Only three months after late activist Edith Windsor’s 2013 victory for gay rights at the Supreme Court, which led to the national legalization of same-sex marriage, The New York Times ran an article questioning the resolve of queer theatres to evolve with the times.
“At a time of rapid change in the gay-rights movement, from marriage to the military, the purpose of a strictly gay theatre company isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago,” remarked Times contributor Erik Piepenburg. The writer observed a general decline in interest for LGBTQ topics and a subsequent drop at gay-specific companies in both revenues and taste. The logical result? Queer theatre companies were opting for lighter, campier fare, Piepenburg wrote, to keep their audiences happy.
Underlying this high-profile conclusion is the anxiety that queer theatre cannot survive the shifting tides of public opinion. Without antipathy, is there just apathy? Without something to fight against, does the once edgy avant-garde of queer theatre disappear?
Elsewhere, critics have eviscerated a handful of once-classic gay works as shallow, dated excursions. Reflecting on the autumn 2016 season, The New Yorker’s Hilton Als wrote a particularly brutal assessment of William Finn and James Lapine’s Broadway revival of Falsettos. Als excoriated the dramatic musical as “hideously cheap sentiment” and “one of the most dishonest musicals” he had ever seen. Als went on to accuse the show of queer-baiting its audience into a middling family drama of Jews, AIDS, and self-referential schmaltz.
Even freshly minted New York Times critic Jesse Green has expressed doubts about the legacy and longevity of older classics like Matt Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) and Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1981). In a September 2017 article, Green commented that the current fall season in New York City was yet another rewind of old gay plays (not only gay, it should be added, but very white, with the exception of Chicago scribe Philip Dawkins’s story of a black transgender etiquette teacher in Charm, at MCC Theater). Again, a leading critic could be observed haranguing the old gay vanguard with charges of increasing irrelevance and encroaching banality. (Perhaps some of Green’s worries can be laid to rest: The newly revised and rechristened Torch Song had a successful and critically lauded staging at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theater, while The Boys in the Band is set for a starry Broadway run in April, not long after the long-awaited revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America from London, though this last production is in a category—and deserves an analysis—of its own.)
Such complaints about queer theatre always seem to arise in tandem with social change. Piepenburg’s 2013 admonishments arose during a short reprieve for the gay-rights movement under the Obama administration; coincidentally, The New Yorker published Als’s screed against the superficiality of Falsettos just one day before President Trump’s earthquake electoral win. Under this political lens, we see how important queer theatre is in critical circles: It acts as a weather vane for current social attitudes and the civic battles to come.
And, from this observer’s perch, much queer theatre in recent years has simply not been poignant enough, or daring enough, or provoking enough, or political enough to rise to the historical occasion.
But a new generation of queer theatremakers is prepared to mount a makeover of the subgenre from outside the mainstream.
The well-worn melodramatric tropes of gayness simply no longer emanate dramatic tension, younger artists understand. And while the sequential threats of “coming out” and “assimilation” still haunt young and old queers alike, their exposition onstage has become hackneyed and dim. Today’s queer theatre need not be reactionary vis-à-vis an intolerant America—it should instead strike out on its own as a force for political alternatives, resistance, and utopia.
That’s what a new class of millennial theatremakers are demanding. They want queer theatre to become an aesthetic that transcends the commonplace instrumentalization of gayness. Indeed they tend to view much of what’s been presented to mainstream audiences in the past decade as frankly embarrassing.
As an example, look no further than one of the most-produced gay plays in recent years, Geoffrey Nauffts’s Next Fall. Though hailed by critics and nominated for several Tony and Drama Desk awards back in 2010, Next Fall is at its core a trite issue play that depicts homosexuality as sensational and incompatible with everyday life. Having seen three separate productions of the play, I can attest to its myopic views of homosexuality, and I understand why it’s such a frequent target of critique. While it may not be a harmful play per se, its lily-white coterie of neoliberal concerns and its lack of nuance serve to stymie our expectations of what gay theatre can be and do.
Instead of mimicking the conservative techniques of Next Fall and its ilk, emerging playwrights are drafting work in the image of pathbreaking artists like Taylor Mac, whose seminal A 24-Decade History of Popular Music has already become a fixture of the queer canon. One of Mac’s fans is young Manhattan-based playwright Kev Berry, currently working on his own marathon production: a 5-part, 12-hour play called Fabulous Creatures, being developed by the Tank in New York.
“My queer aesthetic is relentlessly and effervescently fabulous,” declares Berry. “It does not include heterosexuality under the umbrella of normality, nor does it shun straight people who want to explore queerness for themselves.”
Matt Morrow, the executive artistic director of the LGBTQ-focused Diversionary Theatre in San Diego, recognizes a similar element of relentlessness in the new work he sees. “For decades, maybe centuries, queer theatremakers have embedded codes in their stories based on their experiences in an effort to be heard and seen by others like them. Queer theatremakers were responding to a world not ready for them, or to crises threatening their very lives. Now queer theatremakers have the breadth of history behind them; they are looking to forge new ground with a fresh and offbeat perspective.”
