Entertainment

Everybody must get Stonewalled

It was the riot that sparked the gay-rights revolution — the 1969 brawl outside Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn. And it’s treated with blazing theatricality in Ike Holter’s “Hit the Wall,” which, after premiering at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, opened last night here, a stone’s throw from where it all began.

That late summer night, police officers raided the underground gay bar, instigating an impromptu rebellion that lasted several days. This expressionistic drama is less interested in faithfully re-creating a historical account than in providing a visceral feeling for what it must have been like to be there.

Its characters are painstakingly diverse, both in color — black, white, Latino — and type (buttoned-up businessman, butch lesbian, suburban kid, drag queen, bullying cop). As a bow to gay icon Judy Garland, whose funeral was the day of the riots, Dan Lipton’s hard-driving, rock-music score — performed onstage by a three-piece band — includes an electric-guitar rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”

The action begins in Sheridan Square park, abutting the bar, where the characters raucously and profanely banter. Soon the scene shifts to a sweaty dance floor and then the surrounding streets, where the violence is rendered with disorienting strobe lights and haze. The intimacy of the tiny Barrow Street Theatre, where you’re just inches away from the performers, makes you feel as if you’re part of the action.

“The reports of what happened next are not exactly clear,” a policeman keeps saying, a reminder that historical accounts differ. No mention here is made of the theory that the police raided Stonewall not so much to hassle its gay clientele but to shake up its mob connections.

While the writing borders on the schematic, director Eric Hoff’s muscular staging boasts an immediacy that brings the events to vivid life, never more so then when Nathan Lee Graham’s proud drag queen finally strikes back against the police.

Featuring urgent performances by its youthful ensemble, “Hit the Wall” packs a powerful punch.