Jeff Klawes
Stowe: “I didn’t even know what gay was because nobody offered me that definition.”
Five years ago, Zak Stowe was being raked over the coals for trying to stage a play that his conservative Lutheran college considered anti-Christian. Now in Madison, Stowe is making his directorial debut with StageQ’s Southern Baptist Sissies, the story of young gay men finding themselves in Texas.
“I can say I was each of those boys at some point in my life,” says Stowe, who will turn 27 during the show’s Sept.14-22 run at the Bartell Theatre. “From the time I was able to recognize that I had a crush on a guy at age 13 and 14, even then I still didn’t know what gay was because no one offered me that definition.”
While at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota, Stowe sat on the board of a local community theater company. The education major was in his senior year and looking forward to student teaching. But when he accepted the role of director in the community theater’s production of Inherit the Wind, teachers and school leadership at his college bristled.
The 1955 play is a fictionalized version of the so-called Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925. John Scopes, a small-town Tennessee teacher, was convicted of teaching evolution, an act that was illegal in the state.
Stowe’s teachers questioned his faith, and the school pulled back the facilities and resources that it had historically offered to the community theater. Almost overnight, all but one of the student actors dropped out of the play. The news was picked up by the Associated Press and soon the story was being discussed on playbill.com and atheist blogs.
“That whole incident was the start of the end for my faith, ultimately,” Stowe says, adding that the school rescinded his offer to become a student teacher due to the controversy. “I was one of those kids that laid awake every night praying. It became a P.S. to every prayer. ‘P.S.: I don’t wanna be gay. Amen.’”
After coming out publicly on Facebook the night before graduation, Stowe relocated to Madison to join his sister Alyssa, a theater major at UW-Madison. Along with Alyssa, he began working with StageQ in 2016.
“Being involved in StageQ has been a next step for me to become gayer and queerer than I ever was,” says Stowe, who as of Aug. 1 became president of the company’s board of directors.
The rehearsal process for Southern Baptist Sissies has been emotional for him, as well as for the cast and crew. Most cast members have either been or known someone who was afraid to come out as gay or was shunned for it, he says.
“We cry every day. We watch each other and ask if people are okay,” Stowe says. “It’s easy to spiral back in that hole.”
Despite the trauma of being shunned by his alma mater and his church, Stowe says he doesn’t want to alienate religious audience members.
“We still want to leave you with a little bit of hope, so it’s healing and it starts a conversation and it makes you think,” he says of the play. “I don’t want it to be about revenge.”
