Reviewed By Wesley Spencer and Marty Treinen 5-22-2026

Opening: What I Thought I Was Walking Into

When I first heard the title Silver Foxes, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was walking into. I imagined a group of gray-haired, slightly formal, beyond-senior divas gathering for book club, cocktails, and maybe a documentary screening about the years when they were almost famous, nearly famous, or still convinced they should have been famous.

And honestly, that version might be its own animal — and probably a very funny one.

But that is not this play.

Not this time.

Not this place.

(Spoiler Alert)

Silver Foxes, now playing at Revolution Stage Company in Palm Springs, is a comedy, yes. It knows how to make a room laugh. It knows how to land a line, roll an eye, turn a pause into a punchline, and let a character walk into the room already carrying a whole history of fabulous trouble. But the longer the play goes on, the clearer it becomes that the laughter is only the front door. Behind it is memory. Behind that is survival. And behind that is the long, complicated, beautiful, painful history of a community that has learned how to keep going by turning grief into wit, exclusion into chosen family, and survival into style.

Palm Springs Is Not Just the Setting

What I loved immediately about Silver Foxes is that it takes place in the very community where it is being performed. Palm Springs is not just the setting. It is part of the story’s bloodstream.

There is something beautifully appropriate about that, especially because my husband and I are part of this very community. So when the play begins, it does not feel like we are being invited into some distant fictional world. It feels like someone opened a door to a room we already know.

Palm Springs matters here. The city is not just a sunny postcard, a mid-century house, a mountain view, or a place where someone once came to reinvent themselves. It is a place where many gay men have come to live out some of the best parts of their lives. It is a place where, as I would put it, we finally get to play ball.

Why?

Because for too long, many of us were not allowed to play with everyone else. We were excluded, limited, silenced, hidden, and told in a hundred different ways where we did not belong.

I do not think I have to explain that to many people in this audience. Palm Springs is a community filled with people who have lived those stories. Many came here not only for sunshine, architecture, restaurants, and mountain views, but for peace of mind. For survival. For sanity. For the chance to bury parts of the past and then build something better on top of it.

That is why this play feels so right here. Silver Foxes is a play written by us, for us, in a place where many of us have chosen to live without apology and, as much as possible, without interference. That does not mean the outside world disappears. It does not. But here, there is at least a shared understanding that our lives, our histories, our humor, our grief, and our chosen families are not side stories.

They are the story.

The Premise: Comedy With a Spine

Written by James Berg and Stan Zimmerman, and directed by Zimmerman, Silver Foxes centers on older gay men in Palm Springs who form, protect, and redefine chosen families. On the surface, it has the ingredients of a classic contemporary comedy: old friends, former lovers, a mid-century house, sharp dialogue, generational misunderstandings, neighbors with opinions, a younger man discovering what he does not yet know, and enough theatrical personalities to fill the room before anyone even sits down.

But underneath the comedy is a much stronger question: who takes care of us when the world no longer knows what to do with us?

That is the question that gives the play its spine. This is not just a comedy about older gay men making jokes. It is a comedy about aging, friendship, dignity, desire, loneliness, memory, history, and the people who become family because they were there when no one else was.

That is not a small thing. For many LGBTQ+ elders, aging is not only about health, money, housing, or loneliness. It can also mean facing institutions and systems that still do not understand, honor, or protect the truth of their lives. It can mean going back into closets they fought for decades to escape. It can mean needing friends to step in when systems fail.

In that sense, Silver Foxes is very funny, but it is not frivolous.

Then I Started Laughing

And then I started laughing.

I mean really laughing.

I laughed so hard I can safely say I laughed my ass off — which, at this point in life, is easier to say because I am not entirely sure I still have one.

But underneath the laughter was something I did not expect. Every one of these characters felt like someone I had known. Not types. Not stereotypes. People. Real people. People I had met in theaters, living rooms, bars, parties, rehearsals, fundraisers, and all the strange, wonderful places where creative and queer lives intersect.

That was especially true of Jon Morehouse’s Cecil. His performance was so specific, so alive, and so familiar to me that after the show I actually asked the playwrights whether the character had been modeled after a friend of mine. I was convinced the three of them must have crossed paths somewhere in Hollywood or Los Angeles over the years. Every part of Cecil felt like that person incarnate. The rhythm, the wit, the posture, the theatrical survival instinct — it was all there.

So, thinking I was being clever, I asked point blank if they knew my friend.

They did not.

Cecil was completely fabricated.

