Georg Csarmann
Based on lead actress Quinn Marcus’s one-woman show Chasing Ballerinas, Drew Van Steenbergen’s Alone With People tells the story of Andie, a high-school girl growing up gay in Georgia and her quest to come to terms with who she is. With the help of an open-minded therapist and their ensuing conversations—which range from funny to revealingly honest—Andie finds the strength to come out to the members of her family, one by one, to varying degrees of understanding.
While her father is the first one she opens up to, he immediately tries to connect with his daughter by watching The L Word together and inappropriately talking about the hotness of some of the show’s characters. The inherent humor of this is both funny and uncomfortably true to life. As anyone who ever watched a movie or TV series with his or her parents knows, the shared experience of viewing sex scenes can be an awkward thing. But, when added with the subtext of the recent revelation of Andie’s sexual orientation and how her father reacts to it, it opens up an even broader context in how parents deal with their siblings growing sexuality. The reaction of Andie’s mother to her coming-out is somewhat reverse, which Andie calls out later during a group session with the helpful therapist. Likewise, her sister’s question of how Andie “knows that she’s gay” is ignorant, but not atypical for a teenage girl who has a hard time seeing beyond her own horizon.
The film takes its time to introduce its characters, all captured through amazing performances by the entire cast. The dramatic situations and the changing family-dynamics feel authentic—an accurate representation of how these experiences might occur in real life. Achieving a lot of its subdued comedic sensibilities through long takes and slow build-ups in various scenes, the filmmakers have managed to craft a convincingly executed portrait of growing up, regardless of sexual orientation.
As the director, Drew Van Steenbergen, told SOTW, “Despite her character growing up gay in Georgia and me growing up straight in Connecticut, I relate to her self-doubt and anxieties. We all experience feelings of loneliness and feeling isolated within ourselves at certain points in our lives. We struggle to discover who we are and whether we fit in with a group of friends or even within our own family. It is through these struggles that we discover the type of person we are going to be.”
I never had to deal with something as difficult as coming out to my family and friends, but I know what it’s like to feel different and wondering if those around me would accept me for who I really am if I would show my true colors. Of course, the hope is that they would not only be fine with my unvarnished personality, but that they would actually embrace it, strengthening my own perception of myself without always worrying about what other people might think. Alone With People’s Andie is lucky enough to have parents and a sister who support her, even if they don’t always know what to exactly make of the situation. They try their best to make her feel comfortable, but due to no fault of their own, they can’t always fully understand how Andie must feel. The strong bond to her psychiatrist shows how much Andie needs someone who listens without judgment. To find another person who completely gets you for who you truly are and to make an honest emotional connection is very rare, and the feeling of being alone or lonely can occur no matter how many people are around you.
Based on her own experience growing up gay in the South, Quinn Marcus, a cast member of MTV’s Girl Code and the host of mtvU’s Quinnterviews, subsequently developed her very personal one-woman show with friend and director Drew Van Steenbergen. Together, they transformed it into this 25-minute short after the filmmaker saw a performance of Chasing Ballerinas and was blown away by the “balance of laugh-out-loud humor, truth and heart showcased through her sheer candor of coming out to her family.”
Completed with the support of a successful 30-day Kickstarter camapaign raising over $15,000 and shot on a combination of an ARRI ALEXA and Blackmagic, filming took place over the course of nine days on location in and around Marietta, GA (the same town where writer/star Quinn Marcus grew up). Currently Drew is serving as associate producer on production company REVEAL 42’s animated feature length film Henry & Me, starring Richard Gere and the New York Yankees. Together with Quinn and their production team, the director is also wrapping post-production on their second short-film, Subpar, and have just entered pre-production on their third short A Lack of Dating, scheduled to begin shooting in Brooklyn this September.