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Love, Madness, and Violence: Queering Classical Passions in Two New Solo Performances

1/17/2015

One of the arguments of Murder Most Queer is that plays with homicidal homosexuals are often dramas of lost love. Playwrights have used the plight of the abandoned lover to explore the ways in which homophobia, both internal and societal, threatens our ability to find or maintain loving relationships. This week, I saw two intriguing performances that pick up this theme, using some of the same conventions and motifs explored in my book, but also taking the archetype in exciting new directions. Both plays are solo performances, using a single performer’s voice to tell a story of love gone terribly wrong.

In Chapter Five of MMQ, I analyze how the ennobling excesses of classical opera inform the theatricality of the contemporary plays The Lisbon Traviata by Terrence McNally and Porcelain by Chay Yew. Playwright David Johnston and composer Jeffery Dennis Smith alter this dynamic by bringing the irony and dark humor so often found in contemporary plays to their original one-act modern opera. As performed at Le Poisson Rouge on January 11, the provocatively titled Why Is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me? begins in a police holding cell, where a middle-aged white gay man declares his innocence of a terrible crime and then tells us his story.

Like many an operatic heroine, he falls passionately—which is to say irrationally—in love with a young man, a rising art-world star whom he knows only through photos in magazines. At the same time that he develops this romantic obsession, he also begins to have visions of Eartha Kitt (who is, of course, dead) hunting him down, first with a machete in a laundromat, then with a machine gun inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As sung by the tenor Keith Jameson, with music performed by the American Lyric Theatre’s Chamber Ensemble, Eartha Kitt smartly appropriates operatic conventions in a manner that is simultaneously ironic and earnest. The obsessive passions of our main character are shown to be delusional, even rather ridiculous—and yet the beauty of the music and the poetry of the lyrics also make his love noble and compelling. Similarly, the threat of violence throughout the play is rather preposterous—and yet it illuminates the deeper fears and anxieties of the main character. His fantasies about his own death at the hands of Ms. Kitt and about the death of his beloved aggrandize his love, making it a matter of life and death, but also dramatizing the impossibility of this love ever being realized or fulfilled.

Johnston’s libretto ultimately takes a beautiful turn into the surreal, so it’s hard to separate reality from fantasy at the end of the play. But the main character’s revelation of a passionate moment of violence that may have caused the young artist’s death inspires both pity and fear. By making a gay man the protagonist in this tale of love and madness, Eartha Kitt has “camped” classical opera, but it also treats gay passion as a subject worthy of finely crafted lyrics, gorgeous music, and a beautifully expressive voice. The American Lyric Theatre concert presentation was, hopefully, a step in the development of this unique work that will lead to a full production.

The operatic strains of Maria Callas’s Medea bring the audience into the world of Aaron Mark’s Another Medea, performed by Tom Hewitt at the Wild Project, produced by All For One, a company dedicated to solo performances. Hewitt plays an actor who once worked as the understudy for one Marcus Sharp, who has committed a horrible crime and is now serving a life sentence in prison. The understudy obsesses about his former colleague (and double), writes to him, and then visits him in prison. He then “becomes” Marcus, sitting across from him at a table in the prison’s visiting room, telling his story.

Students of Euripides will, of course, know exactly the shape and outcome of this story, but the playwright cleverly recreates the classical tragedy in contemporary terms. Perhaps most ingeniously, he makes his main character quite knowledgeable about the Medea legend and all of its variations, so Marcus is fully aware of his own position as yet “another Medea.” The play expands into a philosophical exploration of why this story of filicide has proven so persistent in our culture, why it continues to fascinate and horrify.

Marcus is an actor who becomes the live-in lover of an extremely wealthy British doctor named Jason. Marcus gives up his home, his friends, and his career to please Jason—he even fathers children with Jason’s sister in order to fulfill Jason’s desire to be a parent. But in living his life so completely for Jason, Marcus loses any life of his own, which makes him rather boring and tedious to Jason, who soon finds love with a younger man and kicks Marcus out.

Feeling desperately abandoned and betrayed, feeling that he has no other path forward, Marcus enacts a horrifying vengeance. Once again, dramatic violence elevates a gay character’s passions, making them a matter of life and death, worthy of moving an audience with pity and fear. In its appropriation of the Medea legend to tell the story of a contemporary gay man, the play can also be read as an expression of anxiety over the quest for affluence, stability, and “normalcy” that characterizes so much of the mainstream gay rights movement at this moment.

Tom Hewitt is perhaps best known for playing dark yet seductive villains, with Broadway roles including Dracula, Frank-N-Furter, Scar, and Pontius Pilate. A handsome actor with a beautiful baritone voice, Hewitt’s monologue performance is a sort of “aria,” and the minimalist staging—he simply sits at a table, center stage—focuses the audience’s attention on the story and the artistry with which it’s told. Like Eartha Kitt, Another Medea is aware of its appropriations, and it uses theatrical artistry to create a degree of empathy for its queer character and position him within the ennobling realm of “high art”—in this case, Greek tragedy.

