GALE ON STAGE IN LA

Gale Harold, Denise Crosby, and Claudia Mason will head the cast of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, to play Theatre/Theater in Los Angeles, January 15-February 21. Lou Pepe will direct. This modern version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is set in the American South of repressed desires. The cast will also feature Robert E. Beckwith, Curtis C., Francesca Casale, John Gleeson Connolly, Kelly Ebsary, Andy Forrest, Sheila Shaw and Geoffrey Wade.
Harold, who plays Valentine Xavier, is best known for his role of Brian Kinney on Showtime's Queer as Folk, and his stage credits include Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer for the Roundabout Theatre Company. Crosby, who plays Lady Torrance, received an Ovation nomination for her performance in Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, and her TV work includes the role of Lt. Tasha Yar in Star Trek, The Next Generation. Mason, who plays Carol Cutrere, began her career as a teen model, and her Off Broadway credits include Boxing Day Parade and The Glass Menagerie, while her film and television work includes Celebrity and Outpatient.

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The character description of Valentine Xavier, that Gale will be playing:

Valentine Xavier is a wandering singer and musician of about thirty who is described in the stage directions as having a wild beauty about him. He wears a snakeskin jacket, mottled white, black, and gray. In the bars of New Orleans where he sang and lived wildly, he was known simply as Snake-skin. Val always carries a guitar with him, and he describes it as his "life's companion." Music saves him whenever he gets into a bad situation. The guitar itself is covered with the autographs of famous blues singers. Val is a free spirit who does not fit into conventional society, and it is significant that the Choctaw cry given by the Conjure Man, a cry of wild intensity, coincides with Val's first entrance.

Val was raised in a place called Witches' Bayou, and he claims to have unusual powers of self-control. He can hold his breath for three minutes, stay awake for forty-eight hours, and not urinate for a day. He also claims that his body temperature is two degrees higher than normal, like a dog's. He left Witches' Bayou when he was in his teens and drifted to New Orleans, where he soon found that women were irresistibly drawn to him, but he eventually tired of their attentions and of the dissipated life he was leading.

Val is basically a good-hearted man who has insight into the deeper longings of life. He can sense what others really need and desire, and he knows how to give comfort when it is needed. He himself says that although he has lived among corruption (in New Orleans), he is not corrupted. In Two River County, however, people find his manner sexually suggestive, although he does nothing deliberately to cultivate this impression. However, because he is an artistic spirit who does not fit into the accepted ways of thought and action, and because he allows himself to be drawn into an affair with Lady Torrance, he is hunted down by the men of the town.

It's almost as if TW foretold the future. As if the role was tailor made for him.