Clean

What would happen if you found that impossible love was indeed possible? And what would happen if two of these couples were a drag queen and a woman, and a priest and a boy?“The forms of love that dare not speak their names are pretty scarce in this age of the tabloid talk shows. But that hasn’t stopped Edwin Sanchez, a new playwright of tremendous emotional conviction … How do you feel, for example, about a thirty year-old Roman Catholic priest in love with a ten-year-old boy? The relationship — which, it should probably be noted right away, is never consummated — is at the center of CLEAN … Mr Sanchez is a wide-eyed, unregenerate romantic who uses what he describes as ‘impossible’ relationships to consider and celebrate the arbitrariness of love. In a sense, the play is like a contemporary MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in which the passion-drunk characters, rather than being sorted into socially acceptable pairs, learn to live in a world ruled by a blind Cupid. It is a theme Mr Sanchez explored in TRAFFICKING IN BROKEN HEARTS, an unsettling drama about a doomed gay triangle … He is, in other words, a playwright to watch closely.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times