But senior playwright Eka Dimitri Sitorus has taken that brave step in his latest play, The Many Taboos of Being Gay, being performed at the Salihara Theater in South Jakarta this weekend.

The one-hour show consists of four short plays: Sweet Hunk O’ Trash, Twenty Dollar Drinks, Frozen Dog and Uncle Chick. All are adaptations of plays with similar titles from acclaimed US playwrights Eric Lane and Joe Pintauro, who often include gay issues in their work.

Eka attempts to look at homosexuality from various perspectives, covering social, political, moral and psychological elements through various characters. He also questions public resistance to gay people and ideas.

Eka says he raised the topic because he has been interested in gay issues since he was young.

“When I lived in San Francisco for two years, I witnessed and learned so many things about this issue,” said the 55-year-old, who attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in California in the 1980s.

Eka said he had been involved with a volunteer organization that assisted people living with HIV/AIDS during that period, an experience that he reflects on through his adaptation of a work by Lane, Sweet Hunk O’ Trash.

He brushed aside assumptions that he had deliberately chosen the topic to attract attention amid the controversy currently surrounding LGBT issues. “I have been working on these scripts since 2005,” he said.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender ( LGBT ) issues are still considered taboo in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population. Many events raising these issues have been banned recently and also subjected to threats from religious fundamentalists.

Hard-liners have stopped events on LGBT issues, including the Q! Film Festival in Jakarta, and their aggressive actions have prevented LGBT-themed films from being commercially distributed in movie theaters. This unfortunately helped to limit the exposure of award-winning 2011 film Lovely Man by Teddy Soeriaatmadja.

This time around, Eka says he has not received any such threats.

“But we have been told to be prepared. So I just tell my boys: ‘Don’t panic and don’t get stirred up by people’s anger’,” he said.

Putting the theme aside, the play is good but not mind-blowing in terms of script, set and cast.

Eka acknowledged experiencing difficulty in adapting the plays for a local audience. This result is that some cast members fail to effectively deliver funny lines that should ideally trigger laughter from the audience.

The cast, all from Eka’s acting school — the Sakti Actor Studio — overall deliver an excellent performance. However, it is clear they are not used to the format of live theater, as can be heard in their limited vocal range and projection.

However, the cast does a great job of maintaining lively dialogues and displaying perfect body language and gestures throughout the play.

Even though each play only involves two actors, those actors always manage to maintain the rhythm of the dialogue and plot.

The cast’s great performance comes as no surprise, being students of Eka’s studio. Besides working as a playwright, Eka is also a senior acting coach who has worked with big names in the film industry such as Agnes Monica and Olga Lydia.

Before establishing his acting studio, Eka was a lecturer at the Jakarta Institute of Arts and has experience as an academic in the US and the UK. He also published a book, The Art of Acting, in 2002.

Eka’s last play was a musical in 2011, titled Bang Bang You’re Dead, which was an adaptation of a work by another US playwright, William Mastrosimone.

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