LGBTQIA+ Theatre

Playwright Tomi Endter imagines a future fifty years from now when American theatre has finally centered Native voices. She looks back at how the industry transformed from exclusion to the celebration of Native stories and artists.

In Ryan “Oki” Naka’s hands The Golden Girls are reinvented as “The Golden Gays”: four queer Hawaiians navigating middle age in Waikiki Beach. Through love, friendship, and resistance, Nguyễn Minh Tiến writes, the characters in Ryan Okinaka's The Golden Gays overcome their challenges together.

How can a life be organized? What authority should an archive hold? Dani Lamorte explores questions like these that propel B Kleymeyer’s As Others Have Before, an account of a sculptor’s life and the claims the living have on the stories of the dead.

“If your body is a portal, where does it lead?” This question led the creation of Paradise Portals, an immersive performance and dance party featuring Baltimore-area trans and queer artists. Laura Grothaus captures some of these artists’ answers, which span the celebration, transformation, ecology, and even escape.

Parrots at the Pagoda imagines an afterworld where parrots guide Puerto Rican drag performer Johnny Rodriguez through memories of his life. In this journey, Citlali Pizarro writes, the transformation of death and life into memory illuminates a queer Latinx theatricality that celebrates itself against erasure.

In Russia, “LGBT propaganda” has been banned, forcing artists who want to create work that engages with queerness to do so in secret. Viktor Vilisov shares about the process of their show Birds, an immersive adaptation of the Tarjei Vesaas novel, that they have performed in apartments throughout the country.

Through non-narrative rock numbers, Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment targets contemporary societal betrayals, from COVID denialism to the genocide in Palestine. Taylor Leigh Lamb writes about the show’s genesis and its multi-pronged commitment to safety and access for audience and artists alike.

Georgia Evans is the writer and director of Walls: Chloe’s Story, a Forum Theatre play about people with chronic vulvovaginal pain—something she doesn’t deal with. She discusses how to create a show about other’s intimate stories in a collaborative, trustworthy way.

After experiencing how collectively reckoning with traumatic queer theatre history can also be joyful in his classroom, professor John Michael DiResta led a series of readings of queer period plays from the last half-century. He reflects on the way this process led to community building and healing beyond his expectations.

UP UNTIL NOW: midair for some time used film, sensory storytelling, American Sign Language dance theatre, and music performance to create an inclusive new world. Carmen! shares what it was like to be enveloped into this theatrical experience.

Playwright and performer Liam Monaghan details the process behind writing Strange/Familiar, his autofictional play on the themes of adoption and queer belonging. He explores the way contemporary autofictions hold up a mirror to ourselves and our world, reflecting both uncertainty and meaning.

Joseph Dunne-Howrie reflects on DV8’s Can We Talk About This?, exploring how the show employs pinkwashing as a vehicle for Islamophobia and racism. Joseph highlights how, rather than espousing progressive values, the show uses similar tactics of alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos.

Sophie McIntosh recounts her experience seeing Double Feature’s productions of Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in one Brooklyn brownstone. The directors of the two shows prioritized care and collectivity and aimed to throw away power structures, despite their limited resources. As a person who has historically felt alienated by Shakespeare, Double Feature helped Sophie discover that Shakespeare was allowed to be for her too.