Drama

The Laramie Project

For a year and a half following the murder of Matthew Shepard, Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project-whose previous play, Gross Indecency, was hailed as a work of unsurpassed originality-conducted hundreds of interviews with the citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, to create this portrait of a town struggling with a horrific event.

The savage killing of Shepard, a young gay man, has become a national symbol of the struggle against intolerance. But for the people of Laramie-both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him-the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation.

Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches (Angels in America)

The Q Guide to Broadway (Pop Culture Out There Q Guide)

The Great White Way has paved the way for some of the most legendary performers in history. But Broadway is more than a street, it's a community. In this Q Guide, a true Broadway expert takes theater fans on the ultimate insider's tour.

Tiopa Ki Lakota

The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?

Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee's most provocative, daring, and controversial play since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat won four major awards for best new play of the year (Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle). In the play, Martin, a successful architect who has just turned fifty, leads an ostensibly ideal life with his loving wife and gay teenage son. But when he confides to his best friend that he is also in love with a goat (named Sylvia), he sets in motion events that will destroy his family and leave his life in tatters.

The playwright himself describes it this way: "Every civilization sets quite arbitrary limits to its tolerances. The play is about a family that is deeply rocked by an unimaginable event and how they solve that problem. It is my hope that people will think afresh about whether or not all the values they hold are valid."

Corpus Christi

2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Most Humiliating Stories

This book collects Lisa Kron's two extraordinary solo performance works. Best known for her ongoing work as a member of The Five Lesbian Brothers, Kron's solo pieces are very personal examinations of both herself and her family history. This is singularly clear in 2.5 Minute Ride, where her writing deftly maneuvers between the tragic drama of the Holocaust and the wry comedy of her family's attempts to pursue pleasure at the local amusement park. This critically acclaimed work played to sold out audience for over six months at New York's Public Theatre. Also included is the riotous 101 Most Humiliating Stories, which first premiered in 1993, and in fact only consists of seventeen tales but each, as the author observes, has several humiliations. It recounts the adventures and misadventures of a self-described Big Lesbian as she tests the boundaries of decorum in social and professional situations.

Out of the Fringe

There is a new generation of Latina/o dramatists afoot. According to Caridad Svich, editor of Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance, "There is a wave of dramatists, storytellers and poets, creating work intensely personal and idiosyncratic, eerie and lyrical, metaphysical and emotive. Flourishing within the margins of an already marginalized theatrical environment, they align themselves with resurgent poetry and the spoken-word movement, with alternative music and literature scenes; their work is bred on the economics of poetry and the nurturing of their work outside official venues."

Collected here are 10 beautifully inventive, shape-changing, form-molding, poetic masterworks of the American theatre:

Luis Alfaro, Straight as a Line
Coco Fusco/Nao Bustamante, Stuff
Migdalia Cruz, Fur
Nilo Cruz, Night Train to Bolina
Naomi Iizuka, Skin
Oliver Mayer, Ragged Time
Pedro Monge-Rafuls, Trash
Cherre Moraga, The Hungry Woman: Mexican Medea
Monica Palacios, Greetings from a Queer Seorita
Caridad Svich, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man's Blues

Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)

Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America

While working as a theater critic for Manhattan's New York Press in 1996, novelist Sarah Schulman reviewed the original off-Broadway production of the eventual worldwide hit Rent. She did not particularly like the show and resented what she saw as its easy and simple-minded appropriation of the East Village's gay and alternative cultures. It was only later, when a friend pointed it out to her, that she began to see that the writer and composer of Rent, Jonathan Larson, had "borrowed" a good chunk of his play's plot and detail from Schulman's own 1987 novel People in Trouble. This shock of recognition was transformative, and it ultimately led to the writing of Stagestruck.

Schulman begins with an unhappy account of having her novel ripped off by Larson, but uses this as a springboard to discuss the broader and more complex issues of how gay themes--particularly AIDS--are used and distorted in mainstream culture, focusing her discussion on a wide range of entertainments including the film Philadelphia, Jon Robin Baitz's play A Fair Country, performances by Diamanda Galas, and POZ magazine. As in her best novels, Schulman's observations on culture and politics are astute and startlingly original. Stagestruck is an incisive and important work of social criticism. --Michael Bronski

In Stagestruck noted novelist and outspoken critic Sarah Schulman offers an account of her growing awareness of the startling similarities between her novel People in Trouble and the smash Broadway hit Rent. Written with a powerful and personal voice, Schulman’s book is part gossipy narrative, part behind-the-scenes glimpse into the New York theater culture, and part polemic on how mainstream artists co-opt the work of “marginal” artists to give an air of diversity and authenticity to their own work. Rising above the details of her own case, Schulman boldly uses her suspicions of copyright infringement as an opportunity to initiate a larger conversation on how AIDS and gay experience are being represented in American art and commerce.
Closely recounting her discovery of the ways in which Rent took materials from her own novel, Schulman takes us on her riveting and infuriating journey through the power structures of New York theater and media, a journey she pursued to seek legal restitution and make her voice heard. Then, to provide a cultural context for the emergence of Rent—which Schulman experienced first-hand as a weekly theater critic for the New York Press at the time of Rent’s premiere—she reveals in rich detail the off- and off-off-Broadway theater scene of the time. She argues that these often neglected works and performances provide more nuanced and accurate depictions of the lives of gay men, Latinos, blacks, lesbians and people with AIDS than popular works seen in full houses on Broadway stages. Schulman brings her discussion full circle with an incisive look at how gay and lesbian culture has become rapidly commodified, not only by mainstream theater productions such as Rent but also by its reduction into a mere demographic made palatable for niche marketing. Ultimately, Schulman argues, American art and culture has made acceptable a representation of “the homosexual” that undermines, if not completely erases, the actual experiences of people who continue to suffer from discrimination or disease. Stagestruck’s message is sure to incite discussion and raise the level of debate about cultural politics in America today.