Best Gay-Themed Show

The gothic setting of rural North Carolina, with its hidden back roads and lost graveyards, is part of what made Stargaze Theatre's spring production of Eric Rosen's Dream Boy so gripping. But it was a terrible paradox -- that such a bucolic setting could hide puritanical repression and extreme violence -- that was the real triumph of the show. There couldn't be a worse place for a gay boy to come of age. Director Christian DeVries created a technically clever production that included a starry-night backdrop and a rolling country river made of light. Against this beautiful landscape, the boys of Rosen's world got naked and engaged in some of the most disturbingly erotic scenes seen on a Houston stage in years. Violent, painful and deeply moving, Dream Boy rose above the constraints of "gay" theater and captured the desperate sadness of the human condition.