By Kenneth Jones
13 May 2010

Playbill.com: Adam is neurotic. A hypochondriac. Are you?
GN: I am a hypochondriac. That I do have in common with Adam, so I was able to write about that.

Playbill.com: So you believe that every pimple is cancer?
GN: Yeah, you know, probably. I mean, I definitely have thought that in my life. It's tragic. The tragedy is I came to New York as an 18-year-old, and came of age in New York. Sexuality is a part of that, and I was a young gay man who didn't necessarily know that, and I struggled through it all coming of age and coming out in New York and it was all during the time when the AIDS epidemic hit. So it was an incredible time of paranoia and tragedy all around, and sex was associated with death, ultimately. And that's how I had my coming of age, and as a hypochondriac you can only imagine what that all meant to me. I was walking around the city in a rubber suit, not touching anything or anyone. And that was my whole first 20 years: "I don't want to get AIDS." That was my hypochondria. So when I finally got over that, I was old enough that anything was fair game. So then it became cancer because now I'm in my 40s. It never ends, so that's my own particular torture.

Playbill.com: In terms of feedback from audiences, what was the range of emotion expressed?
GN: You know, there was a wide range. The thing that I love the most in this whole experience is that people were so moved to talk and converse with each other and ask questions and take the long way home, and that is why I got into it in the first place as an artist, as an actor — I wanted to make people think and affect change in some way. It wasn't going to be through politics or through science it was through art, so I was really encouraged that that could happen.

There was a wide response. I think I was afraid because when I tried to put the play out there initially, there was what I perceived as some resistance from the gay community, from my gay brothers. Because there was a character who was a Christian and gay and had somehow worked that out for himself. And people, particularly men who had come from any kind of religion in their life and escaped it, they didn't want to see that. It was like, "I didn't want to see that person. I've spent my whole life running away from that, and I don't want to give it breath or life or examine it."

Playbill.com: They view Luke as self-hating rather than having integrated his homosexuality and his religious views?
GN: Yeah, and the other character as self-hating by association, as Holly says in the play. And I understand that, I really do, but I think that's the easy way out — the easy first answer. But if you stop, take a look and take a few steps forward and start to dig in there and explore, it brings up feelings and there are more questions, and so I was encouraged that people were able to do that. I really thought people may be blocked from doing that, and there are some people who say, "I can't get behind that, I can't buy that," but for the most part people really took the ride.

(Kenneth Jones is managing editor of Playbill.com. Write him at kjones@playbill.com.)