Contemporary Theatre

and Its Diversity

LOGO
 The years since the late 1960s have been
noteworthy for challenging dominant cultural
standards and demanding the diversity of
American society not only be acknowledged but
also accepted and celebrated.
 Efforts have been made to open mainstream
theatres to plays about groups (African
American, Asian American, Latino or Hispanic
American, Native American, women, gays and
lesbians, and others) previously marginalized or
ignored and also to establish theatres to give
these groups their own voice.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 In the 1960s, the Living Theatre, more than any

other organization, epitomized rebellion against
established authority in all of its aspects: values,
behavior, language, dress, theatrical
conventions.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 Founded in New York in 1946 by Judith Malina

and Julian Beck, it was originally devoted to
poetic drama but during the 1950s was
influenced increasingly by Brecht, Artaud, and
anarchist theory.
 The most extreme of the Living Theatre’s pieces
was Paradise Now.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 It began with actors circulating among the

spectators, denouncing strictures on freedom (to
smoke marijuana, travel without a passport, to
go nude in public, and the like).
 Thereafter during the performance, both
spectators and actors roamed the auditorium
and stage indiscriminately; many removed their
clothing and some smoked marijuana – in other
words, many of the strictures they denounced
were defied.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 Actors provoked some spectators into voicing

opposition and then overrode them, often by
shouting obscenities or even spitting them; at
the end, the company sought to move the
audience into the streets to continue the
revolution begun in the theatre.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 Its aggressive behavior, combined with its

anarchistic politics, won the Living Theatre
enormous notoriety and called attention to
several challenges to long-accepted theatrical
conventions, especially those that distinguished
the fictional from the real: They treated space
and time as real; actors played themselves
rather than characters; actors wore their own
clothing instead of costumes; the subject matter,
political and social issues of the day, was
pursued through improved confrontations rather
than through predetermined text.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 Continued assaults on the conversations of

polite behavior, and the inability of authorities to
prevent violations, gained tolerance of behavior
previously considered unacceptable.
 Nudity and obscenity first came to Broadway in
1968 in the musical Hair, a good-natured plea
for tolerance of alternative lifestyles.
 Alternative Theatre Groups

 Although the most radical, the Living Theatre

was not the only group seeking to change
society through theatre.
 Among these, two of the most effective were the
Bread and Puppet Theatre (founded in 1961),
which used both actors and giant puppets to
enact parables that denounced war and the
futility of materialism, and the San Francisco
Mime Theatre (founded in 1966), which
performed satirical pieces promoting civil rights,
equality for women, and various other causes.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 All of these groups had limited resources. Most

never controlled a theatre and had to perform
wherever they could. They were what Jerzy
Grotowski, director or the Polish Laboratory
Theatre in Wroclaw, Poland, called “poor”
theatres, Grotowski also made his own a poor
theatre, nor out of necessity but out of
conviction.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 Grotowski hoped in his way to rediscover the

essence of theatre. Eventually, he concluded
that only two elements are essential: the actor
and the audience.
 Because of the actor’s central role in
performance Grotowski devoted much of his
attention to actors training.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 He coupled intensive physical exercises with

training designed to remove the performer’s
psychological inhibitions; he also sought to
develop the actor’s voice as an instrument
capable of exceeding all normal demands.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 Grotowski concentrated on creating spatial

relationships among spectators and actors that
would permit the audience to interact
unselfconsciously.
 For The Constant Prince, in which the title
character patiently accepts mistreatment and
suffering, the theatre was arranged so that all of
the spectators looked down into a space that
resembled a hospital teaching theatre where, as
Grotowski put it, psychic surgery takes place.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 Grotowski viewed the theatre as the modern

equivalent of a tribal ceremony.
 During the late 1960s, Grotowski became a
major influence on theatre in Europe and
America.
 His influence was further disseminated through
his book Towards a Poor Theatre (1968).
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 The Open Theatre (1963-1974), based in New

