Tom Rowan

In Tom Rowan’s "Burning Leaves," a play of considerable tenderness and moral complexity, the distance between being someone’s inspiration and becoming someone’s responsibility proves both exhilarating and perilous. Presented by The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS), the long-running LGBTQIA+ theater company whose work has consistently illuminated lives too often pushed to the margins, this production finds an abundance of humanity in a story about a young teacher, a vulnerable teenager, and the sometimes treacherous territory between emotional intimacy and professional obligation. Set in 2007, in a small Illinois town where acceptance of gay identity is hardly a civic virtue, the play examines what it means for a young person to encounter, perhaps for the first time, an adult who makes a more expansive future seem imaginable. Its achievement lies in recognizing that the need for such a connection is real, even as the consequences of acting upon it can be devastating. [more]