From Court Record to Stage: Dustin Lance Black's '8'

Ever since the Supreme Court intervened to derail plans to broadcast the suit against Proposition 8 in federal court on YouTube and via closed-circuit TV to court houses around the nation, there have been efforts to bring the trial to the masses.

GLBT equality advocates have long maintained that if the American public could see for themselves the arguments and counter-arguments aired in the courtroom, anti-gay myths would shatter and anti-gay attitudes collapse.

The anti-gay side said they didn't want the trial broadcast because their witnesses would be targeted for harassment, intimidation, and retaliation from the gay community, which they portrayed as thuggish. But even with the broadcast ban in place, defendants in the suit only called for two witnesses in the trial, versus the 18 witnesses who took the stand to testify against the anti-gay ballot initiative that California voters narrowly passed in 2008.

In the end, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against the ballot measure, agreeing with the plaintiffs, the famously mixed team of conservative Theodore Olson and liberal David Boies, that Proposition 8 violated the constitutional rights of the people it targeted.

Boies and Olson had faced off before the Supreme Court in 2000, in Bush v. Gore, the case that essentially awarded the presidency to George H. W. Bush. In all likelihood, Olson and Boies will appear once more before the Supreme Court, though as a team, given that it is widely expected that the case will be appealed all the way to the top.

There is an effort underway to get video records of the trial released for public viewing. In the meantime, the trial has been re-enacted using actors, and video episodes of the reenactment are available online.

But Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the script for the Gus Van Sant-directed biopic "Milk," has another option for those who want to see and hear for themselves how the trial unfolded. Black has penned a new play, draw largely from the trial's transcripts and titled "8," the New York Times reported on July 17.

Black also employed insights that he gained from interviewing people attending the trial, as he did. He spoke with both proponents and opponents of the measure, which snatched then-existing marriage rights from gay and lesbian families in 2008.

It was the Supreme Court's refusal to allow the American public to view the trial in progress that set Black on the road to writing the play, the New York Times reported.

"One of my hopes about the trial was to get the opposition in court, hands raised swearing to tell the truth, and have the world see the opposition called to account for going on TV saying gay people harm children, harm families," Balck recounted.

"Since the trial itself wasn't heard or seen, I wanted to get that story out another way."

The article noted that Black had undertaken the Herculean task of turning the transcript's thousands of pages into a play lasting one and a half hours. Black also made an effort to portray the anti-gay family side as having a legitimate case.

"I mined the best arguments on both sides, trying to capture everything on their side that was a winning point and anything on our side that was a winning point," Black told the Times.

Black is still working on the script now, but a date has been set for a reading of the play: Sept. 19 will see "a cast of top Hollywood names and Broadway's finest" portray a dozen figures central to the case, according to a spokesperson. The reading will benefit the American Foundation for Equal Rights -- the organization that underwrote Olson and Boies in bringing the suit to trial.

The reading is slated to take place at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, the article said.

The play is already taking on a life of its own. The Times article said that actors in the current Broadway production of the 1960s musical "Hair" plan to do readings of the new play while on tour with production, while two driving forces behind Broadway Impact, Gavin Creel and Rory O'Malley, have similar plans to take the play to the colleges from which they graduated, University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon respectively, and stage readings of their own. At least one full-scale theatrical production is in the works for next season, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, in the summer of 2012.