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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2019

Trouble in His Brain: Queering William FNicihnolnas 'Ksri satof eNr Reichward sBonrain

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COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS

“TROUBLE IN HIS BRAIN”: QUEERING WILLIAM FINN’S A NEW BRAIN

By

NICHOLAS KRISTOFER RICHARDSON

A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

2019

© 2019 Nicholas Kristofer Richardson

Nicholas Kristofer Richardson defended this thesis on April 16, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Aaron C. Thomas Professor Directing Thesis

Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member

Chari Arespacochaga Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have so much for which to be thankful and I am indebted to a great number of people. I will try my best to limit this section to those who helped me specifically with this thesis and these past two years of graduate school.

First, I offer heartfelt thanks to my most admirable chair, Dr. Aaron C. Thomas. Thank you for guiding me through this thesis regardless of my many insecurities. Thank you for demanding rigor from me and my work. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your faith in me. It’s been a pleasure to learn from you and work with you. I only wish I had opened up to you earlier. I sincerely hope this isn’t the end. (There will always be more tea to pour.)

Prof. Chari Arespacochaga, I’m so happy to have someone interested in staging Finn’s works on my committee. Thank you for joining my team and for your time and effort spent reviewing my thesis. I’m honored to be your first!

I owe a great deal of thanks to Dr. Mary Karen Dahl, who supported this project in its infancy – just the seed of an idea in her dramaturgy class. Thank you for nurturing my writing since my senior year of undergrad and for inviting me to pursue a master’s degree. Thank you for always encouraging my many interests in academia and performance. I cherish our relationship and our many conversations – from A New Brain, to Snoo Wilson, to Lady Gaga, and everything in between. (Actually, Snoo and Gaga seem far more related when placed next to each other in the same sentence!)

Alongside Dr. Dahl, all of my professors in the Theatre Studies program (both past and present) have believed in me, even when – and especially when – I didn’t believe in myself. I must thank each of them for their steadfast confidence in me: Dr. Beth Osborne, Prof. Patrick

McKelvey, and Dr. Samer Al-Saber. I need to add an additional thank you to Prof. McKelvey for

iii pointing me towards sources very early on in the process, some of which found a place in my thesis! Though I never got to work with Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti directly, she has been nothing but friendly and lovely – and we did discuss A New Brain! Dr. Tony Gunn, who would’ve guessed four years ago that I’d be wrapping up the M.A.?! Thank you for supporting my work since my sophomore year, from Kinky Boots in Play Analysis to A New Brain.

Two other professors of mine deserve a huge helping of thanks. Without Dr. Kris Salata in Performance and Dr. Jen Atkins in the School of Dance, this thesis would not exist. Full stop.

Do not pass “GO,” do not collect $200. Thank you both so very much for allowing me to work on my thesis through your courses. You have absolutely opened my thinking and shaped my thesis in exciting and thorough ways beyond my hopes and dreams. Thank you both immensely.

The School of Theatre at Florida State staged A New Brain as part of its theatre season in

Fall 2018, and I’m beyond grateful to have served as dramaturg for our production. Thank you to

Prof. Tom Ossowski, Holly Stone, and the cast and crew of FSU’s A New Brain. It was invaluable to work so intimately on the show while thinking through it critically, and I so enjoyed our many conversations surrounding our production! As part of my research for the production, I interviewed Dr. Rajesh Sriraman, a pulmonary ICU doctor. Curious about the HIV reference in the show, I asked him about the relationship between arteriovenous malformations and HIV. Little did I know how crucial that question – and even more crucially, Dr. Sriraman’s answer – would become to my thesis. Thank you, Dr. Sriraman, for sharing your expertise and experiences with me.

I attended the Song, Stage and Screen musical theatre conference at the University of

California, Los Angeles in the summer of 2018, where I met two wonderful individuals. Dr. Alex

Bádue, thank you for sharing your research and archival materials with me. How nice to be in

iv conversation with another Finn scholar! Dr. Dan Blim, your support has been anything but infinitesimal. Thank you for always listening. Thank you for all of your advice and care in so many aspects of my life.

To all of my beautiful friends from the Theatre Studies program at FSU, thank you for seeing me through – some of you even through my undergrad! Dr. Sean Bartley, thank you for gracefully shifting from my TA to my friend, for all of the many pep talks, and for scaring me when I needed to be scared. Dr. Allison Gibbes, you deserve a huge mega-thank-you for helping me acquire video footage of the original 1998 production of A New Brain (!!!); in addition, thank you for always championing me and for our impromptu hours-long hangouts. Marisa Andrews

(and Pretzel) and Shelby Lunderman, thank you for cheering me on from near and far. Merritt

Denman, thank you for (literally) holding me together these past two years. I wouldn’t have made it without you. To all of my peers, know that I appreciate you.

Phyllis Pancella and Mitchell Giambalvo, thank you for all of the music we’ve made over the years. Thank you for keeping me singing, acting, and laughing through the ups and downs of my graduate studies. Thank you for letting me take up rehearsal time to talk about my work, and thank you for asking me all sorts of questions about it. Frequently our rehearsals became my space for emotional release, which wasn’t always pretty or productive; thank you for your forgiveness, reconciliation, and friendship.

I can’t forget the many people at home in Virginia Beach and across Hampton Roads who have followed my journey and have always welcomed me home with open arms – David

Prescott, Sondra Gelb, and the Spotlight crew, just to name a few. I hope I make you proud. And to my friends from home and from undergrad who keep me going – Caroline, Britni, Macy,

Emily, Sara, Maddie, Miranda, and Mary Beth, just to name a few – thank you.

v Mama and Dad, I owe so much to you for an endless amount of reasons. In regards to my thesis, thank you for taking such a vested interest in this project. Thanks for listening to the cast recording with me multiple times, for crashing a rehearsal of our production here at FSU, for watching A New Brain and Falsettos with me, and for letting me talk through my ideas with you.

Thank you for chasing after these ludicrous dreams with me, wherever they may lead us, and thank you for letting me steer the ship. My map-reading skills remain questionable, but at least we are travelling together (with Whitney and Michael CDs, of course) (sorry Dad).

And to everyone who has listened to me blab on about this thesis, I thank you kindly.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... viii

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. “STORIES OF ILLNESS”: HOW AIDS CHOREOGRAPHIES HAUNT A NEW BRAIN .... 22

3. “I SHOULD TRY TO LOCATE ROGER”: LOCATING THE GAY MALE IN MUSICAL THEATRE THROUGH INTERPELLATION, FORMATION, AND SIMULATION ...... 46

Part One: Hailing the Gay Male into Being ...... 47 Part Two: The Gay Male in Musicals Pre-1990 ...... 55 Part Three: Appealing to Gay Males and Heterosexuals in Musicals of the 1990s ...... 60

4. “WHERE THE HELL’S MY SENSE OF HUMOR?”: CAMPING IN THE HOSPITAL ...... 73

5. CAMP REMAINS, HIV REMAINS, AND CONCLUSIONS ...... 93

APPENDICES ...... 97

A. HUMAN SUBJECTS OFFICE LETTER OF DETERMINATION ...... 97

References ...... 98

Biographical Sketch ...... 103

vii ABSTRACT

My thesis argues that a critical study of the gay themes and issues in Finn’s work – both obvious and otherwise latent – elucidates historically specific and significant queer texts and subtexts, along with queer modes of reception. Queerness makes meaning of and in Finn’s works; reciprocally, Finn’s works also shape constructions and understandings of queerness in return. My thesis takes on queerness as the central lens through which to read Finn’s 1998 off- Broadway musical A New Brain. I provide queer readings of various aspects of the show; in other words, I queer the musical. In my first chapter (“Stories of Illness”: How AIDS Choreographies Haunt A New Brain), I investigate HIV/AIDS choreographies from both the concert stage (Neil Greenberg’s 1994 Not- About-AIDS-Dance) and the streets (ACT UP’s street protests in the ’80s and ’90s), alongside David Gere’s book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, to determine patterns in movement vocabularies, aesthetics, definitions, and metaphors for HIV/AIDS-afflicted bodies and narratives. After describing and analyzing these performances, I then read Graciela Daniele’s choreography from the original 1998 off-Broadway production of A New Brain as AIDS choreography. I explain how the music, libretto, and choreography encourage an audience member to view the protagonist’s AVM as a metaphor for AIDS. In my second chapter (“I Should Try to Locate Roger”: Locating the Gay Male in Musical Theatre through Interpellation, Formation, and Simulation), I explain how A New Brain operates in a larger project of defining and shaping the gay male throughout the history of U.S. American musical theatre, specifically in the 1990s. I read D.A. Miller’s essay Place for Us with Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to illustrate how the Broadway musical hails a gay male subject into being. I include Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” to pose that the construction of the gay male exists without a true origin or reference point; instead, the idea of the gay male is formed in a feedback loop between gay men in the real world (offstage) and the gay male characters represented onstage. I include Miller’s examination of three musicals of the 1970s and ’80s to provide a trajectory of gay male representation. Afterwards, I situate A New Brain in context with other gay musicals of the ’90s. From these musicals, I delineate the various narratives Broadway provided for gay male life in the period and compare how these shows represent gay males.

viii My third chapter (“Where the Hell’s My Sense of Humor?”: Camping in the Hospital) argues that in A New Brain, the liminal space created by Gordon’s AVM serves as a productive camp/site for coping with his serious brain injury and questioning societal norms. With Gordon’s rejection of a camp strategy, audiences can drop their earnest responses to Gordon’s crisis and take pleasure instead in the camp aspects of the musical. Despite losing access to the neuroqueer camp/site after emerging from his coma, Gordon still ultimately learns to embrace camp. This lesson extends beyond Gordon; in fact, all of the characters in the musical articulate their newfound camp perspective. Camp creates a community of tangentially related individuals through their shared queer outlook on life. The musical offers this camp approach to its audiences, encouraging them to adopt camp in their own lives outside of the theater. With these approaches outlined above, my thesis provides an angled analysis of Finn’s work from queer perspectives, expanding the existing generalized, queer-averse body of scholarship. My specific focus on A New Brain not only brings attention to a neglected work in Finn’s oeuvre but also illustrates how understanding A New Brain is essential to understanding Finn as a whole. Examining both the original and recent revival productions presents how the reception and meaning of Finn’s work has changed over time. Finn’s musicals also become a case study for larger inquiries into the state of musical theatre and queer politics and histories. Studying A New Brain provides a new brain for thinking about and through William Finn.

ix CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen: Did you ever see yourself as connected to a gay theatrical

movement?

William Finn: Not in musicals. I never did. Musicals it wasn’t that way at all.1

***

Lundskaer-Nielsen: What was it about [Martin Sherman’s play] Bent that had such an

impact on you?

Finn: I thought it was so honest and revealing and gay in a way that I’d never. … Gay

seemed so exotic to me, which is why I was able to write about it – it was like a foreign

land. I was writing The King and I – it was Siam to me. I could not believe I was part of

this world, because I hadn’t yet found my place in it. I didn’t know what a normal gay

life meant. So trying to put that in a play – I don’t know whether that was hopeful or just

trying to write a better version of what I saw my life becoming.2

***

Before announcing the winner for Best Book of a Musical at the 1992 Tony Awards, actor Ron Silver took a moment to explain the red ribbon pinned to the lapel of his tuxedo jacket:

“The theatre community, through Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS, leads the entertainment industry’s response to AIDS. This now familiar symbol first appeared on network television on last year’s Tony Awards. AIDS affects us all: men and women, young and old,

1 Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen, Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 166. 2 Lundskaer-Nielsen, Directors and the New Musical Drama, 166-67. 1 throughout the country.”3 How fitting, then, that the next two awards – Best Book and Best

Original Score – went to Falsettos, the William Finn and James Lapine musical in which AIDS takes the life of one of its principal characters.

Yet the creative team of Falsettos disputed the extent to which Falsettos was about

AIDS. Before the opening of Falsettoland (one half of the Falsettos musical), Finn and Lapine sat for an interview. As Finn recalls, “The guy says, ‘What’s the show about?’ and at the same time Lapine said, ‘AIDS’ and I said, ‘Family.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God. We’re working on two different shows.’ We looked at each other with horror…”4 Explaining his own answer, Finn continues, “The only way I could write it was to write it about family. I couldn’t write about this horrible tragedy. What can you say about that? Consciously we never mentioned the word AIDS.

And in fact some students saw it who really didn’t know about AIDS but they were still moved by it – and that’s why it was structured that way.”5

My thesis argues that a critical study of the gay themes and issues in Finn’s work – both obvious and otherwise latent – elucidates historically specific and significant queer texts and subtexts, along with queer modes of reception. Queerness makes meaning of and in Finn’s works; reciprocally, Finn’s works also shape constructions and understandings of queerness in return. My thesis takes on queerness as the central lens through which to read Finn’s 1998 off-

Broadway musical A New Brain. In order to bring forth these readings, I must reclaim the queerness of Finn’s work from the extant academic writing that resides in a purgatory between homophobia and homophilia (or between stigmaphobe and stigmaphile, as Michael Warner more broadly thinks about it).

3 Walter C. Miller, dir., The 46th Annual Tony Awards, aired May 31, 1992 on CBS, https://youtu.be/ibLrfWoCLrA. (Transcription mine.) 4 Lundskaer-Nielsen, Directors and the New Musical Drama, 166. 5 Lundskaer-Nielsen, Directors and the New Musical Drama, 166. 2 In his recollection above on Falsettos’ subject matter, Finn introduces a dichotomy, positioning AIDS (and, by extension, queerness) as something opposite from a notion of family.