Yet Aaron Mark ultimately treats his subject with a degree of ambivalence that is both honest and intelligent. After Marcus has finished telling his story, he suggests to his understudy that he might write and perform a play about him. Hewitt again becomes the understudy, but he can’t really articulate his feelings about this story. He clearly relates to Marcus, still seeing him as a double, someone whom, given other circumstances or twists of fate, he could potentially be. Yet Marcus remains a mystery to him, perhaps because he is ultimately incomprehensible, or perhaps because to admit his similarity to Marcus—the fact that we are all capable of such madness and violence—would be too painful.

Another Medea, which runs through January 31, creates a compelling new version of this tale of love, madness, and violence, never attempting to “explain” or resolve these passions, but enriching our ongoing struggle to comprehend our own dark potentials.

Queer Theater 2014

12/27/2014

2014 wasn’t the most exciting year for queer drama, and none of the LGBT-themed plays I saw could be counted as a solid hit or a major breakthrough. But I still found much to enjoy in 2014, and this post contains a highly idiosyncratic look back at my personal theater-going experiences over the past twelve months. It’s not so much of a “best of” list as it is a survey of twelve plays that engaged me and moved me with entertaining and insightful explorations queer identities and experiences.

Some recurring themes: Queer Childhoods, Interracial Relationships, Lesbian / Gay Male Friendships, Trans* / Gay Tensions, Parenthood, and Gender Performativity.

January 9, 2014
Ruff @ LaMaMa
Peggy Shaw of the legendary performance group Split Britches is now 67 years old, and in this solo show she explores issues of aging and memory, dealing explicitly with her experience of having a stroke. As butch as ever, wearing a suit and tie and sounding like Marlon Brando, Shaw performs songs like a lounge lizard and tells stories about her extraordinary life as a radical lesbian performance artist and grandmother. I found it both unsettling and lovely to watch Shaw performing post-stroke, and the piece is most moving when she performs in front of a video projection of her teenage self, evoking the passage of time. I first saw Shaw perform in "Belle Reprieve" over 20 years ago, and her theatrical vigor is admirably unstoppable.

January 25, 2014
A Man’s A Man @ Classic Stage Company
Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the brutality of colonialism got an especially queer twist in Brian Kulick’s production at CSC. The transgender diva Justin Vivan Bond (formerly of the cabaret duo Kiki & Herb) plays the Widow Begbick, the smart and sultry proprietress of an army canteen serving the British army in India. Commenting philosophically on the events of the play, Bond’s renditions of Brecht’s songs, set to new music by Duncan Sheik, were captivating—simultaneously smoky and sharp, ironic and heartfelt. Stephen Spinella, the original Prior Walter in Angels in America, also gave a wonderful “against type” performance as the hyper-masculine and over-sexed sergeant who loves Begbick. Even if the production never quite found its footing on Brecht’s shifting sands, the scenes between these two performers were thrilling—and gave students of the performativity of gender plenty to enjoy.

February 6, 2014
The Tribute Artist @ Primary Stages
Drag performer and playwright Charles Busch created one of his most meta plays with this situation comedy about a drag performer who dresses up as his recently deceased landlady in order to keep her beautiful West Village townhouse. Complications arise when the woman’s estranged niece arrives with her transgender son (played by Keira Keeley), a naïve, sunny, and endearing teenager. In one brave and beautiful moment, the boy asks “Aunt Adriana” (Busch’s character in drag) if she’s transgender, too. Busch has to pause for a moment as he struggles to answer, baffled but clearly longing to connect and sympathize. The moment forces the audience to consider how a young person forging an FTM identity and an older gay man who imitates movie queens for theatrical entertainment may both “cross gender” but in crucially different ways and with very different understandings of what gender is. The play is thoroughly silly, but Busch always has sincerity and even insight amidst the shenanigans. And I loved Busch’s longtime collaborator Julie Halston stealing the show as the lesbian best friend and accomplice.

March 8, 2014
Mothers and Sons @ Golden Theater
Terrence McNally’s Broadway play revisits two characters who first appeared in a short play called “Andre’s Mother” in 1988. When Andre died from AIDS, his mother wouldn’t even speak to his grieving partner, Cal. Now Cal (Frederick Weller) has a young husband (Bobby Steggert), and together they’re raising a six-year-old child. Andre’s homophobic mother (the formidable Tyne Daly) arrives unexpectedly at their posh Central Park West apartment. The play moves in real time as the characters recount events from the past while negotiating who they are (and what they owe) to each other now. Many critics were dismissive, but I found the play intriguing and rewarding in its ability to juxtapose the great changes between 1988 and 2014 for this particular class of gay men. Cal and his husband have economic success, cultural power, and happiness, while the homophobic mother is lost, lonely, and incredibly sad. Can the gay man, once the victim of this woman’s bigotry, now give her comfort? How does one treat a vanquished enemy? Ably directed by Sheryl Kaller, the production featured outstanding performances by Daly and the always impressive Steggert.

