The 75-minute play (at the Westside Theatre Downstairs) is a showcase for Lecesne’s mimicry.

Leonard was gay, and in the off-Broadway one-man show The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, actor James Lecesne, who also wrote the play, slips easily from playing the no-nonsense detective on the case to various townsfolk including middle-aged ladies, sulky teens, and a British drama teacher. He stood out like a sunflower in a patch of weeds, and for being different he was murdered. He endeared himself to the local matrons by advising them on clothes and hairstyles, insisted on wearing fairy wings when playing Ariel in The Tempest, and wore mascara and nail polish. His trademark item of attire was the rainbow-colored platform sneakers he made by gluing the soles of half a dozen different-colored flip-flops to the bottoms of his sneakers. Leonard Pelkey was a Jersey Shore teen who glowed with life. Why are so many cultural elites so reluctant to release their grip on a model that is certainly false today, if it were ever true? Implied in this formulation is that we’re an intolerant, repressive people.

Yet Isherwood seems to think the play is instructive at its core, that it is a guide to a better America, an America to which we might someday aspire. Isherwood is focusing on the way the play encourages us to smile at the memory of Leonard, a delicate and beautiful soul, to appreciate, nurture and adore his eccentricity. “Leave you beaming with joy,” a phrase that appeared in The New York Times in a review of The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, is, critic Charles Isherwood conceded, an odd way to describe a play concerning the murder of an innocent, indeed angelic, teen boy.

Leonard pelkey