WILD and PRECIOUS

Published 9:19 am Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Steven Cadwell invites you to take a seat, settle in and talk about what it means to be gay, straight and everything in between.

Cadwell, a therapist based in Boston, has been presenting “Wild and Precious” to audiences across the country. It is a multi-media performance with original songs, photographs, costumes, stories and poems.

“It’s 50 years of gay liberation put into an hour and 15 minutes,” said Cadwell, who calls himself the singing psychotherapist.  “It’s really exciting to be doing the show now because we have this very happy ending of freedom to marry. There is more work to do but it’s such a positive arc that my generation has lived through … When I was coming of age, there was no affirming name for being gay – just slurs: queer, faggot. To feel that we have accomplished what we have around integrating LGBT folks into more of the freedom of the United States is a very powerful, positive story for all of us to take in and celebrate.”

The performance is on the Orcas Center main stage on Saturday, Aug. 1 at 7:30 p.m. There will be Q&A during an ice cream social from the Clever Cow Creamery after the show in the Madrona Room. Tickets are $25, $19 for Orcas Center members and $11 for students at www.orcascenter.org. It is sponsored by Orcas LGBT Fund.

“The fund is really supportive of artists whose voices speak to the LGBT community,” said Orcas Center Executive Director Kara O’Toole. “Steven shares his story so bravely.”

Gay? Straight? Bi? Trans? Still trying to sort it out? Audience members will feel as if they’re sitting in Cadwell’s salon during the show.

“I’ve been really getting into these one-person shows at the center,” O’Toole said. “When the artist has that much skill and intelligence, it’s really a treat to go on that journey with them.”

Cadwell’s story is one of love, of being marginalized, of letting it all hang out and of fighting for what’s right. He says the phrase that is said over and over from audience members is: “We were completely enthralled.”

“Many straight men have come up to me after the show and talked about how they learned from my show how homophobic culture also constricted their experience of being a man,” Cadwell said. “It’s a show about community, music, nature and wordplay and exploring the fuller version of who we all are. I have a very optimistic story but it’s not without pain: homophobia, AIDS. I have ‘survivor’s gratitude’ and I want to tell the stories of people who no longer can.”

Cadwell has been writing poetry and music for years and says making the leap from therapy to performing “came naturally.”

“It’s all part of the expressive arts,” he said. “Storytelling is core to being a therapist. Therapy is really a theatre of two: the client and the therapist.”

The production evolved from a series of poems he wrote and performed for a group of feminists in Cambridge around the theme “What are you going to do with your wild and precious life?”

It was so well received that Cadwell presented it to friends and later gave small performances all over New England at colleges and theaters. He then added piano music, singing and a visual element and has taken it on the road to Texas, California, New York City and now the Northwest (he will perform at Seattle’s Gay City on Aug. 6).

Cadwell was born in Vermont in the 1950s and stayed in the closet until the late 1960s.

“It wasn’t easy. I struggled in and out, in and out,” he said. “It was emotional and turbulent but ultimately it’s about integrating the full range of who we are. The ‘closet’ is not just about sex, it’s about feelings, passion and your bliss. Without that, how do you make decisions about yourself? It’s about the rainbow we each are.”

Over the next two decades, Cadwell became an AIDS activist and earned a Ph.D. from Smith College. He is now a married family man and psychotherapist in Massachusetts, working with individuals and couples.

Cadwell has written on gender, sexuality and shame, co-edited a book on psychotherapy with gay men and worked with caregivers overwhelmed by the traumas of AIDS.

“Silence equals death, the slogan developed by AIDS activists, is a powerful description of being in the closet,” Cadwell said. “Most people have been in the closet in some way in their lives. Shame is not exclusive to any one group. It is part of the human condition. The metaphor of ‘being in the closet’ is something that most of us can relate to.”