York and headed by Joseph Chaikin, was also a
“poor” theatre.
 Above all, Chaikin was concerned with
“transformation” – a constantly shifting reality in
which the same performer assumes and
discards roles or identities as the context
changes.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 The Open Theatre scripts, which sought to

reveal fundamental moral and social patterns
buried beneath troubling contemporary events or
preoccupations, usually evolved in its workshops
in close collaboration with its playwrights.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 One of the Open Theatre’s most successful

collaboration was with Jean-Claude van Itallie on
The Serpent, in which the assassinations of
Martin Luther King Jr. and of Adam and Eve and
other biblical events to suggest that God is a
force that sets limits on our behavior and that
the Serpent is a force that tempts us to breach
those limits.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 In 1968, Richard Schechner, having examined

various contemporary practices, including those
of the “poor” theatres, sought to describe the
conventions of an approach to performance that
he labeled “environmental theatre.”
 During a performance, “focus is flexible and
variable” – that is, a production need not be
shaped by the assumption that all spectators
must be able to see the same thing at the same
time.
 Poor and Environmental Theatres

 Instead, several scenes may be going on

simultaneously in various parts of the space;
spectators are free to choose which they will
watch.
 Environmental theatre blends categories long
treated as distinct during performance: acting
space and nonacting space; performer and
spectator; text and performance; sequentiality
and simultaneity.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Even as the “poor” theatres were restricting their
means, other theatres were emphasizing the
very elements that the poor theatres were
seeking to eliminate.
 Living as we do in the “electronic age”, it seems
inevitable that the theatre would exploit
electronic devices.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Electronic media affected the theatre by creating
the desire to make the representation of place in
the theatre as transformable as it is in film and
television.
 The best-known multimedia experimentation
was dome by the Czech designer Josef
Svoboda.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 One of his projects, Polyekran (multiple screen),
used filmed images entirely but sought to
overcome the “visual paralysis” of a single
screen by hanging screens of differing sizes at
various distances from the audience, projecting
different images on each, and changing the
images at varying time intervals – thus creating
a dynamic visual field and giving the audience a
choice of images to watch.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 These developments are related to others then
occurring in the visual arts.
 Stimulated by dissatisfaction with restrictions
imposed by the media in which they worked,
painters sought to overcome the restrictions by
such devices as gluing thee-dimensional objects
onto paintings.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Sculptors, to overcome the static nature of their
medium, attached motors to sculptures to make
them move or used light to vary the appearance.
 Out of such experiments eventually came
happenings, pioneered by the painter Allan
Kaprow, who argued that not only the art objects
on display but also the space and all of those
who attend must be considered essential parts
of the total artistic experience.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Subsequent happenings varied, but most had common
characteristics with implications for theatrical
performance:
 Happenings were multimedia events that broke down the
barriers between the arts and mingled elements from
several.
 Happenings shifted emphasis away from creating a
product to participating in a process.
 Because there was no single focus, emphasis shifted from
the artist’s intention to the participants’ awareness; each
participant, as partial creator of the event, was free to
derive from it whatever he or she could; no single “correct”
interpretation of the artwork was sought.
 Happenings did much to undermine professionalism and
disciplined technique because anyone could participate,
and there was no right or wrong way of doing anything.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Many aspects of happenings and environmental
theatre recall futurism and Dadaism.
 Perhaps because they were anarchistic,
happenings soon passed out of vogue. But the
artistic impulse that had prompted them
remained and resurfaced in the 1970s as
performance art.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Because some performance artists have used
nudity, obscenity, unfamiliar conventions, and
attacks on authority, it has been at the center of
several attempts in recent years to censor art or
to curb government support of the arts.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 The major creators of performance art originally
came from the visual arts, dance, or music; they
were attracted to performance art in part
because it disregarded boundaries among the
arts, thereby greatly expanding the means of
expression.
 Multimedia, Happenings, and
Performance Art
 Performance art continues to be useful as an
indication of the contemporary tendency to
break down barriers between the arts and as an
acknowledgment that “performance” can take
many forms.
 Perhaps the most influential force in
performance art today is P.S. 122, an
organization based in New York.
 Postmodernism
 The ideas and practices of environmental
theatre and performance art are related to
postmodernism, a label that is imprecise but that
suggests major changes in modernism.
 Postmodernism melded categories by ignoring
or deliberately violating differentiations and
breaching the boundaries between the arts, as
in performance art and multimedia; by breaking
down the barriers between spectator and
performance space, as in environmental theatre;
by removing distinctions between audience and
performers, as in happenings.
 Postmodernism

 Another sign of postmodernism is the blurring of

distinctions between dramatic forms, as in
absurdist and much other contemporary drama.
 Since the early 1970s, Peter Brook has been
exploring the theatrical conventions of various in
an attempt to bridge cultural and language
barriers (his best known Mahabharata).
 Postmodernism

