Murder Most Queer

Queer Theatre 2016

12/23/2016

Pundits and commentators, as they are wont to do in the final week of December, are creating their assessments of the year, and 2016 isn’t being remembered fondly. Certainly any year that takes away David Bowie and elects Donald Trump deserves to be condemned—or at least given a stern talking to.

Although it might be an act of indulgence, creating a year-end list of favorite plays can perhaps serve as a reminder of the creative spirit, which has been not just a refuge but a force for love and hope, even survival and revolution, for queer people. It certainly has been for me. And we’re going to need that force.

As in previous years, this blog entry is not a “best of” list, just my own particular and peculiar experience of queer representation in the theatre for 2016. I missed plenty of worthy performances and wish I could have seen more. (Alas, I couldn’t commit 24 hours to Taylor Mac’s extraordinary song cycle—although I did see the 1930s-1950s segment in 2015 and loved it!)

Any connections among these 10 shows probably indicate more about my own tastes than any larger trends. As a scholar and fan of queer theatre, I’m drawn to plays that reflect upon the significance of queer theatre, including “meta” plays that parody, critique, and/or present the history of an earlier play. The list also includes plays that use non-linear time structures reflecting queer temporalities and performances that highlight the perils of normalization for queer people.

Here, then, offered with gratitude for the theatre artists who created these memorable experiences, is a snapshot of my queer theatre-going in New York in 2016.

O, Earth @ Foundry Theatre (HERE)
Thornton Wilder, Ellen DeGeneres, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson share the stage in this highly theatrical queering of Our Town that also serves as a stirring critique of the trend toward “normalization.” Recasting George as a transman and the Stage Manager as an African American woman, Casey Llewellyn’s play asks who is included in our “Our” and who is left out, measuring the distance from the rebels of Stonewall to the conformists of today. What is the real goal of queer liberation? It probably looks a lot like O, Earth’s diverse ensemble dancing to Donna Summers’ disco classic, “MacArthur Park.”

Boy @ Keen Company / EST
Bobby Steggert gave a remarkable performance in Anna Ziegler’s play (inspired by a true story) about a boy raised as a girl who then asserts his identity as a man. Steggert’s performance, without any change in costume or affected mannerisms, achieved a fascinating gender fluidity as the play moved back and forth in time, allowing us to see the girl who will become a man, and the man who was a girl. The play is not about trans identity per se, yet it has the potential to strike a chord with anyone who has ever felt the pain of “failing” to conform to dominant notions of the gender binary. Steggert’s character must define his own sense of gender, and the actor gave a thoughtful and nuanced performance of that journey.

Locusts Have No King @ INTAR
This wild ride of a play about four gay priests borrows its basic structure from Albee’s Woolf: two couples meet for a party and, after rounds bitchy repartee, they face their truths. J. Julian Christopher writes with an admirably bold theatricality that brings a metaphysical dimension to the proceedings, with water that turns to wine, brimstone crashing through the window, and a stunning diabli ex machina in the form of the King of Locusts. Of course these are outward manifestations of the characters’ inner demons, created by the closet, a crisis in faith, and the search for a true calling. On the intimate stage at INTAR, New York’s preeminent Latino theatre, the play’s central love story, between two former lovers who still care for each other, was all the more affecting.

R*NT @ Performance Project at University Settlement
This performance piece combined a wonderfully askew rendition of Jonathan Larson’s famed musical about bohemians in the 1990s, Sarah Schulman’s critique of that musical, and the young cast’s own experiences of the show. Chris Tyler and the diverse ensemble take aim at gentrification and privilege, couched in astute observations regarding the difficulty of living an artist in New York City. The highlight for me was a monologue in which a woman talks about her first lesbian kiss during the film of Rent at a theatre in Colorado. This personal narrative managed to capture what’s potentially meaningful but also somewhat ridiculous about the musical, illuminating the strange ways in which popular culture intersects with our lives, a site of both identification and disidentification.

Gorey @ HERE
In this bio-play of Edward Gorey, three actors play the author and illustrator at different ages: recent college grad, successful middle age, and eccentric old man approaching death. Gorey was part of a pre-Stonewall gay circle (which included Frank O’Hara and George Balanchine), but he never quite felt comfortable in his sexuality. In 1983, at the height of the AIDS crisis, he fled NYC to become a recluse in Cape Cod, where he passed away in 2000. Like his work, Gorey is strange yet intriguing, particularly as portrayed by these three actors who have great rapport and credibly seem like the same person. The conversation across time of three different selves captured something beautiful and true about the ephemerality of art and life.

Indecent @ Vineyard
An ensemble of actors returns from the dead to tell the story of the Yiddish theatre troupe that performed God of Vengeance, Sholem Asch’s 1907 drama about a brothel owner whose daughter falls in love with one of his prostitutes. In Rebecca Taichman’s stunning production, Paula Vogel’s meta-play presents short scenes with musical interludes, moving forward at a quick clip with a Brechtian sense of the epic. We get a backstage view of Asch as an idealistic young writer, the thrill of the great Rudolf Schildkraut rehearsing the lead role, the romance between the two actresses who play the lesbian lovers, and the simple stage manager who is fiercely devoted to the play—which was shut down by the authorities when performed on Broadway in 1923. Indecent pays witness to the Holocaust and the demise of Yiddish culture, yet boldly imagines the lesbian lovers surviving, a fantasy of love and hope in dark times.

I Want You To Want Me @ The Kitchen
In this 70-minute dance play, Jack Ferver both honors and queers the “ballet horror” sub-genre of The Red Shoes, Suspiria, and Black Swan. He plays the evil witch Madame M, who murders one of her own ballerinas in order to seduce her boyfriend. Wonderfully striking in his shifting black dress and with wide eyes blotched with mascara, Ferver offers a subversive revenge fantasy against heterosexual norms, but also a camp reenactment of queer villainy as he hilariously attempts to take the place of the young ballerina. Still, Ferver can tap emotional depths, whether within the camp (“I don’t just believe in Hell, I’ve been there!!”) or in a sincere observation (“All we do in life is either give meaning or take meaning away”). I know of few other theatre artists who so perfectly exploit the fine line between absurdity and grace.

The Radicalization of Rolfe @ Fringe Festival
Andrew Bergh has written a smart parody of The Sound of Music that refocuses the story on the minor character of Liesl’s boyfriend Rolfe, the 17-going-on-18 messenger-boy who joins the Nazis. Conceptually, it takes something I’m sure many have thought when seeing the movie (“That Rolfe seems kinda gay”) and seriously asks, “What if he were?” Of course there’s a strong dose of camp, particularly for those who know the original material and will recognize all the references, but the play is also sincere in telling the story of a gay boy who joins the Nazis, both out of ambition and out of self-hatred. Just as Rolfe betrays the Von Trapps in the film, here he also betrays his lover Johan and his community, giving names of other gay people to a Nazi officer in order to save his own skin. Given the outcome of the November election, accomplished with the collaboration of some queer people, this play now strikes me as a little less funny and even more trenchant than it did in August.

