Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (review)

Uncloseting Drama wrangles with American modernism’s anti-theatricality by presenting a convincing account of the ways in which literary modernism gained access to and transmitted a very particular sense of queerness through closet drama. Among the book’s surprises is a first chapter on Ezra Pound, a writer well-known not only for his homophobia, but also for his misogyny and anti-Semitism. The closet dramas of Pound might seem an odd object of study for queer theatre research. But, given that the work of queer inquiry is not simply to celebrate the lives and works of exemplary gays and lesbians, but instead to attend to the animating force of queer energies that saturate various cultural sites that may or may not be attached to queer biographies or even experiences, it is an apt choice. Addressing Pound, Salvato finds him to “front” a version of modernism that the book seeks to “uncloset.” Subsequent chapters treat iconic queer modernists like Gertrude Stein (chapter 3) and Djuna Barnes (chapter 4), but also more ambiguous figures, such as Louis Zukofsky (chapter 2). Crisply written and brimming with easy erudition, Salvato’s outstanding new book is an important contribution to queer theatre criticism and modernist studies.

In his introduction, Salvato describes the three “masters” he is “serving” as modernist, queer, and performance studies (17). His word choice is self-effacing insofar as he does not so much “serve” as augment these scholarly fields with this important intervention. Following the lead of Martin Puchner’s Stage Fright, Uncloseting Drama gives the literary critical category of closet drama a new and vibrant life. Resisting the rigid category of genre criticism, Salvato instead describes the closet drama as a mode of performance that, invoking Stein’s Saint Teresa in Four Saints in Thr ee Acts, is “half in and half out” of the wings. Salvato wades through well-worn debates on the question of liveness, clearing space between anticipatable reifying celebrations of the live body in performance and W. B. Worthen’s observation that performance studies recapitulates the textual bias it purports to reject. Staking out a middle ground, Salvato reads closet drama as a queer mode of performance that negotiates modernism’s ambivalence toward theatricality, while unleashing a performative force that resists sexual and gender normativity.

With this theoretical understanding of closet drama in place, Uncloseting Drama adroitly links its reemergence within high modernism to mounting tensions around sexuality and nationalism in the twentieth century. The book’s introduction poignantly introduces the theme of violence that is yoked to most examples of anti-normative sex and sexuality in the texts and performances considered within its pages. As Salvato shows, for Pound, violence serves as a metaphor for sexuality; Zukofsky juxtaposes queer desire with heterosexual “placid[ity]” (64); Stein alternately critiques the inherent violence of heterosexuality and hints that similar conflicts define same-sex desire; and in Barnes, as readers of her astonishing novel Nightwood know, sexuality is linked to eruptions of violence.

The thematic of violence emerges as a strong secondary line of analysis in Uncloseting Drama, but the book’s primary focus is trained on a queerly valenced closet drama that allowed these modernists to partially reject the theatre, while maintaining a concrete investment in the transformative potential of performance. Salvato frames his chapter titles through concepts that are mostly borrowed from sexual vernaculars: Pound “fronts” or poses; Zukofsky, depicted as a submissive and receptive modernist who eschews mastery, “bottoms” for Pound, queerly fronting him in their correspondence; Stein is revealed as a dominant “top” who is prone to sadism; and Barnes “backs” “failed utopic visions of lesbian incest” (141) in a reading that offers a very queer alternative to modernist studies’ depiction of her.

Within these chapters, Salvato attends to Pound’s cross-gender identifications in his translations of Japanese Nō plays and Athenian drama. The book also considers Zukofsky’s queer translations, but shines most when Salvato reads the closet-drama penchant for polyvocality that runs throughout...