As Michael Warner writes, “For gay men of the 1980s … AIDS gave new life to the ancient assumption that sex, and especially queer sex, had to be unethical – unhealthy, irresponsible, immature, and in short, threatening to home, church, and state.”6 Though we are long past the notion that HIV/AIDS is strictly a “gay disease,” Simon Watney notes in AIDS commentary “the tendency to attribute AIDS intrinsically to sodomy, and thence to the domain of the

‘unnatural.’”7 Seropositivity not only correlates with homosexuality (gay men specifically) in the popular imaginary, a positive diagnosis both spotlights the stigma of sex and marks the patient’s sexual practices as incorrect, as both Watney and Warner suggest. Describing the work of ACT

UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Warner says,

AIDS activism in its most powerful (and truly ethical) mode was formed by the need to

confront the pseudo-ethics that consisted in a willingness to stigmatize those who had

sex, to blame them for the virus that was killing them, to use their sex as an excuse to let

them die, to prevent at all cost any further talk of sex even if it could be shown – as it was

– that safer sex was the best and healthiest and most ethical solution to the crisis of

prevention. AIDS activists learned quickly that effective prevention cannot be based on

shame and a refusal to comprehend; it requires collective efforts at honest discussion, a

realism about desire and a respect for pleasure.8

6 Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 50. 7 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 50. 8 Warner, The Trouble With Normal, 51. 3 This recognition and acceptance of desire and pleasure opposes the stigma surrounding sex in

American culture overall. The disavowal of sexual stigma also signifies a queer understanding of sex regardless of someone’s sero-status or sexuality. Gayle Rubin illustrates how Western societies organize sexual acts and partners in a hierarchy, valuing some and delegitimizing many others:

Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual

value. Marital reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid.

Clamoring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most

other heterosexuals. … Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on

respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the

groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently

include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomascohists, sex workers such as

prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses

generational boundaries.9

Notice that promiscuous gay men land toward the bottom of the sexual hierarchy. The language of promiscuity, so prominent in the discourse surrounding AIDS – especially AIDS acquisition, draws a link between AIDS and queer conceptions of sex and desire; more specifically, Rubin inscribes this link upon gay male bodies. The only practice positioned at the top of this hierarchy is procreative sex between married heterosexuals. Here, family-building is exclusively a sexual practice. Biologically speaking, only heterosexuals can produce offspring. Western society privileges only the hereditary family unit. AIDS, then, is not only marked as queer as it

9 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 279. 4 disproportionately affects those who practice deviant sexualities, but it is also positioned as incompatible with the idea of family.

Ironically, though Finn’s comments points toward this divide between AIDS/queerness and family, his musical Falsettos works to undo this belief. Falsettos chronicles a nuclear family unit separating, expanding through various extra-marital relationships both heterosexual and homosexual, and then losing a member of its newly reconstructed, re-conceptualized family to

AIDS. The musical demonstrates how AIDS, queer sexual practices, and families of different configurations can all coexist. This framing of queerness and family as oppositional not only mirrors conceptions of sex in the United States and the West more largely but also reflects the critical reception of Finn’s works – even those that do not seem to be about AIDS.

After his success with Falsettos, Finn battled a brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM)

– a birth defect where an artery and a vein tangle and connect to each other, preventing vital oxygen from reaching brain tissue. Finn lived to tell the tale, which led directly to his 1998 off-

Broadway musical A New Brain. Loosely autobiographical, A New Brain presents the anxieties of a gay composer preparing for a risky operation to cure his AVM. All of the composer’s relationships (friendly, familial, and romantic), his work obligations, and his personal passions and aspirations lay on the line, and he must prioritize them in the little time he has left before his life-changing – potentially life-ending – surgery.

Although A New Brain is not explicitly about AIDS, the musical faces similar analyses and critiques as Falsettos and its composite parts (In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, and

Falsettoland). Scholars treat Finn’s specific gay Jewish vantage point as a biographical fact rather than a driving force in their analyses; perhaps more importantly, what Finn’s works say about queerness, Jewishness, or queer Jewishness gets swept aside in order to assert his shows’

5 mass appeal. The small portions of existing analysis and criticism assert that his shows, while illustrating “gay life,” have subject matter and themes that extend far beyond the characters’ sexuality. Homosexuality is never the focal point of Finn’s show or of scholarly analysis; moreover, scholars belittle the homosexuality blatantly obvious in the text and in production, minimizing its importance in favor of more “universal” ideas. Sexuality in Finn’s works, if not repudiated entirely, seems only able to serve as a platform to study something else. By diminishing homosexuality in their discussions, scholars permit future generations of theatre thinkers and makers to continue to gloss over (or perhaps even ignore) the representations of queerness, how queerness operates, and how audiences engaged with the queer content (perhaps even queerly so) in Finn’s body of work.

Finn is certainly a figure worthy of critical study. Aside from the critical success of the

Falsettos series, his 2005 musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee proved a surprise hit on Broadway, accruing over 1,000 performances over its three-year run and winning two Tony Awards. It premiered in London’s West End in 2011, and to this day remains a popular show for high schools and community theatres across the United States. More recently, the nation is currently in the midst of a Finn renaissance. In 2015, A New Brain received a fully- staged revival with New York City Center’s Encores! program, which takes forgotten gems of musical theatre and presents them in a limited summer run. The star-studded cast included

Jonathan Groff, Ana Gasteyer, and Dan Fogler. This revival also recorded a new cast album of every song in the score (unlike the original off-Broadway cast album, which left out a few numbers). Just a year later, Falsettos returned to Broadway, where it received five Tony Award nominations. This revival also included a cast of Broadway veterans, such as Christian Borle,

Andrew Rannells, and Stephanie J. Block. The 2016 company also issued a new cast recording.

6 In 2017, PBS aired a taping of the Broadway revival as part of its Live from Lincoln Center series. This revival production is currently on a national tour (2019), again with an acclaimed cast.

In addition to his creative work, Finn serves as an adjunct faculty member to the

Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, teaching and mentoring future composers. John Franceschina includes William Finn in his music theory textbook Music Theory through Musical Theatre: Putting it Together. He names Finn alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jason Robert Brown as “representative of a new wave of composers who injected the Broadway sound with rhythms, chord patterns, and vocal styles borrowed from rock idioms.”10 Franceschina includes a music and dramatic analysis of “The

Baseball Game” from Falsettos (originally from Falsettoland) and adds that he hopes the analysis (with Webber’s and Brown’s) “will assist in the study of any composer currently employing a contemporary idiom on Broadway.”11 Finn’s inclusion demonstrates not only Finn’s precedence among contemporary musical theatre composers but also that his music exemplifies the current hallmarks of American musical theatre writing. Since 2006, Finn has served as the

Artistic Director of Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab for the development of new musicals, premiering eleven new pieces and workshopping an additional six. It is safe to say that William Finn is not only back in the national spotlight of American musical theatre, but a continuing presence in shaping the field overall.

Thomas S. Hischak has perhaps written the most on William Finn and his works. Though

Hischak’s writing is largely summary, he includes some comments that suggest specific readings

10 John Franceschina, Music Theory through Musical Theatre: Putting it Together (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 400. 11 Franceschina, Music Theory through Musical Theatre, 400. 7 of Finn’s work, as well as comments that demonstrate Finn’s place within musical theatre in

New York and nationwide.12 Hischak universalizes Finn and his work, broadening the specific gay and Jewish identities of the characters in many of his works (In Trousers, March of the

Falsettos, Falsettoland, A New Brain) to explain the shows’ appeal to wider audiences. Consider, for example, this commentary on March of the Falsettos:

March of the Falsettos established Finn as a major figure in American musical theatre.

Not only were his music and lyrics invigorating and fresh, but his subject matter was also

innovative. Musicals about homosexuals had been labeled gay musicals and limited

themselves to a special worldview. In Finn’s works, the gay characters were just a given

circumstance. His musicals were not about being gay but about people who happened to

be homosexual. Marvin is a crazed, self-centered, yet likable man whose need for

attention is insatiable. His sexual identity is somewhat confused because sex is just one

small part of his driven personality. The other characters are defined by how they react to

this firecracker of a man. The plotting is determined by interpersonal relationships, not

outside forces, so everyone is responsible for their fate in March of the Falsettos. This

will change later when the AIDS epidemic becomes a deadly outside force in

Falsettoland. Finn’s musicals are so character-driven that all the issues, from sex to

religion to love to death, become personal. Not until you consider how rarely this occurs

in American musicals does one realize that Finn is as unique as he is dazzling.13

Hischak continues this line of thinking in his analysis of A New Brain, maintaining, “The Jewish and gay issues of the Falsettos musicals were far in the background in A New Brain. These

12 See, for example, Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991). 13 Thomas S. Hischak, Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919: From Greenwich Village Follies to The Toxic Avenger (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 193. My emphasis. 8 characters and their problems were more mainstream, and the recognition factor was much more potent than in Finn’s previous work.”14 Still, gay issues continue to appear in Finn’s later works.

As Hischak notes in his description of Elegies: A Song Cycle, “‘Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving’ was a fond memory of gay gatherings that were decimated by the AIDS epidemic.”15

Hischak also wrote the entry on William Finn for Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: An A-to-Z Guide, which contains the most focused analysis on Finn and queerness in his works. He names “autobiography, gay lifestyle, and family” as the three themes central throughout Finn’s oeuvre.16 He specifically names the AIDS crisis of the 1980s as an impetus for Finn to write Falsettoland but remarks, “While it may not have the uncontrolled glee of the first two Marvin musicals, Falsettoland is not a ponderous or angry diatribe like so many of the AIDS plays that proliferated at the time. It retains its wacky sense of humor … The musical is rich with understanding even as it offers no easy solutions.”17 Still, Hischak somewhat downplays the presence of AIDS in the musical, writing, “Whizzer’s dying of AIDS, a too- frequent subject for gay literature, is only one aspect of the problems facing Marvin in

Falsettoland. The subject of AIDS is not handled clinically or politically in the musical. It is just another given.”18 In actuality, Finn dedicates a musical number in Falsettoland to the AIDS crisis and handles the virus clinically. Dr. Charlotte, neighbor to Marvin’s ex-wife Trina, sings in

“Something Bad is Happening” about the unnamed virus proliferating among gay men in New

York, bemoaning the lack of research on the virus and the resulting rumors in circulation.

14 Hischak, Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919, 307. 15 Hischak, Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919, 351. 16 Thomas S. Hischak, “William Finn (1952-),” in Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 165. 17 Hischak, “William Finn (1952-),” 164. Hischak does not name any of the AIDS plays that are filled with the ponderous or angry diatribes he so dislikes. 18 Hischak, “William Finn (1952-),” 166. 9 Additionally, though AIDS may only be one of Marvin’s problems, AIDS clearly fuels the plot of Falsettoland; Whizzer’s collapse and subsequent diagnosis completely steers the narrative, and all the characters make their decisions around Whizzer.19

It is this idea of “the given” in Finn’s work that leads Hischak to argue that Finn is somehow beyond gay playwrights writing about gay topics. He explains that the characters’ sexualities are taken for granted without presentation of any sort of moral argument or dilemma, be it internal or external. He also claims that the characters’ “gay lifestyle” goes largely unremarked in Finn’s musicals – that the characters may discuss issues in their relationships but largely avoid discussing sex.20 Hischak accordingly argues against labeling Finn as a gay playwright altogether, stating, “In some ways the musicals by William Finn cannot be categorized as gay plays. The issue in each work is not primarily homosexuality. There are gay characters, of course, but what confronts them and propels the plots is not sex.”21 He continues:

In many ways, Finn wants the audience to get past the homosexuality in his works and

focus on what is happening to the characters. He writes about gay people probably

because that is his perspective. But the musicals are not about a gay perspective. They are

about people in crisis. Finn’s musicals are meant for mainstream audiences. He does not

want to amuse a small group of homosexuals in a small off-off-Broadway house with in-

jokes. Finn’s work belongs on Broadway with a wide audience of all kinds of

persuasions. That is exactly what happened when the double-bill Falsettos ran on

19 William Finn and James Lapine, Falsettos, music and lyrics by William Finn (New York: Samuel French, 1995), 140-144. 20 He does name “Whizzer Going Down” from In Trousers as a notable exception. 21 Hischak, “William Finn (1952-),” 166. 10 Broadway. Audiences did not come to see a gay play; they came to see a hit. … Finn’s

tapestry is much richer than sexual preference.22

Despite naming gay lifestyle as a major theme, Hischak eschews it here and names family as the ultimate theme of Finn’s works. He cites the parental divorce story in “And They’re Off,” the family medical history dramatized in “Gordo’s Law of Genetics,” and the mother’s ballad of a broken family in “The Music Still Plays On” as examples from A New Brain.

