Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights

Making the Radical Palatable

Jacob Juntunen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317376507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del teatro

This book demonstrates the political potential of mainstream theatre in the US at the end of the twentieth century, tracing ideological change over time in the reception of US mainstream plays taking HIV/AIDS as their topic from 1985 to 2000. This is the first study to combine the topics of the politics of performance, LGBT theatre, and mainstream theatre's political potential, a juxtaposition that shows how radical ideas become mainstream, that is, how the dominant ideology changes. Using materialist semiotics and extensive archival research, Juntunen delineates the cultural history of four pivotal productions from that period—Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1992), Jonathan Larson's Rent (1996), and Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project (2000). Examining the connection between AIDS, mainstream theatre, and the media reveals key systems at work in ideological change over time during a deadly epidemic whose effects changed the nation forever. Employing media theory alongside nationalism studies and utilizing dozens of reviews for each case study, the volume demonstrates that reviews are valuable evidence of how a production was hailed by society's ideological gatekeepers. Mixing this new use of reviews alongside textual analysis and material study—such as the theaters' locations, architectures, merchandise, program notes, and advertising—creates an uncommonly rich description of these productions and their ideological effects. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre, politics, media studies, queer theory, and US history, and to those with an interest in gay civil rights, one of the most successful social movements of the late twentieth century.

1 Repairing Reality

Prologue

This book began with an image of the legalization of gay marriage in the U.S. and its celebration, but this development, that some LGBT activists saw as a move towards a more perfect union, was not seen as a panacea by everyone in the gay civil rights movement. Rhodes Scholar Colin Walmsley, writing in the Huffington Post, describes two very different 2015 Gay Pride celebrations in New York City after the landmark Supreme Court decision. At one, $80 could afford one a ticket to an outdoor concert and megaparty billed as “one of the world’s top tier LGBT events.”¹ The other, just across the Hudson River, was an impromptu party by homeless LGBT youth. While recognizing that both groups celebrated the recent victories of the gay civil rights movement, Walmsley worried that, “Although marriage is a declaration of love, in many ways it is also an expression of interpersonal stability, economic security and social respectability—attributes that many marginalized LGBT people do not have.”² Walmsley’s concern was that the homeless LGBT youth, primarily lower-income and people of color, would not enjoy the benefits that came with marriage.

Nevertheless, Walmsley supported the movement to legalize gay marriage, understanding it as a tactic to win mainstream support for the LGBT movement more broadly. He writes, “The fight for gay marriage suggested that the gay community had grown up, left its radical past behind … replaced it with a more wholesome image that mainstream America found more palatable.”³ For Walmsley, then, the Supreme Court decision was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it conferred new rights and status on LGBT citizens. On the other, these rights primarily went to the privileged class of LGBT citizens who had the wealth and stability to take advantage of them. Walmsley fretted that such a division could bifurcate the LGBT community into an advantaged, assimilated class and a more radical, uncared for “fringe” community of LGBT people.

This danger is well noted, but what Walmsley’s argument inherently suggests is not that the gay marriage decision was a setback, or that assimilation is, in itself, problematic. Instead, he implicitly hopes in his article that more of the LGBT community will be assimilated and have the advantages of legal respect and protection. While some might see this type of assimilation as a radical shift in the U.S. national imaginary, it is more of a liberal shift. A useful, if simplistic, delineation between the two terms might be that a radical wants to fundamentally change the structure of society while a liberal, as a product of the Enlightenment, wants to include more people within the existing and expanding structures of legal protection. Walmsley’s line of reasoning, and that of this book, is firmly in the liberal camp.

In order to be part of a liberal nation, one must be assimilated by it.⁴ For good or for ill, that is the fundamental lesson of the Enlightenment, under the strictures of which we still live. If one is seen as property, chattel, or otherwise less than human, one will not be part of the nation’s imagining of itself. In other words, if one wants the protections and the oppressions that come from the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, and legal code, one must fulfill the current definition of citizen. That definition, thankfully, is malleable. Examining the mainstream theatre in which LGBT characters appeared between 1985 and 2000 helps show how.

Art is part of how a nation defines the imaginary boundaries that enclose some people and omit others. It is also a barometer of how a particular group is received in a nation. As the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes, art in a nation is “a story they tell themselves about themselves.”⁵ The self-definition that takes place in national art is part of a rich web of signification that helps define an acceptable citizen. But it is not a static classification. Not only does the national imaginary change, it must be constantly performed. Every day performances great and small, from national elections to newspaper headlines, are the tools with which nations “are created, maintained, and transformed.”⁶ It stands to reason that the most prominent art—that is, the art within the mainstream, or what others might call the culture industry—is the most determining art of a nation’s daily constituency. Why, then, has the scholarship on politics and performance concentrated primarily on radical art outside mainstream theatres?

To some degree, theatre scholars focus on radical performance due to a prejudice against mainstream theatre that suggests a play produced in the culture industry cannot bite the hand that feeds it by critiquing the economic structure of which it is a part. This begins with the Frankfurt School of thought early in the twentieth century and is not wrong but overlooks the ideological complexity of an artistic transaction within the culture industry. For instance, in his foundational study on the politics of performance, Baz Kershaw writes of mainstream theatre that seems to have liberal content: “These plays appear to be attacking the injustices produced by late capitalist hierarchy and exploitation in modern democracies, but in the process of being staged in theatre buildings, in submitting to contemporary theatre as a disciplinary machine, they succumb to what they attack.”⁷ The insight here is that one cannot take a play’s content at face value, and a conservative setting, such as the culture industry, affects the play’s ideological message. But a play’s ideological content is not black and white. That is, one should not assume a production is exclusively radical or conservative. Instead, looking at a specific production with as much nuanced analysis as possible often shows aspects of radical, liberal, and conservative politics simultaneously available to a spectator. And, besides what the production text encodes, each spectator will decode the production differently as well.

