In Kirk Wood Bromley's three new one-acts, Three Dollar Bill, produced by Inverse Theater, the ideological tensions between gay values and conservative values tango in a tangled dialectic. Bromley's verse plays sound like linguistic Chinese finger traps: the more the characters attempt to reason out of their self-contradictions, the further they tend to be trapped by their own dubious assumptions. The first, and least successful, play, "What Are You Thinking, Mary Cheney?," is essentially a one-woman monologue in which the vice president's lesbian daughter tries to justify her existence. Skewered by the likes of the Moral Majority on the right for her sexual preferences, she is equally lambasted by the left for betraying the ACLU, Lambda, and others who try to defend her lifestyle choices.
We meet Mary in her idyllic "log cabin" in the woods�as if in a kind of demented Mister Rogers' neighborhood�where she greets us, reads us "fan" letters, and smashes cellphones when she gets calls from the irate public. While the premise is promising, the result comes off as a screed of self-justifying self-hatred. Director Howard Thoresen utilizes a wide array of blocking