Though published scholarship on Finn seems lacking (especially regarding A New Brain), graduate students in theatre and music have included Finn in their analyses.23 In his dissertation

“Subversive Aspects of American Musical Theatre,” Donald Elgan Whittaker III includes A New

Brain in his chapter on “Homosexuality on the American Musical Stage.” He specifically frames

A New Brain as a post-gay musical. Whittaker begins by giving a very brief history of the term

“post-gay.” Paul Burston coined the term in 1994 to describe “the ability for gay and lesbian people to critique gay politics or gay culture.”24 James Collard claimed in 1998 that gays no longer define themselves exclusively by their sexuality; therefore, they lived in a time that was post-gay. Frank Browning suggested that many young gay men abandoned sexuality labels altogether. Additionally, Whittaker names Donald Morton in saying that queer theory usurped the gay (liberation) movement, which means that the now-queer times may also be considered post-gay.25 Despite claiming that post-gay and queer theory suggest “labels are simply past their usefulness,” Whittaker then labels A New Brain post-gay because the characters’ sexuality is not

22 Hischak, “William Finn (1952-),” 167. 23 See, for example, Alexandre Bádue, “Communicating in Song: The American Sung-Through Musical from In Trousers (1979) to Caroline, or Change (2004),” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2017, ProQuest (10630902). 24 Donald Elgan Whittaker III, “Subversive Aspects of American Musical Theatre” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2002), 305-306, ProQuest (UMI 3049241). 25 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 305-6. 11 a point of conflict, be it internal or external.26 He explains: “Roger and Gordon themselves take their marriage for granted. In presenting the couple in this manner, they are made

(homo)normative. … These characters are gay, have accepted that they are gay, and do not worry about the question. Nor do any of the other characters.”27 He also highlights some reviews of the musical, paying special attention to the media’s own treatment of the gay characters. Criticizing

Vincent Canby’s review for the New York Times, Whittaker remarks, “Canby sounds much like the media critics (and audiences) who bemoan the lack of good, old-fashioned values, when you could tell the queens from the straights, and they evinced the wonderfully old-fashioned bitchy qualities.”28 He claims that Canby and other critics are “resisting the subversive message,” adding, “Once the sexuality has been accepted and is not a part of the story per se, the responses are negative, just as they originally were when gay males were first depicted onstage.”29

Continuing his post-gay argument, Whittaker pays special attention to Roger, as well as his relationship with Gordon. Roger’s abrupt entrance with the ballad “I’d Rather Be Sailing” highlights this post-gay condition. For Whittaker, “the fact that Roger enters and essentially begins singing the song with little preparation is indicative of the post-gay status of this created world. It is assumed that the audience can figure out the relationship between the two men; no explanation is provided. The music provides assistance with this subversion, as well. Beautiful harmony is usually reserved for heterosexual couples onstage.”30 Roger and Gordon also verbally spar with each other frequently. Whittaker considers this depiction post-gay because the

26 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 306. 27 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 308. While it is clear that Roger and Gordon are in a relationship, there is nothing in the text to suggest that the pair is married. 28 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 309. 29 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 309; Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 310. 30 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 310-11. 12 relationship is not completely idyllic and the characters are “neurotic, flawed, and human.”31

Additionally, Gordon’s mother is supportive of their relationship, Lisa the Homeless Woman does not pass judgment either, and gay nurse Richard allows the pair to shower together as

Gordon recovers.

Despite the post-gay label assigned to A New Brain, scholarship on Finn’s earlier musicals specifically keeps the shows in gay contexts. John M. Clum discusses Finn’s three

Marvin musicals (In Trousers (1979), March of the Falsettos (1981), and Falsettoland (1990), named after their protagonist) in his book Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama.

He claims that these musicals “present the richest, most complete picture of the emotional development of a gay man through his love for another man.”32 Though his description is largely summary, he points out specific features that define these works against others of the late 20th century. He names “Whizzer Going Down” from In Trousers, a song explicitly about fellatio, as

“a contrast to the chaste avoidance of sex in most gay plays,” even though the character Whizzer does not actually appear until the next two musicals of the series.33 Clum describes March of the

Falsettos as a struggle over conventional masculinity and what it means to be a man, explored and wrestled with by all of the men in the show, gay and straight, young and old. Finn also includes sex in Falsettoland; more importantly and more prominently, AIDS enters the narrative

31 Whittaker, “Subversive Aspects,” 311. 32 Clum, John M., Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 271. 33 Clum, Acting Gay, 272. Even if the sexual content is graphic, we don’t actually see the sexual partner on stage – we just know of him. According to Clum, “Whizzer’s invisibility in In Trousers is a sign that he is now little more than a virtuosic sexual performer and the object of unrealistic expectations.” 13 and ends Whizzer’s life. He dies “without a death scene, that celebration of victimization that typically culminates nineteenth-century opera.”34

Clum not only highlights the gay plot points in these works but also asserts Finn’s outlook on gay life across the ’80s and ’90s. Clum states, “In the final chorus [of Falsettoland], characters sing that Falsettoland ‘is where we take a stand,’ and Finn’s stand is uncompromising.

He has celebrated the sexual component of Marvin and Whizzer’s relationship as well as their growth from sparring partners to friends. He has placed Marvin and Whizzer’s relationship within a network of marriages and, in the process, created a new sense of family. Everyone, not just the gay protagonist, has come of age.”35 Additionally, Clum marks that Finn’s Marvin fits within a broader trope within late 20th century gay plays: the self-fashioning of the gay male protagonist through self-reflexive metaphor and wit.

Another critic who has written about Finn’s work is Scott Miller, who dedicates a whole chapter of his book Deconstructing Harold Hill: An Insider’s Guide to Musical Theatre to Finn’s

March of the Falsettos – the original one-act musical, not the revised version that comprises Act

I of Falsettos as it appeared on Broadway.36 The March of the Falsettos chapter includes a description of gay life in the United States in 1981 (the setting of the show and the year in which the show premiered), character analyses, a discussion of Finn’s wordplay, and some thoughts on themes. Perhaps Miller’s most insightful piece of analysis comes in his discussion of Whizzer.

He notes: “Even though Whizzer has come of age in an era of multiple sex partners, unprotected sexual activity, and an overuse of drugs and alcohol, he may have the healthiest attitude about

34 Clum, Acting Gay, 274. 35 Clum, Acting Gay, 275. 36 Miller makes this distinction between the two: while Act I of Falsettos focuses on whether or not Marvin can sustain his relationship with Whizzer, the standalone March musical centers on Marvin’s relationship with his son Jason. 14 sex of any character in the show.”37 As I will argue more fully later, although Miller does not go so far as to say that Whizzer serves as Finn’s mouthpiece in the musical or even that Finn agrees with Whizzer’s perspective, the idea that Jason (conflicted and concerned about homosexuality) looks up to Whizzer suggests that audiences should as well. With his comment that “the one-act isn’t about romance; it’s about Marvin growing up enough to help Jason grow up,” Miller, like

Hischak, places family over queerness as the primary subject of the work; nevertheless, it is clear that in the Marvin trilogy, homosexuality remains a pivotal and central conflict for the characters.38

Based on my literature review, no scholar argues that the musical is devoid of any gay content, nor do they suggest that this gay content is not readily legible or obvious; yet in their consistent remarks that A New Brain is not “about” the characters’ gayness – that their sexuality is not a moral question or conflict that drives the plot – these scholars commit an erasure of the musical’s gayness overall. If the musical is “not about them being gay”… then what is the musical about? Why include gay characters at all? Moreover, the term “post-gay” has fallen so far out of academic and common vernacular that it now risks gross misinterpretation. The prefix

“post-” means to come after; the term “post-gay” suggests that we live in a present in which gayness is not an issue in society. Given that the legality of marriage equality precariously wobbles, that some states do not protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination in housing or the workplace, that transgender people cannot serve in the military, and that the sitting Vice

President of the United States supports so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ people, this

37 Miller, Scott, Deconstructing Harold Hill: An Insider’s Guide to Musical Theatre (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 58-9. 38 Miller, Deconstructing Harold Hill, 53. 15 definition of “post-gay” not only rings false but is also dangerous.39 The archive already lacks critical scholarship on this musical by a celebrated composer; the fact that the existing scholarship contains only a one-sided, dismissive “post-gay” outlook places A New Brain in even further danger of being buried in – or completely disappearing from – the archive of gay theatrical works.

My thesis project aims to reverse this threat. I demonstrate what is queer about A New

Brain, and I argue that queerness is central to understanding the musical. To do this, I shall provide queer readings of various aspects of the show; in other words, I will queer the musical.

As Carrie Sandahl describes it, “Queering describes the practices of putting a spin on mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts; of appropriating a representation for one’s own purposes, forcing it to signify differently; or of deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism.”40 Though it may seem obvious or unnecessary to queer a musical that already includes gay subjects, Sandahl’s definition still proves useful for my project. As illustrated in the review of existing literature, there is a mainstream misrepresentation of Finn’s work in general, one that downplays the queer aspects of the show in favor of equalizing non-heterosexualities to a sense of normalcy or of other “more dominant or important” themes in the text. My work will, as Sandahl writes, reveal latent queer subtexts, even if those texts are only “sub-” because they have been buried in existing analyses. By appropriating the musical for my own purpose, I will ask it to signify an overt queerness; in the process, I will illuminate the surrounding heterosexism latent in previous scholarship and flout it.

39 The latest ban on transgender troops went into effect on April 12, 2019, affecting some 15,000 enlisted soldiers according to CBS News. 40 Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1-2 (2003): 37, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9-1-2-25. 16 In conversations with my peers, faculty, and administration – of a variety of sexual identities and practices – I repeatedly received their concern that I perhaps am focusing too much on the queer elements of the musical. Many of them echoed the same rhetoric as some of the scholars above, stating that the musical “is gay, but it’s not about them being gay.” Others tried to remind me that there are aspects of this show applicable or of interest to wider audiences beyond the LGBTQ+ population. Though I do disagree with the vast majority of the straight- washing scholarship above, I do not mean to invalidate those analyses; rather, I aim to open up a discourse on the potential queerness of the musical. Alexander Doty explains this quite nicely:

Queer positions, queer readings, and queer pleasures are part of a reception space that

stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexual and straight

positions. These positions, readings, and pleasures also suggest that what happens in

cultural reception goes beyond the traditional opposition of homo and hetero, as queer

reception is often a place beyond the audience’s conscious “real-life” definition of their

sexual identities and cultural positions – often, but not always, beyond such sexual

identities and identity politics, that is.41

Doty also makes a compelling case in defense of queering, stating, “Queer readings aren’t

‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings.

They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.”42 Additionally, Doty explains that queer readings are not limited only to queer populations. Queering is not exclusively conducted by or

41 Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15. 42 Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, 16. 17 for queer people only; anyone can engage queerly with a stimulus, and this queering can open up a variety of possibilities for interpretation and consumption by all.

In this way, my work takes an anti-assimilationist approach to A New Brain. Warner describes “the desexualization of the lesbian and gay movement and the depoliticization of queer sex in the 1990s” as indicative of a shift towards a politics of assimilation among some queer populations.43 The stigma and shame surrounding sex not only divides heterosexuals and homosexuals but also marks a fissure within the queer community. Assimilationists argue that in order to gain both legal and social respect, gays must present themselves as practicing “normal” sexual acts and desires: private, in pairs, monogamous, in a committed relationship, and vanilla.44 Anti-assimilationists or separatists view this as conformist and instead advocate for protection and proliferation of the acts and desires that are not deemed “normal” by some sort of moral majority. Warner finds this division unproductive and misleading because it proclaims queer as an identity, as a specific type or kind of person, not about one’s actions. Warner says,

“At its best, queer politics has fought the stigmatization of sex, in all the ramifications that stigma has for people, from queer youth to sex workers and single mothers. But in its newest manifestation, the lesbian and gay movement threatens to become an instrument for the normalization of queer life.”45 I see the current scholarship on William Finn’s musicals as working towards normalizing homosexuality, aligning it (or usurping it) with “normal,” “morally correct” notions of family. It is very possible that these scholars intentionally operated within assimilationist rhetoric to advocate for Finn in other circles, bringing him more attention and greater appreciation. I may be indebted to them for their contributions towards Finn’s visibility;

43 Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 76. 44 For a more complete list, see Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 25-26. 45 Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 80. 18 still, I find it high time to address the glaring gap in critical recognition of Finn’s queer content.

By approaching A New Brain through various avenues with an interest in uncovering queerness,

I am working deliberately towards marking the musical as queer: abnormal, distinct, special.

In my first chapter (“Stories of Illness”: How AIDS Choreographies Haunt A New Brain),

I contextualize how U.S. artists and activists of the 1980s and early ’90s constructed HIV/AIDS- afflicted bodies through performance, as well as understand how audiences then read these performances. I investigate HIV/AIDS choreographies from both the concert stage (Neil

Greenberg’s 1994 Not-About-AIDS-Dance) and the streets (ACT UP’s street protests in the ’80s and ’90s), alongside David Gere’s book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking

Choreography in the Age of AIDS, to determine patterns in movement vocabularies, aesthetics, definitions, and metaphors for HIV/AIDS-afflicted bodies and narratives. After describing and analyzing these performances, I then read Graciela Daniele’s choreography from the original

1998 off-Broadway production of A New Brain as AIDS choreography. I explain how the music, libretto, and choreography encourage an audience member to view the protagonist’s AVM as a metaphor for AIDS. I utilize Marvin Carlson’s concept of ghosting and Jacques Derrida’s idea of the “trace” to think about how A New Brain’s original audiences interpreted its gay male protagonist lying in a hospital bed with a mysterious disease as a ghost of AIDS-afflicted bodies from the stage and the streets.

In my second chapter (“I Should Try to Locate Roger”: Locating the Gay Male in

Musical Theatre through Interpellation, Formation, and Simulation), I explain how A New Brain operates in a larger project of defining and shaping the gay male throughout the history of U.S.

American musical theatre, specifically in the 1990s. I read D.A. Miller’s essay Place for Us with

Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to illustrate how the Broadway

19 musical hails a gay male subject into being. I include Baudrillard’s “The Precession of

Simulacra” to pose that the construction of the gay male exists without a true origin or reference point; instead, the idea of the gay male is formed in a feedback loop between gay men in the real world (offstage) and the gay male characters represented onstage.

I take two steps in order to explain the image of the gay male proliferated in musicals that premiered in the 1990s. First, I include Miller’s examination of three musicals of the 1970s and

’80s to provide a trajectory of gay male representation. Afterwards, I situate A New Brain in context with other gay musicals of the decade: Falsettos, Finn’s 1992 Tony-winning musical that features a principal character dying of AIDS; The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993); Hello Again

(1994); Rent (1996); and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998). From these musicals, I delineate the various narratives Broadway provided for gay male life in the period, and compare how these shows represent gay males. The musicals’ scripted narratives of gay male characters similarly script the lives of gay men in the real world. Additionally, these ’90s musicals establish a system of values that defines what makes a “good” homosexual, and they provide models for how heterosexual audiences can welcome these gay men into mainstream society.

