Given these considerations, this exhibit will use two basic definitions of queer theatre as a starting point. Like many of Charles Ludlam’s plays, Bluebeard, produced by his Ridiculous Theatre Company at La MaMa in 1970, is a camp pastiche. What is a woman?”  She went on to describe sex change operations as being “so 1950s.”  Speaking to The Herald in 1971, she said, “I never claimed to be a man, a woman, an actor, an actress, a homosexual, a heterosexual, a transsexual, a drag queen… Clothing merely expresses a mood, reflects a person’s most mysterious qualities.” Her decision to don feminine clothing had nothing to do with wanting to “pass” as a woman and was instead a way of expressing certain facets of her personality. Interview. The Queer Future That Dared Not Be Imagined: Aging and “Post- AIDS” Theatre by Dirk Gindt. One need look only at Rob Baker’s 1978 article “What Do You Get When You Cross a Man with a Dress?”, in which the author’s use of the term “transvestite performer” includes drag queens, transgender women, and other female-presenting performers who were assigned male at birth. Camp sensibility can be seen in many parts of what may be considered “queer culture,” from slang to fashion to films and plays which have become cult classics among queer audiences. Like Ludlam and Vaccaro, he was tired of the conventionality of mainstream theatre and wished to subvert it and its tropes. Notes on Camp. Passing the Torch Song: Mothers, Daughters, and Chosen Families in the Canadian Drag Community by Cameron Crookston. Queer Theatre (Methuen, 1986). Generator also has a history of having killer creative teams in residence, ... For me, that is what queer theatre is at its utter best: a rebellious, beautiful blueprint. While it would take too long to list everything, theatre radically changed along with social attitudes. Glass Menagerie by Tennesse Williams Dec 12, 1948. An act of resistance where, for just a moment, artists and audiences can envision our futures together. Production photograph from Miss Nefertiti Regrets, featuring Jackie Curtis and Bette Midler. Though Curtis was known for her unique rock-and-roll style of female drag (the New York Times excerpt quoted above goes into great detail about one of her everyday outfits, which consisted of “a miniskirt, ripped black tights … clunky heels,” and “no falsies”), she also performed and lived in male drag. It’s a term I encountered occasionally throughout my adolescence, always as an insult, a slur. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The play portrayed gay life as something that was part of the rest of society rather than something that occurred in isolation, removed from the unseeing eyes of straight society. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004), for the connection it makes between sexuality and the state of the nation. Our programs aim to include the HIV+ community and empower youth, elders, activists, and educators through the transformative power of theater. Untitled. Spring Awakening Oct 31, 1895. Cock-Strong was famous for its use of a giant phallus as a prop — the same prop that got the Playhouse of the Ridiculous arrested in Belgium — and Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit shocked many with its portrayal of a thalidomide baby, Siamese twins, and a stump-armed princess played by John Vaccaro. Click through for the full catalog record. Click through to see the catalog record for this object. October 16, 1969. Her plays betrayed an obsession with Hollywood and its scandals, particularly Glamour, Glory, and Gold, which tells a classic story that is as old as film itself: that of the aspiring starlet struggling to get her foot in the door. It's also a little-noticed fact that when Gregory Doran assumes control of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2013 two of our big national companies will, for the first time ever, be run by gay directors. Her obsession with classic Hollywood glamour could also be seen in her masculine performances, which reflected the sensitivity of James Dean or Montgomery Clift rather than traditional masculinity. Though the performers’ imitation of classic ballet meant donning female costume, not to mention wigs and makeup, female impersonation was not the goal. The Playhouse of the Ridiculous–a La MaMa Resident Company–debuted in 1965, and though its director John Vaccaro dismissed the notion that his plays were “something homosexual,” the plays his company put on nonetheless challenged mainstream sexuality and gender through role reversal and cross-gender casting. He blamed his penchant for drag performances on an acting coach he once had who apparently told him “he’d never be a leading man, so he might as well try something else.”  He never identified as a woman, but he was open about being particular type of gay person: “Say I’m a gay activist or a queen out of her time, I don’t care…. Small poster for Conquest of the Universe. It contains, among other things, “transvestism, scatology, obscenity, camp, self-assertion, self-deprecation, gallows humor, cloacal humor, sick humor, healthy humor, and cutting, soaring song,” most of which were hallmarks of Vaccaro’s style of Ridiculous Theatre. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Queer Theory: A Rough Introduction. The Tom Eyen play Three Drag Queens from Daytona, staged at La MaMa in 1973, combined camp with absurdism. There is nothing in the actual content of The White Whore and the Bit Player that makes it queer; but, like Genet’s play The Maids, its themes and social commentary hold a queer interest. Duo Theatre co-founder Magaly Alabau, a Cuban-American poet and actor who later helped create the lesbian theatre company Medusa’s Revenge, played the same role in the bill’s Spanish language version. Jean Genet, author of The Maids, wrote in his novel Our Lady of the Flowers: “If I were to have a play put on, in which women had roles, I would demand that these roles be performed by adolescent boys.” According to Tom O’Horgan, his 1964 production of Jean Genet’s play The Maids at La MaMa was the first in America to fulfill the playwright’s intention. When it comes to pronouns, the exhibit will use whatever pronouns seem to be most frequently used to refer to an individual unless there is evidence that they prefer a particular pronoun. Click through for the catalog record for this object. Queer theatre is visionary theatre. Even those who did not consider their work “homosexual,” like John Vaccaro, nonetheless used apparently queer aesthetic choices like cross-gender casting or camp mannerisms because of their potential as a vehicle for rebellion against the conventions and values of the mainstream. A BRIEF HISTORY OF QUEER THEATRE AT LA MAMA. Grey Silhouettes: Black queer theatre on the post-war British stage. Ryan Gilbey. This book is not only a biography of a playwright but a history of theatre and GLBT as a whole during the significant period between the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic. Alternatives Within the Mainstream II: Queer Theatres in Post-war Britain. The cross-gender casting works with the characters’ role-playing to make the ultimate point of the play: that roles are forced upon individuals, and that there is nothing that separates two lowly maids from their upper class Madame except for the fact that society has made it so. Flyer for a production of the James Dean play Ripping Off Layers to Find Roots starring Jackie Curtis and Coco Perelis. This exhibit, which was created by Pooja Desai, a student in NYU’s Program in Archives/Public history, looks at theatrical experiments from La MaMa’s early years (1962-1980) through a queer lens. It's been heartening to see gay writers exploiting the freedom that came with the abolition of censorship and the relaxation of the law. Missing the Target: Emotion, Stoic Psychology, and the Actor. “…nobody knows where performance comes from when it’s the text-based theater stuff. Click through to see the whole article and its catalog record. Queer theatre × Close. Despite the play’s modern setting, the language is highly formalized in a pastiche of declamatory Greek verse. More recently, Alexi Kaye Campbell's The Faith Machine (2011) aired the heated divisions in the Anglican church towards homosexuality. The bilingual production by the Duo Theatre, a resident company at La MaMa, notably featured Warhol superstar Candy Darling as the white whore in the English language version. Click through to see the object’s full catalog record. The incident in Belgium was perhaps an extreme example of the reaction Vaccaro’s plays garnered, but other plays he directed — such as Jackie Curtis’s Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, which was infamous for its use of “freakish” characters like amputees and conjoined twins  — also received mixed responses from critics and audiences for their outrageous, camped-up content. In this case, the play, whose action takes place in the protagonist’s imagination in the seconds before her death, draws on the unhappy lives of classic Hollywood starlets like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe. He worked in Broadway, Off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, and the plays he directed at La MaMa included Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down, The White Whore and the Bit Player, Three Drag Queens from Daytona, and Miss Nefertiti Regrets, the last of which gave Bette Midler her first professional role. An Encyclopaedia entry focussing on The history and current state of gay, lesbian, and queer theater, focusing on the United Kingdom and the United States. The sexuality of the main character, a one-armed street hustler, is ambiguous: although his romantic attachments are chiefly with women, he is not entirely detached emotionally from the men that he sleeps with for money. As the last of these sources may suggest, Ludlam’s plays were not shy in the least about sexuality. Program for the bilingual Duo Theatre production, 1973. Playwright Harry M. Koutoukas insisted on calling his plays “camps” — which says a great deal about the style and content of the plays in question. A documentary history, yet also a biography, … As a historical document, Baker’s article provides insight into the cultural logics that shaped the downtown view of  gender nonconformity in the 1970s, particularly for feminine-presenting individuals. I truly believe this. Theatre of the Ridiculous became significant not just because it afforded audiences a comical or confrontational, extravagant, and bizarre experience totally opposite the realistic theatre they had come to know, but because it allowed queer people to feel the joy and freedom of seeing themselves represented on stage, a radical concept before Stonewall. Sontag, Susan (2018). As mentioned earlier, the terminology used to talk about queer and trans people and queer/trans issues has changed greatly since the 1960s and 1970s. Harsh Agarwal (President 2015–16) served as the convener for first two editions. Production photograph by James Gossage, 1965. These references shift the play’s tone towards the camp — though in many ways the camp sensibility of the play exists in the very balance between the dead-serious social commentary and the flippant pop culture references. Now read: Not In Front of the Audience: homosexuality on stage by Nicholas de Jongh (2002). Personal interview. An edition of Queer theatre (1978) Queer theatre by Stefan Brecht. Tom Eyen was one of the auteurs who emerged out of the late 1960s and early 1970s, directing and starring in his own works in much the same way that Charles Ludlam and John Vaccaro