DRAMA
Discover A Piece of History
The Gay Theatre Alliance Newsletter was a short-lived publication attempting to keep subscribers up to date about new gay plays, theatre companies, and other news that might be of interest to the community. Browse through the dozen or so issues to discover fascinating bits of gay theatre history from the early 80s. While it was written and published in New York City, it does a laudable job of attempting to cover interesting subjects from all over the English speaking world. As a librarian, I was particularly interested in reading some of the "Gay Plays in Print" notices and learning about the plethora of small publishing houses that helped to disseminate the burgeoning work of the gay theatre world, alongside notices of mainstream scholarly theatre journals that published articles of possible interest to their gay readership.
Reading (Plays) is Fundamental
A sample of plays either by or about LGBTQ+ people (and most of the time they're both!).
The Children's Hour / by Lillian Hellman (1934) (Physical book)
A drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women. An angry student runs away from the school and to avoid being sent back she tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women's careers, relationships and lives.
A documentary play about gay life and liberation in the U.S.A. Coming Out! is a documentary play adapted from autobiographical and historical accounts, fiction and poetry. The author especially wishes to thank those gay sisters and brothers without whose words there would be no Coming Out!
Fefu and Her Friends / by Maria Irene Fornes (1977)
New England, Spring 1935. Fefu and seven friends gather at Fefu's house to rehearse a charity performance. Before and after their rehearsal, the women interact with one another, and share their thoughts and feelings about life along with their personal struggles and societal concerns
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes / by Tony Kushner (1991)
"Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” —Linda Winer, Newsday
Men on the verge of a His-panic breakdown / by Guillermo Reyes (1999)
This series of comedic monologues, which the New York Times called "Glorious," chronicles the lives of various Latino immigrants dealing with transcultural shock of race and gender identity known as the "Hispanic breakdown."
The Brother/Sister Plays / by Tarell McCraney (2010)
This is the first collection by Tarell Alvin McCraney, a major new playwright of the American theater. Lyrical and mythic, provocative and contemporary, McCraney’s dramas of kinship, love, and heartache are set in the bayou of Louisiana and loosely draw on West African myths.
She Like Girls / by Chisa Hutchinson (2010) (Physical book)
Kia Clark has dreamt of Marisol Feliciano since the start of the school year, but always assumed that she was staunchly heterosexual (like everyone else in their neighborhood). While supporting Marisol through a health crisis, the two share a forbidden kiss that starts a fulfilling--but challenging--romantic relationship. Straining to keep their involvement a secret from their conservative mothers and their gay-bashing classmates, harassment from even their closest friends escalates, forcing Kia to choose between the newfound sexuality and societal acceptance.
Fun Home / music by Jeanine Tesori ; book and lyrics by Lisa Kron ; based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel (2015) (Physical book)
Fun Home is a musical adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori from Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name. The story concerns Bechdel's discovery of her own sexuality, her relationship with her gay father, and her attempts to unlock the mysteries surrounding his life
Indecent / by Paula Vogel (2015)
Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play’s subject matter wasn’t deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel’s work traces the trajectory of the show’s success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923—including the arrest of the entire production’s cast and crew.
The Chemsex Monologues / by Patrick Cash (2016)
The Chemsex Monologues explore the sexual, high world of the chillouts through six different characters. A nameless narrator meets a sexy boy on a Vauxhall night out, who introduces him to G’s pleasures; the poster boy for Room Service gets taken to Old Mother Meth’s place by a porn star; Fag Hag Cath is finding the chillouts have become more about the sex; Daniel is a sexual health worker who does community outreach in the saunas; and the nameless narrator meets up with his sexy boy again in different circumstances. Explicit, funny and touching, The Chemsex Monologues display a realm that is sometimes dark, but populated by very real, loveable human beings.
The Funeral Director / by Iman Qureshi (2018)
Life as the director of a Muslim funeral parlour isn’t always easy, but Ayesha has things pretty sorted. She and Zeyd share everything: a marriage, a business, a future. Until Tom walks in to organise his boyfriend’s funeral. A snap moral decision, informed by the values of Ayesha’s community and faith, has profound consequences. Forced to confront a secret she has hidden even from herself, Ayesha must decide who she is – no matter the cost. Iman Qureshi's play The Funeral Director is an incisive and heartfelt story of sexuality, gender and religion in twenty-first-century Britain.