The Wolves @ The Playwrights Realm
On a runway stage of green Astroturf, nine high school girls in uniforms prepare for a soccer match. Their talk ranges from their periods to the punishment of the Khmer Rouge and plenty of gossip. But they’re also serious and focused, amateur athletes who invest a lot in the game. Over the course of the season, some drama emerges—including lesbian and lesbian-ish relationships—but the real power of Sarah DeLappe’s play is in its subtle portrait of a team of women. Under the strong direction of Lila Neugebauer, the production has a visceral physical quality and might well be the best ensemble play for young women I’ve ever seen.

Homos, or Everyone in America @ Labyrinth
Jordan Seavey wrote this play that moves back and forth over five years in the life of a gay couple, played by Michael Urie and Robin De Jesus. The guys face jealousy, arguments about gay culture and sexuality, infidelity, breaking up, and a horrific gay bashing. It succeeds both as an intimate portrait of a couple and as a social analysis of a particular sub-culture that’s no longer as “sub” as it used to be. The Bank Street Theatre was arranged in a unique fashion, with risers in Tetris-like shapes made of untreated wood in four areas of the theater, creating oddly connecting runways in which the actors performed—an effective configuration for Seavey’s structurally and emotionally complex play.

Encore: Playing the Queer Villain in Trump's Melodrama

12/4/2016

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, I’ve had this feeling of dread. Witnessing the reactions of those who will be most at risk of harm from this administration’s policies, I know I’m not alone.

I recognize this dread, having previously experienced it most keenly during eras in which American political discourse vilified LGBTQ people—during the Reagan administration’s callous indifference to AIDS, and again in the push for “marriage protection amendments” under Bush II. In both cases, queers were a “threat” against which America had to be protected. A recurring thought in my middle-aged mind: Do we really have to enact this script again?

America’s political imagination often follows the conventions of melodrama, with a hero, a villain, and a damsel in distress that must be saved. In previous eras, Republican politicians and religious fundamentalists cast themselves as the heroic Dudley Do-Right, with LGBTQ people as the sinister Snidely Whiplash, and the heterosexual family and the nation itself as Nell tied to the train tracks.

For a while, it might have seemed as though this particular melodramatic narrative was no longer politically viable. Trump’s acceptance speech for his nomination at the Republican National Convention was telling. He switched the positions within the melodramatic triangle, still casting himself as the hero, but putting queer people in the role of damsel in distress who needed to be saved from a “hateful foreign ideology”—i.e., villainous Islam.

One couldn’t ask for a better illustration of Jasbir Puar’s argument regarding homonationalism, which describes bringing certain queer citizens into the (white patriarchal) nationalist circle in order to demonize Muslims and immigrants as the hated “other.” This ideological shift attracted a certain number of xenophobic Gays for Trump, but the Republican candidate ultimately won only 14% of the LGBT vote—less than the 22% won by Romney in 2012.

Trump's evocation of a "hateful foreign ideology" was an attempt to obscure his support for hateful domestic ideologies. The president-elect is currently assembling a cabinet uniformly opposed to LGBTQ equality and threatening to roll back anti-discrimination advances made at the federal level. More immediately disturbing is the demonstrable increase of hate crimes, which have primarily targeted immigrants, African Americans, Jews, and queers.

Even if Trump avoided the rhetoric of queer vilification, his election has emboldened those who employ it regularly. Recently, one right wing pundit called for the destruction of the Stonewall Inn, the symbolic site of the start of the modern gay liberation movement. The pundit argued that granting national landmark status to the Stonewall (as Obama had done in June) was “elevating evil.”

“Evil.” Make no mistake: we’re still being cast as Snidely Whiplash. Maybe we’ll occasionally get to go on for Nell, probably at a matinee performance, when the theatre owners are hoping to attract a different audience. But in the minds of the newly empowered homophobes, we’re still wearing a black hat and twirling our moustache.

After the publication of Murder Most Queer in 2014, one colleague asked whether plays with homicidal homosexuals still had as much significance after the decriminalization of homosexuality and the victory same-sex marriage. Wasn’t homophobia over? Haven’t we won?

Well, there may be much that we’ve won. But as someone who has been tracking and analyzing homophobic ideology for over two decades, I’m aware that it’s never stopped being a powerful force across the country. Donald Trump did not create the horrible combination of anti-queer, anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Semitic, and anti-woman ideologies. He simply harnessed the forces that have been there all along.

Post-election, I see many of us shifting our energies from electoral politics to movement politics. Obviously the two are related, but I believe movement politics gives us a better opportunity to break out of the melodramatic narrative. We’re not the villain. We’re not the damsel in distress. And heroism is achieved not with the triumph of an individual, but with the collective betterment of us all. The script they’re handing us is not new. Indeed, we know these clichés quite well. And we must continue the struggle to rewrite it.

Your Friend Dahmer

10/7/2016

Certain corners of internet have noted with a degree of ironic intrigue the recent announcement that Ross Lynch, known for Disney’s Teen Beach movies and TV series Austin & Ally, will play serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in a new film based on Derf Backderf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer.

Articles tend to emphasize the combination of physical similarity and moral dissimilarity between actor and role. One blogger, for example, wrote that “once you strip away the wholesome Disney accouterments,” Lynch bears an uncanny resemblance to the infamous murderer.

Using the innocence associated with a Disney child star as a counterpoint to the evil associated with Dahmer is, of course, exactly the point of the casting. The same strategy was evident on Broadway in 1957 when Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, based on the Leopold & Loeb case, starred Roddy McDowell and Dean Stockwell as the murderous teenagers.

Both performers had been child movie stars. McDowell was still in his early teens when he starred in How Green Was My Valley and Lassie Come Home, while Stockwell was even younger when he starred in Gentleman’s Agreement and The Secret Garden. The casting of actors who were famous as children emphasized the growth from childhood innocence to maladjusted adolescence, reminding the audience that these troubled teens were once adorable kids.

In the case of Compulsion, the casting supported the play’s attempt to create a degree of sympathy for the convicted murderers, seeing them as “sick” (rather than evil) and blaming the sickness on harmful social forces and values. The source material for Lynch’s film, however, promises more moral ambiguity.

Backderf’s autobiographical graphic novel My Friend Dahmer (2012) focuses on his odd friendship with the future killer when they were high school classmates in Ohio in the 1970s. But perhaps “friendship” is too strong a word, since Backderf and his friends see Dahmer as an amusing but creepy freak.

Dahmer would get attention from his classmates by giving “performances” of odd behavior, and in the book’s most telling incident, the high school students pay Dahmer to give a performance at a shopping mall, twitching and shouting at unsuspecting patrons. The teens laugh at Dahmer’s grotesque shenanigans, but once the show is over they don’t invite Dahmer to be part of their evening plans, and he remains outside the circle of friendship.