And that is when I understood how deeply this play had affected me. I was not simply watching characters on a stage. I was reconnecting with people I had known throughout my life. People who made me laugh. People who exhausted me. People who filled rooms with impossible stories and then somehow made them believable. People who survived by being funny, outrageous, stylish, wounded, generous, difficult, and unforgettable.

Many of them are gone now.

But for a couple of hours, Silver Foxes brought them back into the room.

That is one of the quiet miracles of theater. When it works, it does not only show us people.

It returns people to us.

Meeting the Writers and the Cast

After the performance, we had the opportunity to meet both writers of Silver Foxes, including writer-director Stan Zimmerman. That is not always typical, but because this production marks the West Coast premiere of the play, their presence felt especially meaningful.

Like most opening-night or post-show gatherings, the conversations were brief, warm, and congratulatory. There is usually only enough time to meet, greet, thank people, and move on. But even in those few moments, there was enough time to let the writers, cast, and creative team know that their work was appreciated — not only for the laughs they delivered, but for the craft, expertise, and care they brought to the stage.

That matters to me.

For me, the gold standard for any performance — whether it is film, television, concert work, theater, or any live performance where artists make a direct connection with an audience — is very simple:

Did they bring it?

Were they present?

Were they connected?

Were they convincing?

Did they fully inhabit the character, the moment, and the world of the piece?

In Silver Foxes, the answer was yes.

The actors did not simply say the lines. They brought these characters into full view, giving the audience a chance to understand them, laugh with them, and recognize the humanity underneath the comedy.

The Cast: Characters in Full View

Patrick Bristow, as Benny, gives the play one of its emotional anchors. Benny is funny, sharp, direct, wounded, and still very much alive to the world around him. Bristow understands that comedy does not have to erase pain. In fact, with a character like Benny, the comedy lands because the pain is there. It has survived, not been removed.

Michael Corbett, as Chuck, brings another essential layer to the story. Chuck is a man who has lived through concealment, compromise, and the cost of trying to survive inside systems that did not make room for him. Corbett lets us see both the humor and the guardedness in Chuck. He gives us a man who can be funny because he has had to be strong, and strong because he has had no other choice.

Jon Morehouse, as Cecil, is unforgettable. Cecil could easily become only a comic creation — flamboyant, theatrical, outrageous, and larger than life. But Morehouse gives him something more valuable than that. He gives him specificity. Cecil feels lived in. He feels like someone with a past, a rhythm, a public self, a private self, and a way of moving through the world that was built from survival, style, and necessity. That is why he felt so real to me. That is why I found myself wondering whether the playwrights had borrowed him from life.

Zachary Feuling, as Twink, brings the generational contrast the play needs. He is not only there to be young, pretty, and unaware of the histories swirling around him. He is there to show us what happens when one generation has lived through things the next generation was never properly taught. Twink is funny because he does not always understand the room he is in. But he is also important because he represents the future, still learning how to listen to the past.

Melanie Blue, listed simply as Woman, deserves special mention because she does not play only one presence in the play. She moves through multiple roles — friends, pushy neighbors, and even a sugar daddy from one of our many colorful subcultures. There is no humor lost in her performance. She knows exactly how far to push each character, and when the moment calls for it, she goes just as wonderfully over the top as the rest of the cast. In a play already full of theatrical personalities, Blue adds another layer of comic energy and sharp character work.

Together, the cast gives the play its life. They understand the rhythm of the comedy, but more importantly, they understand that the jokes are not floating on top of the story. The jokes come from the story. They come from the lives these people have lived.

Benny, Cecil, and the History No One Taught

What came up for me later, and what stayed with me after the laughter, was the moment when Patrick Bristow’s Benny says plainly that Cecil saved his life.

That line changes the temperature of the room.

Until then, we are laughing, recognizing people we know, and enjoying the rhythm of these older gay men who have survived long enough to become funny about things that were never funny when they were happening. But then Benny opens a door into another part of the story — the years when AIDS was killing friends, lovers, neighbors, artists, strangers, and entire circles of people across our community and around the world.

At that moment, Benny is not simply remembering illness. He is remembering survival.

He is remembering what it meant to try experimental drugs, to hold on while science, government, medicine, and public compassion were all moving too slowly for the people who were dying in real time. He is remembering the years when people in our community became their own advocates, caretakers, researchers, fundraisers, nurses, witnesses, and family because too many institutions responded too late and too slowly.

And he is giving Twink a history lesson that too many schools never taught.

That is one of the most important things Silver Foxes does. It lets one generation speak directly to another, not as a lecture, but as a lived memory.

