Pretty's Got Me All Bent Out of Shape: Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady and the Ritual of Queerness

In Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953), Laura Reynolds delivers what passes as a revelation to young Tom Lee before she locks the door, unbuttons her blouse, and requests that years from now, he speak of the ensuing encounter kindly: "Manliness is not all swagger and swearing and mountain climbing. Manliness is also tenderness, gentleness, considerat ion. You men think you can decide on who is a man, when only a woman can really know."¹ A half century after the lights dimmed with Tom's hand at Laura's breast, Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady, which premiered at the Humana Festival in 2006, exemplifies what has become possible for young men in queer theatre. Harrison is using the American stage to dismantle hegemonic assumptions about gender roles and sexual relevancy, as opposed to Anderson and his contemporaries, who perpetuated what Eve Sedgwick has called a "crisis of homo/heterosexual definition."²

Act a Lady is a response to John M. Clum's "challenge for post-Boys in the Band and post-Stonewall gay dramatists to find forms more suited to the creation of a positive gay self."³ Clum has observed that "in traditional, realistic drama, there is no meaningful place for gay experiences or explorations and expressions of what has been inadequately called the 'gay sensibility.'"⁴ Still, as Victor Turner writes in From Ritual to Theatre, "Theatre in complex, urbanized societies on the scale of 'civilizations' has become a specialized domain, where it has become legitimate to experiment with modes of presentation, many of which radically (and indeed, consciously) depart from Aristotle's model."⁵ With that specialization, we can see how Harrison is kinder to his gay boy than Anderson was to his straight boy. Turner continues: "Through the performance itself, what is normally sealed up, inaccessible to everyday observation and reasoning, in the depth of sociocultural life, is drawn forth—[Wilhelm] Dilthey uses the term Ausdruck, 'an expression,' from ausdrucken, literally, 'to press or squeeze out.'"⁶ To paraphrase the hypermasculine, moonshine-swilling bad boy True in Act a Lady, pretty's got Harrison's characters all bent out of shape. They do not need to return to the status quo ante of Tom's hand and Laura's breast.⁷

In demonstrating how queerness in Act a Lady manifests as ritualistic, I recall the distinction Victor Turner has made between the "tribal-liminal" and the "industrial-l iminoid,"⁸ particularly his assessment that the liminal in tribal societies cannot be subversive, but the liminoid in postagrarian industrial societies can be.⁹ Still, concluding his 1977 essay "Variations on a Theme of Liminality," Turner notes, "It remains true that in complex societies today's liminoid is yesterday's liminal."¹⁰

In "Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp," Moe Meyer argues that "what 'queer' signals is an ontological challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts."¹¹ I suggest that Meyer's "ontological challenge" constitutes the queer ritual in Act a Lady and ultimately answers John Clum's call for a suitable form. Such a ritual may be "today's liminoid," but because the self-actualization of the young gay man, Casper, requires him to undergo the "ontological challenge," the play indeed constitutes a "social drama."

In "The Queer Root of Theater," Laurence Senelick writes that "queer theater has an advantage in that its most essential component, sexual un-orthodoxy, still packs a considerable punch, for all the commercialization of the gay image . . . the enactment of sexual scenarios and gender metamorphosis still aims for the viscera."¹² In Act a Lady, that aim is also to legitimize. According to Eli Rozik, "Although secular rituals do not share the intention to reach the sacred, they may equally well fulfill these secondary functions [of promoting a sense of community and social cohesion, and bestowing legitimation of social and political order]."¹³

With my investigation of Harrison...