Staging Gay Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Gay Theater / edited by John M. Clum
Includes the following plays: The Harvey Milk show / Dan Pruitt and Patrick Hutchison -- What's wrong with angry? / Patrick Wilde -- Randy's house / John M. Clum -- Mean tears / Peter Gill - A madhouse in Goa / Martin Sherman -- Kissing Marianne / Godfrey Hamilton -- Dark fruit / Pomo Afro Homos -- Porcelain / Chay Yew -- Men on the verge of a His-panic breakdown / Guillermo Reyes -- In the heart of America / Naomi Wallace.
Q2Q : queer Canadian performance texts / edited by Peter Dickinson (2018) (Physical book)
This anthology includes seven different plays by queer Canadian writers that provide a snapshot of Canadian contemporary queer performance practices-from play writing to drag to performance art to spoken word to digital performance.
Global queer plays : seven LGBTQ + plays from around the world / selected by Arcola Theatre (2018) (Physical book)
Includes the following plays: Contempt / Danish Sheikh (India). -- 55 shades of gay / Jeton Neziraj (Kosovo). -- No matter where I go / Amahl Khouri (Jordan). -- Only the end of the world / Jean-Luc Lagarce (France). -- Taste of love / Zhan Jie (Taiwan). -- Peace Camp Org / Mariam Bazeed (Egypt). -- Winter animals / Santiago Loza (Argentina).
Awkward Stages: Plays About Growing up Gay / edited by John Clum (2015) (Physical book)
Includes the following plays: Edith can shoot things and hit them / by A. Rey Pamatmat -- Sissy / by Ricardo Abreu Bracho -- Slipping / by Daniel Talbott -- Speech and debate / by Stephen Karam -- From White Plains / by Michael Perlman, in collaboration with Craig Wesley Divino, Karl Gregory, Jimmy King, and Aaron Rossini.
Reading (Nonfiction) is Fundamental
From the all too brief life of Lorraine Hansberry to the great Terrence McNally, there have been many amazing queer playwrights throughout the past century. This is just a small sample of books about some of these playwrights, as well as how their dramatic works have been received and examined by mainstream society.
Perry, Imani. Looking for Lorraine : The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.
Quinn, Carolyn. Mama Rose’s Turn the True Story of America’s Most Notorious Stage Mother. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Rose Thompson Hovick, mother of June Havoc and Gypsy Rose Lee, went down in theatrical history as "The Stage Mother from Hell" after her immortalization on Broadway in Gypsy: A Musical Fable. She became an unhappy teenage bride whose marriage yielded two entrancing daughters, Louise and June. When June was discovered to be a child prodigy in ballet, Rose, set out to create onstage opportunities for her magical baby girl. Rose followed her own star and created two more in dramatic and colorful style: "Baby June" became a child headliner in vaudeville, and Louise grew up to be the well-known burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. The rest of Mama Rose's remarkable story included love affairs with both men and women, the operation of a "lesbian pick-up joint" where she sold homemade bathtub gin, and much more.
Frontain, Raymond-Jean. The Theater of Terrence McNally : Something About Grace. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019.
Terrence McNally’s canon possesses such a breadth of subject matter and diversity of dramatic modes that critics have had difficulty assessing his accomplishment. This book identifies four stages of McNally in terms of his understanding of how theater helps the modern person trapped in a seemingly profane existence to find a gateway to the transcendent. By seeking to foment community, most importantly at the height of the AIDS pandemic, McNally’s theater itself proves to be a channel of grace. McNally’s greatest success is shown to be the creation of a theater of empathy and compassion in contradistinction to Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” and Albee’s Americanization of the theater of the absurd.
Greer, Stephen. Contemporary British Queer Performance. Houndmills : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
This book examines queer performance in Britain since the early 1990s, arguing for the significance of emerging collaborative modes of practice. Using queer theory and the history of early lesbian and gay theatre to examine claims to representation among other things, it interrogates the relationships through which recent works have been presented.
Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Acts of Gaiety explores the mirthful modes of political performance by LGBT artists, activists, and collectives that have inspired and sustained deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. The book explores antics such as camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside more familiar forms of "legitimate theater." Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously by mainstream society, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism.