March 11, 2014
And Baby Makes Seven @ New Ohio Theater
Full disclosure: I worked as the dramaturg on this production, a revival of an early comedy by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel. As with previous productions, most critics weren’t too kind to the play, but some audiences seemed to appreciate this queer little story about a lesbian couple who decide to have a child with their gay male friend, unleashing fears and fantasies about parenthood, as well as a struggle over how we define a “normal” family. Ken Barnett, Susan Bott, and Constance Zaytoun gave great performances, both outrageously comic and soulful, and I always found something new to appreciate each time I saw this funny, thoughtful, and theatrically complex play by one of our great playwrights.

March 27, 2014
Wild @ IRT Theater
Crystal Skillman’s gay romance follows a couple as they break up, struggle to move on, and then get back together. The play was greatly enhanced by the intimate staging, with a set that consisted of a large sand box and a single park bench, plus effective lighting and a good soundtrack. In such a setting, there’s a visceral effect in seeing characters flirt, make out, fight, etc. It was a pleasure to watch Hunter Canning, known to me primarily for his web series including “The Outs” and “Whatever This Is,” perform on stage—and frankly I could imagine Skillman’s play working as a web series or indie film. But I’m glad that the New York scene still maintains small stages that can make this sort of play so effective in the live theater.

April 13, 2014
Casa Valentina @ Manhattan Theatre Club
Torch Song Trilogy was such an important play to me in my youth, so I was excited to see Harvey Fierstein finally write a new play for Broadway. We’re at a summer resort hotel in the early 1960s where men who like to dress as women can enjoy some freedom and each other’s company. We get to meet a variety of men, from the proprietor to the respected elder to the newbie. The real drama comes with the arrival of Reed Burney as an activist who wants to make transvestites legitimate, and to do so he wants to differentiate from the queers, thus beginning a gay witch hunt among those assembled. The conceit is interesting, because it asks the audience to reconsider the dynamic between gender and sexuality: the transvestites feel they can be “normal” if they distinguish themselves from the gays, but of course 50 years later the tables will have turned, and it’s the trans* who are often left out while gays are normalized and assimilated. Fierstein’s heart seems most invested in the plight of the long-suffering wife (played by Mare Winningham) who finally realizes that her husband’s feminine alter-ego is the “other woman” in their marriage.

May 13, 2014
Family Play (1979 to present) @ New Ohio Theater
Collaboration Town’s production of a play created by Boo Killebrew, Geoffrey Decas O'Donnell, and Jordan Seavey presents dozens of scenes covering three decades, with constantly changing characters and situations, all intersecting on a round stage with the audience on both sides. The staging is more fluid than in Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, creating a fascinating and theatrical slippage of identity. We can see that it’s the same performer’s body, but we can’t always be sure of the character’s age, sexuality, or relationship to the other person on stage. Each actor keeps changing, from young to old, gay to straight, parent, child, sibling, lover, creating a collage of characters unified by the actors’ physical presence. After about 90 minutes, the play can become a little difficult to follow because of its diffuse narrative structure, but I found the writing economical and evocative, the performers engaging, and the staging attractive.

June 17, 2014
Orville and Wilbur Did It @ The New Colony (Chicago)
Full disclosure: The playwright is my life partner. The New Colony Theater, best known for their widely produced hit Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche, staged David Zellnik’s absurd road comedy about a troupe of young actors touring America in a children’s theater production about Orville and Wilbur Wright. The play-within-the-play is all about success, and a particularly American sort of can-do / against-all-odds kind of success. Off-stage, however, the performers are all losers: queers and criminals and neurotics and dreamers who do NOT succeed. But in their failure, they find themselves free—to imagine other possibilities and other futures. After trying to follow the road to success, they are suddenly off the map, and they can choose a new path and create something of their own. (NB: The playwright has not read Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. Yet.) An ensemble cast of wacky comedians, Eric Svejcar’s bouncy tunes, and a dramatic climax featuring the hilariously inappropriate sight of “Orville” and “Wilbur” kissing each other on stage made for a fun production that I was happy to see more than once.

August 27, 2014
Bootycandy @ Playwrights Horizons
Playwright and director Robert O’Hara offers an assortment of comic scenes tackling race, gender, and sexuality—which may not add up to a satisfying dramatic narrative, but often are a lot of fun as well as thought provoking. I won’t attempt to connect all of the narrative dots here, but suffice to say that O’Hara’s wild satire hits everything from lesbian wedding ceremonies to racist theater administrators to families who try to force their Michael Jackson-loving sons to be more masculine. The play takes a disturbing but intriguing turn when it explores questions of sadism, empowerment, and consent in a sexual affair between a black man and a mentally unstable white man. Bootycandy feels like a descendant of George C. Wolfe’s brilliant and ground-breaking The Colored Museum, and I was happy to see a major off-Broadway company present O’Hara’s funny and theatrical play on black gay themes.

September 4, 2014
It’s Only Kickball, Stupid @ Hartley House
The theater space is a community room at the Hartley House, with the actors performing in the round and the audience sitting at school tables with crayons and crossword puzzles. Margo is in sixth grade, and a perky girl named Fiona keeps pestering her to play kickball on the girls’ team. On the boys’ team is Fiona’s arrogant boyfriend Henry and his nerdy sidekick Ian. The play then jumps back and forth in time and we see scenes of these kids as adults: Margo is a lesbian living in New York City with Ian, who is gay. Fiona is unhappily married to Hal, who seems an awful lot like an adult version of Henry. The play focuses on the reunion of Margo and Fiona, as they figure who they are—and were—to each other. Playwright Caroline Prugh brings joy and playful wit to her writing, and one can tell the actors, especially Debargo Sanyal as Ian, are having a good time in their dual roles. It’s also interesting to see another play that explores queer childhoods and also shows a lesbian/gay male friendship.

