Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance) Review
Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance) Overview
Passing Performances gathers a range of critical and biographical essays on notable personalities whose major contributions to the stage occurred before 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots that kicked off the gay rights movement in the United States. How these theater practitioners variously "passed"-- i.e., managed unconventional sexual inclinations both on- and offstage--significantly determined the course of their personal and professional lives and thus the course of U.S. theater history.
The actors, directors, producers, and agents examined here include Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Adah Isaacs Menken, whose personal lives and careers traded on the same-sex erotics of "true love" in the antebellum period; Elisabeth Marbury, Elsie de Wolfe, Elsie Janis, Nance O'Neil, and Alla Nazimova, whose intimate female liaisons were variously interpreted around the turn of the century; the "lavender marriages" of Alfred Lunt to Lynne Fontanne and Guthrie McClintic to Katharine Cornell; the lesbian collaborations of Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford; the comic antics of Monty Woolley, which negotiated codified constructions of homosexual perversion in the post-Freudian interwar years; and the on- and offstage performances of Mary Martin and Joe Cino, which resisted the paranoid enforcements of heterosexual normality in the McCarthy era. Central to these investigations are the complex connections of performances of sexuality and gender and their different implications for men and women practitioners working under pervasive sexism and homophobia.
The volume also includes striking archival photographs of the performers and their performances, and an index to facilitate the cross-referencing of subjects' intersecting careers. Passing Performances will engage both general and academic readers interested in theater, gay and lesbian history, American studies, and biography.
Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of Fine Arts, Central College, Iowa. Kim Marra is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Iowa.
Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance) Specifications
From the suspect heroism of Edwin Forrest, paragon of 19th-century American manhood, to the "lavender marriage" of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the private lives of leading actors are unearthed in 14 stimulating essays by historians of American theater. The subtitle Queer Readings... is especially apt, in that Passing Performances continually addresses the promises and perils of "outing" famous figures who lived, in some cases, before the terms homosexual, gay, and lesbian were coined, and before many of the behaviors now associated with same-sex love took on their current meanings. While the best essays here explore the larger significance of these actors' romantic affiliations--how it affected their performances, for example, or their choice of roles--many have a more narrow focus on sexual orientation, and are thus hampered by what the editors call the "vexed and elusive" evidence of sex acts or desires. Lacking documentary evidence or eyewitness accounts, writers are forced to rely (with varying success) on gossip and anecdote, and sometimes on gender stereotyping. Mary Martin is classified as bisexual, for instance, almost solely on the basis of her haircut. Despite occasional leaps of faith, Passing Performances capably fills a longtime gap in theatrical history and the expanding queer curriculum. --Regina Marler
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