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.

Chapter 3 turns to the stage, and to plays that transform stages into dining rooms and dining rooms into stages in ways that reveal the heightened theatricality inherent in the dinner party. Beginning with the failed courtship of Jim and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, it traces a recursive path through a set of dinner party plays that dramatize interpersonal processes of constructing a family, from courtship to marriage (Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House) to raising children (Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner). This chapter, “Commensality and Temporality at the Dinner Party,” intervenes in a discourse of commensality that understands the table simply as a space where genuine connection is made possible by the shared activity of eating, and demonstrates why the dinner party has become the exemplary subject of modern drama.

This chapter discusses historical fiction about Clodia Metelli (wrongly supposed to be Catullus’ Lesbia), from Marcel Schwob in 1895 to Kenneth Benton in 1974; a short postscript refers to subsequent treatments of the subject.