BURBANK, Calif. — The couple at the heart of the story may be fictional, but there are plenty of facts that need to be confronted in the historical drama Home Front, facts that actors Austin Highsmith Garces and C.J. Lindsey face in real life as well. 

Garces is in an interracial marriage and says she is still amazed that there are places in the country where they get stares when out to dinner.  

“He’s my favorite thing in the entire world,” she said of her spouse, J. Teddy Garces. “So I can’t even imagine that there was a time period in which it would have been illegal for us to be together.”

Lindsey himself is biracial. His mother, he explains, is of European descent. His father, African descent, so for him, too, this story is real and personal.

“I’ve been living this life a long time.” he said.

The play takes place at the end of World War II, but both he and Garces agree the themes it addresses don’t feel quite so far removed.

“To still be relevant years later, we have to say, ‘What’s going on here?’”

It was only a few weeks ago that President Biden signed a law to protect same-sex and interracial marriages. While it isn’t something being litigated at the moment, Garces says just the idea that her marriage was still up for debate was shocking and makes the work they are doing at the Victory Theatre all the more important.

“It’s our job as artists to continue to tell the truth,” she explained, “and to make sure that the next generations know what actually happened.”

That includes the story of the Golden 13 — the Navy’s first group of Black officers — who faced deep discrimination during their training and were never assigned positions on combat ships. Their story may be unfamiliar to audiences. It was unfamiliar to Lindsey as well.

“I never heard of the Golden 13, and I’ve studied a lot of African American history,” Lindsey admitted. “I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge this group of men [who] paved the way for a lot of the men, Black men who are in the military today, who get to fight for this country now.”

While his character, Lt. James Aurelius Walker, isn’t based on any one particular member of the trailblazing group, the third character in the play is drawn from real life. Jonathan Slavin plays Edward, a gay army veteran who lives upstairs from the couple and who is based on playwright Warren Leight’s own uncle. 

“He is a war veteran. He’s a very lonely person. And he is a queer person who does not pass for straight in 1945. So he has his own challenges,” Slavin said of his character. “It’s interesting to go back to this time when it was literally illegal to be an active queer person and World War II was the first time that homosexuality was considered disqualifying in terms of the military.”

A longtime LGBTQ+ activist, Slavin is careful about the characters he plays and the way he plays them. And this one feels important at this moment in particular.

“Gay marriage was voted against in 2008. That’s just a second ago,” he explained. “And then we made some really good progress. And now we seem to be going back.”

He cites a host of laws that target the trans community, including access to trans affirming care. In 2022 alone, hundreds of bills that took aim at LGBTQ rights that were introduced around the country. That’s 77 years after the play unfolds and 20 years after Tony-winning playwright Warren Leight began writing it.  

“When I first noodled with the play, people kind of thought it was a history lesson,” the longtime Law & Order showrunner recalled. “Unfortunately, in the last decade or so, the issues the play talks about have moved back into our national consciousness, and we begin to worry again about things we take for granted.”

“And that’s the nature of American history,” he added. “These swings of the pendulum.”

The theatre, he says, is the perfect place to examine and explore those swings.

“There’s such a communion between the audience and the actors on stage,” Leight said. “It gets people thinking about what has changed and what hasn’t changed since then.”

“All of the rich history that Warren has incorporated into this story,” Garces said, “I think it’s just, it’s just really important for people to remember. If we don’t remember where we came from, then we’re… we’re sometimes bound to repeat it.”

The West Coast premiere of “Home Front” is running at the Victory Theatre though Feb. 19.