The Radical Play With the Title We Can’t Say

In the cavernous interior of New York City’s Park Avenue Armory, The F****ts and Their Friends Between Revolutions, until Dec 14) unfolds on a mostly blank stage. Close your eyes to imbibe its mixture of music, myth, manifesto, and polemic, and it feels like being around a campfire of wry and fantastical incantations.

The performance—adapted from a 1977 book by Larry Mitchell, with illustrations by Ned Asta—feels very much of the Lavender Hill Commune, a queer commune in Ithaca, New York, that Mitchell and Asta were founder members of. F****t—a term of anti-gay abuse that the Daily Beast does not write out in full—is here used as badge of honor and pride, both a warrior word and casual descriptor drained of its homophobic viciousness.

On stage are a group of performers who sing and tell