Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 265
of societies who are both proud of their heritage and
longing for harmony.
Choctaw-American actress Shyla Marlin plays Carlisle in Carolyn
Dunn’s The Frybread Queen in the 2011 premiere production in Los
Angeles by Native Voices. The playwright and cast members were all
of Native American heritage. © Tony Dontscheff Photography
A THEATRE OF DIFFERENCE
Gender, race, ethnicity, geography, and language are
not the only sources of the new voices entering the
theatre’s mainstream in the current era. Sexual identity
has emerged as a defining issue for many theatre
groups, festivals, and publications that seek to examine
the political, cultural, and aesthetic implications
of gay- and lesbian-themed drama. Sexual preference
remained buried deeply in the closet during most of the
theatre’s history. As recently as 1958 the representation
of homosexuality was illegal in England and widely
(though not legally) suppressed in America. The love
that “dared not speak its name” came to the stage only
through authors’ subtle references and audiences’ inferences.
Gay playwrights such as Oscar Wilde, Tennessee
Williams, Gertrude Stein, Edward Albee, William Inge,
and Gore Vidal were forced to speak—at certain critical
moments in their work—only by innuendo and through
coded language.
Dramatic changes occurred in the late 1960s, when gay
and lesbian life and gay and lesbian issues began to be
treated as serious dramatic subjects, most notably by Mart
Crowley in his groundbreaking American comedy The
Boys in the Band (1968). Since then, sexual-preference
issues have become principal or secondary topics in
hundreds of plays, including mainstream Broadway
musicals (Fun Home, La Cage aux Folles, March of the
Austin Smith (right) plays a black
playwright who, before our eyes, applies
white makeup to play white roles—both
the heroic “George” (shown here) and the
evil “M’Closky”—in Branden Jacobs-
Jensen’s An Octoroon, which was
adapted from Dion Boucicault’s The
Octoroon, an 1859 melodrama rooted in
American slavery, and performed in 2015
at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience.
Mary Wiseman (left) plays the American
heiress in love with Smith’s “George.”
© Gerry Goodstein