Building a Theatrical Vernacular: Responsibility, Community, Ambivalence, and Queer Theatre

Building a Theatrical Vernacular: Responsibility, Community, Ambivalence, and Queer Theatre JILL DOLAN I originally presented the bulk of this article as the keynote at the Queer Theatre Conference presented in New York City last spring. "Queer Theatre, A Conference With Performances" was held April 27-29, 1995. The conference was presented by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and co-sponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center's Theatre Program; it was co-hosted by the Arts Program at the Judson Memorial Church, New York Theatre Workshop, La . Mama E.T.C., and .the Joseph Papp Public Theatre.I Because of the visibility and heft of CLAGS and its hosts, the conference was advertised nationally and attended by scholars, practitioners, critics, and spectators from around the United States. Because of the historical importance of the Queer Theatre conference, I've decided that I want to mark the occasion of that event here by preserving the keynote much as it was delivered. Often, when academics publish work that began as a lecture or a paper, our effort is to mask the original constituency for which it was written.' Rather than subsuming this piece in a rethought set of propositions, geared to a more readerly audience, I want to evoke the moment into which these words were spoken. I confess that I wrote the keynote address with some anxiety. I was nervous about being an academic in a crowd I assumed would be more practical or "public"; I was worried that my own ambivalences about the word "queer"as a description of a political movement and of an identity - made me an unlikely choice to speak first at the event.3 I worried that I was an outsider in a community that preceded me, a critic in a gathering of artists, a lesbian and a feminist crashing the so-called "golden age of gay theatre," which I knew celebrated mostly white gay men. I didn't want to be responsible for setting the tone or for spoiling the party before it began. Alisa Solomon, one of the two conference coordinators, persuaded m.e that I Modern Drama, 39 (1996) J 2 Jll..LDOLAN should give the keynote, and in retrospect I appreciate her insistence. Despite my trepidations, I was honored to speak first and gratified by the response. I was moved by the palpable sense of community I felt that night in the Judson Memorial Church, with over two hundred people who came to share their commitments, compulsions, and questions about the status of queer theatre and performance. Looking out over the group, I felt as though I were speaking with them, from them, in a way that made it okay to express my doubts and ambivalences, my pride and my pleasure. I'd expected to see a lot of twenty-something people at the conference, wearing black clothing and confrontation T-shirts proclaiming their politics; this, I suppose, is my own preconception about what constitutes "queer" sartorial style.4 Instead, I saw an older crowd of people, probably in their thirties to fifties, dressed 'in a more traditional mix of hippie-funky-preppy gay-andlesbian -wear. Painting the scene like this might convey the demographics that had much to do with the kinds of conversations the conference ultimately inspired. In the process of offering in print the keynote address I performed in public, I've kept things pretty much the same, except for changing the presumptive audience to Modern Drama's readers, revising the tense of things here and there, and including a few additional remarks. I share it here as a memento of an occasion that meant a lot to me, and quite a lot to the history and future of gay and lesbian theatre. Let me say that I see my role here as setting out some ideas with which I hope we'll quarrel during the next three days. If queer means anything at all, especially as an adjective for theatre, it means multiplicity. It can't be anything as stable or coherent as agreement over what we're about here. And that's good. Yet...