Lee Osorio grew up seeing plays at Actor’s Express, including queer shows by playwrights such as Steve Yockey and Samuel D. Hunter, so it felt natural for him to mount the world premiere of his “A Third Way” there.
“It’s exciting to be part of that tradition,” he told Georgia Voice.
Osorio’s new play — based in Atlanta, directed by Lauren Morris and the winner of the Del Shores playwriting competition — is about the issue of whether to open up a relationship after it gets a little stale, as its characters start to question some major aspects about how they live.
Nico (Braian Rivera Jimenez) and Matt (Brandon Lee Browning) are at the heart of the story. Osorio says Nico is a queer middle school teacher and Latino man who has gotten to the point, like many, where he has checked all the boxes in life and doesn’t know what is next.
“He is married and found the boy and the dream house and has his dream job, but what comes next?,” Osorio said. “Looking down the barrel at the next 70 years, what does he have to look forward to?”
Nico is really interested in having kids. His partner Matt is gay and was raised in an evangelical church, so has worked to distance himself from more traditional ideas of marriage.
“He still has a lot of that internalized homophobia and still has a lot of ideas of what the structure of a marriage should look, which is homonormative,” Osorio said. “I think an interesting development throughout the script is seeing how Matt journeys from being maybe a stereotypical Atlanta white gay to embracing a queerness that is bigger than that.”
As the married couple open their relationship, they meet Haamid (Ian Sawan), an artist and bartender in Atlanta. A connection develops between Matt and Haamid.
“I think Haamid sees in Matt a lot of stability that he has not seen in his life and Matt sees in Haamid a freedom to be who you are, unapologetically,” Osorio said. “And so they start a relationship not under full transparency with either Haamid or Nico. Thinking about the long-term implications of that is what the play is about.”
At some point after they meet Haamid, Nico decides they should close their relationship. The arrangement has brought some spice back into their love life and they are doing better,. yet Matt doesn’t want to do that and isn’t able to articulate that in a way, so he continues to see Haamid on the side without Nico knowing — and without Haamid knowing he doesn’t have permission.
The fourth character is Erica (Cecilia Leal), Nico’s best friend since college. According to the playwright, she is in a similar boat to Nico. A successful interior designer who owns her own firm, she doesn’t quite know what the future holds. When she finds out she’s pregnant, that complicates where she thinks she is going and makes her question what she wants to do with her life.
Osorio sees both pros and cons to open relationships and they are the same thing.
“The pro is that you have to have really good communication — and the con is that you have to have really good communication,” he said. “It forces you to be really honest about what you want and what you need — and be honest about the fact that you can’t get everything you need from one person, as much as the homonormative model has told us that ‘once you find your soulmate, that person will give you all the intellectual and romantic and financial stimulation and stability you could ever need.’ The reality is that we can’t get everything we need from one person and that can be a painful thing to talk about. It forces couples to be really honest about what they need and it’s an ongoing shifting conversation. It’s never just a one and done.”
The play is based in large part on a past relationship Osorio had.
“We did not open our relationship,” he recalled. “What would have happened if we had? Would that relationship have been able to continue if we had been more honest and have more open communication?”
Osorio thinks much of the art he’s seen about opening a relationship ends up being really negative about the idea.
“It’s that [idea of] ‘we tried it and at the end we have to go back to being monogamous because it almost destroyed our relationship, or it did destroy our relationship and we ended in a sad space,’ says Osorio. “I think this is a play that has a much more hopeful and realistic view of what it takes to build a family that actually serves us.”
“A Third Way” runs through October 27 at Actor’s Express