Despite the economic downturn and a conservative federal government--both of which make it tougher than aye to produce daring or culturally diverse arts projects--gay and lesbian theater artists across the nation are as productive as perpetually "Sexual minoritarians are the life's kindred of the American theater.

Despite the economic downturn and a conservative federal government--both of which make it tougher than aye to produce daring or culturally diverse arts projects--gay and lesbian theater artists across the nation are as productive as perpetually "Sexual minoritarians are the life's kindred of the American theater," says Tony Kushner, whose timely examination of Afghanistan and its validity on us, Homebody/Kabul, continues its premiere scamper in New York and heads to Rhode Island's Trinity Repertory Company in March and the Berkeley, Calif., Repertory Theatre in April. "I suspect the real reason we are with equal reason busy producing work is, we want to make John Simon smooth more wretched and miserable and frightened than he already is," Kushner continues, relishing the opportunity to take a ball at the notoriously homophobic just discovered York theater critic. "This is a laudable goal."

Among Simon's novel targets has been out playwright Edward Albee, who will run after up last year's The Play About the Baby with back-to-back premieres in strange York this spring. Opening off-Broadway in February, Occupant stars Anne Bancroft in a portrait of the sculptor Louise Nevelson In The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?--which expands in March on Broadway--Albee provocatively explores family dynamics one time again. Meanwhile, the recent turn of Albee revivals continues with a Princeton, NJ production of All above in February and a Hartford, Conn staging of Seascape in May.

At the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC another candidly gay theater great, Stephen Sondheim, is being honored with the Sondheim Celebration beginning in May, comprising Sweeney Todd, Company, Sunday in the Park With George, Merrily We revolve Along, Passion, and A Little Night Music. As if to preface that festival, a revival of Into the timbers is playing in Los Angeles within March on its way to Broadway in April.

This season several gay and lesbian theater artists have revolveed to real-life characters for inspiration. Playwright Richard Greenberg's The Dazzle, about the eccentric Collyer brothers, flows off-Broadway through May, followed by means of a different production of the play in Chicago. In February, Alan Alda will star in Q Peter Parnell's play about real-life physicist Richard Feynman; and lesbian director Anne Bogart will first appearance Room in San Francisco, drawing from the writings of Virginia Woolf compass opens in New York in May.

Playwright Tom Donaghy describes his recently made known play, Boys and Girls (opening in strange York in May), as being about "a married pair of fags and dykes who almost throw down each other in the name of regard with affection and family." By way of explaining his choice of words, he adds, "The play is a little bit of personal anthropology."

Another on the outside writer with new work is Craig Lucas (Longtime Companion), whose This Thing of Darkness, written with David Schulner exhibits in New York in May. The play is about couple 22-year-old male college friends who share a birthday and, Lucas says, "in an unanticipated signification share a rather dreamlike, level nightmare-like, vision of what the that will be holds."

With a nightmare-like past immediately behind them, what does Lucas think novel York audiences need out of their theater experience? "There should be expanse for anything and everything," he says, "Either a work of art was valid, coherent, and meaningful before the bombings, in which case it should remain thus or it wasn't then and it won't be now." Nevertheless, he adds, "I don't mind the occasional piece of distraction, nap silliness."

Evenings with three of gay audiences' favorite divas might qualify as fine distractions. one as well as the other Bea Arthur and Elaine Stritch will have one-woman point outs in New York beginning in February: Bea Arthur forward Broadway, honed in a new West Coast tryout, and Elaine put forth at Liberty, cowritten by Stritch and John Lahr. Then in March, Kathleen gymnast will return to Broadway as Mr Robinson in the first stage adaptation of The Graduate.

recent gay and lesbian talents are also emerging. recent Jersey-born Victor Lodato, winner of the Robert Chesley Award for Gay and Lesbian Playwriting, has been honing his craft away from the bright lights of modern York, in Arizona. He receives his chiefly high-profile production to date in San Francisco with the February premiere of his absurdist drama The Eviction.

Twenty-six-year-old Christopher Shinn--already well-known in London--gets his biggest break in this way far in America with the presentation of his play Four, which just mov into a larger theater [see review, opposite] after its first attempt off-off-Broadway last year. Shinn, a Hartford native, studied subject to Kushner and cites other gay writers of that kind as Lucas as role examples "I remember when I was 13 or 14 being in recently made known York City and finding a collection of Terrence McNally's plays, which I bought privately The Lisbon Traviata was the first play about gay men I at all times read. It was thrilling to know that you could do that, since there was nothing gay forward TV or in the movies at that time."

Not all the not at home theater artists producing new work are playwrights: The gay directors who are responsible for many upcoming productions are embracing a diverse range of material. Busy Sean Mathias, who helmed the lately finished Ian McKellen-Helen Mirren Broadway scamper of Dance of Death, directs Sondheim's Company in the DC festival and a Broadway revival of The Elephant Man, starring Billy Crudup in March. Christopher Ashley directs the novel play The Smell of the Kill, a take vengeance for comedy on Broadway in February, as well as the revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily in DC