Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History (review)

In Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, editors Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke present fourteen essays that diligently work to recuperate the ways in which same-sex desires have shaped the creative sensibilities of the American stage. These essays set out to investigate the lives of a number of theatre artists and reclaim their work and identities from past and present systems of oppression, combating a culture that continually fosters a "climate of shame and risk surrounding same-sex eroticism" (4). In the opening essay, Marra's thoughtful study of late-nineteenth-century playwright and director Clyde Fitch establishes a tone for the collection. Marra's biographical narrative is a cautionary tale of a young aesthete whose reverence for Oscar Wilde (letters recently uncovered by Wilde scholars suggest the two men were lovers during the late-1880s) inspired a profitable career on the Broadway stage. The essay dances around Fitch's sexuality, building credible evidence that his identity confusion shaped his creative imagination. Ultimately, Fitch chose to deny his sexual impulses, utilizing the "theatre as his primary means of containing as well as expressing his transgressive desire" (43).

The essays that follow treat such figures as Djuana Barnes, Lorenz Hart, Eric Bentley, and Jean Rosen-thal, and although they are individually well researched and intelligently written, the collection as a whole assumes an inherent, essentialist ontology. The challenges the contributors confronted while reading the multiple, often conflicting signs and sign-bearing relics—including those signs suggesting active concealment—are not always satisfactorily surmounted. Indeed, more often than not, the absence of signs is transformed into a performative trope that generates scholarly evidence out of thin air. Marra and Schanke have collected a number of intriguing and informative portraits of artists workingat the margins of American cultural norms, but the conclusions arrived at by a majority of the scholars feel thin. Jane T. Peterson, in her study of Robert Edmond Jones, invests much effort filling in the gaps made visible by the anecdotes and artifacts available to her. Peterson argues Jones was a closeted gay man based upon a single piece of gossip handed down to one of this anthology's editors by a senior theatre scholar who, in turn, received the rumor a half-century earlier from a fellow graduate student who once worked as an assistant to Jones. The fact that Peterson is willing to "out" Jones while protecting the identity of her source is only one concern in a sea of many unsubstantiated facts and assumptions.

J. K. Curry's portrait of a closeted Rachel Crothers reveals little as to how her sexuality informed her writing and directing. Crothers's plays are steeped in the norms of heterosexual behavior, and though she wrote independent woman characters that test the boundaries of gendered expectations, the economics of the commercial stage continually shaped her work. Crothers's female characters rarely, if ever, defy middle-class norms. Robert A. Schanke's brief overview of poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Mercedes de Acosta is also problematic. Schanke predominantly catalogs de Acosta's sexual exploits with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Eva Le Gallienne, as well as documenting her consuming desire for fame and celebrity. Indeed, Shanke reveals de Acosta to be a woman "blinded by sexual passion," but in such a short essay (Schanke's book on the writer has just been published) de Acosta's life in art reads as little more than high-minded melodrama (101).

The best essays in this anthology study the production of sexual identities in actual perform-ance settings where the products of a culture at any given historical moment become sites of negotiation and opposition to the hegemony of dominant ideologies. Lisa Merrill, for example, looks at the "economy of homoerotic desire" that shaped the intimate bonds of friendship between...