Just in time for the Tony ceremonies this Sunday, June 6, the Gay & Lesbian Times is taking a moment to look into San Diego theater from a GLBT point of view. When it comes to cutting-edge GLBT theater in San Diego, is there, as Gerturde Stein once asked, a “there there”?

The answer is a resounding yes (hold the applause ’til the end please). For instance, one of the most cutting-edge GLBT plays of the past season – Doug Wright’s Tony-nominated I Am My Own Wife – was workshopped and presented at our own La Jolla Playhouse, which happens to be one of the most innovative and well-respected theaters in the country and which also premiered Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (Kaufman also directed I Am My Own Wife) in 2001.

Furthermore, we’ve got Jack, folks. It just so happens that one of the most successful directors in theater today is a gay San Diegan, who’s been at the helm of San Diego’s Old Globe theaters since 1981, and has had an ever-increasing string of huge successes, including last year’s hot Broadway ticket Hairspray. In our interview, O’Brien, who’s been profiled in dozens of papers internationally and in the New Yorker recently, talks publicly about his late lover for the first time.

Finally, if it’s theater and it’s gay, it’s got to have something to do with The Diversionary Theatre, San Diego’s only GLBT theater whose audiences have recently been “straightening up” as the mainstream community takes notices of what the Diversionary is about. There are others we’ve not had time to profile here: underground cutting-edge companies at 6th at Penn Theatre and Sledgehammer Theater, help as much as the big guys to make San Diego the truly dynamic theater town that it is. Hats off to all of these companies, each making sure that GLBTs are out, proud and complicating our world views on San Diego stages any given night of the week.