November 7, 2014
Fortress of Solitude @ Public Theater
This musical by Michael Friedman and Itimar Moses tracks the creation and dissolution of a friendship between two boys—one black and one white—growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s. Racial and class differences ultimately pull the boys apart, with one becoming an intellectual in California and the other going to prison. The play is rather cagey about the degree to which this teenage friendship is also sexual, but from my seat in the theater, I couldn’t help but understand the relationship as deeply erotic: they imagine “flying” together as they both hold onto a ring, one seems jealous of the other when he gets a girlfriend, and one spends all of act 2 trying to get that ring (which was his mother’s wedding ring) to his estranged friend. For me, the question isn’t so much whether the play or the characters are “gay,” but rather to what extent the erotic plays a role in forging a friendship across cultural divisions. Fortress of Solitude appears exactly 50 years after Amiri Baraka staged an interracial affair between two teenagers in The Toilet—which also can’t envision any future for such friendships.

Of course there are plenty of plays I didn't see, so I can't pretend that my survey is comprehensive. While the American theater can always strive for greater diversity both on-stage and off-stage, I think 2014 shows positive trends toward plays created in a variety of styles and forms, in a range of venues, depicting an enriching array of lives and experiences. Ever the optimist, I look forward to 2015.

Demonology: Michael Brown, Tamburlaine, and the Making of Monsters

12/6/2014

Although I’ve written an entire book about the representation of murder in the theater, I don’t pretend to be an expert on real life cases of murder. Nevertheless, I can’t help but notice how dramatic formulas and conventions construct the ways in which we talk about real murder. Take, for example, police officer Darren Wilson’s testimony regarding his fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He describes Brown as having “the most intense, aggressive face” and looking “like a demon.” By literally “demonizing” Brown, making him an evil spirit from Hell, Wilson has placed him within a metaphysical melodrama of absolute good versus absolute evil. Brown becomes a monster, outside the parameters of humanity. Whatever one thinks about what did or didn’t happen in the altercation between Wilson and Brown that left Brown lying dead in the street, one fact must be made perfectly clear: Brown was not a demon. He was not a supernaturally evil force. He was human. And his human life was stopped by Wilson’s bullets.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the demonization of black men this week. On Thursday, I joined the many New Yorkers who took to the streets to protest the non-indictment of yet another police officer for the death of yet another black man. And on Friday, I went to see a production of Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe at Theater for a New Audience. Although these two events were obviously quite different, both made me wrestle with the construction of “demons” in our cultural imagination. In this contemporary American production of an epic Elizabethan drama, John Douglas Thompson (pictured above) plays the title role of Tamburlaine, a Mongol warrior who conquers the world, laying waste to nations and subjugating the kings and queens of continents. He’s a glorious monster, brutal and grotesque in his bloody deeds, but also made glorious and even beautiful by Marlowe’s magnificent poetry. Although the play's dramaturgy can become a bit redundant (Tamburlaine comes to a new land, he conquers it, repeat), the bloody excesses of the play continue to mount, making the audience wonder what, if anything, can stop this force of destruction.

Thompson, an actor with a commanding voice and physical presence, is thrilling in the role, giving one of the best classical performances I’ve ever seen. This production, directed by Michael Boyd, employs color-blind casting, and I’ll admit I wasn’t always sure how to interpret the choices the production made of matching certain actors to certain roles. But there were more than a few moments when Thompson, who was born in England to Jamaican parents, made me think of Darren Wilson’s demon. Here was a black man portraying an unstoppable force of terror, a demon who seems emboldened by the attacks of his enemies. At times, Tamburlaine’s terror is so excessive that it verges on high camp—and one can see why the young Charles Ludlam, founder of the ultra-queer Ridiculous Theatrical Company, used Marlowe’s drama as the basis for one of his earliest plays, Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide (1967).

In the fantasy world of the theater, it can be exciting to imagine the extremes of human capacity, exploring what Oscar Wilde called the “monstrous and marvelous.” While I hope that audiences of Tamburlaine are both thrilled and disturbed by the monstrosity of the main character, I also hope that we recognize the theatrical conventions that construct such monsters. And when we see those conventions employed in the real world, we identify them as the artificial constructions that they are. Here, Ludlam is particularly instructive. His queer camp sensibility both celebrates and satirizes the ridiculous artificiality of Tamburlaine as a theatrical monster. By having a better understanding of how we make monsters in the theater, I hope we can recognize and combat instances in which racism, homophobia, and other dehumanizing ideologies create “demons” in the real world. Michael Brown was no Tamburlaine, and we must condemn the attempts to cast him in that role.