 French director Ariane Mnouchkine, working with

her company the Théâtre du Soleil, has drawn
on Asian performance conventions in
productions of several of Shakespeare’s plays
and in a tetrology of Greek plays presented
under the title Les Atrides.
 Postmodernism

 Many aspects of postmodernism came together

in the theatre pieces of Robert Wilson, among
them A Letter to Queen Victoria, Einstein on the
Beach, CIVEL warS, Time Rocker, and many
more.
 Most of the pieces were very long, from four to
twelve hours, one lasted seven continuous days
and nights.
 Postmodernism

 According to Wilson, in his pieces there is

nothing to understand, only things to experience,
out of which each spectator constructs his or her
own associations and meanings.
 Many spectators have been infuriated or bored
by the length and lack of clear-cut intention in
Wilson’s pieces, but many critics have called him
the most innovative and significant force in
today’s theatre.
 Postmodernism

 Even when Wilson stages classical texts,

however, he avoids visual elements that merely
illustrate what is in the text; rather, he seeks to
suggest other dimensions through imagery not
literally related to the text.
 Trends in Directing

 Postmodernism has influenced directing in

several ways, perhaps most significantly by
altering attitudes about the director’s relationship
to the playwright and the script.
 Most radical reinterpretations have involved
plays by authors long dead. Bur since the
1980s, some directorial decisions have elicited
strong objections from living authors.
 Trends in Directing
 Some important questions raised by the productions at
this time:
 Can playwrights protect their work from distortions?
 Are directors justified in reshaping a script to suit their own
vision even if it distorts the playwright’s intentions?
 What are the implications of demanding that directors
adhere to playwrights’ notions about how their works
should be staged?
 Should playwrights’ preferences be honored even after
audience tastes and staging conventions have changed?
 What the role of the director?

None of this questions can be answered definitively, but they

have created heated debate.
 Cultural Diversity

 Broadway, because it is a sign of professional

acceptance, continues to represent for many
people the test for the theatre in America.
 On Broadway, usually no more than twenty-five
productions are running at the same time. About
thirty-eight theatres are classified as Broadway
houses. Their prices range from $25 to $75 for
most plays and $25 to $100 for musicals.
 Cultural Diversity

 During 2001, more than 360 not-for-profit

theatres scattered throughout the United States
presented 4,700 productions for a total of 81,800
performances. Total attendance was 22,5
million. Ticket prices were considerably lower
than those of Broadway theatres.
 Cultural Diversity

 Both Broadway and regional theatres tend now

to see themselves as serving all segments of
society through universal appeals independent
of race, class, or gender.
 Much of what has happened in theatre since the
1960s calls these assumptions into question.
 The argument is that instead of trying to achieve
homogenization, America would be better if it
acknowledged, accepted, and valued
differences.
 African American Theatre

 Theatres and plays concerned with African

Americans have probably made the greatest
impact.
 African American playwrights and producing
organizations have greatly increased since A
Raisin in the Sun was first produced.
 African American Theatre

 The most durable of the companies was the

Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), founded in
New York in 1968 by Douglas Turner Ward.
 The upsurge in African American theatrical
activity provided a corresponding increase in
opportunities for actors, directors, and
playwrights.
 African American Theatre

 Among recent playwrights, one of the most

successful has been George C. Wolfe, who first
gained wide recognition in 1986 with The
Colored Museum, a series of eleven exhibits
about African American life that combine satire
and anger.
 African American Theatre

 Wolfe is now one of the most influential figures

in the American theatre.
 Suzan-Lori Parks is perhaps the most admired
female African American playwright with The
America Play, The Death of the Last Black Man
in the Whole Entire World, In the Blood, and
TopDog/Underdog.
 African American Theatre

 Perhaps the most praised African American

playwright is August Wilson, who has declared
his intention of writing a play about black
experience in each decade of the twentieth
century.
 His first success came in 1984 with Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom.
 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

 The entire action of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

takes place in a recording studio in Chicago
during one day in 1927.
 Ma Reiney, “mother of the blues” and her band
(all of them are black), are preparing to
recording. Their two white managers have no
respect for black musicians and their music, the
only thing they want is money.
 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