My third chapter (“Where the Hell’s My Sense of Humor?”: Camping in the Hospital”) reads A New Brain through the lens of camp. I define camp as a mode of reception, a way of reading a text, using David Bergman’s and Esther Newton’s descriptions of camp elements. I specifically analyze the musical numbers that comprise Gordon’s post-surgery coma in the original 1998 off-Broadway production. I argue that in A New Brain, the liminal space created by

Gordon’s AVM serves as a productive camp/site for coping with his serious brain injury. David

Halperin articulates how queer people utilize camp as a productive way to cope with crisis and question societal norms. Gordon actively resists this possibility, making him a “failed camper.”

20 With Gordon’s rejection of a camp strategy, audiences can drop their earnest responses to

Gordon’s crisis and take pleasure instead in the camp aspects of the musical.

Despite losing access to the neuroqueer camp/site after emerging from his coma, Gordon still ultimately learns to embrace camp. This lesson extends beyond Gordon; in fact, all of the characters in the musical articulate their newfound camp perspective. Camp creates a community of tangentially related individuals through their shared queer outlook on life. The musical offers this camp approach to its audiences, encouraging them to adopt camp in their own lives outside of the theater. Camp reaffirms the queerness of both the musical and of Finn.

With these approaches outlined above, my thesis provides an angled analysis of Finn’s work from queer perspectives, expanding the existing generalized, queer-averse body of scholarship. My specific focus on A New Brain not only brings attention to a neglected work in

Finn’s oeuvre but also illustrates how understanding A New Brain is essential to understanding

Finn as a whole. Examining both the original and recent revival productions presents how the reception and meaning of Finn’s work has changed over time. Finn’s musicals also become a case study for larger inquiries into the state of musical theatre and queer politics and histories.

Studying A New Brain provides a new brain for thinking about and through William Finn.

21 CHAPTER 2

“STORIES OF ILLNESS”: HOW AIDS CHOREOGRAPHIES HAUNT A NEW BRAIN1

In his review of the 2015 New York City Center Encores! revival of A New Brain,

Vulture writer (now critic at the New York Times) Jesse Green recalls the original 1998 off-

Broadway production. He writes, “Back then, it was hard not to see the show’s focus on brain disease as a stand-in for AIDS, which was no metaphor; now it emerges more clearly as a stand- in for mortality in general, and the responsibility we have to use ourselves fully in the meantime.

(With AIDS, even by 1998, it did not feel like there was a ‘meantime.’)”2 Though A New Brain is ostensibly not about AIDS, I am curious about initial audiences’ attachment of the work to

AIDS and more specifically how the AIDS crisis still manifests in the piece, defying authorial intent and the “about-ness” or subject matter of the work overall. A dance studies approach provides me with the opportunity and ability to read director/choreographer Graciela Daniele’s choreography for traces of the AIDS epidemic in tandem with embodied and/or choreographed experiences of AIDS during A New Brain’s inception. By analyzing Neil Greenberg’s 1994 piece

Not-About-AIDS-Dance and a 1989 ACT UP “die-in” protest, particular movement qualities emerge that constitute an AIDS aesthetic that ghosts the choreography in A New Brain: disobedient bodily control against life-governing outside forces; stillness; and costuming and spatial framings in conversation with the expected, societally-imposed social choreographies of

AIDS-afflicted bodies. These qualities haunt A New Brain to such an extent that the movement

1 William Finn and James Lapine, A New Brain, music and lyrics by William Finn (New York: Samuel French, 1999), 15. 2 Jesse Green, “Theater Review: William Finn Reveals A New Brain,” Vulture, June 26, 2015, https://www.vulture.com/2015/06/theater-review-william-finns-new-brain.html. 22 lends itself to an AIDS-informed interpretation of the musical. Naming AIDS as the central conflict of the musical highlights the queer content latent in A New Brain and emphasizes the importance of queerness in interpreting the show overall.

A few theatre theorists have tackled the idea of ghosting, most notably scholar Marvin

Carlson in his book The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine.3 Carlson argues that

“all theatre… is as a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition.

Moreover, as an ongoing social institution it almost invariably reinforces this involvement and haunting by bringing together on repeated occasions and in the same spaces the same bodies

(onstage and in the audience) and the same physical material.”4 He names this phenomenon ghosting, which “presents the identical thing they [the audience] have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity, …but of identity becomes a part of the reception process.”5 Ghosting, then, helps us describe the phenomena of repeated images in the theater. These images haunt audiences’ memories as they watch theatrical productions, informing the audiences’ responses to the work.

Carlson’s interest in ghosting bodies specifically focuses on audiences identifying an actor from a previously-seen production. He notes, “The recycled body of the actor, already a complex bearer of semiotic messages, will almost inevitably in a new role evoke the ghost or ghosts of previous roles if they have made any impression whatever on the audience, a

3 Other takes on ghosting include Mike Peason’s book Site-Specific Performance, which considers the constructed scenography for a site-specific performance as a presence that ghosts the host location of the performance. See also Herbert Blau’s mention of lighting ghosts in his essay “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness.” 4 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 11. 5 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 5. 23 phenomenon that often colors and may indeed dominate the reception process.”6 Carlson’s interpretation fails to take into account the moving body or to consider gesture or movement as the repeated material that ghosts the current performance. I propose that choreography holds the same potential for ghosting as an actor’s identity. A gesture, a movement quality, or even a way of framing the moving body can evoke ghosts of previous performances that can bear their own weight upon a performance. The moving body, regardless of who executes the movement, haunts audiences and harks back to constructions of prior movements and bodies.

I find Derrida’s idea of the “trace” a generative lens for my ghosting theory. In pondering the nature of “being,” Derrida argues that “to be” in the present tense and in present time depends upon a relationship to that which is not being, to something that exists before or after the present. We cannot know the present without relating it to something else that came before or after it. This “something else” manifests itself, makes its presence known in the present moment, in the “being.” Derrida calls this manifestation the “trace,” “the very condition of non-presence of the present.”7 He claims that “In everything, there is the trace, the experience of a return to something else, of being returned to another past, present, future, a different type of temporality that’s even older than the past and that is beyond the future.”8 This trace then informs how one makes sense of the present. Derrida explains that “in order to access the present as such, there must be an experience of the trace, a rapport to something else, to the Other. Sometimes to something other than Being, to the Other past, the Other future, or to Others in general, but to an

Other that does not appear as the present or presence.”9

6 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 8. 7 Jacques Derrida, “The Trace,” Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (New York: Zeitgeist Video, 2004), DVD. 8 Derrida, “The Trace.” 9 Derrida, “The Trace.” 24 In a choreographic ghosting, moving bodies in the present evoke moving bodies from other temporalities. I assert that audiences can read the traces of these ghosts choreographically.

It is in the trace that these ghosts make their presence known, and it is the trace that tethers these ghosts to the present realm. In this way, choreography can call ghosts of AIDS movements and bodies into the present, even when the piece claims not to be about AIDS.

Dance critic and professor David Gere maintains a similar belief and works to codify and analyze AIDS choreographies in his book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking

Choreography in the Age of AIDS. Gere seeks to demonstrate that “dances by gay men in the

AIDS era can be seen as intricate concatenations of signs.”10 Approaching dance through an understanding of semiotics, Gere claims that “by attending to the corporeality of gay male bodies approaching death under constraints of the symptoms associated with AIDS, one has already decoded a set of (indexical) bodily conditions or bodily signifiers that will turn up again in the

(metonymic) depiction of corpses.”11 He does not limit his objects of study solely to concert dance; rather, he asserts, “These signs freely travel back and forth among the hospital, the street, and the theater, constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing AIDS in a fury of meaning making.”12

In his book, Gere outlines three qualifications that constitute an “AIDS dance.” First and foremost, “The dance must depict gayness.”13 This gayness is legible to audiences because gay men are abject, not the subject or the object but something else – something Other – that marginalizes them. The second marker necessitates the depiction of male-male Eros, be it

10 David Gere, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 10. 11 Gere, How to Make Dances, 9. 12 Gere, How to Make Dances, 10. 13 Gere, How to Make Dances, 12. 25 successfully achieved or thwarted in some way. Eros is crucial for Gere in order to differentiate an AIDS dance from depictions of more platonic male-male relationships. The final requirement is a depiction of mourning on some level, in any form. Gere makes this clear: “No loss, no conjuring of AIDS.”14 Gere’s ideas and approach are incredibly useful for my project, and I will use his tenets to analyze Graciela Daniele’s choreography in A New Brain; yet, despite Gere’s extensive work in naming and cataloguing AIDS dances, his book omits two objects of study central to my endeavor. Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance from 1994 is noticeably absent from Gere’s book, perhaps because of its lack of male-male Eros, as Jaime Shearn Coan suggests.15 Additionally, though Gere names and refers to the ACT UP die-in protests of the late

1980s and early 1990s, he examines ACT UP’s Seize Control of the FDA demonstration in 1988 more broadly and holistically. Protesters performed die-ins at the demonstration, but the die-ins themselves are not the focus of Gere’s inquiry. To consider the Not-About-AIDS-Dance and ACT

UP die-ins as AIDS choreographies, I must develop my own tenets.

Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance premiered in 1994 at The Kitchen in New

York City. It is a 50-minute dance piece choreographed for five dancers, including Greenberg himself. This original production won two New York Dance and Performance Awards (“The

Bessies”) for choreography and lighting, and dance critic Jennifer Dunning of the New York

Times named it one of the year’s ten best dances. The 2006 revival of the dance for Dance

14 Gere, How to Make Dances, 12. 15 Coan, Jaime Shearn. “‘I don’t know what made this ‘private’ in the first place.’: Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS Dance and The Disco Project.” Drain 13, no. 2 (2016). http://drainmag.com/i-dont-know-what-made-this-private-in-the-first-place-neil-greenbergs-not- about-aids-dance-and-the-disco-project/. 26 Theater Workshop in New York City (now New York Live Arts) landed on Apollinaire Scherr’s

“Best Dance of 2006 Top Ten” list for Newsday.16

The space in The Kitchen does not consist of any curtains; instead, the back wall of the space upstage, the front row of the audience downstage, and a line of light trees flanking stage left and stage right frame the dance space. Depending on the amount of light cast into the dance space, the dancers are sometimes visible in the “wings” – the strip of dance space between the wall and the light trees on either stage left or right. The lighting largely comes from the sides of the stage, lighting the dancers’ bodies from the side; still, a pool of color encompasses a circle on the floor. The size of the pool varies depending upon how many dancers are on stage, but the light never covers the full dance space; the edges of the square space are always dark. The dancers do not cast shadows upon the floor. In addition to this lighting are projections displayed high against the upstage wall. Each projection lasts for five seconds and consists of a short sentence. Most of the sentences inform the audience of the process behind the final product before them, enlightening them about the background of a dancer, providing context about what happened during the creation of the piece, or pointing out the structure of the piece. All of the dancers wear a boxy-cut plain white tank top and matching boxers that cut off above the mid- thigh, and all dance barefoot.

The dance consists of a series of choreographed sequences or phrases repeated in various configurations of numbers of dancers. Sometimes the dancers do not move in sync as a full unit: for example, in one passage, two dancers downstage begin a phrase, and the two upstage dancers begin the same phrase but behind a few counts. The movement vocabulary includes large, expansive gestures, with limbs extended out from the center of the body. The movements look

16 Neil Greenberg, “Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994),” accessed December 2, 2018, http://www.neilgreenberg.org/naad.html. 27 awkward and slightly precarious. The dancers rarely execute the pirouettes that would maintain tall spinal columns and vertical extension of concert ballet; rather, the dancers turn off-center, unbalanced, even when on relevé. A dancer may hop on her planted foot while turning so as not to fall over entirely, regaining some control. The dancers cover a great amount of stage space when traveling, taking huge strides, lunging, and quickly at that. Abruptly, at the conclusion of a passage, the dancer will return to a neutral standing position and walk off stage – pedestrian movements that jar the viewer after watching the dancer totter, stumble, and stretch.17

I read this movement vocabulary as a play or struggle with weight and gravity. The dancers each test their capacities to defy earth’s gravitational pull, eschewing verticality yet still trying to remain upright, trying not to fall over. They also test their physical limits as they extend their limbs in a multitude of directions across different planes of their bodies, both when standing still and while traveling. Miraculously, no dancer fails at maintaining this tension between her body and gravity; a dancer may succumb to the pull but only voluntarily. Despite the peculiarity of the dancers’ bent limbs, wide stances and strides, and still poses with weight shifted off of center or out of alignment, the dancers still perform the passages in fluid sweeps. I name this aesthetic “disobedient bodily control against life-governing outside forces.” The dancers successfully maintain control by manipulating their weight and shifting their centers of gravity, decidedly oscillating between rebellion and compliance.

