A special benefit reading of Stan Richardson's Veritas, for Lambda Legal, starring Matt Doyle (Broadway: Spring Awakening, Bye Bye Birdie), Tate Ellington (Broadway: The Philanthropist; Film: Remember Me), Eric Nelson (Broadway: 13), Mitch Dean (Altar Boyz), Blake Daniel (Broadway: Spring Awakening), Matt Steiner (The Acting Company's Jane Eyre), Wayne Wilcox (Broadway: Coram Boy, TV: Gilmore Girls), and Christian Coulson (Film: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). It will be directed by Ryan J. Davis (White Noise, Broadway Beauty Pageants). This performance will include music by Rachel Peters (Stretch [a fantasia]) freely adapted from the Harvard Song Book.
The play will be fully produced as part of the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival in August. More information at www.veritastheplay.com.
Profits from this reading benefit Lambda Legal, the nation’s oldest and largest legal organization working for the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, and people with HIV/AIDS.
In the spring of 1920, a Harvard undergraduate's suicide unearthed a hidden homosexual subculture. Grief-stricken and demanding justice, his family brought two incriminating letters to the attention of Harvard’s legendary president, Lawrence Lowell, who hastily assembled a team of deans to expurgate these sexual deviants before they infected other students on campus. The five-man committee, self-titled “The Secret Court,” soon found 14 individuals “guilty” of homosexuality, forcing them to vacate not only Harvard, but the city of Cambridge as well. Astonishingly, this clandestine witch-hunt--the cause of two suicides and a slew of punctured lives--remained undiscovered until 2002, when a researcher for The Harvard Crimson accidentally stumbled across the “Secret Court Files, 1920″: 500 pages of cryptic documents describing in detail the systematic and malicious persecution of these students.
First workshopped at Classic Stage Company in 2007 and selected for the 2010 FringeNYC this August, Veritas is the tragic story of the bright-futured boys whose lives fell prey to a family's desire for revenge and an august institution's reckless pursuit of the Truth.