 When the band arrives for recording, without Ma

Rainey and her companions, tension begins to
rise. The struggle of power begin to take shape.
 When Ma Rainey finally arrives, dressed in furs
and other finery, with her nephew, Sylvester and
her girl friend, Dussie Mae, trouble begins.
 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

 The white men had decided Levee should play

an introduction to Ma Rainey’s signature song,
she had decided that Sylvester, who has a
pronounced stutter, must introduce it with a
spoken passage.
 After several attempts, Sylvester does succeed,
but they find that line to the recording booth was
disconnected.
 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

 During the interruption that occurs, Dussie Mae

wanders down to the rehearsal room and,
despite the warning from others about Dussie
Mae’s relationship with Ma, Levee fondles and
kisses her.
 Eventually the recording gets completed, after
which Sturdyvant informs Levee that he is no
longer interested in his music. Toledo
accidentally steps in Levee’s shoe, the rage is
redirected, and Levee stabs and kills Toledo.
 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

 Wilson seems to suggest that this violence is an

outgrowth of the treatment of blacks that has
been discussed and dramatized in the play.
 Latino Theatre

 After African American, Latino is the most

extensively developed alternative theatre in the
United States.
 Non until the 1960s did Latino theatre begin to
make an impression on the wider American
consciousness, first through the work of El
Teatro Camperino, a bilingual Chicano company
founded by Luis Valdez in 1965.
 Latino Theatre

 A prolific playwright, Valdez has written works

that include Los Vendidos, Corridos, I Don’t
Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, and
Bandito.
 Valdez is probably best known to the general
public for his film work, especially La Bamba.
 Latino Theatre

 One of the most notable Hispanic American

playwrights is Maria Irene Fornes, a Cuban
American who began writing plays in 1965.
 Among her plays Fefu and Her Friends, The
Conduct of Life.
 Latino Theatre

 Another notable Latina dramatist is Milcha

Sanchez-Scott, daughter of a Colombian father
and Indonesian mother.
 Her plays are Latina(1980), Dog Lady, Cuban
Swimmer, Evening Star, and The Old Matador.
 Her best-known work is Roosters.
 Roosters

 Roosters, which takes place in the present-day

Southwest, uses cockfighting as its basic
metaphor.
 The father of the family is named Gallo
(meaning “rooster”, a word also signifying
“macho”, the male animal focused in his own
needs)
 Roosters

 The primary action of the play is concerned with

the struggle for dominance between the forty-
year-old Gallo and his twenty-years-old son,
Hector.
 Gallo prefers a life focused on cockfighting,
winning at which in his eyes justifies any
behavior, including cheating, con games, and
even murder. Hector, on the other hand, dreams
of going beyond the mountains to escape his
family and the kind of life Gallo envisions for
him.
 Roosters

 The struggle between two men is brought to a

head in their attempts to assert ownership of
Zapata, a fighting cock that Gallo considers the
culmination of his efforts to breed a champion
but that has been given to Hector by his
grandfather, who died while Gallo was in prison.
 Roosters

 Set against this struggle between males are the

three women of the family: Juana, Gallo’s worn-
down, thirty-five-year-old wife; Chata, Gallo’s
fleshy, forty-year-old sister, who “gives new
meaning to the word blowsy”; and Angela,
Gallo’s fifteen-year-old daughter who wears
angel wings, plays with dolls dressed as saints.
 Roosters

 Unlike Gallo and Hector, both of whom are

described as being unusually handsome, the
women are all homely.
 The men are set off by the women, like colorful
roosters surrounded by drab hens, and the
women apparently are expected to feel grateful
to be associated with these handsome
creatures.
 Roosters

 Roosters is divided into two acts and eight

scenes. The elapsed time is unclear but
apparently not more than a day or two.
 The atmosphere, shifting easily between realism
and fantasy, is characteristic of Latino “magic
realism”.
 Overall, Roosters is a powerful play that has
much to say about machismo, women, love, and
psychological need in a male-dominated Latino
culture.
 Roosters

 There are in the United States more than one

hundred Hispanic American theatre groups –
Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or other
categories.
 Asian American Theatre

 Asian American have also made their mark in

theatre.
 Asians first came to America in large numbers
when Chinese workers were imported in the
mid-nineteenth century to help build railroads.
 Those who remained usually clustered together
within cities such as San Francisco, New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
 Asian American Theatre