Teenage Dahmer gives an exaggerated and ironic performance of his own feelings of monstrosity, and this spectacle of alienation stands in sharp contrast to the versions of teen life depicted in Disney fare such as Teen Beach 2. Casting Ross Lynch as Dahmer has the potential to merge these two kinds of performance in the imagination of the audience, reading the Disney teen into Dahmer—and perhaps even reading Dahmer into the Disney teen.

Jeffrey Dahmer is now one of the most widely reimagined serial killers in American culture. Jeremy Renner gave an excellent performance in David Jacobson’s 2002 film Dahmer, which featured flashbacks to his teenage years. The stage has seen even more representation, mostly from queer theatre artists, including experimental works by Reza Abdoh (The Law of Remains) and Paul Outlaw (Berserker).

Can a new film about the teenage years of Jeffrey Dahmer “explain” what made him a serial killer? I don’t think so. But it might illuminate something about our cultural fantasies regarding innocence and evil, showing how a single actor might embody both.

Thinking Critically About Internalized Homophobia

6/13/2016

Reports are beginning to come in from various sources that Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, had previously frequented that club and had messaged other men on the hook up app Grindr. In other words, Mateen is now rumored to have been possibly queer.

I'm not about to attempt to psychoanalyze Mateen, and there's no real way to know exactly what he thought or felt. But I do know that we are about to be inundated with news media and social media discussing "internalized homophobia" and the fact that "one of our own" is responsible for the murder of so many. In the past, such rhetoric has been horribly homophobic. We need to be aware of the ideologies behind this rhetoric and respond to it.

The phenomenon of the queer person who kills other queer people -- and particularly queer people of color -- immediately reminds me of the case of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, which inspired many theatrical representations. I have no doubt that, in the future, theatre artists will wrestle with the meaning and significance of Mateen's crime.

But my present concern is not with the nuanced and complex meanings that can be created in theatrical art. Right now, we need to address what we really mean when we talk about internalized homophobia in the wake of horrific brutality. In Chapter Two of Murder Most Queer, I discuss how homophobic organizations use the "homicidal homosexual" to reinforce homophobic ideology:

While the homicidal homosexual may have originated as a homophobic construction, there are, of course, actual gay and lesbian people who commit murder, and the representations of these real people raise more complex problems about queer villainy. Antigay organizations are fond of pointing to gay and lesbian murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrew Cunanan, and Aileen Wuornos as “proof ” of the evil of homosexuality, which then becomes “evidence” in the argument to deny civil rights to LGBT people. For example, the antigay Family Research Institute publishes the writings of Paul Cameron, who directly links the gory details of Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalism to a “substantial minority” of gay men and lesbians who practice “violent sex,” as well as the reportedly high rate of suicide among gays and lesbians. The conclusion to be drawn from these tenuously connected assertions is that “most violence involving gays is self-induced” and therefore hate crime legislation should not be passed.

In the final chapter of the book, which focuses on theatrical representations of Dahmer, I engage with David Schmid's excellent work on the discourse surrounding internalized homophobia:

In his analysis of narratives about serial killers, David Schmid argues that true crime writers inevitably focus on some “deviant” aspect of the killer’s life as an explanation for his or her murders, since the public needs to be able to exclude the killer from the realm of the “normal.” But they enforce a double standard when it comes to sexually motivated crimes. So true crime writers represent Ted Bundy, who murdered and engaged in necrophilia with numerous women, as “an aberration that told us nothing about heterosexuality at all,” while they attribute Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes to homosexuality itself. Indeed, Schmid finds in these narratives “the assumption that extreme violence is a normal part of homosexuality.”

In their attempts to explain the murders of Jeffrey Dahmer, many true crime writers place the blame on internalized homophobia—that is, the gay man’s loathing of his own homosexuality. While this assertion may be correct, Schmid maintains that true crime writers use it to support, rather than challenge, the homophobia of their readers, since they never address the origin of the loathing. The implication, then, is that “to be homosexual is so disgusting and traumatic that of course one would murder again and again in order to assuage one’s guilt about being gay.” And here Schmid imagines an alternate possibility for the exploration of internalized homophobia:

A more productive, and less homophobic, aim for true crime would be to explain why Dahmer felt ambivalent about his homosexuality or why he hated other homosexuals. Examination of these issues in true crime has the potential to correct some of the biases of the genre, but rarely does, simply because gay self-hatred can be acknowledged but never analyzed in detail . . . To explore the sources of Dahmer’s conflicted homosexuality would involve acknowledging both the familial (Dahmer’s father was virulently homophobic) and social context of widespread homophobia. [Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, 2006]

In other words, rather than naturalizing internalized homophobia as a psychological response to homosexuality, Schmid challenges true crime writers to examine the social origins of this homophobia, thus implicating American society itself as the source of Dahmer’s self-loathing.

The plays discussed in this chapter have the potential to take up that challenge. My examination of plays and performances about queer serial killers focuses on how these works may challenge the homophobia so often found in other media, articulating a critical perspective on causation and the supposed conflation of violence and homosexuality. Additionally, many of these plays engage critically with other issues surrounding narratives of queer serial killers, including the role of the media in creating celebrity serial killers, ambivalence about the innocence of their victims, and the public’s interest in the gruesome physical details of sadistic murders.

There's still much we do not know about Mateen, and probably much that we will never know. But whatever information, misinformation, sheer guesswork and fantasy appear on our social media and news feeds, I hope we can keep some critical perspective on the phenomenon of internalized homophobia and not compound the pain of those who have been victimized by these horrific murders.

Further Illumination

6/6/2016

Published scholarship is most interesting to me when it participates in an ongoing conversation. One of the pleasures of publishing Murder Most Queer has been connecting with other scholars, theatre artists, and theatre fans who have their own perspectives on murderous queer characters. The book has also garnered reviews in academic journals, and I genuinely appreciate that my colleagues in theatre studies and queer studies have taken the time to engage with the book and share their insights.

Most recently, John Clum, author of seminal books in the field such as Acting Gay and Something For the Boys, reviewed MMQ for Theatre Journal. Although he praised the book as “well written” and “insightful,” he also asked questions about the perspectives and arguments expressed in the book. Clum raises significant issues about homophobia and representation, so I’ve written this blog entry to respond to some of his questions and concerns.

FANTASIES OF EMPOWERMENT

In the introduction to MMQ, I write:

Far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, these homicidal homosexuals are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance, even to vengeance.

Clum is skeptical of this argument and asks, “Are the murderers he discusses really empowered by their crimes? I would suggest that in most of the plays he discusses they are left isolated and miserable as the curtain falls.” Clum is correct, but I believe we are expressing different understandings of the phrase “fantasies of empowerment.”