Reza Abdoh: Dahmer, Warhol, and Sinister Celebrity

11/22/2014

Filmmaker Adam Soch is running a Kickstarter campaign to support his documentary film about the avant-garde theater director, Reza Abdoh. Any project that preserves and promotes Abdoh's amazing work is worth supporting. Please consider donating before the December 1 deadline!

Abdoh was born in Iran in 1963 and died from AIDS in 1995, and during his too-brief life he was hailed as a "theatrical visionary" for his wildly theatrical and visceral performances. Among Abdoh's most famous productions is The Law of Remains, inspired by the murders of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. In the final chapter of Murder Most Queer, I analyze this remarkable play and its critical reception. Here's an excerpt:

The first theatrical production about Jeffrey Dahmer was perhaps the most stunning—and the most open to diverse interpretations. In February 1992, avant-garde theater maker Reza Abdoh staged his production of The Law of Remains in the abandoned ballrooms of the Diplomat Hotel in Manhattan. The New York Times heralded this world premiere by proclaiming, “The enfant terrible of sex and death has created yet another demonic work of experimental theater.” As a writer and director, Abdoh eschewed realist notions of character and plot to create dense and layered performances with viscerally affecting sounds and images. Critic Stephen Holden described The Law of Remains as “a blood-soaked pageant of contemporary Grand Guignol depicting mass murder, sexual mutilation, necrophilia, and cannibalism.” Abdoh’s postmodern aesthetic intersperses found materials, including interviews and news reports about Dahmer, with scenarios inspired by the S&M club scene, African dances, and invocations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These scenes are joined by the story of Andy Warhol creating a movie about Dahmer, here named Jeffrey Snarling. Abdoh’s fourteen actors push the audience to different sections of the hotel, witnessing seven stations in the journey of Snarling’s soul through scenes of sex and violence, until the performance ends in Heaven.

Critics differed about the meaning and merit of the production, but most agreed that it was, in the words of New York Times critic Stephen Holden, “one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience.” While Holden seemed to admire Abdoh’s skill, he complained that “the sheer density of the noise and tumult make it hard to follow” and that the production “seems to want to punish as much as to enlighten” the audience. Alisa Solomon in the Village Voice also found the performance elusive in its frenzy and assaultive in its “high pitch of rage.” Yet certain elements of Abdoh’s nightmare vision did resonate for both critics, and these elements speak to the ways in which Dahmer, as a gay serial killer, has functioned in American culture.

Along with noting the fury at the heart of The Law of Remains, both Holden and Solomon acknowledge the play’s commentary on a culture that turns murderous criminals into celebrities. But rather than focusing on mass media, Abdoh depicts Andy Warhol—the master of Pop Art who died in 1987—as the avatar of America’s obsession with fame and celebrity. By putting the serial killer Jeffrey Snarling into a movie, Abdoh’s Warhol is exploiting him as a commodity, creating him in a “factory” and selling him like a can of soup. Warhol and Snarling are not protagonist and antagonist as much as they are two sides of the same coin: two gay men who gain celebrity in America, one for works of art (creation), one for acts of murder (destruction). Perhaps Warhol can also be seen as a stand-in for Abdoh, the auteur who offers an artistic representation of a celebrity serial killer that is somewhat different from the mass media image, but still attached to the culture of commodity and consumption. [pages 160-161]

The chapter goes on to discuss Abdoh's use of Dahmer as a "performer" and as a metaphorical embodiment of AIDS, as well as Abdoh's synthesis of rage and mourning, particularly when focusing on Dahmer's victims. Dahmer still haunts the American imagination, and Abdoh's Law of Remains brilliantly confronts the audiences with the brutality of his crimes and complicates his cultural significance.

Foxcatcher: Wrestling with Emasculation and Murder

11/15/2014

Bennett Miller’s new film Foxcatcher is based on a true story and stars Steve Carell as John du Pont, the heir to the Du Pont fortune who shot and killed the Olympic gold medal wrestler Dave Schultz in 1996. Du Pont had turned his family estate, Foxcatcher Farm, into a training camp for athletes, and at the time of the murder case, rumors abounded that Du Pont was, in fact, gay and had a sexual interest in maintaining a stable of athletic younger men. Miller’s film never directly addresses du Pont’s sexuality, and the result is a film that relies on the homophobic clichés that have long informed the depiction of the homicidal homosexual.

The internet is filled with speculation about whether du Pont was gay. So let’s just start with the assumption that he was. Well, okay, maybe not gay like a post-Stonewall “out” gay person who identifies as part of a gay community. And probably not even gay like a self-loathing-but-hiring-hustlers closet-case gay like Roy Cohn. But let’s concede that, whatever the rumors (and the settled-out-of-court sexual harassment case and the quickly-annulled marriage to a woman), Du Pont’s strongest attachments seemed to be to men, specifically the athletic men with whom he surrounded himself.

So how does Foxcatcher depict du Pont’s non-normative erotic life? Miller’s film portrays du Pont not so much as a homosexual but as a machosexual: someone who valorizes masculine power in himself, in his companions, and in his nation. Du Pont’s power is financial rather than physical, so he buys large athletes and large guns in order to increase his own sense of masculinity. Does he “desire” these men? Well, he certainly objectifies them, and he wants to be able to control them, even dominate them. I’m not sure if that’s desire, but in Miller’s film, it’s deeply creepy and emblematic of all that’s wrong in America.