In order to examine productions with such specificity, materialist semiotics may be used. Kershaw points to the theatre building as a disciplinary system, and materialist semiotics includes an analysis of the theatre’s architecture as well as all conditions of production, such as the neighborhood, advertising, historical context, and the text’s development history. Beyond studying the conditions of production and the production text—including mise-en-scène—materialist semiotics likewise examines the conditions of reception. Thus, reviews, program notes, merchandizing, and other peripheral aspects of the production that would influence spectators’ receptions are examined. Taking all these variables into account shows how mainstream AIDS theatre in the U.S. culture industry at the end of the twentieth century helped the emergent ideology of gay civil rights enter the dominant ideological discourse. But, beyond its oft-assigned negative definition opposing it to radical and alternative performance, what exactly is mainstream theatre?

Mainstream is a label ubiquitously applied to many cultural artifacts that are popular, commercial, and widely disseminated. Those are indeed aspects of mainstream theatre in the twentieth century, but a definition needs more precision. Popular with whom? Is the profit motive of a Broadway production the same as an off-Broadway theatre’s non-profit attempt to make money to put back into the organization? And because theatre, by its location-specific nature, will never be as widely disseminated as film or television, what line must be crossed before a play is disseminated enough to be considered mainstream? In answering these questions, it is again useful to appeal to specificity and to the fact that mainstream theatre’s definition must be relational rather than essential. That is, rather than claiming that a production is mainstream or not, there is a spectrum on which one can measure a production’s mainstream status. For instance, Broadway and off-Broadway are the theatrical loci of U.S. theatre, and productions housed there are likely to have national press coverage, advertising campaigns spanning multiple states to cater to New York’s tourist trade, and, if successful, national awards, that will carry their titles across the United States. By contrast, a production at a large Equity—that is, union contracted—theatre in Chicago will certainly be mainstream in Chicago, complete with local press coverage and advertising that reaches the many millions that live in Chicago and its suburbs, but it may not have the national reach of Broadway and off-Broadway. Moving down the spectrum, a small, 30-seat theatre in a remote Chicago neighborhood with advertising only consisting of posters hung in local coffee shops will not qualify as a radical performance as defined by scholars such as Kershaw, but is certainly not as mainstream as Broadway or Chicago’s Equity theatres. However, even that 30-seat theatre in Chicago will receive reviews in the local press and be eligible for area awards. And there are far more factors: is a movie star in a Chicago production? Is a production of a musical premiering in a town outside New York before transferring to Broadway? Is a regional production part of a national tour that originated on Broadway? These and other aspects may all add to a production’s mainstream status.

Many of the qualities that made up the traits that led to a theatre production’s mainstream status in the U.S. at the end of the twentieth century were economic connections to the culture industry. For instance, because sizeable ticket sales were a primary goal, an ideal audience for mainstream theatre was the largest and most inclusive group possible with varied backgrounds, political beliefs, and personal identities. Similarly, in the hope of promoting ticket sales, a production would likely have had an official, gala opening night, to which all major reviewers were invited, leading to reviews in high-subscription periodicals. A well-known venue also contributed to mainstream theatre’s social visibility, and, hence, ticket sales. All these attempts to sell tickets also facilitated mainstream theatre’s “registration into theatre history.”⁸ The mainstream review process—far larger than that of alternative theatre or radical performance—functions as history’s first judgment of the production. And a popular or “landmark” production at a theatre may secure more spectators at following shows, in some case leading avant garde troupes, such as The Wooster Group, down a path from alternative to mainstream theatre complete with commercial touring shows.

Capitalism’s ability to incorporate and sell radical performances as mainstream leads to the skepticism many scholars of politics and performance feel towards the liberal political potential of mainstream theatre. Elin Diamond, in her decisive text examining performance and cultural politics, assigns conservative disciplinary power to theatre and gives radical performance the ability for “dismantling textual authority, illusionism, and the canonical actor in favour of the polymorphous body of the performer.”⁹ Similarly, in the introduction to Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject, Matthew Causy and Finton Walsh write that “capitalism sees in the fracturing of identity a wonderfully lucrative commercial project” of which mainstream theatre is a part and that radical performance may resist.¹⁰ But if mainstream theatre and, by extension mainstream culture, can only reflect the dominant ideology to which it sells its products, what accounts for shifts in mainstream entertainment? Is mainstream theatre merely reflective of political change that is accomplished elsewhere? Or, can mainstream theatre help to effect change?

Making the Radical Palatable demonstrates that mainstream theatre is able to simultaneously incorporate elements of an emergent ideology while reproducing enough of the dominant ideology to be palatable within the culture industry. Although the object of study in Making the Radical Palatable is the U.S. gay civil rights movement at the end of the twentieth century, to understand the book’s position one must first understand that it has an atypical interpretation of the Frankfurt School’s culture industry concept. First proposed in 1944, the typical culture industry notion fuels the pessimism of much scholarship on politics and performance. But when the culture industry’s largely ignored WWII context is invoked, one can see that the typical view gives to...