When I began researching queer drama for my senior capstone, I found myself confronted with the lack of mainstream drama that represents non-male queer individuals. Even when I discovered plays depicting other queer identities, most had not drawn as much attention as plays by queer men. Both scholarly work and reviews in popular magazines were scarce, and many of these plays were out-of-print or had never been published. This led me to analyze this gender disparity by comparing the strategies used to negotiate with the dominant culture used by two plays: The Normal Heart, a well-known 20th century play about queer men, and A Late Snow, a lesser-known 20th century play about queer women.
The Normal Heart clearly illustrates the negotiation between the heterosexual, gender-normative dominant culture and queer subculture that takes place in successful mainstream queer theatre. In his essay “Strange Bedfellows,” Peter Cohen examines how Kramer’s play switches its focus between the “love plot” between Ned and Felix and the “politics plot” surrounding his involvement with the Gay Men Health Center. Ultimately, he concludes that in order to fulfill “its mission of reaching middle-class, heterosexual theater-goers,” there needs to be focus on a love story. It provides “an excellent vehicle for conveying a challenging political message to mainstream audiences more familiar with dominant theatrical conventions,” and prevents the play “from becoming one long polemic, transforming it instead into a satisfying theatrical experience to which dominant audiences can easily relate.” The love story between Felix and Ned is not the only part of the play that caters to a mainstream audience so that its political message is not undermined; we see this as well with the conversations between Ned and his brother, Ben. Ben “always dresses in a suit and a tie,” and it is clear that he is wealthy and successful. Performing the male gender in such an overt way, Ben’s main purpose is to provide a character that the dominant culture can identify with. This becomes most apparent during Act 1, Scene 6, when he voices his distaste for depictions of queer subculture depicted in the media. Kramer’s play could easily polarize the dominant culture due to its cast of characters consisting almost entirely of queer men and its attention on politics surrounding queer subculture, but Ben prevents this from happening. He provides a means by which the dominant culture can have a voice rather than feel excluded from the conversations happening onstage. While Kramer’s play was able to find mainstream success, though, it is not simply because it negotiates with the heterosexual aspect of the dominant culture; it also negotiates with the male aspect of it. Save for Emma, all of the characters in the play are men. Granted, the play focuses on the AIDS epidemic among gay men, using theatre as a platform for activism and education, but we still cannot ignore the fact that the dominant culture privileges men. Even if Kramer’s decision to include a cast almost entirely featuring men was a necessary one, the decision negotiates more with the dominant culture than a play featuring less male characters would. In fact, plays by and about queer individuals who do not identify as men may use similar strategies for negotiating with the dominant culture, but their lack of male characters hold them back. A Late Snow by Jane Chambers provides an example. First produced in 1974 at Clark Center for the Performing Arts by Playwrights Horizons, an off-Broadway theatre company, and written by a self-identified lesbian, A Late Snow utilizes many of the same tactics as The Normal Heart in order to negotiate with the dominant culture. Unlike The Normal Heart, though, it did not receive as much widespread attention. It is not remembered as well, either; while The Normal Heart received a Broadway revival in 2011 and was adapted into a movie in 2014, A Late Snow only lives on in smaller productions. This could be attributed to the fact that The Normal Heart opened amidst the AIDS crisis, making it politically relevant at the time, while A Late Snow does not respond directly to any major events. This does not mean that the discrepancy should be ignored, though, especially when we examine how similar Chamber’s and Kramer’s strategies for negotiating with the dominant culture are. A Late Snow depicts five queer women who find themselves trapped in a house during a snowstorm. The house’s owner, Ellie, lives there with her current partner Quincey, and she was previously in relationships with the other women, Pat, Margo, and Peggy. The action revolves around the tensions that arise between the women while they stay together, waiting for the storm to pass. Similar to Ben in The Normal Heart, though, Chambers includes a character who does not openly identify as queer. While Peggy’s sexual identity is a bit more ambiguous than Ben’s, she is still more firmly part of the dominant culture than the rest of the characters. The character description that Chambers provides makes this explicit. She is “a chic suburban housewife trying to do everything ‘right.” The only aspect that holds her back from her stake in the dominant culture is her possible queerness, which Peggy denies despite Ellie’s reminders about the relationship they shared in college. Peggy may possibly have a queer sexuality, but her disavowal of it allows her to maintain her place in the dominant culture. Chambers also ends her play with the beginning of a monogamous relationship. While there is no deathbed wedding like in The Normal Heart, the play ends with Ellie and Margo deciding to live together, suggesting that they are beginning a long-term relationship together. This allows Chambers to end on a note that the dominant culture can relate to, conveying that queer couples are not much different from traditional heterosexual couples; they are just of the same gender rather than different genders. Given the fact that A Late Snow uses tactics similar to The Normal Heart to negotiate with the dominant culture, it may seem that Chambers’ play would find more success than Kramer’s play, but as mentioned previously, this is not true. While Chambers does live on in theatre history through the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, which recognizes “plays and performance texts created by women that present a feminist perspective and contain significant opportunities for female performers,” her plays do not receive the same level of recognition or the big-budget productions like The Normal Heart. In an interview for the New York Times in 1981, Chambers relates her own opinion on why plays about lesbians do not reach the same level of recognition as plays about queer men: “'Lesbians have been ignored,'' she added. ''People turn their heads the other way as if to say, 'We know you exist, but we don't want to have to deal with this, so let's all keep our mouths shut and we'll all pretend it's not there.'” There is a willingness to ignore the sexuality of queer women, but this same willingness does not exist as much for queer men, or at least not as much. This ultimately results in extreme gender disparity within understandings of queer theatre history in America. Even in books and essays that look specifically at queer drama, there is a lack of information about plays in the mainstream by and about queer people who are not men. So many works focus on plays by men, mainly The Normal Heart and Angels in America. These are important plays of course, but they shouldn’t be queer theatre history’s sole focus. It is difficult to come up with recommendations on how we should proceed in remedying this disparity, though. After all, queer playwrights who do not identify as men are already using the same tactics, or even more tactics, than their male counterparts to negotiate with the dominant culture in their work. While not the easiest or most accessible way forward, it seems that the only way that these playwrights can begin to find wider success in the mainstream is through a cultural shift. Culture must turn away from privileging male, heterosexual writers and favoring plays that view queer individuals who are not men through this lens. Instead of expecting lesbians and other non-male queer individuals to fit self-loathing and undesirable stereotypes, culture will need to be open to representations that do not necessarily fit into this idea. While this does not sound reassuring, we may actually be in the midst of this change due to the musical Fun Home, which premiered on Broadway in 2015. Adapted from the graphic novel memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel, a queer woman, the musical follows Bechdel’s life as she grows up realizing that she is a lesbian and that her father is a closeted gay man. It has been far more successful than most plays by queer women up until this point in American theatre history, winning five Tony Awards including Best Musical. Of course, one incredibly successful play by and about a queer woman does not mean that gender disparity in queer American theatre is solved; still, it does suggest that the cultural change needed to begin solving it may be on its way. Gavin Damore serves as General Manager of AfS. He is currently overseeing marketing, publicity, and outreach for our Evening of Original One Act Plays.
1 Comment
Ally Madden
1/28/2017 03:50:35 pm
Fun Home is life-changing!
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