When JaDonna Harris and Marquian Harris married in 2015, they did it alone, before a justice of the peace. As their 10th anniversary approached, they contemplated a do-over that would include friends and family. But the cost was an issue, as was agreeing on a venue. Then JaDonna Harris received an email from Arena Stage. An upcoming play was looking for real couples interested in getting married or renewing their vows. She and her wife replied immediately.
“We were like, this is kismet,” JaDonna Harris recalled.
That play, “We Are Gathered,” is a new work by Tarell Alvin McCraney that began Friday, overlapping with Washington’s World Pride festivities. A celebration of love, each performance will culminate with what Arena Stage is calling “Love Takes Center Stage,” an immersive experience in which one or more couples will join the actors for a real marriage ceremony or vow renewal. One of the stars, Craig Wallace, has been ordained. Over the course of the show’s 30 scheduled performances, several dozen couples will participate. After each show, Arena Stage will hold a reception with cake, champagne and dancing.
The Harrises can’t wait.
“We are happy to celebrate queer love, to celebrate the love in general all over the world and everybody’s ability to find a person that they are attached to,” JaDonna Harris said. “That’s all that matters.”
McCraney began to dream up “We Are Gathered” during World Pride in Sydney, Australia, in 2023. A theater there was staging a revival of his 2012 play “Choir Boy,” a drama about a young gay man at an all-Black preparatory school. McCraney admired the production, but he wished that the play, which deals with anti-gay prejudice, didn’t feel quite so relevant. He decided that by the time the next World Pride came around, two years later, he would offer actors a script that felt more playful, more joyful.
In searching for a subject, McCraney, now 44 and the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, kept returning to the idea of marriage. When he was growing up, marriage wasn’t available to gay men, but a 2015 Supreme Court decision had changed that. Now friends were asking him why he wasn’t married and he was beginning to ask that question of himself. Recent opposition to gay rights and transgender rights — including book bans and a Florida law nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” — had made that question feel more urgent. “Those things were happening pretty regularly and beginning to remind me there isn’t a lot of time and nothing is promised,” he said. “I decided, OK, I’m going to find out what this means to me.”
“We Are Gathered,” a love story between W. Tre (Kyle Beltran), an architect, and Free (Nic Ashe), a musician, is one answer. What begins as an anonymous assignation in a dark park becomes a serious relationship. But owing to W. Tre’s reservations, the knot stays untied.
I visited rehearsal on a Saturday afternoon last month. As McCraney watched from a monitor (he was in Los Angeles), Beltran stood center stage in character and welcomed the audience. “I’m inviting you to witness, to witness me here,” he said.
The director Kent Gash, dressed in black, with rainbow high-tops, walked over to Beltran, asking him to adjust his body position and gesture. “I think that just includes everybody more specifically,” Gash said.
Inclusion is at the heart of the play, which is why Tiffany Fulson, Arena Stage’s community engagement producer, and Hannah Viederman, the artistic producer, were seeking out real couples via emails, a newsletter and targeted ads on social media last month. So far they have vetted about 50 couples, straight and gay, young and old, local and far-flung.
“We’ve been really totally surprised by the great diversity of people that have showed up and said, I feel like this play in this moment is really speaking to me,” Viederman said. “Every single couple that we’ve talked to has demonstrated to us that their love is deserving of having a place onstage.”
In addition to learning his lines, Wallace became ordained via an online application approved by the District of Columbia. “As an actor I’m responsible for telling the story, but as somebody that’s officiating a wedding I’m responsible for their union,” he said. “It’s a step beyond what I usually do onstage.”
He described himself as both anxious and excited about this extra role. “If I blow a monologue one night, I have the matinee to get it right,” he said. “I don’t have the matinee to get their marriage right.” But the stress is worth it. Wallace and his partner of 30 years were married in January. They did it for legal reasons, but Wallace found himself overcome with emotion. He hopes that the participating couples will feel the same.
“I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces,” he said. “I can’t wait to see them actually stand before 800 people and profess their love to each other.”
Gash isn’t quite sure what to expect. “We’re going to be discovering a great deal each night,” he said the week before performances began. McCraney has already discovered plenty. Before the writing and rehearsing, he was dismissive of weddings. They seemed like pointless displays of opulence. Now, he feels differently. “This commitment is sacred and essential and a human right,” he said. “It is about a community coming to witness people who have made a decision to be together forever and that’s powerful.”
Theater also draws its power from community, from witnessing. And for McCraney, that makes “We Are Gathered” consummate theater. “We always hope that we come in, and through our dreaming together, we leave different,” he said. The marriages make that real.
Whether marriage equality will remain legal is an open question. Though the play was written before the 2024 election, it is being staged after, when queer and transgender people continue to be the target of hate crimes as well as policies and executive orders that seek to erode their rights. This has not escaped the cast and creative team. The play is both a romance and a political act.
“I hope it prompts us all to think that the commitment to loving someone belongs to all of us,” Gash said.
That political aspect was appealing for Ashe, who appeared in “Choir Boy” on Broadway and is a longtime collaborator of McCraney’s. To perform in the play would be to perform a civic duty, with delight. “It feels like an act of rebellion,” Ashe said. “When you hear ‘rebellion,’ you think, holding up signs, raising fists. But the rebellion in this show is actually the joy. That these characters can laugh and love is rebellion enough.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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