Lesbians Take to the Stage

In a media landscape that hews to the heterosexual mainstream, theater is an often overlooked medium that does an excellent job of providing marginalized communities — particularly the LGBT community — with an opportunity for expression. Plays such as Angels in America and The Laramie Project have long given voice to the experiences of gay men, but recently, lesbian playwrights and lesbian-themed plays have also been recognized for their cultural contributions.

Last year, lesbian playwright Lisa Kron's (The Five Lesbian Brothers) play Well received two Tony nominations. The musical adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple was nominated in 11 different categories, with LaChanze winning Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for the role of Celie, whose lesbian relationship with Shug Avery is front-and-center. A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop, Marta Góes' solo show about the lesbian poet, also garnered strong reviews.

Lesbian playwrights — and thus their stories — are as diverse as their straight contemporaries. Barbara Kahn, Carolyn Gage, Rebecca Nesvet and Vanda are among several who use history as a source of inspiration, setting and character. Others, such as Rosemary McLaughlin and Kathleen Warnock, as well as Gage, focus on contemporary issues.

But the last few years aside, it was not always easy to find lesbian stories on the stage. “It was very, very difficult in the 1980s to find support in academia or in mainstream theaters for lesbian work, especially radical work,” said Carolyn Gage, a prolific writer of over 40 plays, musicals and monologues, including the award-winning The Second Coming of Joan of Arc .

Theater is one of the few places that continues to honor the oral tradition of storytelling, Gage pointed out, and that power should not be relinquished to corporate interests. Ownership is important when it comes to the narratives and stories of a community or culture.

In fact, said Kathleen Warnock (Grieving for Genevieve), theater is largely concerned with representation: “It's the art that speaks to people who frequently don't find realistic depictions of themselves or their interests in the mainstream entertainment industry.”

It is also far less expensive to produce than film, which opens it up to more artists and emerging writers. The theater can target smaller audiences, especially at the grass-roots level, without compromising the story. “The higher up the food chain you are in the entertainment industry,” said Warnock, “the more homogenous arts need to be in order to make their numbers.”

Competition with mainstream theater is still a consideration. “I have been occasionally advised to make my work more ‘mainstream,'” said Barbara Kahn, who primarily uses real-life characters or fictional characters in real-life, historical settings. “I believe [mainstream] is code word for heterosexual,” she said, “though when I press the person on it, they retreat.”

This does not prevent Kahn from creating the kind of characters she wants to see more of on the stage — characters who “portray people whose lives are usually ignored or distorted in history and in popular culture, such as women, lesbians, gay men and immigrants.”

Many plays are also moving beyond the coming-out story, said Kahn, whose next play, 1918: A House Divided , a musical drama about generational conflicts within a Jewish immigrant family in 1918 Greenwich Village, will be performed this April in New York at the Theater for the New City .

“In any human rights movement,” Kahn said, “the first wave is always about coming out, and then it moves into telling the story of the experience rather than the movement. We've gotten past that. We really see our lives now.”

Kahn believes that intimacy is a significant part of portraying lesbian characters as honestly and accurately as possible. She long ago decided to show the same level of physicality among her lesbian characters onstage as other playwrights show with heterosexual characters.

“My lesbian characters embrace,” said Kahn, “and when they do, their bodies actually touch.” It can be distracting, she continued, to have female characters fall in love yet “the actors create that ‘adolescent triangle' when they kiss.”

The physicality of the characters is something Warnock also considers — both as a writer and an audience member. “I like to see people fall in love onstage,” she said. “I'm interested in stories about the search for a place to belong, about moments of grace, about the times when it all comes together and falls apart.”

Warnock accepts that it is ultimately her responsibility to show how these moments differ for individuals. “And since I am a lesbian,” she added, “I'm interested in the way lesbian characters experience these things.”