MMQ does not argue that murderous characters achieve romance and happiness (or whatever the opposites of isolation and misery might be) through the act of murder. These queer characters, and perhaps queer audiences, can fantasize about achieving power through physical violence, but such power is rarely ameliorative. One might find pleasure in fantasies of empowerment, but a fantasy can be a delusion, and power can do terrible things.

My arguments about power grow organically from the plays themselves, in which characters often describe their murderous actions in terms of power, usually in contrast to the oppression they experience as members of a stigmatized minority. A clear articulation of this theme comes from Miss Roj, the snap queen in George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum.

Snapping comes from another galaxy, as do all snap queens. That’s right. I ain’t just your regular oppressed American Negro. I am an extraterrestrial. And I ain’t talkin’ none of that shit you seen in the movies! I have real power.

Miss Roj’s “real power” enables her to give a heart attack to a racist, homophobic bully; she literally snaps her oppressor to death. When Robert in Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul murders, he expresses his dominance and announces, “And this time I’m god.” Joyce Carol Oates, whose portrait of a killer based on Jeffrey Dahmer (Zombie) was staged by Bill Connington, states that the serial killer “exerts control over the dead body as, he believes, he could never exert control over the living.”

I do not suggest (nor do these plays suggest) that committing murder is the way to escape isolation and misery. Characters might imagine murder as a form of power that will help them combat their victimization in a homophobic society, but I argue that these violent acts are also emblematic manifestations of the very dread, abandonment, and criminalization that they hope to overcome.

Many plays invite the audience to share this fantasy of empowerment—but also to have a critical perspective on it. MMQ argues that an audience member can do both at the same time. Fictional murders can be simultaneously attractive and repulsive, and this duality is part of what makes the plays such rich sites of interpretation.

HOMOPHOBIA IS A FACT OF LIFE

Clum criticizes MMQ by suggesting that the book has not properly recognized violence against queer people: “[M]any of the works he discusses were written and performed when homophobia was a fact of life for gay men. Gay men were far more likely to be killed than to kill.”

Again, Clum is correct, but the book is not blind to these facts. In every chapter I outline how homophobic forces of particular eras inform theatrical representations of homicidal homosexuals. A scan of the book’s index will show entries for AIDS, bias crimes, censorship, civil rights, the closet, the Cold War, Jerry Falwell, heterosexism, internalized homophobia, etc.

Indeed, one of my arguments is that the queer person, recognizing their victimization in a homophobic world, might want to create fictional narratives in which they invert the social order, imagining themselves as aggressors rather than victims. In the introduction, I write:

[T]he prevalence of violent bias crimes against LGBT people can burden queer people with the fearful passivity of victimization. By romanticizing criminal transgression, LGBT artists can exchange the role of victim for the empowering fantasy of the queer killer, combating violent persecution with violent action and replacing shame with a defiant pride.

The footnote in this passage includes statistics on hate crimes against LGBT people. By examining plays with queer killers, MMQ does not negate homophobia. On the contrary, it attempts to show how these plays grow out of—and often confront and subvert—homophobia.

RESISTANT READINGS

In MMQ, I offer an interpretation of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, one of the most commercially successful plays ever written about same-sex lovers, which positions the closet, rather than homosexuality itself, as the “deathtrap.” Clum isn’t convinced and asks: “Did the predominantly heterosexual audiences really read it as an indictment of the closet?”

I imagine most audiences did not read the play this way, but my goal is not to put forth the obvious or generally accepted reading. Rather, the role of the scholar or critic can be to challenge the common understanding of a play and offer a resistant reading that goes against the dominant interpretation.

The resistant reading is not a radical invention on my part, and I follow in the footsteps of many queer theatre and film scholars (including D. A. Miller and Stacy Wolf) who participate in this practice. Miller can find the gay fantasy in Gypsy and Wolf can point out the lesbian dynamic in Wicked without claiming that most audiences read those shows in those ways. Here’s how I explain the interpretive practice in my book:

A play, then, does not have a single secured meaning determined by the author, but rather is a site of many potential meanings. Additionally, while performances may address spectators as a group, individual audience members can view the same performance but find different ideas, emotions, and meanings. Authorial intentions and social conventions may urge the audience member toward a dominant reading, that is, a reading based on the assumption of shared social values and acceptance of dominant ideology as expressed through narrative conventions. Yet resistant readings can run rampant in the theater, especially among queer audience members who refuse to submit to “normal” social structures and interpretive practices. Thus my task here is not to determine the “correct” reaction to a play but to explore, through a close analysis of texts and contexts, possible reactions, interpretations, and experiences that I hope will make the plays more interesting, exciting, and challenging. My goal is not to reduce these plays but to enlarge them.

Of course I could be criticized for creating a resistant reading that strays too far from the text and defies all reason. Is it wrong to think that queer audiences might find significance, value, or pleasure in a play like Deathtrap? Recent revivals in Los Angeles (staged by the LA Gay & Lesbian Center) and London (starring out gay actors Simon Russell Beale and Jonathan Groff) suggest to me that I am not alone in my queer perspective on this play.

STRAW MEN

Clum seems to accuse me of creating a straw man argument when he notes my intention to “exonerate” plays with homicidal homosexuals and asks “But who is attacking them? Exactly what is the author arguing here?”

In the introduction to MMQ, I explain how the gay liberation movement protested “negative representations” in films with queer killers, including Cruising, Silence of the Lambs, and Basic Instinct. It’s true that GLAAD, to the best of my knowledge, never organized a protest against a play. But theatre critics, in both the mainstream and gay press, did complain about “negative representations” in plays with queer killers, and I cite many examples of such reviews throughout the book.

In particular, Deathtrap, The Lisbon Traviata, The Law of Remains, and The Secretaries were criticized for being exploitative, excessive, too angry, too bloody. In one of the most forthright examples, I discuss how Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune responded to Jim Grimsley’s Fascination by declaring a moratorium on representations of serial killers and expressing offense that a gay theatre company (About Face) would be so “irresponsible” as to stage a play that included the stereotype of the gay murderer.

Many of the plays I discuss in MMQ were critically lauded. But I do not believe I am creating a straw man argument when I note a strain within the LGBT rights movement and the critical establishment that prefers “positive representations.” Many other scholars and activists have noted this strain and identified it as part of the larger ideology of homonormativity. I position plays with homicidal homosexuals as challenges to this preference for positive or normative representations.

A COMMON RARITY

Clum offers two key reasons why Murder Most Queer should have been a different book, or perhaps not been a book at all. In the first paragraph of his review, Clum notes that the homicidal homosexual was “one of the most common of those stereotypes” analyzed by scholars in the early years of LGBT studies. But later he writes, “The fact that the author talks about so few plays is evidence that the homicidal homosexual onstage is a rarity.”

