21 - Queer American Drama

Summary

This chapter traces a strand of contemporary queer American drama that replays key figures and texts of the modernist era. With its recurrent return to canonical works and figures of literary and theatrical modernism, this late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century drama literalizes Marvin Carlson’s notion that theatre is a fundamentally haunted art, in this case by the queer figures and texts of its cultural past, and resonates with Carla Freccero’s view of spectrality as a mode of queer historiography. Adaptations, too, are ghostly, haunted, as Linda Hutcheon notes, by their source texts and dependent on repetition and change. In the contemporary queer replays, the modernist era serves as a touchstone against which to consider continuity and change in the historical and cultural representation of gender and sexuality. Queer modernism thus haunts contemporary queer drama, often literalizing this haunting by featuring ghosts. This chapter considers linked works spanning these two temporalities to suggest key moments in and features of the history of queer American drama, and theatre’s role in representing and reimagining how queer lives have been, are, and might be lived.