Playwright Sarah Schulman makes this assertion in this Slate interview. There are a fair number of Broadway plays centered on gay male characters, but no lesbian plays of this type (that I can recall). Why is this so?
In a country in which there’s no lesbian play in the repertoire—which is the case—
Well, Rent has both gay and lesbian couples. The Children’s Hour involves lesbianism (in a 30’s conception of it). There’s also The Killing of Sister George.
There also appears to be an anthology titled Amazon All-Stars: 13 Lesbian Plays
Schulman has no idea about how copyright works, either.
Oh, and the qualifier “in the main repetoire of American theater” is the propaganda technique of “Victory by Definition”*: you define the answer in such a way as to eliminate all reasonable counterexamples.
*Anyone else remember “The Propaganda Game”?
So, according to her, unless it’s a slam bang hit, there hasn’t been any at all?
I read that, too. It does annoy me that the musical not only ripped her off but undermined the message of her story, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say lesbian plays are being exluded from the repertoire. There really haven’t been many additions to the American drama canon recently. I remember Lewis Black saying about the Tonys, “I live in building that backs up to an alley behing Broadway, and I don’t give a f*ck about them.” I remember the gist of Julie Andrews’ speech at the Tonys, when she said that American theatre was moribund.
I can’t give you the name of a straight drama that was written in the past 20 years, though, tht wasn’t written by Mamet. The only exception would be Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, which my ex stage-managed (locally) before we were married. So it’s that one and ** Glengarry Glen Ross,** Oleanna and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. I’d be happy if there was theatre you’d want to be included in.
Sorry I missed these posts. Chuck, the playwright in question essentially wrote the play Rent. She was upset not so much because of that, but because her story had gay characters as the focus, and Rent marginalized them, and portrayed them in a way she objected to. The Children’s Hour isn’t exactly a great example of lesbian drama. I’m not familiar with Sister George.
Again, I don’t think lesbian drama is being excluded, it’s just there isn’t much interest in any drama anymore.
P.S. The wiki article calls it “a failed Broadway stage show.”, whereas I have always heard it was an Off-Broadway play. Which one was it? Anyone know what theater it was originally shown in?
I agree with saoirse. Lesbian dramas are being written (my husband personally knows a published lesbian playwright who writes them), but they’re not smash hits, and neither are most of the “heterosexual” plays written these days.
As a side note, I saw Sarah Schulman’s most recent play, Manic Flight Reaction, and it was really bad. You can read my husband’s review (he’s a playwright/writer) here. I’m a bit skeptical that Sarah Schulman’s going to write the Great American Lesbian Play.
No, she claimed that Rent was stolen from her novel. First of all, she gives no evidence that Jonathan Larsen ever read her novel in the first place. Without evidence of that, there can’t be plagiarism.
Second, Rent is based on La Boheme. Is she claiming to have written that? It’s clear that her novel is nothing like La Boheme, whereas Rent follows its general outlines pretty closely.
Every time there’s a big hit, posers come out of the woodwork claiming their story was stolen. And even if Larsen happened to use similar situations that she did, it’s not copyright infringement. This is just sour grapes from an author who sees plagiarism in every coincidence. (And I say this as someone who is not overly enamored of Rent – it’s good, but not great, and the last scene is one of the worst examples of cheap pandering to the audience I’ve seen since the “revised” “Romeo and Juliet” in Nicholas Nickleby).
Judging by the summary of the book on Amazon, the elements that are the same between the two are things that any writer dealing with the issues would have noticed.
The main reason there are more plays dealing with gays than lesbians is simple: AIDS. It’s a disease that’s inherently dramatic: incurable and a death sentence (less so these days, but still, it will get you eventually). But lesbians are at a low risk for getting the disease (I’m sure it still happens, but the number of cases where it’s spread by woman-to-woman sex is pretty small). Most plays about gays since the 80s have AIDS as a part of it. And many of these are plays about AIDS, not homosexuality.
(Though the concept of a lesbian with AIDS is certainly ripe for dramatic potential.)
Come to think of it, why are there no major plays about gay hunchbacked, hare-lipped Latvian dwarfs? Damn, it’s disgusting how provincial and closed-minded the commoners are. Hell, I understand there are people who have never attended a play and are still so impossibly ignorant as to think of themselves as decent people living worthwhile lives. Good thing there are so many progressive intellectuals around to remind them of what pigs they are, isn’t it?
[QUOTE=LonesomePolecat]
**Come to think of it, why are there no major plays ** about gay hunchbacked, hare-lipped Latvian dwarfs?
[QUOTE]
There will be, I’m working on that very play right now except they will have hook-hands.
[QUOTE=The Chao Goes Mu]
[QUOTE=LonesomePolecat]
**Come to think of it, why are there no major plays ** about gay hunchbacked, hare-lipped Latvian dwarfs?
If they’re using # 5 stainless Hosmer-Dorrance hooks the success of your play is guaranteed!
[sarcasm]I think the dearth of lesbian plays is more than made up by lesbian movies. Heck, there’s a whole lesbian movie section at my local video store. What more could lesbians possibly want?[/sarcasm]
[QUOTE=astro]
[QUOTE=The Chao Goes Mu]
GAH! :eek: On second thought, maybe hook-handed lesbian plays are not a good idea. The squick factor would be waaaay to high. If my girlfriend came at me with a hook-hand you wouldn’t be able to pry my legs open with the jaws of life.
That’s the second story I’ve read about Schulman in the last few months. I keep waiting for her to blame the problem on the prevalence of gay men in theatre.