Foxcatcher primarily follows the relationship, beginning in 1987, between du Pont (Carell) and Mark Schultz, an Olympic wrestler played by Channing Tatum, complete with cauliflower ear and protruding lower jaw. Mark won an Olympic medal in 1984, and he still trains with his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), but he’s living an impoverished existence, both economically and spiritually. When watching Carell’s rich older man “seduce” Tatum’s virile younger man with money, drugs, and helicopter rides, I couldn’t help but think of Mordaunt Shairp’s play The Green Bay Tree, performed on Broadway in 1933.

In this British melodrama, a wealthy sophisticate named Dulcimer corrupts young Julian with a life of idle luxury, even getting in the way of Julian’s engagement, until Julian’s working-class father shoots the old pansy dead. The play never directly addresses homosexuality, but, as the director of the American production Jed Harris noted, “The suspicion had to be there. That’s the only way you can explain what was going on” (Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage, 118). So The Green Bay Tree relies on coded signifiers for homosexuality, such as Dulcimer’s meticulous sense of style and penchant for witty epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde. Miller uses a similar technique of connotation: when the audience sees that Tatum’s character, after spending time with du Pont, has dyed blond tips and mousse in his hair, we know that something has gone terribly wrong.

The film critiques du Pont’s attempts to purchase masculinity, and it’s a moment of high camp when du Pont throws a hissy fit because the army tank he ordered didn’t come with the machine gun he requested. But the film itself displays a deep fear of emasculation, at times functioning as a horror film, with du Pont as the monster who threatens the hero’s masculine virtue. In one particularly creepy sequence, du Pont wrestles Mark late at night, alone in the gym in the dark. Since the film can’t imagine or depict actual homosexuality, it shows du Pont on top of Mark, with Mark’s face mashed into the ground, subjugated and emasculated not by du Pont’s superior athleticism, but by du Pont’s financial power. If Mark wants to get paid, he will submit. While some audience members might read this scene as “gay,” the filmmakers can imagine male same-sex relations only as emasculation, part and parcel of the decadence brought about by excessive luxury, wealth, and power.

Meyer Levin asserted this same connection in Compulsion, his dramatization of the Leopold and Loeb murder case on stage (1957) and screen (1959). Leopold’s homosexuality is simply a failure of masculinity caused by too much money—and too much intellectualism. In Meyer’s view, if the boy played more baseball and read fewer books, he wouldn’t have become a homicidal homosexual. Note also that du Pont, like Leopold, is an ornithologist. Du Pont’s collection of stuffed birds might remind the viewer of yet another queer killer: Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Like Bates, du Pont has a mother who disapproves of her son’s erotic life. In Miller’s film, Vanessa Redgrave manages to give some depth and resonance to this role, despite the ready-made Freudian cliché of the overbearing mother.

Foxcatcher contrasts the emotionally stunted and sexually frustrated du Pont, as well as the morose and victimized Mark, with the most vibrant character in the film, Mark Ruffalo’s Dave Schultz. Dave is the burly and bearded older brother, a family man who adores his wife and two little children. He’s a man of principle who can’t be bought by du Pont’s money. Although he agrees to work as a coach at Foxcatcher, his conscience won’t allow him to call du Pont a “mentor” or a “hero,” because he knows it’s not true. Indeed, his unwillingness to submit to du Pont may be what makes him du Pont’s murder victim. The film does little to set up the shooting in terms of a direct cause and effect, and the audience might understand the violence simply in terms of du Pont’s increasing megalomania. The film does nothing to suggest that the murder is directly tied to du Pont’s sexual desires—and the real criminal case established that there was no “gay angle” to this murder. The audience of the film, however, will understand that Dave Schultz, the good brother and father, the normative family man, has been shot and killed by the queer psychotic.

One might argue that the film is simply being true to the facts of the case. If Miller’s du Pont falls into homophobic cliché, it’s because du Pont himself lived those clichés. Perhaps. But when depicting a homicidal homosexual, the key difference between a homophobic film and a non-homophobic film is the degree of subjectivity given to the queer character and the degree of empathy asked of the audience for that queer character. If du Pont is an egomaniacal sexually-frustrated closet case, what exactly is his experience, and how might we understand it in a way that doesn’t simply pathologize homosexuality? Even if du Pont is a monster, what are the forces (psychological, social, ideological) that construct his monstrosity, and how do all of us potentially participate in those forces? The film fails to go deeper into the character’s inner life, and it fails to look outside to the broader social landscape in which the character exists. Therefore the film remains frustratingly opaque, never challenging the homophobic understanding of queerness as emasculating and deadly.

Capturing the Queer Killer on Camera

11/8/2014

Theatrical performance is ephemeral, existing in a particular time and space -- and then disappearing. So the photographers who capture images of live performances serve a crucial function in creating a visual archive. Their photographs can give scholars and fans an idea of how a particular scene might have appeared on stage, preserving the work of the actors, designers, and director, and indicating the style and tone of a production.