 When Asian Americans were depicted by white

dramatists, they were usually reduced to a few
stereotypes: dutiful houseboy, inscrutable
detective, wise Confucian patriarch, treacherous
dragon lady, or submissive Asian doll-bride.
 Asian American Theatre
 Asian Americans began to rebel against these
stereotypes around 1965, writing their own plays
and founding their own theatres.
 Some of the most important of the companies
were the East-West Players, founded in Los
Angels in 1965; the Asian Exclusion Act,
founded in Seattle in 1973 and later renamed
the Northwest Asian American Theatre
Company; the Asian American Theatre
Workshop, founded in San Francisco in 1973;
and the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, founded
in New York in 1977.
 Asian American Theatre

 Frank Chin was the first Asian American

playwright to win wide recognition; The
Ckickencoop Chinaman satirized both self-
stereotyping and media-stereotyping, and his
The Year of the Dragon was said in 1977 to be
first Asian American play ever produced in New
York.
 Asian American Theatre

 The best-known Asian American dramatist is

David Henry Hwang, who first came to
prominence in 1980 with F.O.B. His subsequent
plays include The Dance and the Railroad,
Family Devotions, Face Value, The Golden
Child, and several works written in collaboration
with Philip Glass.
 Asian American Theatre

 Hwang’s best-known work is M. Butterfly (1988),

which focuses on race, gender, and politics and
suggests that Westerners view “Orientals” as
submissively “feminine”, willing to be dominated
by the aggressive, “masculine” West.
 Asian American Theatre

 Other prominent Asian American playwrights

include Ric Shiomi, Hans Ong, Ping Chong,
Elozabeth Wong, Rosanna Yamagiwa, Winston
Tong, Daryl Chin, and Naomi Iizuka.
 Native American Theatre

 There have been a few Native American theatre

groups.
 The first all-Native American company, the
Native American Theatre Ensemble, was
founded by Hanay Geiogamah in 1972. With
support from the LaMama company in New
York.
 Native American Theatre

 In recent years, Geiogamah has transformed his

company into the American Indian Dance
Theatr, with nineteen members drawn from a
dozen tribes.
 The American Indian Community House in New
York has long served as a community center for
Native Americans living in New York and has
maintained a performing arts program that has
sought to revive authentic Native American
rituals and performance traditions.
 Native American Theatre

 Spiderwoman Theatre, founded by three Native

American sisters, was the first all-female Native
American group in the United States.
 Native American Theatre

 Still other theatres and playwrights reflect the

concerns of such groups as the deaf, blind, and
elderly.
 Theatre by and for Women

 Women, representing as they do roughly one-

half of the world’s population, cannot on one
level be considered a minority.
 Throughout the theatre’s history they have been
relegated to a minor position.
 In England they were not permitted to appear on
the stage until 1661 , and though prominent as
actresses thereafter, seldom did they write plays
or attain positions of power in the theatre until
recently.
 Theatre by and for Women

 Only gradually since World War II have women

come to be accepted as directors and heads of
theatre companies.
 Changes have come about primarily through
concerns for women’s rights, which date back to
at least the nineteenth century but were given
new energy by the civil rights movement that
accelerated in the 1960s.
 Theatre by and for Women

 Beginning in the 1970s, a number of theatres

were formed to present the work of feminist
writers.
 Some of the most important of these were The
Looking Glass Theatre, New Georges, Six
Figures Theatre Company, Voice and Vision,
Women’s Interart Theatre, Spiderwoman Native
American Theatre, and the Women’s Project and
Productions, all in New York.
 Theatre by and for Women

 Many female playwrights have written almost

exclusively for feminist theatres and have not
sought a larger audience.
 Others have won recognition in mainstream
theatres.
 Among the best known of the latter group are
Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, and Wendy
Wasserstein.
 Theatre by and for Women

 Norman is best known for ‘night, Mother, winner

of the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
 Beth Henley has written primarily about colorful
characters in small southern towns.
 She was most successful with Crimes of the
Heart.
 Theatre by and for Women

 Wendy Wasserstein is best known for The Heidi

Chronicles.
 Other contemporary female playwrights is Paula
Vogel. Her plays include And Baby Makes
Seven, The Oldest Profession, The Baltimore
Waltz, and The Mineola Twins. The bet known
her play is How I Learned to Drive.
 How I Learned to Drive

