood in a gay-friendly city, to explore the lives and methods of those involved in attempts to bring homosexuals out of their “sin.” His first “out of town” trip is to a therapist in Bellevue who believes firmly that the way to become “straight” is to change the secretions of the body’s glands. A simple-enough process, the therapist explains, once you master yoga. Next is a series of encounter groups with Metanoia Ministries, where he is alternately bored and appalled by the attempts of gay men to put their riotous lives behind them and find wives. This, Schmader notes, is assumed to be “something automatically bestowed on ex-gays, like giving a college graduate a Lexus.”

Finally, the author heads home to the absolute heart of American heterosexuality, Texas, and a weekend retreat where ex-gays are partnered up with straight mentors for a series of lectures and workshops designed to steer them further along the straight and narrow. Here is where Schmader’s absurd humor reaches its zenith: He performs, in an “ex-gay Christian talent show,” a rendition—set to a tune of his own devising and accompanied on folk guitar—of some passages from Leviticus describing how to recognize leprosy. (That Schmader himself looks as “straight” as a Midwest bank teller is an unspoken but hilarious undercurrent to all this business.)

Advocates of the conversion movement are an easy target for outrage and ridicule, and the idea of “going undercover” into the movement is certainly not new. (At one point, Schmader considers the possibility that all the “ex-gays” at the retreat are undercover journalists.) But while he gets plenty of comic mileage from the material, he’s also surprisingly critical of the gay community (why, he asks, does one need “gay pride,” unless one assumes the automatic existence of “gay shame”?), and he gives the arguments of the conversionists a thoughtful hearing. Schmader admits that he himself is disconcerted by the attempts of some gays to find salvation through promiscuous sex, and that the idea of sex with no potential for procreation is a serious philosophical conundrum.

Nonetheless, Schmader can see that even the valid criticisms of the conversionists come from a place of hate rather than loving concern, and it’s a constant struggle not to blow his cover by letting them know exactly what he thinks of their nonsense. In fact, while there’s no catharsis in the story that he tells us, the entire evening is one long release of his frustration and anger in trying to connect with these people. His final solution, much like his Leviticus-inspired guitar solo, is not rational argument, but a wonderfully underplayed absurdism that, instead of giving the movement more of the attention it craves, gives it laughter.