Svich, Caridad. Mitchell and Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019
As the first musical to feature a genderqueer protagonist as its lead, the show has had an extraordinary life on film, Broadway and in the music field. A glam rock musical with a complex relationship to issues related to art, eroticism and matters of identity formation, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a darkly exuberant fairy tale about a child that discovers she is one of a kind, but also potentially among her own kind, if she dares travel past borders that confine and try to stabilise her being and identity. Caridad Svich examines this exhilarating work through the lenses of visual and vocal rock ’n’ roll performance, the history of the American musical, and its positioning within LGBTIQ+ theatre.
Stein, Gertrude et al. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1996.
The friendship and correspondence of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder encompassed the last twelve years of Stein's life and a period of major work by Wilder. A generation apart in age, the two writers met during Stein's acclaimed American lecture tour in 1934-35, during which they shared the experience of lecturing to audiences in the wake of great success. They quickly became mentor and pupil as well as friends, and Wilder eloquently passed on what Stein taught him through his introductions to her books. While Wilder supported Stein's efforts at publication, she held him to his vocation as a writer, urging him to ignore the distractions incurred by family and fortune.
Ibell, Paul. Tennessee Williams. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2016.
Few writers have brought more of their life into their works than famed playwright Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III. His characters have often served as proxies for himself, his mother, and especially his tragically unstable sister, Rose, who many consider to be the inspiration for Williams's iconic female leads Blanche DuBois and Laura Wingfield. In this gripping new biography, Paul Ibell looks at Williams as a poet, playwright, brother, homosexual, alcoholic, drug addict, and, ultimately, a deeply passionate soul whose operatically intense plays were a vibrant reflection of life.
Clum, John M. Something for the Boys : Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. (Physical book)
A look at how the world of musical theater and gay culture intertwine, from the attraction of Ethel Merman to the homophobia of Rogers and Hammerstein, explains why gay men find musical theater so attractive and offers profiles of Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, and other luminaries.
Clum, John M. Still Acting Gay : Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000. (Physical book)
The book focuses on the relationship between American and British dramas written by and about gay men and the changing gay culture those plays reflect, from the carefully enforced closet to liberation politics to AIDS to the qualified security of the present. Still Acting Gay chronicles the transition of the gay man as subject for sensational melodrama to creator of many of the most powerful and celebrated plays of the late 20th century.
Watch Party
From classic plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with underlying gay themes by renowned gay playwright Tennessee Williams, to the contemporary Pieces of String, a musical that tells the story of a soldier coming home from war with a secret by following three generations of a family through two different time periods, you can watch many different plays that are either written by queer playwrights or have strong queer themes (and frequently both).
Nominated for five 2017 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical, Falsettos is a hilarious and poignant look at a modern family revolving around the life of a gay man Marvin, his wife, his lover, his soon‑to‑be bar‑mitzvahed son, their psychiatrist, and the lesbians next door. Originally created under the specter of the AIDS crisis, this timely musical about middle‑class family dynamics manages to remain buoyant and satirically perceptive even as it moves towards its heartbreaking conclusion.
A new musical exploring three generations of one family, Pieces of String alternates between the 1940s and the present day, telling the story of a World War II soldier who returned with a secret that he would carry until the day he died.
On a steamy night in Mississippi, a Southern family gather at their cotton plantation to celebrate Big Daddy’s birthday. The scorching heat is almost as oppressive as the lies they tell. Brick and Maggie dance round the secrets and sexual tensions that threaten to destroy their marriage. With the future of the family at stake, which version of the truth is real – and which will win out?
Straight is a hilarious and subversive excursion into the world of conversion therapy, where gays and lesbians are reputedly 'cured' of their homosexuality and made 'straight.' Schmader, a gay man, pulls no punches with either the conversionists or the gay community in this one-man show -- attending sessions with a German psychoanalyst, going undercover at 'ex-gay' support groups, and engaging in an intensive crash course in Christian heterosexuality.
Indecent is inspired by the true events surrounding the controversial 1923 Broadway debut of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance—a play seen by some as a seminal work of Jewish culture, and by others as an act of traitorous libel. The play charts the history of an incendiary drama and the path of the artists who risked their careers and lives to perform it. Contains adult themes.
Backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House a soprano is preparing for her debut in the opera Tosca. The stage manager gives her encouraging advice. She is visited by her "tenor for the evening." Equally terrified and nervous yet excited, she thinks fondly of her brother, who died from AIDS. He appears to her in her dressing room as a ghostly apparition.
Header image credit: Marcus, Joan. Christian Borle and Andrew Rannells in Falsettos. (Hollywood Reporter) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/falsettos-review-941715 .
