Tales of Hofsiss.

Years after an accident left him paralyzed, Tony award-winning director Jack Hofsiss keeps creating hot theater--including the new gay-Catholic comedy

In the new off-Broadway comedy Avow, two gay Catholics who want to marry ask their baby-boomer priest to perform the ceremony. What follows is an unusually sophisticated discussion of the Christian virtue of faith--and that's one of the things that excited Jack Hofsiss enough to direct the production, which opened July 27 at the Century Center in New York City.

Hofsiss, best known as the 1979 Tony award--winning director of the Broadway hit The Elephant Man, grew up in Brooklyn, where he was trained by Jesuits in high school before attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

"I learned from the Jesuits not just to accept what is given to you but to think about it," he told The Advocate during rehearsals for Avow (by Bill C. Davis, playwright of Mass Appeal). "There was a sense of questioning. They shared the fact that ultimately your relationship to God is your own thing, that you can be gay and have a relationship with the God of the Catholic Church. That's one of the big issues in this play, the refusal of these guys to take second-class citizenship. Instead of saying, `My love precludes me from being a Catholic,' to say `My love enables me to be a Catholic. My love is love. Love is God. God is love.' That's the journey."

The 48-year-old Hofsiss, who considers himself a nonpracticing Catholic, has been on a remarkable journey himself. As a golden boy fresh out of Georgetown, he was a founding member of Washington's Folger Theater Group. Joseph Papp saw his work and invited him to New York's Public Theater, where Hofsiss started in the casting department--he helped cast the original A Chorus Line--and then began directing. When producer Richmond Crinkley sent him a play called The Elephant Man, Hofsiss recalls, "my life changed overnight."

The play ran almost three years, and Hofsiss became the youngest director ever to win a Tony. He made the A-list, directing movies (I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can), plays, nightclub acts, and opera. Then in July 1985, he dove into the pool of his house on Fire Island, and his head hit the bottom; the impact fractured his spine. Paralyzed from the chest down since then, he gets around in a wheelchair, assisted by Maureen Laffey, who oversaw his yearlong recovery at New York's Rusk Institute.

His limited physical mobility didn't dampen his mental agility or his quick wit--if anything, it had the opposite effect: "One had to be more articulate, which is not a bad thing for a director," he says. The accident did force Hofsiss to choose between film and theater, and since then he's worked steadily on plays and musicals. He received credit for codirecting (with playwright Richard Nelson) the Tony-nominated musical James Joyce's The Dead last season, even though he left before it opened, an experience about which he is both dishy and diplomatic. "I learned to be careful about working with playwrights who have absolutely no respect for what a director does," he says.

Hofsiss says that growing up gay and viewing the straight world from the outside honed the observational skills that have served him as an artist. And he is convinced that theater is an art form ideally suited to changing America's perceptions of gay people. "Theater deals with bigger and more complicated issues because it's language-based rather than driven by visuals," he says. "You can deal substantively with issues because the theater is essentially a temple of ideas. For instance, in Avow the gay characters relate to the straight characters very `How's your boyfriend?' the more normal it becomes. It's part of life."

Shewey is the editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.