That history is certainly ripe for investigation. Most of today’s emerging queer playwrights are committed to the cause of intersectionality, which investigates the permeable boundaries between queerness and the innumerable other categories of identity. In Chicago, About Face Theatre’s new artistic director, Megan Carney, notes the necessity of defining a new chapter of LGBTQ theatre as quintessentially queer.
“I think of queerness as a way to disrupt, reimagine, and liberate our bodies and minds—we need to tell more stories that reveal the nuances of our identities and desires,” she says. “We must remember that not all queer people benefited from the recently won policy battles, especially trans folks and queer people of color. That said, I think everyone in our extended communities feel vulnerable and galvanized to act right now.”
Carney’s specificity about the term “queerness” points to an important distinction: Theatremakers today are differentiating between theatre with LGBTQ themes and theatre that is innately queer. Popularly known as the tough-talking transgender waitress Lola on Hulu’s “Difficult People,” Shakina Nayfack also boasts theatre cred as the founding director of New York’s Musical Theatre Factory. “Not every LGBT piece qualifies as queer in my book,” she notes. “To me, a queer aesthetic implies a varied mix of subversive representations of sex and gender, a clearly politicized framing of LGBT bodies, and a discernible level of irreverence—or at least self-awareness.”
Nayfack’s definition gets to the point about queer theatre—that it’s more than the sum of its experiences. New York-based emerging theatre artist Cristina Pitter would likely agree with Nayfack’s words. A self-described “queer fat babe and bruja,” Pitter often engages in her work with the histories of African and queer diasporas. Appropriately, her concept of queerness has unfolded slowly with time and research.
“Queer aesthetic—what a whirlwind of color, vibrations, exhilaration, raw energy, and magic,” Pitter writes, in her patently extravagant fashion, in a personal manifesto. “The power of a fist held high, wrapped in fishnet glory and boots strapped up, or the fierce walk of a sleek black suit, heels, and mischievous eye. The soft femme fur of legs unshaved or the perfect polish on his fingernails. Queerness is more than sexuality and gender. I believe it’s a political statement, a way of living and loving relentlessly, of knowing pain and violence and our history of existence—but still fighting for a better world.”
As Pitter puts it in florid detail, queerness is an ideology that stretches far beyond theatrical walls. Again we see her describe it as “relentless,” but we also gain a sense of the utopian aesthetic, the fight for a “better world.” What would this queer utopian world look like? What are the laws of a queer utopia?
Today’s queer artists sincerely believe their work marshals audiences toward a better future. Paradoxically, though, that future might not even contain the concept of queerness. “Queer only has power in so much as it’s resisting something,” notes Alok Vaid-Menon, a genderqueer South Asian performance artist currently based in New York. “Hopefully we won’t have to resist in the future—and can maybe even rest instead!”
With a large social media following, a deftly poetic voice, and an accomplished regimen of art, poetry, and fashion to their credit, Vaid-Menon is among the important queer voices of the new generation. Having recently completed a world tour, Vaid-Menon is well positioned to speak on the state of queer performance. “It’s not just all white cis men anymore—I’ve been excited about all the trans and genderqueer performers I’ve been watching emerge all over the world. I think it’s because people are really coming to the stage as one of the only spaces in our culture in which we can be honest and experimental. With the rise of nationalism and conservatism everywhere, art is having to become political as a response! Trans artists are leading this push to create work that is relevant, political, honest.”
Vaid-Menon cites a handful of queer trendsetters outside the U.S. who are making a strong impact: Vivek Shraya in Toronto, Travis Alabanza in the United Kingdom, Umlilo and FAKA in South Africa.
But despite its careful theoretical positioning, the emerging queer avant-garde faces precarious practical challenges. Structures that would specifically help these practitioners—theatre grants and residencies that so often provide a springboard for new talents, for example—are relatively scarce in America, particularly for artists from marginalized groups. So where are these artists finding their big breaks? Real economic and social investments in queer work have not been made yet.
There are positive signs: Queer | Art’s mentorship program for the broader visual and performing arts is active in New York, and the city contains a multitude of queer theatre festivals (La MaMa’s Squirts in the winter; and in the summer, Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival, the Brick Theater’s Trans Theatre Festival, and the Fresh Fruit Festival at the Wild Project). But none of these programs is known for commissioning work from emerging artists.
“I applaud producers who collaborate with us—more producers need to listen better to what queer artists and queer theatre needs to be,” proffers writer-performer Diana Oh, creator of the concert/performance installation {my lingerie play} at Manhattan’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. “And reviewers need a wake-up call, because they’ve pandered for too long to their subscribers, often silencing, belittling, and killing theatre made by queer people and people of color. Often there is damaging language and rhetoric included in the assessment of our work, and that needs to change. We are innovators, trailblazers, and out-of-the-box thinkers. We know what it’s like to live in a society that chokes us, and our art is pushing back by screaming for liberation. The queer aesthetic is not quiet.”
Zachary Small is a New York-based genderqueer writer. He’s written for BOMB magazine, Artinfo, and HowlRound, among other publications.