did. These programs include workshops, classes, and long-term residencies led by expert Production photograph by Irene Vilhar, 1973. Using objects from La MaMa’s Archives, Desai reconstructs a history of the plays, production companies, playwrights, and directors who presented work on La MaMa’s stages that either reflected  a “queer sensibility” or were relevant to queer/trans/LGBTQA audiences. This article about lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender topics is a stub. The shows were often deliberately confrontational and generated controversy on numerous fronts. When a show is coded as queer in this exhibit, I am referring to the content or style of the play, not the actors, writers, or directors. in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, 1st Edition,Howard Chiang, Anjali Arondekar, Marc Epprecht, Jennifer Evans, Ross G. Forman, Hanadi Al-Samman, Emily Skidmore, Zeb Tortorici (eds) … Like a number of other plays by Eyen, The White Whore and the Bit Player drew gay or otherwise queer audiences because it reflected themes relevant to their lives despite its lack of gay or queer characters. And I'd have thought the rancorous schism between old and young Tories towards gay marriage would be a rich subject for drama. “What do you get when you cross a man with a dress?” The Soho Weekly News. A concise history of Queer political theatre in the UK from 1968 to 2018. What’s Up: Ohio State Theatre productions, Shrek-themed trivia and the history of ‘Bridgerton’ spice up this week. The characters in the play are aware of Medea’s myth before it happens, and she herself references the fact that she knows how her story ends. Click through to see this object’s catalog record. Click through to see the full catalog record for this object. The study of queer history is as much about the present as the past. “Off-Off and Away.” After Dark, October 1973. May 25, 1978. A play like The White Whore and the Bit Player, one production of which starred Warhol superstar Candy Darling, is not about a gay or queer subject, but the role reversal between the “white whore” and the nun is a subversive attack on the audience’s expectations of what these roles mean. The Maids, according to Ozzie Rodriguez (Director of La MaMa’s Archives), forces the audience to accept the arbitrariness of the roles in the play, first through the presentation of the men in drag and then through the class-based role reversals as the maids in turn take on the role of Madame. Since queerness is, like all identity categories, historically produced, this definition must necessarily allow space not just for characters who self-identify as queer or trans but those whose actions suggest sexualities and/or gender identities other than cisgender and/or heterosexual. Macelle Mahala PART II: FAILURE AND PERFORMANCE . The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman Mar 31, 1944. Now might be a good time to ask: what next? Photo collage of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous. Jackie Curtis’s play Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, directed by John Vaccaro and performed by the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, received mixed reviews, to say the least. Playwright, actor, and director Charles Ludlam began as a member of John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous until a falling-out between the two prompted Ludlam to leave the company. Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women's studies. Though Vaccaro was derided by Charles Ludlam as being “too conservative”, the shows he directed did not by any means escape controversy. As the sixties progressed and the scene grew with the founding of venues like La MaMa, off-off-Broadway remained an important venue for queer expression in theatre. Critic Stefan Brecht, in reviewing the genre of ridiculous theatre, felt that cross-gender casting was used to such a degree that it “strikes one as peculiar when an actor plays his own sex.”  Vaccaro himself was not necessarily trying to make a political statement; the hilarity of seeing a very masculine performer attempt to appear feminine was just another facet of the overall ridiculousness of ridiculous theatre. Reviews compare the play to Absurdist Theatre in the vein of Samuel Beckett, saying that the three drag queens, as they sit around “bitching … and dishing,” seem to be “waiting for Godot.”  The play is a pitch-black comedy full of overt social and political commentary, but it also contains references to old pop songs, movies, and other sorts of nostalgic pop culture. Q is for queer theatre The gay and lesbian theatre movement has changed radically since the oppressive days of the 1950s, but could more writers rise … The play has a sense of pathos which brings it into the realm of camp tragedy. What I would like to see, however, are more plays on the Kushner-Ravenhill model which deal with sexuality in a wider political context. Tickets: $15-$25. Running from April to June in its theatre, the season will feature 16 shows at different stages of development including new writing from an array of queer theatre-makers. When John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous debuted in 1965, it pioneered a new genre of theatre known as the “Theatre of the Ridiculous.”  A genre that had its roots in the earlier Theatre of the Absurd, the goal of ridiculous theatre was to draw attention to what was artificial in theatre — and in life. Oscar Wilde Trials Oct 31, 1923. Other plays focused on different forms of role reversal outside of drag, such as The White Whore and the Bit Player, and yet other plays used different aspects of camp sensibility either as satire or merely as a form of attacking social conventions, as did the works of Charles Ludlam.

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