The implication seems to be that the homicidal homosexual is a “common” stereotype in American culture but a “rarity” in the American theatre, and therefore not worthy of a book-length examination. Even if we accept that this character is not seen as often in theatre as in film or television, it wouldn’t negate the unique artistic and cultural significance of homicidal homosexuals in the American theatre.

But is the theatrical iteration of this archetype so rare? An appendix in MMQ, which Clum generously describes as “helpful,” contains 81 examples of plays with queer killers. These 81 plays were written between 1927 and 2014; on this blog, I’ve written about a half dozen other examples that have been produced since MMQ was published. Although the term “rarity” is subjective, I would argue that it should not be applied in this case.

Clum then suggests that it would be more worthwhile to write about movies, since many of the plays I discuss “are better known from their film versions.” If we were to follow this argument to its logical conclusion, we’d have to give up theatre scholarship altogether and write about, say, cat videos, which have been seen by a greater number of people than any play.

I do include some commentary on the movie versions of certain plays (Rope, Compulsion, Deathtrap), but most of the plays I write about—some widely seen and others not—are wildly, beautifully theatrical, and therefore resist cinematic adaptation. While also examining examples of popular theatre, MMQ argues for the significance of lesser-known plays that might speak primarily to queer audiences, allowing us as a community to reimagine the vilifying archetype of the homicidal homosexual, outside of so-called “mainstream” culture.

DIVERSE GENEALOGIES

I feel the need to correct another assumption evident in Clum’s assessment of Murder Most Queer. His review begins by positioning the book within the lineage of compendiums of representations of gay men in film and theatre, written by gay men, including himself. I recognize and respect Clum’s position as one of the first scholars to focus on gay theatre. Indeed, I cite three of his books in Murder Most Queer.

But this genealogy ignores other direct influences on my work, particularly Lynda Hart’s groundbreaking Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. My theoretical and methodological approaches are deeply informed by the work of Jill Dolan, Eve Sedgwick, and Alisa Solomon. I was fortunate enough to study with all of these women, and their influence (and citations of their work) can be found throughout MMQ.

Clum’s review might lead the reader to believe that the book focuses exclusively on murderous gay male characters, when in fact MMQ looks at bisexual, lesbian, and transgender characters as related but distinct subjects, each with their own particular position on the cultural landscape. True, my research found a preponderance of gay male characters within the field of queer killers. But that does not mean that only the gay male characters should be recognized, just as not only gay male scholars should be recognized, within the work.

* * *

Although John Clum and I have never met, we belong to the same community of theatre scholars, and I believe he chose to review Murder Most Queer because he cares deeply about theatre that reflects queer lives and experiences. I share that concern, and therefore I’m grateful for his critique, which gives me an opportunity to refine and clarify my work as a scholar. MMQ came from my need to explore a dark and complicated subject, and I value exchanges that bring further illumination.

Queer Theatre 2015

12/28/2015

Audiences seeking LGBTQ representations on the stages of New York had a lot of great opportunities in 2015. We had a multitude of Alisons and a handful of Hedwigs on Broadway, plenty of gay relationships in critically lauded plays off-Broadway, and countless boundary defying performances at venues off-off-Broadway.

Seemingly more so than usual, the plays at mainstream theatres tended toward representations of affluent white male protagonists with rather conventional romantic conflicts. Is this what marriage equality hath wrought? Come back to the 5 & dime, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Tarell Alvin McCraney.

But queer representations in all their cultural and aesthetic diversity were out there, and I encountered some excellent performances across the spectrum of theatrical production. The following blog entry is not a “best of” list. Rather, it’s a highly subjective and idiosyncratic look at some of the queer performances that I happened to see this year—performances that moved me, excited me, and challenged me.

Notable trends: autobiography, non-linear narratives, parent-child conflicts, deconstructions of old movies, and Blanche DuBois

January 8, 2015
DarkMatter @ LaMaMa Café
The poetic monologues (and occasional dialogues) of Alok Vaid-Menon and Jenani Balasubramanian, collectively known as DarkMatter, contain a thrilling combination of truth, beauty, sly wit, and righteous fury. This trans south Asian performance duo tackles intersecting forces of oppression, from racism encountered in the queer community to the wars caused by the forces of colonialism. Their work also presents a search for identity in a world in which all labels of identification are suspect. Since witnessing their performance at the LaMaMa Café, I’ve included their videos in my courses in queer theatre, and they never fail to provoke the students in all the right ways.

January 18, 2015
Night Light Bright Light @ Abrons Arts Center
Jack Ferver’s unique brand of performance includes dance, song, confessional monologues, surreal poetry, and video. Night Light Bright Light, performed with dancer Reid Bartelme, is filled with memorable sequences, but two in particular stand out for me. One: Ferver performs a condensed one-man version of A Streetcar Named Desire that is both hysterically funny and more truthful than some full productions of that classic play. Two: Ferver stares into a mirror, with only a candle in his hand for lighting, and repeats “I am not afraid” while a figure portraying Death stalks the darkened theatre. It’s genuinely chilling. This performance piece, inspired by the tragic life of Fred Herko, illuminates how artists combat their fears—of madness, of failure, of death—with their best weapons: art and wit. Ferver has plenty of both.

February 26, 2015
Bright Half Life @ Women’s Project
Tanya Barfield’s two-hander gives us a lesbian relationship over two and half decades—but in a theatrical style that slips back and forth over time, fragmenting a linear narrative into a kaleidoscopic whirl. The technique might be cinematic, but the results, guided by director Leigh Silverman, are purely theatrical. Shifting over time and space with incredible speed, the bare stage comes to represent dozens of locations, and Rebecca Henderson and Rachael Holmes represent these women at various stages of their lives. Some of their life events might be “typical,” but others are grounded in their specific experiences as an interracial lesbian couple. Even if you’ve never immersed yourself in theories of “queer temporality,” Barfield’s play will offer you a beautiful and evocative depiction of two women in and out of love—and in and out of time.

March 21, 2015
I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees @ Abrons Arts Center
In 1951, Helen Twelvetrees, who had been a Hollywood leading lady in the 1930s, was performing Blanche DuBois in a summerstock production on Long Island. From this fact, David Greenspan—playwright, actor, and blinding genius—creates a theatrical fantasia about a fan tracking down the now-forgotten Hollywood star. He imagines her drama—failing career, addiction, and multiple husbands—through the lens of his own life, combining her biography, his biography, her starring roles, and his gay fantasies. A certain sadness pervades this play about loss, yet Greenspan renders it with such artistry, aided by (clearly one of my favorite directors) Leigh Silverman, so the experience is ultimately sweet. And it made me want to watch obscure pre-code movies starring Helen Twelvetrees.

