Meet Chris Urch

Let me confess to a lazy assumption about Chris Urch, whose play, The Rolling Stone, we will be discussing tomorrow night. Because the story takes place in Uganda, and the characters are all black, I assumed Urch is, too. Well, we all know what happens when we assume! :-).

In fact, Urch is a very Caucasian Englishman, judging by his photo. He was moved to write the play after reading coverage of the debate in the Ugandan Parliament of the bill popularly known as "Kill the Gays" (though life in prison replaced execution as the penalty in the final version). As he commented in a 2019 interview, “My play was inspired by real events, but the characters are fictional. I wanted to highlight a political issue through a love story between two men and through the conflicting loyalties in a family when one of the members is gay.”

After the Ugandan High [= Supreme] Court struck down the law as unconstitutional in 2014, Parliament considered various revisions over the following decade. It ultimately passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023, which President Yoweri Museveni signed into law in March 2023. Warning: The act's provisions make for harrowing reading.

Nor is Uganda an outlier, sadly. “Initially,” Urch said, “I worried that the story the play tells wouldn’t stay relevant. But it has. It was done in Australia during the debate there over same-sex marriage, and in Brazil, which has the highest murder rate in the world of LGBT people. On our planet right now, there’s still tremendous violence against gay people, and there’s a more general upsurge of people’s rights being taken away. This play sadly couldn’t be more relevant right now.”