Dear Pen Pal: The Queer Peanuts of Dog Sees God

Introduction

I leave the stage having delivered the curtain speech and watch as the world goes dark. In the darkness, I see the actor playing CB move to his block and sit. He reaches his mark and my stage manager hits the cue to begin the show. The lights come up on a blonde boy, clad in yellow; he is writing a letter, his melancholy is palpable. "Dear Pen Pal," he speaks. The audience is slowly drawn into his monologue. He is both Charlie Brown, and not Charlie Brown all at once. The play has begun, and the audience meets a new, queered version of a favorite childhood comic strip.

For the past year I have been developing Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead (2006) as part of my department's 2018–19 "Elsewhere" low-tech season of theatre. This essay, as a result, exists at the intersection of scholarship and creative endeavor. Taking an autoethnographic approach, I examine and unpack the creative decisions that went into the final production of Dog Sees God. I argue that this production exists through a collection of queer world-making and memory, and movement and choreography; in defining each of these areas, I evidence the role of theory in shaping my praxis, and ultimately, creating the world of the production. I consult my personal directing notes and conversations with my cast and production team as an archive of creation. I then use those interlocutors to provide further evidence of embodied theory that points to the ways in which my staging of Dog Sees God functioned as utopia.

Words like queer and utopia are slippery and fraught with different meanings depending on the person utilizing them. I use queer as both noun and verb throughout my praxis. As a noun, I use it as a stand-in for LGBT+ community; as a verb, I think of queer as a pedagogy to disrupt or reimagine systems that can reveal to audiences' new ways of doing and being. Furthermore, I use Sara Ahmed's theories on orientation and straightness to think about how lines of movement in the space can be queered and reoriented by various exercise that asks audiences to question character. In my conceptualization of utopia, I build from Jill Dolan and José Esteban Muñoz as a way of pointing toward hope, that theatre might ultimately provide an affective structure on the horizon that offers audiences' a glimmer of something better on the horizon, that might affect social change.

For me, directing this production meant not only looking at theories of queer scholarship, but also finding ways to encode research into theatricality to reveal that future, or the promise of queerness. Many glimpses of queerness prompted the production aesthetic. First, Dog Sees God queers nostalgia for the childhood classic comic strip Peanuts (1950). The characters in Dog Sees God are those characters and not those characters simultaneously. They invoke the spirit of their younger selves while seeking to become something or, rather, someone new. Second, Dog Sees God features queer characters. While the sexual orientation of many characters can be debated, and in some cases their queerness questioned, queer individuals certainly exist in Royal's play. As a gay man, scholar, and creator, I invest in and tell stories to which I feel connection. I am not interested in storytelling worlds that are populated solely by heterosexuals. In a time where representation is increasingly scrutinized and addressed within the public sphere, in film, television, theatre, and social media, it is important to show the world as in its multiplicity. For me, this means that identities other than dominant heterosexuality should be staged. For minority groups, there is power and utopic hope in seeing a piece of you reflected onstage.

Additionally, the structure of the Elsewhere season and limitations set forth by the decision committee required me to consider the blocking and creation of this cohesive world in new ways. For those working in academic spaces, minimalistic aesthetics might not be considered inherently queer. There are often budget constraints and other...