Despite its title, Anita Bryant Died for Your Sins has little to do with her except that her crusade against homosexual rights makes gay Horace Poore, the main character, apprehensive. Despite being touted as a contemporary Our Town, the major likeness here is that Horace narrates the play. He does so by typing-out-loud the story of how he gets through life amid the events and changes of the 1960s and '70s, bound up with what happens to his family.
His tree house, both office and retreat, is cleverly integrated into a dark, rocky atmosphere that engulfs Horace's Poore Corners homestead, where dinners are eaten before the TV, out of tinfoil, accompanied by Kool Aid - and love. Next door, a mentally-deficient, Polish-American woman screams out every night and tends to a doll. This becomes FRAUGHT WITH MEANING in a denouement involving Horace's phys ed teacher and first crush. In fact, it is one of the few crises that doesn't parallel American problems (Vietnam War, unions losing power, OPEC's bringing on an energy crisis, factories closing, unemployment, educational inequities). Each problem affects his family personally, and they all eventually join in to solve each other's dilemnas. Only Horace feels he has to hide something - his homosexuality; only he experiences Bryant as a threat.
Scenes in which she sings the national anthem, appears on radio and TV, and gives sermons while she tries to get Dade County voters to discriminate against gays, represent a motif of Horace's personal problem being woven into societal troubles. Lucky that he comes from such a noble family, real diamonds in the rough! Just dandy how all the story picks up everything they could be involved in! (Even Jewish neighbors are dragged in and out, indicating they can be integrated with Christians.) And see the parallels to today?
Is the ultimate answer that family can quickly change or be accepting to demolish obstacles? That seems to be the point of a second half that's better than a seemingly meandering first. But in both, all the sentiments are in their right places.
The younger actors do well in their mild roles, but the adults make their characters real: Barbara Bradshaw's brash, gutsy Henrietta Poore; Robert D. Mowry's stalwart husband/father; Elizabeth Palmer in a variety of parts, but especially as self-righteous Bryant; Tom Demenkoff, also doubling but most effective as a far-rightist media preacher. Palmer sings well too.
Director Steven Umberger gets as much drama as possible from a script that's basically a pageant with narrative incorporating dramatized episodes.