March 28, 2015
Gender/Power @ Gibney Dance Center
Complemented by the video portraits of Maya Ciarrocchi, three transgender / genderqueer performers tell their stories to each other and to the audience. While the narratives are largely autobiographical, they also “slip” among the performers, resulting in a sense that all of them, while having different experiences, overlap in interesting ways. Becca Blackwell, James Tigger Ferguson, and Kris Grey are all compelling performers who connect with the audience, and they’re also very smart about analyzing and theorizing their own experiences: queer childhoods, bathroom confrontations, workplace dress codes, abusive relationships, etc. Ciarrocchi and Grey have continued to develop this piece, creating different iterations with different performers, including the fabulous Pamela Sneed.

March 31, 2015
Fun Home @ Circle in the Square
To understand the significance of Fun Home, the Broadway musical based on Alison Bechdel’s amazing graphic memoir, I recommend listening to “When You’re Good To Mama” from Chicago—and then listening to “Changing My Major” from Fun Home. Since Chicago has been running for almost two decades, Matron Mama Morton is the lesbian character seen by the greatest number of people in Broadway history. She’s strident, brassy, and expresses lesbian desire through vulgar innuendo and double entendre. In contrast, Medium Allison in Fun Home is a college student who has just fallen in love and had sex for the first time. She’s naively exuberant, vulnerable, and even a little scared. Instead of harsh brass, we hear sweet strings; instead of innuendo and coercion, we have heartfelt and forthright desire. Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori have successfully translated Bechdel’s book to the musical stage, and Sam Gold’s re-direction of the production for Broadway made the show all the more nuanced, intimate, and affecting. It deserves its Tony Awards.

April 17, 2015
Bird in the House @ LaMaMa
Dane Terry, with tattoos on his arms and long scraggly hair touching the collar of his plain white t-shirt, sits at a baby grand piano, accompanied by drums, bass, and two female singers. With songs taken from his album Color Movies, he tells a fantastic narrative of queer childhood: the night he met another gay boy at the pool, woke up in the woods, and was accused of burning down the condiment factory that had recently fired his mother. His piano playing is expressive, nimble, and remarkably accomplished, and what first appear to be “shaggy dog” anecdotes coalesce into riveting storytelling. Dane comes from the Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, and seems to have traveled into outer space and somehow landed in Brooklyn. Following him on that journey is a total pleasure.

July 18, 2015
Pound @ Dixon Place
Marga Gomez is probably one of the funniest people I’ve ever seen on stage. Part stand-up comedian, part performance artist, and part cultural critic, Marga has created a one-woman show in which she fantasizes about meeting all the lesbians from cinema history. There’s the tortured schoolteacher from The Children’s Hour, the doomed farmgirl from The Fox, and the hot ex-con from Bound. While offering a critique of lesbian representation, the show also takes great pleasure in speaking forthrightly about lesbian sexuality and the female body. Marga is exuberant and fearless. If you’re up for it, I highly recommend a double feature of Bound and Pound.

August 21, 2015
Rope @ HERE
Brendan Drake choreographed this four-member ensemble piece inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, loosely based on the gay murderers Leopold and Loeb. The soundtrack includes snippets from that 1948 film, along with the scene from Red River in which Monty Clift exchanges guns with handsome cowboy John Ireland. Drake takes the coded homoerotic subtext of these films and makes it evident with dances that blur the line between sexuality and violence. As in Gomez’s Pound, Drake’s Rope offers a critique of Hollywood representations of homosexuality, but also finds a certain pleasure and eroticism in them. This vision of male-male relationships is dark, perhaps even threatening, but it’s also rendered aesthetically compelling through the art of dance.

September 20, 2015
Cloud 9 @ Atlantic Theatre
There’s an amazing moment at the end James MacDonald’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s masterpiece about gender and sexuality when Chris Perfetti hugs Brooke Bloom. In Act One, Mr. Perfetti (in excellent drag) plays Betty, the unhappy young mother with an effeminate son named Edward, played by Ms. Bloom. In Act Two, they are 25 years older, and Bloom now plays the mature Betty, while Perfetti plays the adult version of Edward. So, if you’re following the casting, “mother” and “son” have essentially switched places. But in a magical moment, Betty from Act One and Betty from Act Two embrace, bringing together not just the old self and the young self, but also mother and son from Act One, and son and mother from Act Two. That might sound a bit complex, but in performance it’s elegantly clear and incredibly beautiful. Cloud 9 premiered in 1979, and in the intervening years we may have witnessed a couple more waves of feminism and marriage equality, but Churchill’s insights into gender and sexuality have not dated. Indeed, we might finally be catching up to her.

October 20, 2015
Veritas @ The Cave
Full Disclosure: I worked on this production. As a dramaturg with a specialization in representations of homosexuality, I couldn’t have asked for a better gig. Veritas is about Harvard University’s secret trials to find and expel students who “practiced homosexualism” in 1920. Playwright Stan Richardson, working from documents long hidden in the university’s archive, constructed a smart, sexy, and complex play about the young men who were the victims of this witch hunt. Under the direction of The Representatives, a theatre company known for “radical intimacy,” a diverse ensemble of ten actors performed in the basement of a gothic church, often just inches away from the audience seated around the space. Veritas tells the story of a small secret community destroyed by the forces of homophobia, but at each performance the audience saw that community brought back to life in all its youthful energy and fragility. No matter how many times I saw it, I was always deeply moved.

November 1, 2015
Hir @ Playwrights Horizons
There’s an act of violence in the second act of this play that made me gasp. Not because it’s gory, but because it marks a stunning and decisive turning point in a familial struggle, carrying great emotional and ideological weight. I won’t spoil it for you. The moment is so evocative because Taylor Mac’s absurdist-realist play works on one level as a domestic family drama, but on another level as an allegory for the ideological conflicts between patriarchy, radical feminism, liberalism, and the new trans-queer movement. Kristine Neilson, one of our funniest actresses, is daffy as ever, but here gets to go a bit darker in her role as a newly empowered mother, helping her transgender teenage son explode the gender binary, while her other son has come home from the war and would like a little more order, thank you very much. I took a group of 19 college students to see this production, and their enthusiastic response solidified my decision to give this play a permanent place on my queer theatre syllabus. The Playwrights Horizons production is also remarkable because it instigated a shift toward trans inclusion in casting calls in the New York theater.

December 26, 2015
Invisible Thread @ Second Stage
Griffin Matthews plays himself in this autobiographical musical, co-authored with Matt Gould, about a young gay black man searching for connection. The plot is set in motion when Griffin comes out at church and finds himself exiled from the choir. He then goes on a journey to Uganda, where his savoir complex and his fantasies about connecting to his roots are sorely tested. But in his quest to help a group of Ugandan orphans, he does find a purpose—and it also brings about one of the most moving “homecomings” I’ve seen on stage. Urged on by his Jewish boyfriend Ryan, Griffin goes back to the church to ask for their help. They not only help him raise funds, but they invite him back into the choir. Melody Betts leads the full ensemble in a gospel song, “Bela Musana” (“Be The Light”), that stops the show and brings the crowd to its feet. Here is the reconnection that the audience needed to witness: a queer young man embraced in song by the community that had previously rejected him. It’s a beautiful and powerful moment of musical theatre.