 How I Learned to Drive brings into focus Vogel’s

twin themes of incest and pedophilia, which
“drive” the play.
 The play was inspired by Vogel’s reading of
Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita about a
relationship between a man in his forties and a
pre-teen girl.
 How I Learned to Drive

 Vogel’s nonlinear narrative is madeup of

nineteen scenes that portray the sexual initiation
of Li’l Bit, beginning at age eleven and
continuing to age eighteen.
 How I Learned to Drive

 Li’l Bit’s family and friends from the backdrop to

explain her socially conditioned responses to her
sexual initiation by an adult relative.
 The story’s complexity is enlarged by Peck,
whose personal history is that of pedophile,
voyeur, and sexual deviant.
 How I Learned to Drive

 The play begins with Li’l Bit (all family nicknames

are derived from their sexual features and her
nickname derives from the family’s discovery at
birth that the baby’s genitals are “just a little bit”)
at age thirty-something reflecting on the “secret”
of her forbidden sexual life when she was an
adolescent.
 How I Learned to Drive

 The play is framed by Li’l Bit’s two monologues,

which set the emotional and physical landscape
for the adolescent’s sexual molestation.
 How I Learned to Drive

 Li’l Bit’s unspoken lesson is the residual effects,

twenty years later, of her seven-year sexual
molestation during her formative adolescent
years.
 She is suspended in a condition of alienation
from others, having become the perpetual
outsider and able to feel sensations only when
she is driving a car.
 How I Learned to Drive

 In her theory of memory, Paula Vogel puts

weight on the sensory dimensions of Li’l Bit’s
recollections – warm nights, full moon, and the
fragrance of leather car seats pressing against
her.
 How I Learned to Drive

 As the narrator, Li’l Bit’s control of the narrative

development affords her a creative role as she
puts a figurative hand into her memory bank and
pulls out the sexual initiations of her youth.
 How I Learned to Drive

 Music, like sound effects, is an important feature

of Vogel’s work.
 She tells us that before she sits down to write a
play, she makes a tape of songs and music to
play continuously throughout her process.
 How I Learned to Drive

 Nonetheless, Vogel’s is a balanced view of her

feminist landscape.
 For Vogel, the stage with its capacity for
metaphor and live performance is a vibrant site
for demonstrating the human act of
remembering.
 How I Learned to Drive

 Vogel’s ending is problematic.

 The final scene suggests that Li’l Bit cannot fully
escape the consequences of her abusive past.
 She has been damaged but she can come to an
understanding of her relationship with Pick.
 How I Learned to Drive

 As she works toward finding self-forgiveness,

understanding, and peace, she is effectively
getting on with her life.
 Gay and Lesbian Theatre

 Although homosexuality has been an occasional

topic in drama since the Greeks, it was the
primary focus in few plays until recently.
 Matt Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), the
first play on Broadway specifically about gay
men, is often said to have marked a turning
point in the acceptability of plays about
homosexuality, although all of its characters
were still treated as doomed or irrevocably
unhappy.
 Gay and Lesbian Theatre

 One of the best-known exponents of gay theatre

was Charles Ludlam (1943-1987), head of the
Ridiculous Theatrical Company from 1967 until
his death and author of several plays which
parodied familiar literary genres and the
absurdities of art and life, Ludlam acted in his
own plays, often playing several roles, most of
them female.
 Gay and Lesbian Theatre

 Beginning in the 1980s, the AIDS crisis

generated numerous gay plays, among the first
of which were Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart
and William Hoffman’s As Is, both in 1985.
 Later AIDS plays include Cheryl West’s Befor It
Hits Home, Terrence McNally’s Lips Together,
Teeth Apart, Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, and Richard
Greenberg’s Take Me Out.
 Gay and Lesbian Theatre

 Few lesbian plays were made their way into the

mainstream.
 Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove
and Holly Hughes’s The Well of Horniness are
among the best known.
 Gay and Lesbian Theatre

 Gay theatre companies in the United States

have included TOSOS, the Stonewall Theatre,
The Glines, and the Meridian Gay Theatre, all in
New York; Theatre Rhinoceros in San
Francisco; Diversity in Houston and others.
 Conclusion

 The theatre has become quite diverse.

 Broadway’s attempt to encompass all tastes
often leaves no one satisfied.
 Ultimately, the need for intercultural
communication and understanding may exceed
the need for unicultural theatre.