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'100 Years of Queer Theater'
Friday, November 7, 2008
"Just imagine this world without queens in it," the posh New Orleans interior
decorator Candy Delaney says with a shudder, then muses on the implications for
home decor. "It would be absolutely barbaric."
Tennessee Williams wrote those lines in 1957, in an overtly homosexual short
play called "And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens... ." The piece, in
which the cross-dressing Candy gets beaten up by a straight sailor he tries to
possess, remained in the closet of Williams' unproduced works for decades,
finally premiering in 2004, 21 years after the playwright's death. It's back on
the boards now, in "100 Years of Queer Theatre," a rotating repertory of eight
short plays at Theatre Rhinoceros that poses some fascinating then-and-now
questions about how gay life is seen in a culture that keeps rotating the lens
to sharpen the view, blur it or blot it out altogether.
This year's festival, the seventh annual foray of short works by the
Eastenders Repertory Company, arrives with uncannily apt timing. Even as "Milk,"
a high-profile Hollywood film that chronicles San Francisco's 1970s gay-rights
movement, arrives in theaters this month, this week's passage of Proposition 8,
which bans same-sex marriage in California, provides a high-contrast punctuation
mark. Gay history suddenly seems to matter more than ever, albeit in confounding
ways.
Maybe Harvey Milk, the gay leader portrayed by Sean Penn in the new Gus Van
Sant movie, couldn't have foreseen a day when the marriage of two men or two
women might take place in City Hall, the very building in which he served as a
San Francisco supervisor before his assassination 30 years ago this month. But
he surely would have been in the thick of fighting any move to roll back rights
already established by the courts - just the sort of occasion for activist
street theater that turned up Milk's voltage.
Live theater has always been a particularly potent means of capturing the gay
experience, even when that experience is thwarted or submerged. "Theater is the
queerest art," argues critic Alisa Solomon, its very nature a challenge to the
dominant social order. Onstage, she writes in her 2002 essay "Great Sparkles of
Lust," "the human body is absolutely present in all its sweating, spitting
specificity."
From the days of men playing all the female parts in Shakespeare's plays to
Cole Porter's double-entendre songs to today's free-wheeling political works and
gender benders, the blunt physicality of theater paired with its fundamental
qualities of make-believe and disguise create a blooming garden of suggestive
possibilities. Theater transforms whatever it touches, from a table and chair
onstage to an actor's clothing and identity to single-channel sexuality. Plays
invite us all to play along together, to feel and fear and love in ways that
somehow remain closed off to us in normal life.
For most of theater history, the gay blossoms have remained chastely pruned
or carefully camouflaged. "Unable to be honest about their sexuality, " write
Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke in "Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American
Theater History," gay playwrights "used coded language, substituted straight for
queer characters, and formed their plots in heterosexual contexts in order to
gain acceptance and production of their plays." The work of Tennessee Williams
is a prime example.
In "The Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of
Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era," Marra and
Schanke tick off a long roster of gay playwrights, composers, actors and
directors who often played by straight rules: William Inge and Thornton Wilder,
Stephen Foster and Leonard Bernstein, Tallulah Bankhead and Danny Kaye, George
Cukor and George Kelly.
All that passing, says Theatre Rhinoceros Artistic Director John Fisher,
links gays to Jews in American show business. "It's the spring of comedy," he
says, "the desire to undermine, the ability to talk out of turn and be
underhanded about it."
Setting herself the century-of-gay-theater challenge, Eastenders Rep Artistic
Director Susan Evans says she had a hard time finding pre-1940s short plays that
were overtly "out." One of her early-years finds is "The Dangerous Precaution,"
a 1907 mini-musical by the Russian writer Mikhail Kuzmin.
Staged with a fittingly light, fractured fairy-tale touch by Fisher, this
historical oddity turns on the amorous maneuverings in a 17th century court. The
king's son (Gene Moscy) is passing himself off as a woman disguised as a man -
or something like that. One song lyric celebrates a "lissome waist and trim
rump"; another winkingly puns on "top or bottom." It all ends with a jolly
male-to-male kiss. Fisher speculates that the Russian czar, who was reeling from
a bad war effort, let his censorship guard down in order to demonstrate his
confidently expansive nature. "It's like Bush being so nervous about losing
power," says Fisher, "that he'd start letting boys get married."
Subtext figures, too, in Djuna Barnes' "The Dove," a sublimated 1926 play for
two "advanced virgin" sisters (Carolyn Doyle and Amanda Krampf) and a title
character (Diana Dorel Gutierrez) who pointedly polishes a sword and expresses
her fondness for moles, those "dark things underground." In the second of its
three evenings, "100 Years of Queer Theatre" shifts to a pair of bluntly sexual
works, by Joe Orton ("The Ruffian on the Stair," from 1964) and Robert Patrick
("T-Shirts," 1978).
The final program features an AIDS-era bedroom sketch by Craig Lucas; Cherrie
Moraga's "Giving Up the Ghost," a choral meditation on lesbian ardor and anguish
set in a Chicano barrio; and Tony Kushner's "Terminating, or Lass Meine
Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein, or Ambivalence" (1998), about a neurotic gay
patient (Dale Albright) and his lesbian therapist (Carolyn Doyle). Both
characters are partnered onstage by their offstage lovers, who reveal the
tangled erotic roots below the surface.
Ending with Kushner is a gratifying choice. It was this writer who finally
and irrevocably, with his 1991 "Angels in America," that great "Gay Fantasia on
National Themes," freed gay theater from its lingering shackles of indirection,
agit-prop obligation, cheerleading or agenda-driven purpose. Here with fully
dimensional characters - gay and straight, courageous and cowardly, aspiring and
damaged - Kushner flung open the closet door and let the full frank light of
truth flood the room.
Evans remembers when "Angels" played Atlanta on tour, and her mother's
next-door neighbor went to see it. "This is not somebody who would have gone to
see queer theater, and she never would have called it that." The neighbor knew
the characters were gay, of course, and she knew she was wrapped up in the life
onstage. Gay theater had fully arrived when its greatness and its gayness were
perfectly fused.
"We can do a lot of different things now and not worry how those images make
us look," says Fisher, who is a prolific playwright as well as a director.
"We've come through our rite by fire." The next 100 years may hold its share of
topical works about issues such as gay marriage and adoption, just as the last
100 worked through sexual liberation, coming-out stories and AIDS. But the
future also holds things entirely unpredictable, from playwrights, actors and
directors who are free to follow the strivings and convulsions of the heart,
wherever they may lead.
100 Years of Queer Theatre: Eight short plays continue in
repertory through Nov. 23. Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St., San Francisco.
Tickets: $15-$25. Call (415) 861-5079 or go to www.therhino.org.
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@