I'm thrilled that so many photographers generously granted permission for their work to be used in Murder Most Queer. This blog post is a special "hat tip" to these artists and their work. (I don't have the rights to publish these images in a blog post, but in many cases you can find the images at the links.)

Rope (1929) The key photographer of Broadway in the first part of the twentieth century was White Studios, and the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library is a fantastic archive of their work. (page 44)

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985) Sadly, I was unable to track down photographer Adam Newman, but Charles Busch graciously gave permission for the use of this photograph from his hit off-Broadway play.

The Secretaries (1994) Joan Marcus recently received a Tony Award in recognition of her work as one of the great photographers of contemporary theater. I'm also indebted to the Theatre Communications Group for sharing this image of the Five Lesbian Brothers in performance at New York Theatre Workshop. (page 96)

The Lisbon Traviata (1989) Photographer Gerry Goodstein captured the performances of Nathan Lane and Anthony Heald in Terrence McNally's play at Manhattan Theatre Club. Bonus points if you can spot Maria Callas in the photo. (page 108)

Porcelain (1993) The Dallas Theatre Center produced Chay Yew's play in 1993, directed by Richard Hamburger, and the company generously shared this haunting image of actor Steven Eng surrounded by hundreds of origami cranes. (page 125)

Zombie (2009) Dixie Sheridan has photographed hundreds of off- and off-off-Broadway productions, including Bill Connington's 2009 adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novella. Sheridan's specialization in the avant-garde is especially valuable, preserving innovative performances outside of the commercial mainstream. (page 169)

Jerk (2010) French photographer Alain Monot captured the performance of Jonathan Capdevielle in this adaptation of Dennis Cooper's short story, seen at P.S. 122 in New York. (page 170)

In addition to production photographs, Murder Most Queer also includes the work of an artist who is in a category unto himself:

Deathtrap (1978) If you've seen any Broadway show posters over the past few decades, you've probably seen the work of design artist Fraver (a.k.a. Frank Verlizzo). He created posters for productions ranging from Sweeney Todd to The Lion King, and his poster for the original Broadway production of Ira Levin's thriller Deathtrap is a classic. (page 66)

The Theatrical Pleasures of Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf

10/26/2014

For a great exploration of the pleasures to be found in the theatrical performance of murder, I highly recommend the “live” version of songwriter Rob Cantor’s “Shia LaBeouf.” The viral video (about 2 million views at this point) imagines the Transformers actor as an “actual cannibal” who spends a “normal Tuesday night” hunting down and eating human prey. Here’s the clip:

By recreating his 2012 song as “live theatre,” Cantor delivers a delicious mash-up of high and low culture. The low-brow and gory fun of the horror film is filtered through “serious” cultural forms—a string quartet clad in black, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles in tuxedos—and the aesthetic clash is hilarious. We also get rock musicians and Cantor himself delivering the deadpan spoken-word narrative while wearing a suit, so the performance has pop elements of hipster irony, too. As it progresses, the video grows increasingly campy, incorporating interpretive dancers, bare-chested men in over-sized Shia LaBeouf masks, and aerial silk acrobats. By the time glitter falls from the heavens, we’re firmly in the world of aesthetic overkill.

The very “artiness” of the performance makes it both ridiculous and pleasurable. Cantor satirizes genre clichés (“Wait! He isn’t dead! Shia surprise!”) and highlights the incongruity between the exceedingly messy and corporeal obsessions of the horror film and the more refined and conceptual ambitions of capital-A Art. (It’s also worth pointing out that the video acknowledges how art engages in the common slippage between the twinned taboos of sex and murder, with the murderous hunt eroticized by the dancers as a heterosexual pas de deux.)

But who is the audience for this performance? Cantor addresses the story in the present tense to “you,” the victim on the run from Shia LaBeouf. And “you” ultimately, despite having lost a leg in a bear trap, decapitate the homicidal superstar. But when the performance is over, the video reveals that the show has been performed for an audience of one: not the victim, but the killer, Shia LaBeouf himself. The address has shifted from the hunted to the hunter.

LaBeouf, alone in the audience and in formal evening wear, vigorously applauds the performance, but he also looks a little self-conscious and troubled. In the conflicting emotions flashing across his face, I see the deep ambivalence that any audience member might experience in seeing him- or herself depicted as a killer. It’s potentially thrilling to imagine oneself as an almost super-human villain, letting go of social repression and indulging in the taboo. Once the houselights come back on, however, the super-ego represses those id-driven fantasies, and the killer must go back into hiding. Witnessing himself in the mirror of artistic representation, LaBeouf seems both thrilled by and somewhat ashamed of his murderous self.

But for the length of the performance, it’s a pleasure to imagine Shia LaBeouf going for the kill.

Wilde: "Monstrous and Marvelous"

10/16/2014

Murder Most Queer resists the demand for "normal" or "virtuous" LGBT characters in the theater, and one of the writers who influenced my thinking on this subject is Oscar Wilde, born on this date (October 16) in 1854.

In addition to being a poet, playwright, novelist and incredibly snazzy dresser, Wilde wrote philosophical dialogues on the nature of art, in which he argued against the trend toward Realism in the theater. In "The Decay of Lying" (1889), Wilde described how, in premodern times, the goal of art was not to mirror life as it actually is, but to create "complex beauty" that contained the "monstrous and marvelous."