Though Neil Greenberg asserts his 1994 Not-About-AIDS-Dance is not about AIDS, by naming the illness, he instantly conjures AIDS into being. In naming what the piece is not about,

Greenberg invites an about-ness to the piece, specifically an about-ness of AIDS. Stating that the

17 Neil Greenberg, Not-About-AIDS-Dance, feat. Ellen Barnaby, Christopher Batenhorst, Neil Greenberg, Justine Lynch, and Jo McKendry, perf. December 15, 1994 (New York: High Risk Productions, 1994), video, 50 min, https://vimeo.com/44322468. 28 piece is not about AIDS immediately initiates thoughts about AIDS, for in order to know what the dance is not, one must know what AIDS is. The title, then, refers and relates to an Other outside of that which is present in the dance. Though this might seem contrary to Greenberg’s goals, this contradiction actually comes to seem intentional on his part. Regarding the titles for his dances, Greenberg says:

I choose a title that might provide an arena within which a viewer’s thoughts might play

(or even battle). But I don’t intend the title of a dance to necessarily signal the meaning of

the dance. Rather, for me a title best functions as a MacGuffin— something to involve

the viewer’s mind, perhaps providing the false-confidence that something concrete is

being presented (hence noun-titles, such as The Disco Project, or Really Queer Dance

with Harps), and in so doing freeing the viewer to experience other, perhaps deeper,

potencies of the performance.18

In this sense, the piece may not be about AIDS or mean AIDS, but AIDS still frames the piece.

Jaime Shearn Coan puts it succinctly: “AIDS functions more as context than content.”19

Greenberg uses text projections to provide context to the dance and to facilitate a sort of distancing – akin to Bertolt Brecht’s Alienation effect – between the audience member and the subject matter of the piece. Greenberg’s inspiration for using text in this way stemmed from his experiences in rehearsal as a Merce Cunningham company dancer. He reflects:

Perhaps part of what made my experience watching those rehearsals of Cunningham’s

dances so rich was that I knew the dancers personally, knew something about their lives.

I think with Not-About-AIDS-Dance I was using the self-revelations of the performers as

18 Neil Greenberg, “Writing and Performance,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 1 (January 2012): 136, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26206379. 19 Coan, “‘I don’t know.’” 29 a tactic, thinking that maybe if the audience knew something about the dancers, they’d be

able to connect to the dancing, and all the particular kinds of meaningfulness that dance

can provide.20

The projected text positions the audience to look at what the body is doing rather than what the body is saying, what it means. The audience then derives meaning from the moving body rather than viewing the movement through a specific lens, searching for the “about-ness” of the piece.

Ironically, though Greenberg claims that “the dancers were never acting out what was in the text. Their dancing was not generated by the words,” there is a specific moment in the dance where the movement and text correlate directly; moreover, this moment is about AIDS, or, at the very least, is in reference to AIDS.21 About twenty minutes into the dance, Greenberg himself enters the space from center stage left, walks towards center, and then curves downstage. In a spotlight downstage center, he spreads his feet a bit wider than shoulder-length apart, and he lifts both of his arms up at shoulder height. His elbows are bent with his hands near his head, which is tilted to his right. His right wrist is turned inward, his left wrist turned outward. Both hands are curled into loose, gentle fists. Greenberg breathes in and out. Eyes closed, he lifts his eyebrows upward, and his head tips ever so slightly backwards at the top of his neck. He maintains this pose for about six seconds and then drops his eyebrows, his head tipping forward, returning to its first position. About four seconds later, he repeats the eyebrow lift and head tilt for another six seconds and then lets them fall once more.

20 Greenberg, “Writing and Performance,” 137. 21 Neil Greenberg, “Neil Greenberg in Conversation with Biba Bell,” by Biba Bell, Critical Correspondence, published November 3, 2014, https://movementresearch.org/publications/critical-correspondence/neil-greenberg-in- conversation-with-biba-bell. 30 Suddenly, his right index finger springs forth, pointing at his right eye. A few seconds later, text appears: “This is what my brother Jon looked like in his coma.” After 13 seconds of stillness, Greenberg opens his eyes, shifts his feet closer together underneath him, and begins to walk backwards upstage, his hands still in their positions by his head, which is now vertical. As he walks backwards, another projection: “He was in a coma 2 days before he died of AIDS.” He stops walking at the upstage wall of the space, the spotlight illuminating him from the edge of his white boxers up. Eyes closed, his head leans to the right once more, along with his torso. He keeps this position as the text “I’m HIV+.” fades into view. Greenberg repeats the eyebrow lift.

His right index finger flexes, and then relaxes. Another eyebrow lift, and then he sways left, then right.22

As he sways right, Greenberg leans into his right hip, carrying his body weight forward as he bends at the waist and his arms circle to the left. He crosses his left leg over his right, swings his body around, and then hops in a circle on his right foot, arms extended at shoulder height. After completing a full turn, he then switches onto his left foot, on relevé, arms still extended outward with his right leg in arabesque. He finishes a half turn before hopping downstage on his right foot twice while facing the upstage wall. At this point, the phrase “But this part of the dance isn’t meant to be about me” fades into view. He takes two more leaping steps backwards and a chassé leading with his right foot. Changing directions, he jumps in the air with his left foot in piqué, then shifts his weight over to his left leg to complete one more pirouette. This time, his arms make a Y-shape above his head, but his right leg is still in arabesque. As he turns to face the audience, he swings his arms down to his right, plants his right

22 Greenberg, Not-About-AIDS-Dance. 31 foot about shoulder-width from his left, and returns to his initial pose. He then repeats the sequence of eyebrow raises and finger pointing previously described.23

The aforementioned movement sequence is distinct for a number of reasons. This is a point in the piece where Greenberg directly acts out the projected text behind him. By naming the illness, AIDS is no longer solely context for the work but also the content of the work. This is also the only part of the entire dance that did not come from Greenberg’s typical choreographic process of recording improvised movement; instead, it is a real-life mimic of a real seropositive person.24 He represents his brother Jon dying of AIDS while in a coma. Perhaps most importantly, this representation of his brother’s physical posture and gestures while in a coma uses a striking amount of stillness. Greenberg’s movements as he stands still – the tilt of his neck, the eyebrow raises, and the finger points – are minute, especially compared to the expansive movement vocabulary of the rest of the piece, yet riveting. After disclosing his own serostatus, Greenberg returns to the movement vocabulary previously established in the dance, an attempt to return to the dance that “isn’t about” him; still, he ends his solo by returning to his brother’s comatose position, one of relative stillness.

In this solo, Greenberg uses his body to fight against life-governing outside forces – both as his brother Jon and as himself, an HIV-positive gay man. Fighting, at this stage of progression of the illness, however, requires stillness, a bodily shutdown, a release of conscious control for subconscious takeover. Directly invoking an AIDS-afflicted body, in this instance, demands stillness. The stillness refocuses the eye and the mind to observe the minutiae of the body itself and to pay attention to the corporeal realities of the illness: its capacity to render the body

23 Greenberg, Not-About-AIDS-Dance. 24 Coan, “‘I don’t know.’” 32 immobile and then lifeless. The spirit of fight – the daring, risky, energetic display – is missing.

Greenberg inserts it briefly into his solo only to return to the coma.

Stillness also proved an effective tool for the political motivations of ACT UP, the AIDS

Coalition to Unleash Power. Like a Civil Rights sit-in, members of ACT UP would occupy public spaces where AIDS-afflicted bodies were not expected – or allowed – to appear.

Protesters would lie down and “die” on the street, blocking pedestrian traffic and causing a scene. Die-ins were a common form of protest organized and staged by ACT UP in major cities across the United States, including New York City and San Francisco. The following example comes from a YouTube video posted by the GLBT Historical Society.

On January 20, 1989, the day of then-President George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, ACT

UP protesters marched to the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. They stopped periodically along their route to perform a die-in. The group dies before a Carl’s Jr. restaurant.

The camera angles from the home video footage make this difficult to assess, but I estimate about thirty protesters in attendance, mostly white men. Wearing rather everyday, pedestrian clothes – jeans, khakis, plaid shirts, and light jackets in dull grays and browns, for example – the majority of the group lowers themselves down to the ground in front of the store’s entrance.

They take on various “dead” poses in close proximity to each other but at different angles. Some take a linear, rigid position on their backs with hands folded across their chest, as if in a casket; others lay on their sides or backs with limbs bent out away from the body, as if they had collapsed on the street without warning or control. One man in the casket position covers his face with his hat. Other members walk between the “dead” protesters with white chalk, tracing outlines of their bodies, like at a police crime scene.

33 As all of this occurs, one protester with a microphone delivers a speech: part statement of grievances, part manifesto, and part eulogy. One man’s head rests against a mock tombstone with a red handprint in the center: “BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS – ONE AIDS DEATH Every

20 minutes.” Before the group departs, the speaker requests onlookers to “please leave the flowers and the tombstones, in remembrance.” The dead bodies come back to life, stand up, and walk on. White carnations reside in the center of the traced outlines of some of the bodies, and other tombstones litter the city sidewalk, including one that reads, “DIED From LACK OF

Treatment.”25

Greenberg in Not-About-AIDS-Dance fought against the life-governing outside force of gravity by playing with weight; here, the ACT UP protesters used their weight as their weapon against the life-governing outside forces of government policy, healthcare and pharmaceutical provisions, law enforcement, and the behavioral expectations of normative society. Susan Leigh

Foster notes that the protesters “maintained a determined listlessness, thereby increasing their weightiness,” which made it difficult for police officers to forcibly remove their bodies from the space when police forces sought to intervene.26 It would take two, three, even up to four police officers to remove the “dead” bodies; still, another wave of protesters stood by, ready to “die” in the street, creating a cycle of dying and disposing of AIDS-afflicted bodies. In addition to this repetition’s ability to “drain state resources,” “using a minimum number of people to effect

25 GLBT Historical Society, “ACT-UP Demonstration (1989),” ed. Don Frazell, filmed January 20, 1989, in San Francisco, CA, video, 9:31, https://youtu.be/H3zefhq9Ql4. 26 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (October 2003): 404, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2003.0111. 34 maximum disruption,” Foster also notes, “The cycles of bodies dying underscored the magnitude and urgency of the AIDS crisis by staging its effects as seemingly never ending.”27

Even after the die-in, the traced outlines of the dead bodies remained. Foster marks two purposes of these outlines: to represent statistics of AIDS deaths and to “document with ghostly inadequacy the effects of AIDS, reducing the idiosyncratic liveliness of each body to a thin, ephemeral trace.”28 I would add that the traced bodily outline – an iconic image from crime scenes and crime shows alike – adds a representation of criminality to the protest. The protest itself may be illegal, a disruption of the peace despite activists’ legal right to assembly, but more importantly, the AIDS-afflicted body itself is rendered criminal by the tracing. The limited understanding of AIDS solely as a “gay” disease incriminated any infected gay man, for a seropositive status marked his potential violation of anti-sodomy laws, depending upon where in the United States he lived. Additionally, the AIDS-afflicted body was treated criminally in both the legal and moral sense. He was denied rights and privileges such as access to housing and healthcare (as the ACT UP speaker shared in his speech), and also largely neglected by mainstream society, including the federal government.

The protesters also used stillness when staging the AIDS-afflicted body. Stillness here functioned as both a form of noncompliance against law enforcement and a representation of death. With their stillness, the protesters, according to Foster, “forced police, and those who watched, to envision the body as helpless, as incapable of moving itself. … In this way, they provoked everyone in the vicinity to contemplate how one body can and should care compassionately for another, and to examine the ethical obligations that the well have toward the

27 Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 404; Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 403; Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 404. 28 Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 404. 35 sick and dying.”29 Though stillness may have been an expected bodily function of an AIDS- afflicted body, the location of the “dead” AIDS-afflicted body shocked passersby. It is this violation of space that made the protest – ACT UP’s staging of the AIDS-afflicted body – politically efficacious.

In every space is an expected code of physical conduct, a societally imposed way of moving the body. Imani Kai Johnson calls this idea “social choreography”: “the ways the people of a given society are trained to move (both physically and spatially) and to contort and comport their bodies in keeping with and in (counter) production to a given social order.”30 By dying in the streets, the social choreography of the ACT UP protesters countered the expectation of the

AIDS-afflicted body being invisible, isolated from society in a hospital. Simultaneously, their performance of death fell in line with the given social order; at this time, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. Bringing the dead AIDS body out of the hospital and into the streets provoked law enforcement and society at large to acknowledge the corporeal realities of the disease and the human cost of failing to properly treat the AIDS crisis at large.

Whereas ACT UP violated the rules of space, A New Brain restores the perceived AIDS- afflicted body to its social choreography: stillness in a hospital room. Though the protagonist,

Gordon Michael Schwinn, is later diagnosed with an AVM, for nearly the first half of the musical, Gordon remains in bed or in a wheelchair with a mysterious, inexplicable illness that renders him out of control of his emotions and body. After suddenly collapsing during lunch with his friend and agent, Rhoda, medics rush Gordon to New York University’s hospital. As medical

29 Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 404. 30 Imani Kai Johnson, “Battling in the Bronx: Social Choreography and Outlaw Culture Among Early Hip-Hop Streetdancers in New York City,” Dance Research Journal 50, no. 2 (August 2018): 63, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767718000232. 36 staff begin examining Gordon, Nancy D. (“the thin nurse”31) asks Rhoda routine introductory questions:

NANCY D. Patient’s name?

RHODA. Umm… Gordon… Schwinn!

NANCY D. Are you next of kin?

RHODA. Oh, no no no, we’re just close friends. We work together. …But I will call his

mother, and – and Roger.

NANCY D. Roger?

RHODA. His, umm, … lover.

NANCY D. Is he HIV?

[Music underscoring stops abruptly.]

RHODA. [Beat.] … No. Is he gonna be alright?

32 NANCY D. Shrugs.

Despite the brevity of this exchange, this moment stands out in many ways from the rest of the show. It is the first time that any character references Gordon’s sexual and romantic attractions.

