The Drama of Marriage Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present

by Clum, John M.

• ISBN13: 9780230338401
• ISBN10: 0230338402
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

In drama of the past century and a half, marriage has been presented as an ideal, an impossibility, and the measure of the morality and limitations of the parties involved. Do marriages fail because couples fail or because marriage itself is impossible? Is true understanding between two people possible? Is monogamy unrealistic? Queering Marriageis a study of performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama. Paradoxically, at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men (some of whom had a very different understanding of the word "gay"). Many of these playwrights tried in their private lives to negotiate some sort of same-sex partnership in a period when legal sanctions against homosexuality were Draconian. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, the writers have become as much a part of gay history as theatre history: Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England; Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee in the United States. The relationship between the ways these men tried to find ways to live and love outside the law and the plays they wrote about heterosexual marriage continues to impact contemporary gay playwrights and the depiction of marriage.

Author Biography

John M. Clum is a professor emeritus of Theater Studies and English at Duke University. His books include Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in modern Drama: Something for the Boys: Musical Theatre and Gay Culture; and He's All Man: Learning Masculinity, Gayness and Love from American Plays and Movies. He has published numerous essays on modern American and British drama and musical theater. He reviews London theater on his blog: http://clumtheater. blogspot: com. Clum is also a director and playwright.

Table of Contents

"At a time when the traditional definitions of marriage are being questioned and the legality of same-sex marriage is being debated, all legislators, judges, and the electorate should read this well-researched and lively book. Clum examines how the complex and often closeted lives of several British and American gay playwrights are reflected in their depictions of how couples in their plays perform their marriages - as entrapment, as necessity, as convenience, with deception, with negotiation, with compromise, with transgressions - and ‘challenge conventional notions of love and marriage.’ Clum’s relevant, fascinating, and provocative work critiques the premises of marriage and illustrates the countless ways the institution is performed." - Robert A. Schanke, professor emeritus, Central College and author of Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (2011) "There is very much a sense of this book being written in a real world in which sexuality still often has to be lived and defended on the front line. It pays serious attention to playwrights who struggled in a previous world, although we haven't before always heard what they were saying." - Simon Shepherd, professor of Theatre, Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London