The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater (review)

This eclectic array of essays, inspired by a Queer Theatre Conference at The City University of New York in 1995, is touted on the back cover as "a pioneering collection of articles by and conversations among a diverse range of leading theater academics and artists." While offering some truly fine, thoughtful, and even provocative writings useful for both the classroom and theatre practice, the "pioneering" promise has perhaps faded since the collection's catalytic gathering, and several of the dialogues published are not as effective as are the stand-alone essays.

Many of the contributors look at the debate around embracing or rejecting the term "queer" for their work and themselves, whether they are scholars or artists (and some regard themselves as both). Jill Dolan's prefatory remarks, from her keynote address at the conference, aptly set the stage for the essays that follow. She argues that "queer" means multiplicity, and that to be queer "is not who you are, it's what you do" (5).

Alisa Solomon, in "Great Sparkles of Lust: Homophobia and the Antitheatrical Tradition," deftly links the Puritan fear of the performances of boy-actresses in early modern England with contemporary anxieties about queer performance in the (historically antitheatrical) United States. She points out that theatre is a place where "heteronormative master plots could be undercut and questioned through self-conscious performance styles, even as they were played out in the stories staged" (14).

In the incisive "The Queer Root of Theater," Laurence Senelick contends that "queer theater cannot be created from without: the status of its creator as 'queer' within a 'straight' society is, at some level, its raw material" (21), and that "theater is most truly itself when it is most queer" (24). He contextualizes the queer theatre, with its "most essential component," "sexual unorthodoxy" (25), in the larger picture, from the queerness of kabuki to his consideration of Ubu Roi as the first Western queer play. Senelick further distinguishes queer work—that is, texts about queer subjects generally written by queers—from queer sensibility in producing work that may not necessarily be queer. He cites the style of the Glasgow Citizen's Theatre, a company of queer artists who produce work not necessarily originally intended as queer, as "more challenging and more elegantly presented than their counterparts elsewhere" (35).

The essays of Ania Loomba, Valerie Traub, and David Savran achieve varying degrees of success in balancing scholarship with keeping on topic and maintaining focus. Savran discusses the problem of "queer" as both a term and an identity, and asserts that a truly queer theatre is still a "utopian fantasy," because women and people of color still haven't been able to achieve the same visibility as white gay men (165). Don Shewey's writing on the pioneers of queer theatre (redundant, in several places, with his remarks in a panel discussion elsewhere in the book) exemplifies the purpose of the entire volume: "Queerness and theater seem inextricably linked, twined around each other like flesh and spirit" (126). David Román and Tim Miller make a compelling argument for a "lesbian and gay theater that supposedly preaches to the converted" as a "valuable, indeed viable, activity" (206).

"From the Invisible to the Ridiculous," a transcript of a conversation among artists who represent the "emergence of an out aesthetic" (135), includes Moe Angelos, Ana Maria Simo, Susan Finque, Doric Wilson, Lola Pashalinski, and Everett Quinton. This discussion contains the problems inherent in converting an audiotaped record to print, from repetitive comments not being edited out to the mistranscription of what is heard. For example, Susan Finque's mention of Kate Bornstein's play reads as Hidden Agenda, instead of its title Hidden: A Gender, so the intentional play of words about transgendered identity is lost (although perhaps that's only annoying to...