Most importantly, the scene introduces HIV/AIDS into the narrative, and it does so in a deliberate manner distinct from the rest of the musical. The vamp underneath the dialogue is a short repeated five-note phrase in the bass line: four eighth notes chromatically ascending up the scale, followed by a final eighth note down a whole step. The last two eighth notes of the phrase are marked staccato. The upbeat tempo, the short, driving phrase of eighth notes, the ascending chromatic pitches followed by a fall down to an accidental, and the staccato one-two punch at the

31 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 22. 32 A New Brain, music and lyrics by William Finn, book by William Finn and James Lapine, dir. and chor. Graciela Daniele, Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, New York, NY, Summer 1998, digital video file, 94 min. (Transcription mine.) 37 end of the phrase all work to maintain the tension and urgency of the medical emergency bubbling underneath the spoken scene. This vamp cuts out abruptly after Nancy D. asks Rhoda about Gordon’s HIV status.33 Finn leaves Rhoda’s spoken line unsupported musically. The lack of musical accompaniment underneath her casts some doubt as to Gordon’s HIV status; without accompaniment, her answer is not grounded in the vernacular of the number. On a larger scale, a moment without music in a sung-through musical marks a blatantly observable shift in the musical fabric of the show. Silence here brings heightened attention and gravitas to this specific moment, especially against the songs and musically-accompanied spoken scenes that compose the vast majority of the musical.

After this awkward, tense moment, the instrumental line returns with two pairs of chromatically ascending eighth notes, lifting the music from B# major up a half step into a new key of C major.34 Tension literally rises over the course of the number, and the higher pitches bring the melodic line into higher territories of the singers’ vocal registers.35 Gordon’s HIV status directly fuels an increase in the stakes of the scene, as reflected in the score. To put it another way, Gordon’s HIV status is of critical importance to both his overall health and to the overall plot of the musical. Though his status is only mentioned here, once, and never brought up again, Gordon’s AVM diagnosis does not come until a full fifteen songs later, just under halfway through the show’s thirty-six total songs. Gordon’s identity as a gay man, his unknown illness, and his relative stillness in a hospital bed or wheelchair all combine to reproduce a portrait of a gay male dying of AIDS.

33 William Finn, “911 Emergency,” A New Brain, libretto by William Finn and James Lapine, prepared by Emily Grishman Music Preparation (New York: Samuel French, 1999), 4. 34 The song originally starts in Bb major. 35 Finn, “911 Emergency,” 4. 38 There are only two moments in the show where Gordon moves freely. Both of them occur when Gordon is unconscious. First, just after Rhoda and Nancy D.’s exchange, Gordon appears from behind a medical curtain. Lights aimed behind the curtain cast shadows of doctors and nurses examining Gordon’s immobile, horizontal body on a stretcher. The second instance occurs after his craniotomy to remove the AVM, while he remains in a coma. Here again, the audience receives a visual reminder of Gordon’s “real-time” body: on the back wall is a shadow box with an aerial view of Gordon’s hospital room, with Gordon’s body lying still in bed.

The first number of the coma sequence, “Brain Dead,” begins with Gordon standing in a pool of light at center stage facing the audience, legs wide apart, holding a chair over his right shoulder. He spins the chair down in between his legs, the back of the chair towards the audience, sits down in the chair, and hunches forward against the back of the chair. He slowly lifts his chest off of the chair back, and then fully stands up. After the first verse, he stands to the right of the chair with his right foot on the chair seat. Roger, his boyfriend, strides onto the stage in an all black outfit with a black fedora. The pair pretends to sit at a dinner table, where they recreate an argument – Gordon sitting in the chair, Roger in a deep lunge upstage. The pair then strikes tango poses. Roger turns out and extends his hand to Gordon. He pulls Gordon’s hand, rolling Gordon into him, and Gordon lifts his right thigh up to Roger’s waistline, wrapping his leg around Roger and embracing him with his arms. Gordon then steps backward with his right foot; he and Roger rock together, and then Roger turns Gordon 180 degrees. They hold this pose, the frame created by their arms on a sharp diagonal pointing downstage, with Roger’s right leg extended out, foot pointed. The two then commence a tango sequence. Roger plants himself as

Gordon executes footwork, twisting at the hips while keeping his thighs together. Then, their upper bodies maintain the partner frame, but they move in grapevine steps in an arc toward

39 upstage left. Gordon peels away from Roger, stumbles downstage a few steps in a stupor, then frantically jumps in the air and snaps his fingers.

At this moment, the rest of the ensemble enters, wearing all-black versions of their earlier garments. The ensemble walks into the stage space, leaping on one foot, and snapping together.

They then reach over each others’ shoulders and perform the Hava Nagila while Gordon stands in the middle on his chair, an homage to his Jewish heritage. After circling Gordon, the ensemble then stumbles downstage with stiff legs and arms loosely swinging at their sides, like brain-dead zombies. They unanimously turn upstage and execute signature Fosse choreography. Their right hands stay at the sides of their foreheads, thumbs and index fingers pinched, the remaining fingers extended out. Their left elbows are bent and their left hands rest upon their waist. Their feet execute the same pattern: cross over; step out with the opposite foot. As they step out, their right hands travel across their forehead, as if outlining the brim of a hat, and they swivel at the waist. These Fosse-inspired movements hark back to a reference to the musical Chicago earlier in the show and also prepare the audience for the next number in the coma sequence, “Whenever

I Dream,” staged with Rhoda as a marionette puppet on Gordon’s lap, much like Fosse’s choreography for “We Both Reached for the Gun” from Chicago.36

This movement vocabulary and its execution reverses Greenberg’s approach in N-A-A-D.

In his piece, Greenberg recreates the coma in stillness, which juxtaposes against the broad, expansive movement of the rest of the dance. Similarly, the ACT UP protesters employed stillness in juxtaposition to the expected social behaviors and movements (literally moving bodies) of public spaces. With the return of the AIDS-afflicted body to its expected hospital setting and its expected relative immobility, Gordon must figuratively leave the hospital space in

36 Finn, A New Brain. 40 order to execute other, more motile movement vocabularies. In these dreamy unconscious states,

Gordon defies the social choreography of the AIDS-afflicted body as his literal body fights to recover from his brain surgery.

Though Gordon’s actual body lies still in his hospital bed, his dream body remains clothed in the same hospital garb he wears throughout the show, only this time now with a bandage wrapped around the top of his head. The costuming here is a visual reminder of

Gordon’s continuing battle with life-governing outside forces. His hospital clothes – a loose- fitting white long-sleeve shirt with matching loose white pants – become particularly noticeable in the low lighting of the dance and the all-black costumes surrounding him. The color white appears across all three AIDS choreographies: in the costumes of Neil Greenberg’s N-A-A-D and

A New Brain and in the chalk outlines and carnations left behind in the ACT UP die-ins. White as an archetype represents purity, peace, innocence, cleanliness, and sterility; ironic, then, that white is used in relation to AIDS, whose discourse throughout the ’80s and ’90s was dominated by rhetoric of moral and even literal impurity, dirtiness, criminality, and guilt. As Simon Watney writes, “Whether or not we live in states or countries where homosexuality is still a criminal offence, a legal gaze invariably surveys our lives, together with the marginally less obtrusive attentions of other agencies of moral regulation, from social workers to the local Neighbourhood

Watch scheme.”37 In how Britain and the United States define and criminalize what is considered pornography, “we are being invited to choose whether we prefer to regard homosexuality as indecent and/or obscene, or intrinsically ‘pornographic,’” and therefore illegal.38 Watney

37 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 61. 38 Watney, Policing Desire, 61. 41 explains how the same discourse surrounding pornography also surrounds AIDS: as passive/passivity, an epidemic, sick.39

There are, of course, other factors that may make the AIDS-afflicted body legible to the audience of A New Brain aside from the choreography. Finn’s Falsettos involves an AIDS diagnosis and death. An audience member familiar with Finn’s previous work may carry an expectation or association with AIDS with her into the theater. Additionally, HIV/AIDS did bear medical relevance to AVMs in the 1990s. In an interview with the author on July 4, 2018, Dr.

Rajesh Sriraman, a pulmonary intensive care unit physician, noted that doctors in the ’90s observed a correlation between weakened immune systems and presence of AVMs, lymphomas, aneurisms, and parasitic and fungal brain diseases. Before researchers could investigate a causal link between HIV/AIDS and AVMs, treatment for HIV/AIDS became more widely available, rendering any research project less necessary.40 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first protease inhibitor for HIV treatment (Invirase) in 1995, about three years before A New Brain premiered Off-Broadway.41

Still, Daniele’s invocation of the practices of AIDS choreographies (which, by extension, paints the protagonist as afflicted with AIDS) speaks to the legacy of the AIDS crisis as a whole and its tendency to dominate discourse. Writing in the early 2000s, Gere predicted that “death and grief, mourning and AIDS activism have, in fact, become so integral to the culture of the arts at the start of the millennium that the stamp of AIDS will surely remain on us long after the

39 Watney, Policing Desire, 62-63. 40 The extent to which this knowledge may be considered “common” seems dubious to me, simply because of how few people have AVMs. 41 Jonas Demeulemeester, Marc De Maeyer, and Zeger Debyser, “HIV-1 Integrase Drug Discovery Comes of Age,” in “Therapy of Viral Infections,” ed. Wibke E. Diederich and Holger Steuber, special issue, Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 15 (2015): 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/7355_2013_33. 42 epidemic actually comes to an end – assuming it does.”42 Furthermore, he adds, “Making dances

– and refusing to relinquish the particularities of gay male sexuality and sexual practices – may prove to be this era’s most distinctive legacy.”43

This inquiry into AIDS choreographies, in a broader sense, questions the extent to which performance can be considered ephemeral. David Gere and I have both established codes that make AIDS decipherable to an audience through the body, even if the body or its movements are

“not about” AIDS. If movement can be codified to signal something that is seemingly not present, summoning something from the past into the present, then performance may not be so fleeting. Diana Taylor explains this phenomenon this way:

The acts that are the repertoire [dance, music, ritual, and social practices] can be

passed on only through bodies. But while these acts are living practices, they

nonetheless have a staying power that belies notions of ephemerality. ‘Acts of

transfer’ transmit information, cultural memory, and collective identity from one

generation or group to another through reiterated behaviors. That is to say that

knowledge, albeit created, stored, and communicated through the embodied

practice of individuals, nonetheless exceeds the limits of the individual body. It

can be transferred to others.44

I do not mean to say that AIDS is an intangible cultural heritage, but perhaps it is a habitus, or part of a larger habitus that shapes the way one moves through the world. Those who possess the habitus can read and recreate specific bodily signs that suggest the presence of AIDS, regardless of whether or not AIDS gets explicitly named. The performed repetition of these signs and codes

42 Gere, How to Make Dances, 265. 43 Gere, How to Make Dances, 268. 44 Diana Taylor, “Performance and Intangible Cultural Heritage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 92. 43 transfers knowledge of the illness, of a culture, and of a community of people afflicted by AIDS.

In this way, previous performances continue to haunt present performances.

Yet in his review of the revival of A New Brain, Jesse Green claims that the musical, once a metaphor for AIDS, now points to a broader idea of mortality. His claim suggests that the habitus of AIDS is fractured, if not completely forgotten. One can lose access to this knowledge of AIDS if, as Diana Taylor notes, the performance, the “act of transfer,” is not protected and preserved. When repetition ceases, memory gets lost. Somewhere along the line, this corporeal understanding of AIDS lost its footing in performance. It may be, however, that we can recover at least some of that memory through remembering signs and codes. The body makes history legible, if only its ghost.

But to call AIDS “history” is a dangerous claim. In 2018, ACT UP New York protested the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition of David Wojnarowicz’s work. Wojnarowicz was a member of ACT UP before dying of HIV in 1992. The protestors argued that the Whitney failed to contextualize Wojanrowicz’s art within conversations surrounding AIDS in the present day, inaccurately rendering AIDS as a relic of the past.45 In 2013, 30 members of ACT UP New

York staged a die-in at the New York Public Library’s exhibit Why We Fight: Remembering

AIDS Activism for its memorialization of AIDS activism as a piece of history, ignoring ongoing

HIV/AIDS issues.46 As these protests illustrate, AIDS and AIDS activism are far from dead and gone.

45 Sarah Cascone, “‘AIDS Is Not History’: ACT UP Members Protest the Whitney Museum’s David Wojnarowicz Show, Claiming It Ignores an Ongoing Crisis,” Artnet News, published July 30, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/act-up-whitney-museum-david-wojnarowicz- 1325891. 46 “ACT UP ‘Die-In’ at New York Public Library AIDS Exhibit,” POZ, Smart + Strong, published October 9, 2013, https://www.poz.com/article/act-up-library-24615-3954. 44 To recover an AIDS habitus and apply it to A New Brain serves multiple purposes. Not only does it contextualize what the musical signified and how it made those significations during its conception and premiere, it can also remind audiences and scholars in the present that the

AIDS crisis continues to this day. Additionally, reading Gordon’s AVM as a metaphor for AIDS helps re-center the musical’s queerness overall, as opposed to Green’s more generalizing claim of AVM as just one of many forms of mortality. Addressing illness and death was a specific necessity for queer men in the 1990s, and stories of illness remain crucial both to remembering the past and responding to the present.

45 CHAPTER 3

“I SHOULD TRY TO LOCATE ROGER”: LOCATING THE GAY MALE IN MUSICAL THEATRE THROUGH INTERPELLATION, FORMATION, AND SIMULATION1

I structure this chapter in three distinct yet related sections. Part one is a close reading of

D.A. Miller’s Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Miller serves as my guide for understanding how gay males have come not only to identify with the musical genre but also – perhaps more importantly – how these men’s association and engagement with musicals shape what can be called, provisionally, a “gay male identity.” I incorporate other theorists, namely

Althusser and Lacan, to supplement and expand upon Miller’s ideas.

