Monday, October 28, 2024
Finding Community and Joy in Sharing Lost Queer Plays
HowlRound Theatre Commons: I hear it from my students, my audiences, my colleagues, and my friends: give us queer joy! Give us queer narratives that transcend the typical tragedies of historical queer dramas! Give us queer plays without suicide, without AIDS-related death, without concentration camps, without bashing, without familial rejection. Give us unadulterated joy!
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This is such a hard line to walk. If what theatre is striving for is catharsis, then it should be as true to life and real people’s struggles as possible, but that can be very exhausting for audiences, especially when that is all that is available to them. A tired theatergoer might argue that theater is actually about escape, but an overreliance on frivolity that skates over real issues is passing up important opportunities to make change. There is no neat answer or ratio to this question; they are just different types of theatre, with different purposes, and since anyone can make theatre, we have to trust in the balance of the universe that both will find their audiences. I love the spirit of this revisiting sort of underground queer plays to get to explore and really show how queer people have always been here, and have always had nuanced and enriching experiences and stories to tell.
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