This matters because there are histories that never make it into the official textbook in a way that feels human. There are histories that get reduced to timelines, policy changes, medical breakthroughs, or cultural footnotes. But that is not how people lived them. People lived in one hospital room at a time, one phone call at a time, one memorial at a time, one experimental treatment at a time, one friend at a time.

Benny’s line about Cecil saving his life is not sentimental. It is not decorative. It is a doorway into everything this community had to become for itself.

Chuck and the Cost of Silence

The same thing happens when Michael Corbett’s Chuck talks about his experience in the military.

He had been married to a woman. He had a child. He had built one version of a life while hiding another version of himself. Then came the damage of a system that told gay service members they could serve their country only if they denied the truth of who they were.

Whether under the official shadow of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or the older, harsher military policies that came before it, the result was the same: silence, shame, secrecy, punishment, and lives split in two.

That is why these scenes matter.

They are not heavy-handed. They do not stop the play. They deepen it.

They remind us that comedy in queer life has often carried history inside it. Sometimes the joke is the door. Behind it are the things people survived, the names they do not always say out loud, and the memories they keep buried because there was never a safe place to put them.

We never forget these things. Sometimes we bury them. Sometimes we keep them hidden from family, from friends, and even from ourselves. Sometimes we put them away because we have to keep moving. But then a line in a play opens the drawer, and there it is again.

Not gone.

Just waiting.

Twink, the Missing Man from Chicago, and the Future

And then there is Twink, with the unseen man from Chicago who does not come to Palm Springs for Cecil’s birthday.

That relationship, at least to Twink, is a romance made in heaven. But the older men can see what he cannot yet see. They recognize the avoidance. They recognize the excuses. They recognize the familiar ache of someone waiting for a person who may never fully show up.

Every time Twink brings him up, the others have to navigate that delicate space between truth and kindness. They do not want to crush him. But they also know that part of becoming yourself is learning the difference between being loved and being used as someone else’s convenience.

That is where Silver Foxes becomes more than a comedy about aging gay men in Palm Springs. It becomes a story about generations teaching each other.

Benny, Chuck, and Cecil carry history in their bodies. Twink carries the future, but he is still learning how to see clearly. And somewhere between them is the real subject of the play: how a community survives when the world has tried, again and again, to make its people disappear.

Chosen Family Is Not a Slogan

The phrase “chosen family” can become easy to say and hard to feel. In Silver Foxes, it becomes real again.

Choosing a family is not just a charming idea. It is the friend who shows up. It is the person who remembers who you were before the world tried to reduce you. It is the one who tells the truth when everyone else is too polite. It is the person who opens the door when you have nowhere else to go. It is the circle that says: no, you do not get to disappear. Not while we are still here.

That is what makes this play land. It understands that family is not always biological. Sometimes family is built through laughter, conflict, care, memory, irritation, and loyalty. Sometimes family is the people who survive the same storm and then decide, somehow, to keep setting the table.

That is a serious subject. But the play does not treat it with solemnity. It treats it with comedy, because comedy is often how people tell the truth without breaking apart.

Tru-Collaboration™ and the Work Behind the Work

A successful evening of theater is never created by one person alone.

It is the work of the writers, director, actors, designers, stage crew, technical team, front-of-house staff, house managers, and everyone who helps move the audience from the street into the world of the play. When that works, you feel it.

You leave the theater remembering moments, performances, gestures, lines, images, and emotions.

That is what we call Tru-Collaboration™ — a shared creative effort where every person has the same job: to help make the production the best version of itself.

That kind of collaboration is often easier to see in professional theaters, touring productions, and Broadway shows, where more time, money, marketing, and technical support are available. I know that world from experience, having worked across several of those media.

But I also know something else from experience: there is a particular kind of beauty in productions created without all of those advantages.

When actors and crew members are often unpaid, when lighting, sets, video, and sound must be begged, borrowed, built, or invented, creativity has to come out of the woodwork. Everyone has to bring their talent, discipline, resourcefulness, and heart to the table.

That is one reason I have such deep respect for community and intimate theater. At its best, it reveals the creative process in its most honest form. People come together with limited resources and a shared purpose, and they make something live. They create a world where one did not exist before.

Silver Foxes benefits from that kind of commitment. It is not only a comedy about aging, friendship, chosen family, and visibility. It is also a reminder of what theater itself can do when a group of people choose to show up fully for the story, for one another, and for the audience.

The Arts Let Us Create Ourselves

My husband and I have never allowed anyone to place limitations on who we are. That may also be one reason we both found our way into the arts.

The arts gave us a way to imagine a future, shape it, create it, and then make it real.