[Art] enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has even felt, whose joys were keener than lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvelous sins, monstrous and marvelous virtues. To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm... jeweled with wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction... Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance. History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognize that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Far from expecting art to provide the audience with "good role models," Wilde understood that one of the functions of art is to present and express the extra-ordinary. Wilde's aesthetic philosophy inspired my own attempt to find complex truths and complex beauty in plays and performances that depict the monstrous and marvelous.

Black / Queer / Alien Nation

10/12/2014

The fantasy of being a space alien can be found in both black culture and queer culture, and these worlds collide in "The Gospel According to Miss Roj" by George C. Wolfe. In Chapter Six of Murder Most Queer, I discuss this vignette from Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986) in relation to the Afro-Futurism of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the film Brother from Another Planet, as well as the queer sci-fi glam of Ziggy Stardust and The Rocky Horror Show.

Miss Roj, a fierce snap queen who claims to be an alien from another planet, is a "homo superior" rather than "your regular oppressed American Negro." Wolfe complicates this fantasy of empowerment, however, by indicating that Miss Roj's special abilities may come from a more sinister realm. The more Bacardi and Cokes she consumes in a gay bar known as The Bottomless Pit (read: Hell), the more her "demons" take over.

Her weapon of choice is the snap, which underscores a truth and can steal a heartbeat. A series of snaps can cause a homophobic racist to drop dead from a heart attack. This empowerment, then, includes the ability to kill with a vengeance, taking control over the power of death in a world filled with horrors that threaten to destroy Miss Roj -- and the rest of us. As a black queer alien, this triply alienated observer of our "deteriorating society" has a grasp on the truth, and we ignore her gospel at our peril.

Below is video of the "Miss Roj" vignette from the PBS version of the Public Theatre production of The Colored Museum with the amazing Reggie Montgomery. Snap!

Digging "The Well" of Holly Hughes

10/5/2014

Last spring, CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies hosted a fantastic event that featured critic and scholar Jill Dolan interviewing writer and performance artist Holly Hughes. Hughes was in New York with a troupe of her students from the University of Michigan, and they performed scenes from one of her plays, a sexy and subversive comedy called The Well of Horniness. You can watch a video of the whole event at the website of the CUNY Graduate Center.

The Well of Horniness (1983) is an early example of an out lesbian playwright appropriating the "homicidal homosexual" for her own radical purposes. The play was originally performed for a predominantly lesbian audience at the WOW Cafe, but it's frequently been revived by other companies for not-necessarily-queer audiences -- and in their fascinating conversation, Dolan and Hughes discuss how different venues and audiences can affect the meaning of queer culture.

In Murder Most Queer, I write about the significance of the "killer lesbian" in The Well of Horniness, along with Lesbians Who Kill by Split Britches and The Secretaries by the Five Lesbian Brothers, in a section about the WOW Cafe. Here's my take on Holly Hughes's funny and incisive play:
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Holly Hughes was instrumental in creating one of the house styles of the WOW Cafe, which C. Carr described as "dyke noir." Her 1983 cult hit The Well of Horniness was an over-the-top all-female burlesque that was part parody of the classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, part trashy lesbian pulp novel, and part radio soap opera, complete with vocal sound effects, organ stabs, and commercial breaks. In the play, Vicki is engaged to marry Rod, but her secret past as a member of a "sapphic sorority" is in danger of being exposed when she meets Rod's lesbian sister, Georgette. When Georgette is shot dead in a lesbian lounge, Vicki is suspected, and private detective ("lady dick") Garnet McClit is on the case. Garnet falls in love with Vicki and reveals that the real killer is Babs, the tough-talking hatcheck girl who was Georgette's previous lover. Babs (who is greeted with hisses each time she enters) tries to frame Vicki and is about to kill Rod, but suddenly the scene shifts--and we realize that everything we've seen was Vicki's dream.

Babs the killer lesbian was, in fact, imagined by Vicki, a closet case who fantasizes about "killing off" her own lesbianism so she can be "the best little wifeypoo a man could ever want." Yet Vicki is perhaps also expressing a fear and desire when she fantasizes that Babs will kill Rod, thus relieving Vicki of the need to be a wifeypoo and allowing her to continue her affair with the lady dick. Even while the play revels in campy presentations of the villainous dyke, Hughes exposes the actual murderous rage (and lesbian passions) in the dream life of Vicki, the femme who has "defected" from the sisterhood and is trying to pass as straight. Repressive heteronormativity becomes the real villain of the play. Of course, the heteronormativity in The Well of Horniness is presented queerly, since a woman plays Vicki's future husband Rod, and the playwright herself originally played Vicki. Kate Davy has argued that Hughes's work "liberated lesbian and feminist theater from the 'good-girl syndrome,'" freeing it from the need to beg for acceptance and allowing it to be "sexy and dangerous." Hughes's play about the expression and repression of erotic and violent passions set the stage for similar works that would find a home at the WOW Cafe. [Murder Most Queer, 92-93]

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