Some (Killer) Queer Plays I Previously Blogged About in 2015: Angry Fags, Revenge of the Popinjay, Why Is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?, and Another Medea.

Wedding Bells for Leopold and Loeb

6/30/2015

Those of us who write about LGBT culture have responded to the US Supreme Court decision on marriage equality in a variety of ways, including joyous celebration of a victory for equal rights, ambivalence toward the conservative nature of marriage as a social institution, and frustration over the lack of attention paid to other serious LGBT issues.

I, for one, having come of age in the deeply homophobic 1980s, am mostly amazed at how quickly the cause of marriage equality has been won. Let's not fool ourselves: there's still a lot of homophobia -- some virulent, some subtle -- in America. But the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision on marriage equality signifies a shift in the culture, and I see it as a significant milestone in the fight against the criminalization of the queer.

It's interesting, then, to consider two recent stories that have made their way onto various blogs and news feeds, both concerning gay male murderers and marriage. On March 28, 2015, the Guardian UK ran the story "Convicted Murderers Become First Gay Couple to Marry in Prison." More recently, a Canadian newspaper reported that a man convicted of a brutal murder had posted a dating profile in his search for a "prince charming" interested in "a long term committed relationship."

Most of the reader comments on these stories express outrage that murderers should be able to seek love or get married. But are these gay murderers so different from their heterosexual counterparts who have long taken advantage of their fundamental right to marry?

These stories gain much of their interest (and, indeed, most of their irony) in relation to the "politics of respectability" that has underlined much of the marriage equality movement. These arguments have positioned gays and lesbians as good people who have earned the right to marriage. But marriage -- and, for that matter, love -- are not just for the good. By recognizing marriage as a fundamental right, our society acknowledges that even the most despicable people can get married.

It wasn't so long ago that LGBT people were widely considered despicable, no better than murderers. In researching my book on the "homicidal homosexual" in the American theater, I was surprised at how often the story of Leopold and Loeb (the infamous murderers of Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924) was taken up by queer theater-makers as a romantic story.

John Logan's play Never the Sinner depicts the two killers waltzing together to Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do," while Stephen Dolginoff's musical Thrill Me concludes with the convicted lovers singing that they'll be together for "Life Plus Ninety Nine Years." The wedding imagery is taken even further in Tom Kalin's film Swoon, which imagines Leopold and Loeb exchanging rings and vows.

The most "queer" version of the romantic Leopold and Loeb appears in Laural Meade's Leopold and Loeb: A Goddamn Laff Riot, a "deconstructive vaudeville" presented in Los Angeles in 2003. The characters of Leopold and Loeb are each performed by a pair of actors -- one male and one female -- giving us four actors who continually alternate lines and express contradictory feelings and thoughts. When asked in court if they plead guilty, the Leopolds and Loebs respond by putting on wedding veils and dancing to the ABBA song "I Do, I Do, I Do."

Part of the reason queer artists imagined the "gay wedding" of Leopold and Loeb in the 1990s and early 2000s is that it allowed a community that felt criminalized to imagine that even the worst among us might find love. But to varying degrees these representations also parody notions of traditional marriage, showing that the love of these anti-heroes does not fit within the standard romantic narrative.

Now that we've achieved marriage equality, will we lose interest in these subversive criminal romances? The continuing popularity of shows like Never the Sinner and Thrill Me indicate that there's still an audience for these complex representations.

Many queers have no desire to be "respectable," and others may still feel criminalized by the strong homophobia that operates in certain corners of American society and politics. Therefore these dramatic representations of romantic queer killers speak to our fantasies about the ability of the "despicable" to find love and even to get married.

Those more recent real-life convicted killers -- the ones getting married in the UK and seeking love in Canada -- are guilty of truly horrific crimes. But those criminals are still human, and they have a fundamental right to marriage. And so do we.

Political Melodrama and Queer Fantasies of Vengeance

4/3/2015

Debates in American politics often play out as melodrama, with absolute villains, victims, and heroes. Who exactly is playing which role, however, depends on one’s political perspective. In the current arguments about religious freedom and anti-LGBT discrimination in Indiana, gay rights advocates position themselves as defenders (heroes) of a small minority (victims), one without civil rights protections in the state, against a law that would give bigots (villains) the right to discriminate against them.

But supporters of Indiana’s RFRA believe that they are victims, oppressed by powerful political and corporate entities who claim to want equality but whose “real goal” is to destroy religious freedom. Representatives of these conservative Christian groups refer to those who support LGBT equality as “homofascists” and “gay terrorists,” thus casting themselves as heroes defending powerless florists, bakers, and pizza makers. [The image at the top of this post is making its way around the anti-gay corners of the internet, showing LGBT rights advocates as monstrous wolves in sheep's clothing.]

For those familiar with the history of LGBT people in America, this vilification is nothing new. But there’s been a slight shift in the rhetoric of vilification. Previously, LGBT people were maligned as the sinister threat from outside and below. We were a minority without any real political power, but we threatened to undermine and infect all that was good and normal. Now that the mainstream LGBT rights movement has won some substantial legal battles, that rhetoric has shifted to paint a portrait of LGBT people as a dominating power, one aligned with government and industry, to crush our enemies from above.

While it’s true that the social and political landscape has seen a tremendous shift in regards to the standing of LGBT people (Lawrence v. Texas, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, DOMA), by almost any measure LGBT people are still struggling for basic civil rights, including anti-discrimination protections in employment, housing, and public accommodations. We’re still subjected to harassment and violence, and we see the effects of homophobic culture, one that devalues LGBT lives, in statistics regarding LGBT health, addiction, and suicide. The myth of super powerful queers who can mercilessly destroy anti-gay forces is a fantasy.

Theatre artists often work within the realm of fantasy, unpacking and exploring its meanings, and I’m intrigued by two current theatrical productions that imagine queer characters who wreak violent vengeance on homophobes. What if we could be so empowered and destroy our enemies? Topher Payne’s dark comedy Angry Fags, first staged in Atlanta in 2013 and currently at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago until April 26, follows Bennett, an upstanding homosexual who works for a lesbian state senator. When he learns that his ex-boyfriend has been gay-bashed, he teams up with his (perhaps slightly sociopathic) roommate Cooper to become a gay vigilante terrorist. First they revenge themselves on the man they presume to be responsible for the initial attack, and then they go after a closeted anti-gay minister, an anti-gay politician, and a whole building of Family First types.

Payne smartly creates his dark political satire within the realm of screwball comedy—with a dash of romance—so the audience can recognize it as a loopy fantasy, but still engage with the reality underlying the fantasy. As the horrors of the play mount, the audience realizes that these gay vigilantes are bashing back against innocent people and that vengeance doesn’t really help their cause. Angry Fags has elements of the classic thriller as Bennett and Cooper have to kill friends in order to keep their secrets, and by the end it’s become a full-fledged revenge tragedy with a heap of bodies on the stage. So the play allows us to indulge in the fantasy of “gay terrorists” becoming empowered and taking action, but then it shows us how this violence will not further the cause and will destroy us.

