‘A great queer’

How one writer’s friends helped make his play, ‘Where Moments Hung Before,’ lighter

PREVIEW. When Joey Pelletier began writing his first full-length play a year and a half ago, he was recovering from a drug addiction and a recent breakup. But “Where Moments Hung Before” debuts this weekend not as a painful self-reflection but as comic relief to the woes of sexual identity, grief and desire.
 
“Whatever I was feeling back then — whatever loss — I don’t feel anymore,” Pelletier says. “Maybe there’s a lot more love in the play now. It’s definitely a lot more fictional.”

With characters like a gay Jewish rapper and homosexual male and female leads, Pelletier’s play attempts to rev up issues thus far handled gently by local gay theater. Though the story follows the friends and family of a man named Jasper Kelly as they mourn his death, Pelletier sums it up as “a big gay drama with big queer laughs.”

“Even my straight friends wanted to play these gay characters,” he says.

Pelletier says the play took many forms before it was ready for an audience, including an epic musical and a soap opera. His friends, who became the cast of the production, acted out three workshops and threw in their own two cents about the play’s
direction.

“There’s a lot of self-deprecation that, when we workshopped the show, my friends laughed at but also made fun of,” says Pelletier. “Who doesn’t find humor in darkness?”

Other than his colleagues, Pelletier says he also found inspiration in music, an element that has remained in the final product. He says “Moments” draws influences from artists like Elliott Smith, Death Cab for Cutie and Regina Spektor.

Also included in the play’s soundtrack are an original rap and a few numbers sung by Pelletier himself. That’s right: The writer has also stepped into a role originally based on himself, yet the persona emerged as a reflection of the whole cast.

“It is just a wonderful feeling because it’s a mix of the past, present and the extensive future,” Pelletier says about his character. “He’s a great queer.”

‘Where Moments Hung Before’
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
Through Aug. 16
949 Comm. Ave., Boston
$10-$15, 16+, 866-811-4111
BostonActorsTheater.com