PORTRAIT OF THE
ARTIST AS FIVE GAYS

Paul Kubicki’s wildly inventive cycle
of short plays finds humor, heartbreak,
and humanity in unexpected places

Juan José Mojica

If Tennessee Williams and Cole Escola had an artistic progeny, the result might look something like Paul Kubicki’s Portraits of Gays in Despair: A Cycle of 5 Plays. Beginning with a vignette about a therapy session’s role-playing exercise gone awry (or so we initially think), Portraits runs the gamut of postmodern gay male life, a milieu where nothing is exactly what it appears to be. In a less skilled playwright’s hands, the play might have given way to sentimentality or devolved into amusing but unmemorable skits, but Kubicki’s momentum matches his mercurial style, or as one character puts it: “Absolutely no blessings. Keep going.”

Debuting as part of the Basement Theatrics series at HB Studio just in time for Pride month, this hilarious and lively collage consistently finds novel ways of bringing out the talents of its gifted cast of actors. Embodying the archetypes of “Young Gay,” “Middle Gay,” and “Elder Gay,” Juan Jose Mojica, Moshe Henderson, and Chris Jaymes represent a study in contrasts, each actor equipped with a range and power equal to the demands of Kubicki’s dreamlike shifts.

Chris Jaymes and Juan José Mojica

Mojica’s naturalistic delivery lends his characterizations edges and depth, while Jaymes’s versatility makes him, to borrow a phrase from Harper Lee, a pocket Merlin. And Henderson’s flashes of intensity and vulnerability allow him to inhabit wildly different characters, from a porn director to a version of Peter Thiel poised to shed the last vestiges of his humanity for a supposedly better world. Who knew an actor playing an analogue of a billionaire could bring me to tears? In this moment—perhaps the most haunting of the show—Kubicki reckons with the idea that our consciousness is being rapidly digitized in favor of “more perfect bodies… no mystery… no anxiety… no need for release.”

Chris Jaymes

Other engaging set-pieces—such as a divorcing couple contending with a new boyfriend’s awkward visit to their summer house, a rehearsal of Hamlet where the father’s ghost delivers some hilarious feedback to his ill-fated son, and a conversation with the Muse that conjures an HPV-afflicted but affable Judy Garland–mine the camp and pathos of characters confronting their own irreducible, absurd complexity. Intimately staged, with the majority of the audience seated on the stage alongside the actors, Portraits makes its digressions credible thanks to production designer Christopher Annas-Lee‘s flawless lighting and haunting sound design. Costume designer Zen Tunsa makes each character instantly, elegantly recognizable and distinct. Here’s hoping that this play enjoys a revival soon.

Juan José Mojica and Moshe Henderson

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photos by Nate DiDomizio

Portraits of Gays in Despair
Loose Delights & Basement Theatrics
HB Playwrights Theatre, 124 Bank Street in New York City
approximately 80 minutes
played June 23-25, 2026

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Juan José Mojica