I would hope everyone could experience that kind of freedom. But I also know that would be an outright lie. Not everyone gets that chance. Not everyone is given permission. And too many people spend too much of their lives fighting just to become visible.

That is one of the great strengths of art. It gives us perspectives we might never have seen otherwise. Exceptional art does not shrink the world. It expands it. It shows us that life is far more diverse, complicated, funny, painful, beautiful, and contradictory than we often allow ourselves to believe.

Silver Foxes does exactly that.

It lets us laugh, but it also asks us to remember.

It reminds us that theater can be entertainment and testimony at the same time. It can make a room laugh and then, without warning, bring back the names of people we thought we had already grieved.

Why This Play Belongs Here

There are plays that could happen anywhere.

Silver Foxes belongs here.

It belongs in Palm Springs because this city understands reinvention. It understands performance. It understands beauty and aging, glamour and survival, real estate and memory, the comedy of desire, and the ache of becoming visible later than you should have had to.

It belongs here because many people in the audience know exactly what is being said, even when no one explains it. They know the shorthand. They know the history. They know the feeling of laughing a little too hard because the alternative is to remember too much.

But the play is not closed off to people outside the community. Quite the opposite. While Silver Foxes is clearly written for us, and in many ways reminds us of our own journeys, it also opens the door for anyone willing to walk through it.

You do not have to be an older gay man in Palm Springs to understand friendship, loneliness, survival, regret, love, denial, humor, or the need to be seen.

You only have to be human.

The Palm Springs Art Museum Connection

I also want to put in a plug for the wonderful Palm Springs Art Museum, which is doing important work through its Q+ Art initiative. Exhibitions such as Tender Swagger: Works by LGBTQ+ Artists from the Collection and A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit, curated by David Evans Frantz, offer LGBTQ+ perspectives that many people, myself included, may not have fully encountered before.

Go see those as well.

Theater and visual art are doing the same essential work here: they are making visible the lives, histories, symbols, wounds, pleasures, and creative power of a community that has always had more to say than the world allowed it to say.

That is why this matters beyond one play or one exhibition. These are not side notes to culture. They are culture. They are records of how people lived, what they carried, what they survived, and what they created when the larger world would not make room for them.

Should You Go?

Would I tell people to go see this play?

Yes.

Absolutely.

No matter who you are.

If you are part of this community, you may recognize people you have loved, lost, avoided, laughed with, or sat beside at some impossible party where everyone was both too much and exactly enough. You may hear lines that open memories you did not expect to revisit. You may find yourself laughing first and remembering later.

If you think that you are not a part of this community, you are wrong. Every person that lives, or visits our communities is a part of this community. And that diversity matters, because it is the very foundation of what it means to be human. While we would identify with gay, we and everyone in this communities are so much more. They are the very fabric of what makes this place what it is. If I would have to describe it.  It is every color of light that comes through the Rose Window at the Notre Dame Cathedral. It is everyone of those colors that come through, together create one of the most memorable artworks in the world. The light that comes through is unforgettable, just as this community is unforgettable. 

Go to this play and this theater because it is only one of the places where we can safely sit inside someone else’s life for a while. Go because laughter is often the easiest way into compassion. Go because these characters may be specific, but their need to be seen, loved, protected, and remembered is universal.

Silver Foxes is funny, warm, pointed, tender, and deeply at home in Palm Springs. It is a comedy with a heart, a wink, and a little bite — which, frankly, is exactly how a silver fox ought to age.

Silver Foxes runs May 21–31, 2026 at Revolution Stage Company, 611 S. Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs. Performances are listed as Thursdays/Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $49. 

Tickets are available through Revolution Stage Company’s website or the show’s ticket page.

About the Authors

Wesley Spencer and Marty Treinen have spent their lives in the arts, working across the full creative spectrum and becoming part of many communities through the opportunities they created for themselves. That lived experience shaped their belief that the arts, sciences, and creative process are not luxuries — they are survival mechanisms that have carried humanity through natural disasters, social upheaval, and historic change.

For the past 15 years, they have dedicated their work to expanding that opportunity for others. Their book, Universal Creative Intelligence: How the Arts and Sciences Propel Human Advancement, reflects that mission. It is also why they have made the Coachella Valley their home.

Now, they are launching an ambitious community vision: to make the Coachella Valley the birthplace of Universal Leadership Education™ — an educational pathway built on the core principles people need to lead their own lives, interconnect with other Universal Leaders™, and help expand their communities through a shared vision.

Universal Leadership Education is about choice. And anyone can choose to become part of it.