5 Trailblazing Plays That Set The Stage For LGBT History
From its designers to its performers to its authors, the theater is one of America’s most enduring and dependable safe queer spaces.
While they have always played major roles as theater artists, LGBT people have not always been reflected in the stage’s stories.
In honor of Logo’s Trailblazer Honors special tomorrow, June 27, we’re honoring five landmark plays that put LGBT people and issues in the spotlight.
1. The God of Vengeance, Sholem Asch (1907)
Asch’s play tells the story of an upstanding Jewish family whose patriarch runs a brothel in the basement of their home. The play’s salacious narrative depicted the hypocrisy of men of orthodox values.
But it was the play’s portrayal of a passionate romance between the brothel-keeper’s daughter and a prostitute that caused the most controversy. When the play premiered at the Apollo Theatre in New York in 1922, Asch and his cast were arrested for obscenity–the police citing the play’s lesbian love scene as its greatest offense.
Although the play is considered to be one of Asch’s best works, the playwright eventually refused to let it be performed in public.
2. The Drag, Mae West (1927)
Mae West was no stranger to controversy in 1927, having just served jail time for obscenity charges against her play Sex. Riding her notoriety from the trial, West wrote The Drag about the closeted son of a gay conversion therapist.
The play culminated in a drag ball, for which West cast real female impersonators and Broadway chorus boys who were “too effeminate” to land leading roles. West let the actors improvise most of their dialogue so that a script couldn’t be used against them. When West reworked the play into The Pleasure Man in 1928, the show was raided by the vice squad and the cast was arrested–several in full drag.
Arresting officers told the press they wanted the female impersonators to be arraigned for their crimes in costume. Understanding her cast was vulnerable to violence and unnecessary charges, West fought tirelessly to bail them out the following day.
3. The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley (1968)
Not every moment of The Boys in the Band has stood the test of time. Although Crowley’s story of a group of gays throwing a birthday party for their morose friend has a clever meta-awareness of the trope of the tragic queen, the play also indulges in some serious self-loathing itself.
Regardless of its more cringeworthy moments, The Boys in the Band stands as a watershed moment for gay representation. Crowley plays with all the existing stereotypes of the sissy supporting character–vanity, an acid tongue and a bitter outlook. But he makes his band of sissies the center of his story and sneaks up on their backgrounds. The party unravels and everyone drops their masks.
Although they can be painful to watch, the gay clichés of The Boys in the Band represent an important history. The gay community in 1968 had a lot to complain about. This was the theater’s first attempt at revealing that painful reality.
4. The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer (1985)
Of all the theater’s responses to the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart plays the most like an urgent and hard-bitten call to arms (as opposed to a helpless and inevitable tragedy). This might be partly due to its being written in 1985, but probably has more to do with its very urgent and hard-bitten author.
The protagonist of The Normal Heart, journalist Ned Weeks, is a Kramer stand-in. Larry Kramer was at the forefront of the fight to bring attention to AIDS, even facing conflict with his peers for his demand that gay men stop having sex until the virus was contained. Like Kramer, Ned’s confrontational style meets opposition from both outside and within the gay community.
The Normal Heart was a bold piece of protest theater, calling out the inaction of then-mayor Ed Koch directly. Kramer’s incendiary activism still bears an important lesson to today’s LGBT community: Sometimes the stakes are too high for polite restraint.
5. I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright (2003)
Wright’s play tells the incredible true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender survivor of both the Nazi and East German Communist regimes. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, von Mahlsdorf rose to prominence as a collector and curator of Weimar-era antiques that she protected from a lifetime of military conflict.
I Am My Own Wife portrays von Mahlsdorf as complex person whose gender identity is only a small part of her story: She was indoctrinated as a Nazi youth, she killed her abusive father with a rolling pin as a teenager and she was an informant to the East German Secret Police.
Written entirely for a single actor who takes on almost 40 characters (including the playwright himself), Charlotte is given complete authority over her identity–even the less than heroic parts of herself. Like all our other trailblazing plays, I Am My Own Wife takes a character that is often reduced to the background and makes her visible as the heart of its story, whether its audience is ready to see her or not.
The 2015 Trailblazer Honors air Saturday, June 27, at 8pm.