Part two documents Miller’s analysis of three musicals of the 1970s and early ’80s:

Company, A Chorus Line, and La Cage aux Folles. Each show prominently features a gay male

(or at least a character that audiences can read as gay); however, Miller finds their representations of homosexuality problematic and unappealing to gay men. He claims that without a star female to follow, musicals staging gay men fail to call the gay male into being. I include Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” with Miller’s investigation to argue that the gay male is an image constructed by his repeated representation in the Broadway musical.

Miller begins a project I continue by exploring musicals of the ’90s with gay male protagonists. Embracing Miller’s contextualizing method, part three of this chapter puts A New

Brain in conversation with other musicals of its decade both on and off-Broadway: Falsettos (by the same creative team as A New Brain, composer William Finn and playwright James Lapine),

Kiss of the Spider Woman, Hello Again, Rent, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I explore how A

1 William Finn and James Lapine, A New Brain, music and lyrics by William Finn (New York: Samuel French, 1999), 11. 46 New Brain takes part in the simulacrum of the gay male alongside these other musicals and outline the various tropes evident across the decade. I argue that this simulacrum of the gay male, like those musicals with female protagonists, scripts the lives of gay men in the ’90s, even if, as

Miller suggests, the gay male fails to identify with the representation on stage. Taking Miller’s suggestion one step further, I mark that, rather than appeal to gay men, ’90s New York musicals instead appeal to heterosexuals, modeling for them specific ways in which to appreciate the gay male and fold him into mainstream society.

Part One: Hailing the Gay Male into Being

The final chapter of Miller’s Place for Us begins with a simile comparing gay men’s first identification with musical theatre to the recognitions realized by primary characters in the musicals Flower Drum Song and Camelot:

Recall how Linda Low, hearing a whistle on the beach, immediately turns around, happy

to know the whistle is meant for her… or how Lancelot du Lac, receiving Camelot’s call

in far-off France, has this instant recognition: ‘c’est moi.’ With the same peremptory

familiarity did many of us who would become gay men feel addressed by the Broadway

musical, which hailed us as directly as if it had been calling out our names, and met us so

well that in finding ourselves called for, we seemed to find ourselves, period.2

Miller dedicates this chapter of his book to explaining his claim that may otherwise read as a joke among gay men or even as a stereotype of them: that “the Broadway musical made him homosexual.”3 Furthermore, Miller argues, “It is impossible to describe the appeal – let me

2 D.A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 65. (Emphasis mine.) 3 Miller, Place for Us, 66. 47 insist: the organized appeal – made to gay men by the post-war Broadway musical as though one hadn’t already heard it long ago.”4

Together, these three quotations echo Louis Althusser and his theories on ideology and

Ideological State Apparatuses. The word hailed, emphasized above, is in fact a particular linguistic choice that explicitly references Althusser (perhaps even hailing Althusser into being).

With Althusser’s notion of interpellation, it is possible to see that musical theatre, as an art form, is part of the cultural Ideological State Apparatus. Althusser asserts that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”5 Ideology serves as a worldview, a sort of mediator or link between the individual and her real, material world.

Ideologies also carry with them their own practices or rules to which individuals subscribe and which they obey. This is what makes ideology material: the fact that the imaginary, the metaphoric, has real-world implications that guide how people live their lives. Althusser uses religion as an example. If an individual engages with a certain religion, the individual adopts certain attitudes and beliefs and also executes specific behaviors in order to practice the religion.

It is in these practices that one can identify another’s beliefs – her ideology – because her actions reflect her ideology. As Althusser explains, “the ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that every ‘subject’ endowed with a ‘consciousness’ and believing in the

‘ideas’ that his ‘consciousness’ inspires in him and freely accepts, must ‘act according to his ideas’, must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice.”6 Ideology, then, manifests in the actions of the individual.

4 Miller, Place for Us, 69. 5 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162. 6 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 167-68. 48 In order for the ideology to function, it must call out to the individual, and the individual must recognize this calling. In this recognition, the individual becomes a subject of the ideology because she responds to its call. Althusser puts it this way: “Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing.”7 There is a sort of double affirmation at stake here. Ideology only exists because of its subjects, and its subjects, through their actions, are what make ideology material. This mutual dependence between ideology and its subjects validates and sustains both.

Broadway musicals can serve as apparatuses of the state. Joshua Chambers-Letson acknowledges Althusser’s interest in theatre and his use of theatre as a metaphor for his theories, including ideological state apparatuses. Chambers-Letson illustrates Althusser’s linkage of the two:

Althusser claimed that theater has the capacity for inspiring “the production of a new

consciousness in the spectator” and, in the making of a new consciousness, a new mode

of political subjectivity: “the play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor

who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”

Althusser’s spectator becomes an “actor” who carries the momentum of the play out into

the world, performing in a fashion that will realize the play’s revolutionary ambitions,

“but in life.” The language of theatricality in the process of subjection conjures a similar

image, as one is made a subject for the law by performing in response and accordance to

its hail. Thus, subjection is both a legal and political process as well as a theatrical and

7 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 174. 49 aesthetic one. Subjection occurs through performance as the legal, the political, and the

aesthetic mix together across the body.8

As Chambers-Letson explains, to be hailed into a subject is not only a theatrical event, but the theatre itself also contains values and expectations that are conveyed to its viewers and then carried out in the real world outside of the theater.

Returning to Miller, then, the content in a performance of a Broadway musical not only suggests a cultural ideology, but also the actions of engaging with the Broadway musical – be they through listening to a cast recording, singing and observing live performances of its songs in a piano bar, or in actually attending a show in a theater – reflect a cultural ideology. The

Broadway musical itself interpellates its subjects, and by responding to it and recognizing that call, the gay male becomes a subject of its ideology. He carries out these practices in devotion to the musical.

This introduces a paradox. If other Ideological State Apparatuses (such as religion and politics) and even Repressive State Apparatuses (such as the police) not only denigrate the gay male but also criminalize him, why, then, would a cultural Ideological State Apparatus such as the Broadway musical hail the gay male, calling him into existence? The answer may relate to the bodies that actually do the hailing.9 According to Miller, the audience is predisposed to relate to the female on stage not only because the narrative of the musical positions her as the protagonist of the story, but also because of the cultural codes that surround the acts of spectatorship. Miller states, “Though male and female alike may and indeed must appear on the

8 Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 17. 9 This actually answers how, not why. As Toni Morrison writes in The Bluest Eye, “There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” 50 musical stage, they are not equally welcome there: the female performer will always enjoy the advantage of also being thought to represent this stage, as its sign, its celebrant, its essence, and its glory; while the male tends to be suffered on condition that, by the inferiority or subjection of his own talents, he assist the enhancement of hers.”10 The dynamics of spectatorship arrange gendered bodies such that to be the observer, active, is gendered male, while to be the observed, passive, is gendered female. A male figure on stage, then, is instantly feminized through his placement in a passive role – to be observed by a crowd, especially a crowd of other males. In order to combat the homoerotics of the male gaze and reclaim his masculinity, the male performer must work to prove his masculinity by performing in conventionally coded masculine movement vocabularies or by under-performing so that his movements read as less expressive, especially next to a female partner, so that he is not the direct object of the male gaze. To perform too energetically or too effusively would also jeopardize his masculinity – more so, his heterosexuality – because excessive movement and expression also read as feminine.11 Miller writes, “Every female who enters the star spot is paired with a less brightly lit male figure, ridiculous or pathetic, of whom it is variously demonstrated that he may not take her place there,” for if the male were to take her place, he would assume a feminine position as the passive object of the male gaze.12 Without a male performer to observe and with whom to relate, the gay male spectator of the Broadway musical must take his cues from the female leading actress.

This impulse for the gay male to follow, to mirror, relates to the idea of mimesis – the innate human desire to imitate something or someone else. Aristotle explains, “Representation is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other animals in this: man tends

10 Miller, Place for Us, 71. 11 See Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacles, Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1995). 12 Miller, Place for Us, 73. 51 most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation.”13 As Miller remarks, “Contending against the established musical-theatrical regime that feminizes access to the performing space, a Mother Stage has universalized the desire to play there.”14 He goes on to detail this desire more thoroughly:

Now, to such pleasure of mothered performance, whose shared, even blurred aspect does

not allow it to be isolated on only one side of a proscenium, the logic of the musical

number is deeply allied. For – when it works at any rate – this number is destined to be,

as we say, “infectious”: to be caught and reproduced by the spectators who at a certain

moment cease to be simply watching it (with all the distance, the evaluative superiority,

that such watching implies), and begin, like the orchestra conductor who rises on tiptoe

for a dramatic note, or flings his arms out with a sudden expansion of sonority, to imitate

it.15

Miller claims that it is in the songs of a Broadway musical where audiences begin to identify with the female performer. Even the smallest habits, such as tapping one’s foot to the beat of the music, suggest an urge to mimic the performer. Keeping the beat is a physical embodiment of the music. Music is a specific arrangement of sound in space, both the aural space and the printed space when notated on a page. By physically embodying the music, the spectator occupies this spatial arrangement and makes it materially manifest upon her body, performing an association, an identification, with the sounds. This physical practice makes evident the values – the note or rhythmic values and the cultural values – of the music, of the culture, of the Ideological State

Apparatus.

13 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 4. 14 Miller, Place for Us, 81. 15 Miller, Place for Us, 86-87. 52 The musical has the power – or, perhaps instead, spectators bestow upon the musical the power – to then script how the spectator can – and should – live her life. Incredibly, this scripting can impact anyone, regardless of gender. As Miller suggests, “When it conjoins performance and femininity in the star, or when it implants this conjunction in the spectators’ breasts – almost as though it were implanting breasts – the musical is training a woman in the same familiar affinities between herself and, say, spectacle (or say narcissism, masochism, her mother) that other mainstream forms of cultural representation have needed no catchy rhythms to be drumming into her all along.”16 The distinctiveness, then, of the Broadway musical in post-war mass culture is not that it leads a woman to inhabit the socially given idea of her gender – a project it shares, for instance, with fashion and cinema of the period – but that it seduces a man to inhabit the same idea. Stimulated by the mimetic mechanism of the number to the spectacular pleasures of femininity, the male spectator finds himself placed in a fantasy scenario whose inseparable, almost indistinguishable players are mother and child.17

Miller’s discussion of the mother and child relationship between the stage and the spectator, along with the education and imitation that occurs in this relationship, calls to mind

Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage in childhood development. Lacan builds his theory off of the idea of fetalization: the “specific prematurity of birth” in man.18 At birth, the human infant remains still completely dependent upon the mother, despite completing gestation. In this phase of the infant’s life, she cannot distinguish herself (her body) from her surroundings. She exists everywhere; therefore, there is no self – no unique, sentient, independent being. There comes a point in development, however, where the infant can recognize her own image in a mirror. This

16 Miller, Place for Us, 89. 17 Miller, Place for Us, 89-90. 18 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 78. 53 recognition suggests a time “in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”19 In this mirror stage, the infant experiences a

“transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.”20 Lacan names this transformation an identification; the infant now identifies itself as an individual. In this awareness of the Other in the mirror, the infant realizes her self.

The infant then mirrors or mimics the actions of the Other (the other humans around her), and repeats these actions as a means of survival. The infant learns and rehearses a script of actions that help her navigate and survive her surroundings. Extending these ideas to gay male spectatorship of musical theatre, the gay male experiences a mirror stage not only in infancy but also upon consuming the Broadway musical. With a female in the spotlight, the gay male develops an identification with her. He mimics her actions, and her actions become a script for him to follow as he navigates his world.

Not only does he mirror her, but he later then desires her – though not sexually. Lacan states that the stage following the mirror stage is a stage of desire. This shift from mirroring the

Other to desiring the Other reflects a growing Oedipus complex – a desire for one’s mother and a simultaneous love and hatred for one’s father. Lacan hints at an important distinction: “the dynamic opposition between this libido [desire, as coined by Freud] and sexual libido.”21 Gay men do not possess the desire to have their mother; rather, according to Miller, gay men possess the desire to be their mother. In Miller’s theory, the mother is not one’s biological mother but instead the Mother Stage, the musical theatre.

19 Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 76. 20 Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 76. 21 Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 79. 54 Acknowledgment of this desire for the Mother Stage, for a “feminine” expression, came with significant, even potentially life-threatening consequences for the post-war male. Upon recognition of this identification with the female stage figure in musical theatre, the male spectator had two options: either bury this identification to resist retribution from society, or adopt this identification to such an extent that he becomes the secret himself. He that adopts this identification becomes the gay male, devised, scripted, rehearsed, and presented by musical theatre, the cultural Ideological State Apparatus itself. In this way, Miller illustrates how the gay male is a construction of musical theatre, how the musical scripts his life, and how his behaviors ultimately reflect a cultural ideology.22

Part Two: The Gay Male in Musicals Pre-1990

This construction of the gay male becomes complicated – and fails, in Miller’s eyes – when Broadway musicals incorporate gay males as their subjects. Miller uses the end of his book to chronicle some of these musicals and speak to their ultimate failures in satisfying gay male audiences. Though the following section may seem like a detour, I find it important to document the history of gay male representation in musical theatre before diving into my own analysis of a specific decade of musicals. This will help me illustrate what musicals of the ’90s inherit from the works that came before them and how these ’90s musicals align with this legacy. I can then draw larger conclusions about A New Brain’s place in musical theatre history overall.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company depicts Bobby, a bachelor, visiting various friends in celebration of his 30th birthday, all of whom are married. Though the musical includes

Bobby’s three current female love interests, his heterosexuality reads as tenuous at best. (As

Miller quips, “So many winks does Bobby share together with us that if we don’t take this

22 Miller, Place for Us, 102-103. 55 character for a gay cryptogram, it is only because there seems nothing cryptic about him.”)23

Though the musical has the potential to resist the all-too-common musical narrative of a heterosexual couple falling in love, getting married, and living happily ever after (in Oklahoma or any other setting), the musical ultimately succumbs to this trope, if only halfway. Miller laments, “In adopting a perspective on the couple that is not, for a change, the couple’s own, it recognizes the social existence of a whole ignored population of unmarried, not to say unmarriageable, others. Company only becomes truly nasty with Bobby’s last number, when it writes off this perspective – and this population – to become (in Sondheim’s chillingly apt words) ‘the most pro-marriage show in the world.’”24 The finale of the show, the solo number

“Being Alive,” marks Bobby’s realization that he longs to be in a monogamous heterosexual marriage, eclipsing the musical’s potential to represent any sort of queerness, be it that of a gay male or of even a perpetually single straight male (queer against the normative expectation of heterosexual marriage and procreation).

