Vile Isle throws the worst queer people you know headfirst into the apocalypse

Featured image: Mariyea Jackson in Vile Isle. Photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich.

We’ve reached a landmark era for queer representation in theater — one where gay people get to be awful, too.

So proves Vile Isle, a new dark comedy now playing at The Tank in New York City through October 6. The play, written by Justin Halle and directed by Spencer Whale, features a very queer cast telling an even queerer story, wreaking havoc through an impending apocalypse as they go. “It was really a challenge to see if I could write the worst kind of gay people I know and just put them all in one show,” Halle tells INTO. 

Vile Isle is one part Old Testament, one part five-in-the-morning circuit party. It begins as drag queen Lizzie Fine has a petrifying prophecy of the end of the world: in 18 days, a great flood is coming, and she sets to work finding a way to survive. The rest of the play’s characters, meanwhile, have bigger things to worry about — throwing your cat a Bat Mitzvah, having an affair with your best friend’s boyfriend, or meeting God while high off your ass at The Met, to name a few.

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In a time when queer people can see themselves on stage more than ever before, theatermakers like Halle and Whale find themselves free from the burden of “good representation.” Not every gay character needs to be a paragon of morality, lest the entire queer community be associated with that one not-so-flattering figure. Instead, there’s room for Vile Isle’s titularly vile (yet relatable) quintet of characters.

“I think it’s really important to separate the high art form of tragedy from the Hays Code-influenced sad stories about queer people that we are trying to get away from,” says Whale. “One of the things that we have to do to be brave as queer artists is say, ‘We want to have the same kind of stories that everybody else gets to have, and we are going to work together to give ourselves those stories in ways that are not influenced by other people’s taste or expectations of what queerness is.’”

That was easy to achieve for Vile Isle, he continues, thanks to his collaborators behind the scenes: “When you get the right team together and nobody is looking at queerness as a moral failing, you can create a moral framework within the play that has nothing to do with queerness, but is human beings striving and failing in the same way that human beings have striven and failed in hundreds and thousands of years of drama.”

We want to have the same kind of stories that everybody else gets to have, and we are going to work together to give ourselves those stories in ways that are not influenced by other people’s taste or expectations of what queerness is.

– Spencer Whale

Halle and Whale know their work won’t satisfy everyone — and they don’t aim for it to. While studying together at Columbia University, the two were frequent collaborators, including on another of Halle’s plays, Cowgirl. They recalled an audience member who wasn’t happy with the way nonbinary identity was represented in that show: “At the end of the day, the note was like, ‘This character doesn’t reflect my experience. So what are you going to do about that?’” Halle says. “And the answer is, ‘Nothing,’ because we were depicting a very real experience of what it means to move out of one phase of life and move into another.”

When they first started writing Vile Isle two years ago, Halle says they kept that audience member in mind. “I wanted to make a play that they really loved and really hated, characters that represented real queer people in real moments of their life, even if those moments are uncomfortable and not particularly glamorous or even generous,” they say.

With that in mind, what would that audience member think of Vile Isle? The play’s queer representations are fraught, to say the least: there’s a semi-straight himbo wannabe DJ, a trans man willing to let his friend relapse to get his way, and a drag queen dictating who does and doesn’t get a ride out of oblivion on the queers-only ark. They’re almost gay stock characters — but not quite.

Halle says they did a lot of thinking on “how to tell a story about familiar archetypes, but then subverting them.”

“What happens if the Adderall twink has a terrifying religious revelation?” they muse. “What happens if the trans Black woman who thinks it’s her job to save the world realizes that that’s the last thing she wants to do, is save these assholes?”

No matter how bad we hurt each other and hurt ourselves, can we also protect each other?

– Justin Halle

Vile Isle sets out to answer those questions, and it does so with all the spectacle you could ask of a play about the apocalypse. Its world-ending flood is as much a nightmarish rave as it is a terrifying tempest, thanks to oppressively loud house music and strobing lights that place the audience alongside the characters in a maelstrom of chaos. That’s not even to mention a collapsing set adorned with tinsel and — as Halle puts it — a “12-foot-tall Kabbalah monster with light coming out of his face.”

“We talked a lot about Basement. We talked a lot about Berghain,” says Whale of the production’s design inspirations. “These spaces that are terrifying in a lot of ways to a lot of queer people — starting there and then working our way outwards has been the guiding principle of the design process.”

When Vile Isle’s flood does come, and its ark does set sail, and its world does come to an end, Halle and Whale hope audiences — beyond laughing at and having fun with the play’s many absurdities — can think of their own roles in queer community.

“In a world where it’s so, so easy to hurt each other or hurt ourselves, I think faith in community, faith in friendships, and the forgiveness that has to come along with that is something that’s really sticking with me at the end of this process,” Halle says. “It’s like, no matter how bad we hurt each other and hurt ourselves, can we also protect each other?”

“We want them to hold their queer community a little closer and think about the gift that it is that we as queer people get to transform so many times throughout our life,” Whale agrees. “I hope that it reminds people that it’s never too late to transform and to rethink what family is.” ♦

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Vile Isle is now playing at The Tank through October 6. Tickets are available here.

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