While Angry Fags operates as absurd comedy and political satire, Revenge of the Popinjay, currently on stage at Dixon Place in New York City, employs a more surreal and visceral theatricality. Anthony Johnston plays a variety of roles: a theatrical version of himself, his sister who passed away in 2010, his new boyfriend who is also named Anthony, a self-help guru who preaches “positive thinking,” and a gay rapper named Popinjay who incites his audience to rape and kill heterosexuals (#yeshomo #nohetero). After his boyfriend hooks up with this rapper, Anthony goes to the police, convinced that the Popinjay is the serial killer responsible for the recent rash of hetero-bashings.

Johnston and his performance partner Nathan Schwartz find the ironic humor in this Bizarro World, in which heterosexuals must go into the closet and pretend to be gay in order to be safe. But there’s also deep anger in the piece, and by the end of the show the stage will be splattered with blood, a few body parts, and a slimy cephalopod. The hetero-bashing rapper serves as an alter-ego for Anthony, who is still dealing with the death of his sister. While Anthony obediently takes pills and goes to self-help seminars, Popinjay is a “bad boy” who takes violent action, at first against heterosexual oppressors, but then expanding to the entire world, encouraging the audience to burn it all down. In one theatrically fascinating and disturbing moment, Johnston plays both the murderer and the murder victim at the same time, perfectly embodying the theme that vengeance will become nihilism and will ultimately destroy both perpetrator and victim.

Angry Fags and Revenge of the Popinjay function simultaneously as revenge fantasies and cautionary tales, so they engage in a moral complexity often missing from our political rhetoric. They wrestle with the paradox: how can the queers be both oppressed victims and all-powerful villains? By challenging the melodramatic categories, perhaps the audience can emerge with a deeper truth about the difficult position of a minority group that, while achieving more political power, still faces the injustices and injuries of homophobia. The accusations of homofascism / gay bullying / terrorism are used to exaggerate the power of queer people, while also denying the continuing existence of homophobia and the need for LGBT civil rights. These plays, while enacting and critiquing violent fantasies, never lose sight of that political reality.

A New Article About Sex, Death, and the Queer Future

3/14/2015

"Refusing the Reproductive Imperative:
Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom"

One of the questions that drives Murder Most Queer is "How do theatre artists engage with the homophobic ideologies that continue to circulate in American culture?" While the "homicidal homosexual" is one of the most pernicious homophobic constructs, it's not the only one.

Take, for example, the trope of homosexuality as a "barren lifestyle" that contributes nothing to the future. The thinking behind this homophobic perspective is neatly summed up in this quote from a conservative columnist writing for the Washington Times in 2011:

By its very nature, homosexuality cannot fulfill the primary function of sex: procreation and the reproduction of the human race. It is inherently a socially barren act. A homosexual society is a childless one—doomed to extinction.

The question of how queer people might contribute (or fail to contribute) to the future is taken up by the playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb in his smart, funny, and widely-produced comedy boom [with a small b]. This apocalyptic sex farce follows the travails of a gay male biologist and the female journalist who refuses to have sex with him, even though they are literally the last people on earth. The play, which has had over 100 productions since it premiered in 2008, wrestles with the "reproductive imperative" and comes to some surprising, perhaps even radical, conclusions.

In the latest issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), I explore boom in relation to other apocalyptic dramas, as well as recent theories about queer futurity. Since JADT has gone fully electric, the article, entitled "Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom" is available on-line, with no subscription necessary.

Porcelain: "Why Have I Never Seen This Play???"

2/7/2015

John Lee (Steven Eng) surrounded by red origami cranes in the Dallas Theatre Center production of Chay Yew's Porcelain, directed by Richard Hamburger.

In the feedback I’ve received so far from readers of Murder Most Queer, more than a few commenters, most of them theatre practitioners, have expressed interest in the play Porcelain by Chay Yew. “The play sounds fascinating!” noted one respondent, while another asked, “Why have I never seen this play???”

I first encountered Chay Yew and his play about an alienated gay teenager when the Mu-Lan Theater Company performed Porcelain at London’s Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1992. This intimate venue, known for producing new and experimental plays, including those by American playwrights who had yet to be produced in America, was a perfect location for this lyrical and minimalist “play for voices.” As I write in the book, Porcelain is

presented on a bare stage in thirty fragmented scenes that shift in time, place, and perspective. Four white male actors dressed in black are “Voices” who act as a protean chorus, creating sound effects, painting stage pictures with poetic phrases, and playing a variety of incidental roles and a few supporting characters. The fifth member of the cast is an Asian actor dressed in white playing John Lee, a London teenager who is under arrest for murder after being discovered in a public restroom crying over the dead body of his lover, Will.

At the time, I had never seen a play that focused on a young, gay, working-class Asian immigrant, exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race, and nationality. So while I, not so far removed from my own teenaged feelings of queer alienation, identified with John Lee, I also recognized that Yew was opening my eyes to experiences quite different from my own.

Furthermore, the play’s fragmented and multi-layered narrative, which includes allusions to Madame Butterfly and Carmen, and minimalist theatrical presentation allowed my imagination to create a variety of different perspectives, constantly shifting as the play both sought and subverted a rational “explanation” for John Lee’s crime-of-passion murder.

I think one reason why this extraordinary play might remain unknown to some of my respondents is that it never had a major production in New York City. After its premiere in England, where it won the London Fringe Award for Best Play, Porcelain received its American premiere at the Burbage Theatre in Los Angeles in 1993, with subsequent productions around the United States, including at theaters in Dallas; San Francisco; Washington, DC; Chicago; San Diego; Boston; Seattle; and Columbus, Ohio. As part of Yew’s Whitelands Trilogy, the East West Players of Los Angeles mounted a major production of Porcelain in 1996 starring Alec Mapa. The script was published in John Clum’s anthology Staging Gay Lives (1996) and then in a trade paperback from Grove Press, Porcelain and A Language of Their Own: Two Plays (1997).

Chay Yew has had other successes in New York, both as a playwright (A Language of Their Own, Red) and as a director (Durango, My Manana Comes). Since 2011, he’s also served as the Artistic Director of the prestigious Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. And Porcelain continues to be produced around the US; most recently, I noticed a casting call for an upcoming production at Chicago’s Prologue Theatre Company.

Of course, plays do not need to be produced in New York City in order to be successful. But since this is the community in which I happen to live and work, I’m glad whenever colleagues and professional acquaintances in the New York theatre scene take an interest in this early work by a major theatre artist. And I’ll be thrilled if—or, more optimistically, when--Porcelain finally receives a major production in New York.

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