Directing Queer Theatre at Its Edges on College Campuses: An Invitation

It’s an odd time to teach queer theatre and direct queer plays on college campuses. While we in the United States have become accustomed to conversations about our K-shaped economy, I experience a similar K-shaped distention culturally, especially in regard to queerness. While progressive values and liberatory practices regarding the LGBTQ community have reached wider cultural saturation, so has a polarized opposition that threatens the safety of queer people, especially people of color, women, genderqueers, and immigrants. More than 20 percent of Gen Z identifies as queer; simultaneously, nationwide support for same-sex marriage has dropped 6 points and support for trans rights has dropped by 12 points in the last two years.

This K-shaped cultural bifurcation, with its disparate arms, profoundly impacts my work as a professor of queer theatre. I look out at the students in my classes at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and I see a more diverse, more empowered group of students than ever before; their identities reflect many different subsections of the spectra of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, background, and class. Then I look beyond our campus, and I see a world aiming to curtail their access to medical care, the ballot box, and basic civil rights.

November 2024

Peppermint Patty is weeping. Schroeder’s fists are clenched so tightly I worry that they will break a finger. Lucy and Snoopy are holding each other. And we open tomorrow.

Six weeks into our rehearsal process, the company of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown at Drew University has taken to referring to our production as “Our Big Gay Multicultural Charlie Brown.” My cast, most of whom identify as queer, several of whom are trans-identified, and some of whom have undocumented family members, have gelled into one of my all-time favorite squads. They work hard. They take care of each other. And they have never shied away from the childlike play that the musical demands.

But tonight, the day before we open, we have spent the first hour of rehearsal gathered in a circle, often in tears, discussing how to perform this piece of light, sweet theatre on the day after our country has elected a president whose platform was built upon a bedrock of transphobia and anti-queer rhetoric. Within the walls of our black box theatre, these remarkable college students have used queer theatre practices throughout rehearsal. Snoopy vogues and duck-walks in high-drag fashion throughout “Suppertime.” Peppermint Patty draws upon clandestine middle-school same-sex crushes for their vignettes with Marcie. The show they have built is a delightful version of Peanuts that nobody had ever seen before.

The night before, a decided national referendum had rebuffed our work; in the county in which we were performing, 51 percent of voters had voted for the Republican candidate. The juxtaposition in the room was staggering: How could we have created in our theatre such a utopia while outside the powers of repression and censorship were congealing?

July 2026

This summer, in conjunction with the 2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, I am curating a HowlRound Journal series featuring essays from college professors (and two remarkable graduating seniors!) from across the nation. In order to include experiences impacted by both sides of the K-shaped cultural moment, we decided to specifically focus on queer theatre on campuses not located within historically queer urban centers. We asked the writers to respond to the question “What is it like to direct queer theatre on college campuses today?” from their specific, localized lived experiences. These essays share wisdom and experiences of directing fiercely queer theatre in such disparate places as rural upstate New York, the cornfields of Illinois, beneath the MAGA billboards of central Ohio, and within the wealthiest purple suburbs of New Jersey. In each essay, our queer brethren speak not to the constrictions of our era, but to its dynamic possibilities. Universally, they demonstrate the power of queer magic to expand the limitations of who is welcome in our theatres, on our campuses, and in our hearts.

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.

September 2024

During early rehearsals for You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, I offer my undergraduate cast some thoughts on community. I introduce them to the history of queer societies in the United States; in particular queer performance societies, who created cultures and communities of mutual aid. We talk about Café Cino, Doric Wilson’s TASOS Theater, and Wow Café, places where queers could find each other at the bar after performances or in rehearsal. I speak about queer playwrights like Miguel Piñero, Jerry Douglas, Jane Chambers, and their contemporaries, who allowed queer expression in their moment and provided a model of “outness” that was rarely found in pop culture. I propose to the group that “queer theatre” is combinatory, simultaneously the physical space of the theatre and the ephemeral space of a queer theatre ethos. Both of these spaces are built around fearlessness, camp, and subversiveness. I share with the cast how I am equally inspired by the collectively minded queens of the sixties, seventies, and eighties who turned ballroom from a place into a culture as I am by Sylvia Rivera’s “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech at the 1973 New York Gay Pride Rally, where she demanded place be made for trans women of color in a cis-white space and, in doing so, created a new community of otherwise marginalized queers in New York.

To welcome in all students, not just those who identify as queer, after offering this brief history of queer mutual aid societies, I share an observation of the Peanuts characters that they are about to embody: “These kids are weird! They’re also happy. They’re so happy that they finish their show by singing a song called ‘Happiness.’ They create happiness for themselves.” We go on to discuss how we each identify as weird; most students speak about how it related to their queerness.

With the history of queer theatre societies introduced and the benefits of weirdness celebrated, I invite students to mutually create community norms and standards. While many of them mirror the same agreements students have asserted at the beginning of other processes and classes, like “have patience” and “meet deadlines,” many of the other guidelines are unusual, like “Say yes to the adventure and to boundaries,” “Hold my colleagues accountable in an understanding way” and “See things with soft eyes, looking at everything like it’s the first time I’m seeing it.” While not specifically “queer,” per se, each of these directives could have come from the mutual aid societies created in the queer theatre of the sixties and seventies.

Beyond creating a society of queer mutual aid, embracing this queer community ethos enables students to surface the latent queerness of the canonical Peanuts characters. Early in rehearsal, I invite students to embrace a childhood whimsy that believes anything is possible. What we quickly discover is that the heteronormative strictures of our society vanish; it seems every time I invite students to think imaginatively, their queerness steers their choices. For example, the non-binary student playing Schroeder revels in exploring how the character embodies “diva.” In the words of the young actor playing Charlie Brown, “the cute little red-headed girl” Charlie Brown has a crush on becomes, in his mind, “a fierce drag queen that I want to kiki with.”

Two months later, the day after the election, the day before we open, once we’ve dried our tears and shaken out our bodies, I am able to remind the company about this history, and I point out to them that they have managed to create their own society of mutual aid in the model of these queer ancestors. They take the stage; the dress rehearsal, and the entirety of the run that follows, is the kind of joyful tonic that audiences need in a difficult week. We create in our performances space between the bifurcated arms of our K-shaped cultural moment without compromising our own queer practices.

July 2026

My own mechanisms for creating a capacious space in my classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and individual meetings with students have always been grounded in history and the lessons of my queer ancestors, as I did in rehearsal for Charlie Brown to get us through opening night. I cannot shy away from my belief that our current cultural moment is, indeed, K-shaped, and I cannot deny that I find that shape a dangerous one. I am fearful for the future of my marriage’s legal standing, my students’ access to medical care, and my nation’s continued democracy. But I also believe that the mechanisms my colleagues offer in this series for making queer theatre on college campuses today provide a roadmap for a way out of this anxiety. Across these essays, we see how queer theatre on campuses today is, as it always has, emerging from contradictions, and how our queer brethren, faculty and students alike, are transforming marginality into artistry, precarity into community, and impossibility into performance. These essays do not just push the path of freedom and justice higher; they also find common ground between the different limbs of that cultural K without compromising queer liberation. These authors demonstrate that the work of directing queer theatre at its edges is not merely defensive; it is generative. Whether in rural communities, suburban campuses, or politically contested regions, queer theatrical practice continues to create access and redefine who gets to belong, who gets to speak, and who gets to imagine themselves into the future.