March 2018
In front of me stands a student who has written a play that the faculty has selected to receive a workshop and staged reading at my previous institution in upstate New York. The student has the typical litany of questions: When can rehearsals start, can they use props, can the reading be on a weekend so their parents can come?
But one question is atypical.
“Can you add a question to the audition form about whether the actors auditioning are queer?”
I ask them why they want that question on the form.
“The play is about my queer experience, and it would be inappropriate for a straight person to say these words.”
I explain to the student that, legally, we can’t require auditioners to declare whether they identify as queer. I also point out that required declarations of whether one does or does not identify as queer have, historically, not ended well for queer populations and that perhaps we should not hasten to return to such practices.
But the student is adamant; they will not allow their play to be performed with a student who identifies as straight, and they share that they cannot tolerate hearing potentially straight actors read the lines at callbacks. I share that they most likely have a number of classmates who are queer who have not come out yet and that participating in this reading might help those students with their coming out journeys. I also remind the student that while, legally, they cannot ask the auditioners if they identify as queer, they can certainly talk with them in callbacks about how their lived experiences prepare them for rehearsals.
“That’s like allowing a white person to audition for Fences!” the student exclaims. They storm off before I can point out that most queer theorists would caution them against synonymizing race, sexuality, and gender identity as they just had.
The faculty does not add the question about queer identity to the audition form; the student is still able to cast the play and goes on to have a productive workshop that foments important conversations in our department.
A few weeks later, a reporter from the local newspaper asks to interview me about the play I am directing on campus that same semester. The recent election saw a decisive victory in the county for the Republican candidates for both governor and congress, both of whom the paper endorsed. As I talk about my vision for the show and my practice as a queer theatremaker, the interviewer interrupts me. “Why do you keep saying that word, ‘queer’?” he demands. I ask him for some clarity, and he explains that, “if I’m allowed to say queer, then I should be allowed to say…” and then rattles off a list of racial slurs he believes he should be allowed to say since I am using the word “queer” to define myself and my artistry.
Earlier in the month, on the first day of my queer theatre history class, I had written the word “queer” on the chalkboard and asked students to define it. By the end of class, we’d filled much of the chalkboard space. We talked about the reclaiming of this pejorative and how the word, unlike some other slurs, had lost much of its negative connotations and gone mainstream. Students discussed with nuance what has been gained, and also what has been lost, now that “queer” had such a capacious definition.
Yet here I was on the phone with a local community member who was aghast that I was even speaking the word, after engaging with a student who demanded that auditioners declare their queerness.
Eight years ago, the bifurcation had already begun.
As I wrote about previously for HowlRound, a queer theatre is many things: a physical space, a genre of drama, and an ethos of mutual aid that is fomented by queer collaboration. The essays collected in this series suggest that queer theatre on college campuses is similarly a space between multiple realities, but that these multiple realities have grown significantly more extreme. Queer theatre on college campuses today is made by a generation of students who arrive with unprecedented fluency in the languages of identity, embodiment, and self-determination and who live within a broader culture increasingly willing to weaponize fear against those very freedoms. To make queer theatre on college campuses today is to live within this juxtaposition. It is to watch students and colleagues create work with staggering generosity and imagination while knowing that outside our walls, legislatures, school boards, mass media, and electorates may be moving in the opposite direction.
How do we make common ground in our classrooms and on our stages both for students who demand that only openly queer undergraduates get to audition for queer plays and also for students who are still closeted or who may share some of the views towards queerness that permeate the other leg of our K-shaped cultural moment? The essays in this series, in different ways, seek to not only find answers to these questions, but also to ask different, perhaps equally relevant questions.