“A Chorus Line (1975),” Miller names, “is what we’ll remember for being the first musical to manifest the male fantasy that all the preceding ones (while no less essentially ministering to it) had maintained in secrecy.”25 Paul, a dancer auditioning for the chorus line, reveals his homosexuality in a soliloquy to the casting director. Later in the show, during a tap dance sequence, Paul falls, injuring his leg. He then gets escorted off of the stage and out of the musical entirely. Miller offers this theory about musical theatre as a form: “Homosexual fantasy may take the shape of a narrative memory or even a dramatic incident, but it must never assume what is, in the musical theatre, the far more involving and hence more dangerous form of a

23 Miller, Place for Us, 124. 24 Miller, Place for Us, 125. 25 Miller, Place for Us, 126. 56 number. Or rather, insofar as it does so, it must have explicitly ceased to identify itself either as

‘homo’ or as ‘sexual.’”26

The 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles prominently features both a gay male couple and a community of drag performers. Critics of the show fell into two different camps: those that remarked and celebrated a gay presence in a mainstream musical, and those that claimed the musical was not “gay” enough.27 Miller falls into the latter category, arguing, “La Cage works to disclaim the equally disturbing generality of that desire [a male occupying the Star Mother role in a musical], which it suggests can only be the wish of outrageous – and hence (despite

Herman’s rhyme) not at all contagious – folles. Wilier than A Chorus Line, this ‘gay musical’ denies its homosexualizing tendencies not by rejecting the homosexual, but by recognizing him, as a mythological creature that no one could ever actually be.”28 To Miller, the character of

Albin/Zaza is such an extreme caricature of female transvestism that the gay male cannot desire to be like her.

Miller has little hope for any future “gay” musical. He predicts that no musical with a gay male subject can ever truly succeed in appealing to the gay male because the female star, the object of his desire and that which calls his identity into being, is no longer front and center.

Miller writes,

However improved over La Cage, therefore, no gay musical is apt to elucidate what

makes any musical gay; the featuring of homosexuals on the Broadway stage – even ones

amicably drawn to our type – works positively against the recognition of the homosexual

26 Miller, Place for Us, 127. 27 Ryan Donovan, “‘Too Gay for You, Too Hetero for Me’: The Homogenized Homosexuals of La Cage aux Folles” (paper presentation, Song, Stage and Screen XIII: The Musical and Its Others, Then and Now, Los Angeles, CA, June 2, 2018). 28 Miller, Place for Us, 131. 57 desire that diffuses through ‘other’ subjects, objects, relations, all over the form. Indeed,

by the contrary application of the same cruel logic, Gypsy and its closeted kind can now

seem to have rendered a far richer account of this desire than anything we are likely to

owe to a counter-tradition of gay avowal. After all, who that saw the closet at work on the

musical stage, least of all our selves, failed to witness this double operation: not only of

‘hiding’ homosexual desire, but of also manifesting, across all manner of landscapes, an

extensive network of hiding places – call them latencies – apparently ready-made for the

purpose? To perceive the closet was always to perceive the multitude of conditions under

which closeting was possible, to glimpse, even as it was being denied, the homosexual

disposition of the world.29

In other words, what makes a musical “gay” is not its inclusion of gay males in its narrative; rather, the gayness is located at the site of the gay male’s association with the Other. The Other cannot be another gay male; it must be something other than a gay male. It is this queer sort of identification that queers musical theatre. Sites of queer identification illustrate the many possible locations and ways in which queer life thrives and continues, despite the Ideological

State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses that disdain and punish the gay male’s existence. Though the term “gay” may connote sexual desire of a specific kind, “queer” is broader. It opens up and reveals many sorts of desires, and many places to find them.

In both musical theatre and the world outside of the theatre, where, then, does the gay male originate? If the origin of the gay male exists in his queer identification with the Other, and that identification calls him into being, how, then, does putting him on stage reflect this action?

If the gay male is not a noun (defined by his personhood), but rather a verb (defined by his

29 Miller, Place for Us, 132-33. 58 actions), what images of the gay male are constructed by and for the stage? Jean Baudrillard helps us to see that the image of the gay male is a simulacrum of its own. When it depicts the gay male on stage, musical theatre does not represent the gay male; instead, it simulates the gay male, turning him into a repeated image.

Jean Baudrillard states that there are four “successive phases of the image”: “it is the reflection of a basic reality, it masks and perverts a basic reality, it masks the absence of a basic reality,” and last, “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”30

Naming a “reality” of the gay male seems difficult given that the gay male seems to exist only in an ideology made material by his practices – in this case, the practice of engaging with the music of a female lead in a Broadway musical. Additionally, finding “reality” is also difficult when, as

Althusser states, “Ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”31 If “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary,’”32 how does simulation work when it simulates an ideology, something that is already imaginary?

If the “real” in this case is the real-world actions performed by gay men, then perhaps the simulation of the gay male simulates the image of his actions. If the gay male cannot desire the gay male on stage, then this representation of the gay male is already invalid. If musicals continue to depict the gay male on stage, then their depiction is created from an identification that did not occur. The musical tries to simulate the image of the gay male, and this simulation stems from a “real” that truly never existed to begin with. As these images proliferate through

30 Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 11. 31 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 162. 32 Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 5. 59 other images, they become increasingly detached from this nonexistent “reality.” They are a simulacrum of repeated images, signifying nothing, lacking any reference to a “real” gay male.

Part Three: Appealing to Gay Males and Heterosexuals in Musicals of the 1990s

With this theoretical groundwork and musical theatre history laid out, I can now move on to my specific interests. If, as Miller claims, musicals that feature gay male characters fail because they obfuscate the spectator’s queer desire for the Other, then the musicals of the 1990s aim their appeal instead at heterosexual audiences. These musicals craft specific images of gay men and perpetuate the simulacrum in order to package a gay male identity that heterosexuals can value and embrace in their lives. Not only do they provide a script for gay men to follow in order to be seen as valuable, but they also script how heterosexuals can and should find value in homosexuals and how heterosexuals can work to incorporate them into their heterosexual society.

Central to my claims is the tenet that Broadway and off-Broadway musicals of the 1990s depict where and how the gay male fits within the family unit. No other musical of the ’90s stages the idealistic, quintessential bond between a mother and her gay son so blatantly as Kiss of the Spider Woman, the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical with a book by gay playwright

Terrence McNally. Luis Molina, an inmate in an Argentine prison serving time for “corrupting a minor,” envisions a conversation with his mother while in a morphine-induced haze in the prison’s infirmary.33 After confessing his homosexuality to his mother, Molina tells her, “I’ve brought you such shame.”34 His mother replies with a ballad of complete acceptance. She sings:

33 Terrence McNally, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb (New York: Samuel French, 1997), 12. 34 McNally, Kiss, 44. 60 Some other mamas have children

Whose secrets hurt them so

But you have no secrets. I already know

And you could never shame me

Let me say out loud

I’ve a son

A loving son

Who makes me proud.35

In his mother’s eyes, the only thing that is cause to shame Molina is if he were to do “something cruel, uncaring.”36 Molina’s mother goes beyond mere acceptance of her gay son to state her pride in him explicitly; moreover, she encourages the caring, emotional side of his personality – gendered qualities stereotypically uncommon of (heterosexual) males. Though the musical does not mention any other family members, it clearly suggests that a mother’s bond with her gay son is a welcome and essential part of the family unit.

Molina’s mother mourns in song as she waits for her son to return from prison. Molina wonders if his mother has forgotten about him. Enter Molina’s mother, singing:

Dear one

No, I don’t think about you

Dear one

I do nicely without you

Dear one – say that over and over

Keep repeating it as the days go by

35 McNally, Kiss, 45. 36 McNally, Kiss, 45. 61 …

And someday you’ll believe the lie.37

Molina’s mother demonstrates how a mother can attempt to stop missing her gay son. Though he is not dead, he is inaccessible. The prison robs the gay male of living a free, uninhibited life. The trope of the gay male as criminal, however, is even more pronounced here in the literal prison setting than in the hospital with AIDS (as other musicals I cover will depict).

AIDS comes directly into the spotlight in William Finn and James Lapine’s other musical of the ’90s, Falsettos. Falsettos on Broadway follows the protagonist Marvin as he embarks on a new relationship with his new gay lover, Whizzer, while simultaneously raising his son Jason with his ex-wife, Trina. Martin wants the best of both worlds: a romantic and sexual male-male relationship and a nuclear family. Over the course of the musical, the notion of “family” expands to include Trina’s new husband (and Marvin’s former psychiatrist) Mendel, the lesbian couple who lives next door, and Whizzer. This newly constructed family is itself a message from the musical to its audiences: that families are not strictly blood-related, that families can contain a multitude of sexual practices and identities, and that these conglomerate families can successfully raise a child.

In the second act of the musical, Whizzer contracts AIDS, and the narrative swiftly steers away from a portrait of neurotic Jews making sense of their tangled romantic and familial relationships to Whizzer’s hospitalization and ultimate death. Falsettos here models how to take care of an AIDS victim (like A New Brain) and also demonstrates how to integrate him into the family. Trina expresses her own surprise at Whizzer’s place in her life. She says she is “trying not to care about this man that Marvin loves. / But that’s my life. / He shared my life. / Yes,

37 McNally, Kiss, 22. 62 that’s my life.”38 In naming Whizzer’s life as her own, Trina suggests that AIDS not only threatens the wellbeing of her family but that AIDS also directly threatens her own life. As Trina and Mendel debate over whether or not to cancel Jason’s bar mitzvah given Whizzer’s health crisis, Jason proposes a third option: to have the bar mitzvah in Whizzer’s hospital room so that

Whizzer will be in attendance. As Jason reasons to his parents, the bar mitzvah would be incomplete without “good friends close at hand.”39 During the actual ceremony, Mendel recognizes Whizzer’s influence beyond simply friendship. He names Jason “Son of Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob. Son of Marvin, son of Trina, son of Whizzer, son of Mendel”; the rest of the ensemble adds, “And godchild to the lesbians from next door.”40 Here, the musical acknowledges the gay male as one of many parents to Jason as he accomplishes a major milestone in the Jewish faith: leaving childhood behind for adulthood. Mendel cites Whizzer as an overwhelmingly positive influence on shaping Jason into a man. Despite the common binary that marks homosexuality as opposite from masculinity, here gayness works to develop and usher in manhood.

The musical tackles head on the societal anxieties over queer parents raising children.

The musical articulates these fears through the child. Though Jason consistently indicates his interest in women throughout the show, he still worries about becoming like his father – inheriting homosexuality. Towards the beginning of the musical, Jason sings, “My father is a homo. / My mother’s not thrilled at all. / Father homo… / What about chromo-somes? / Do they carry? / Will they carry? / Who’s the homo now?”41 Marvin tells Jason, “I’ve made my choice. /

38 William Finn and James Lapine, Falsettos, music and lyrics by William Finn (New York: Samuel French, 1995), 148. 39 Finn and Lapine, Falsettos, 154. 40 Finn and Lapine, Falsettos, 170. (Emphasis mine.) 41 Finn and Lapine, Falsettos, 38-9. 63 But you can sing a different song.”42 It is Whizzer, however, from whom Jason seeks counsel and comes to admire. Whizzer convinces Jason to speak with a psychiatrist after Marvin and

Trina fail to convince him. Whizzer gives Jason pointers on how to swing a baseball bat, which leads to Jason’s first ever hit. When Jason once again voices his concern over his own sexuality,

Whizzer reassures him that Marvin’s sexuality has no bearing on Jason’s desires. Whizzer proves valuable to Jason not only in matters regarding homosexuality but also in other life events.

In analyzing the original one-act musical March of the Falsettos, Scott Miller argues,

“Whizzer knows that it’s ok to be gay. He’s telling Jason two things: that Marvin being gay doesn’t mean Jason will be gay, and that if Jason turns out to be gay, there’s nothing wrong with that. Earlier in the show, Jason won’t listen to his parents, but he will listen to Whizzer. He chooses Whizzer as a role model because perhaps he senses that Whizzer is the least screwed up of the adults in his life.”43 Though Miller does not go so far as to say that Whizzer serves as

Finn’s mouthpiece in the musical or even that Finn agrees with Whizzer’s perspective, the idea that Jason (conflicted and concerned about homosexuality) looks up to Whizzer suggests that audiences should as well. Jason becomes the placeholder for the presumed heterosexual spectator, a mouthpiece for many of the societal concerns surrounding homosexuality. As Jason comes to trust Whizzer, the audience, by extension, learns to trust Whizzer as well. Children on the stage represent the future; Falsettos suggests, then, that the future involves an appreciation for homosexuals and their incorporation into the traditional family unit, particularly in raising children.

42 Finn and Lapine, Falsettos, 94. 43 Miller, Scott, Deconstructing Harold Hill: An Insider’s Guide to Musical Theatre (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 58-9. 64 Though Rent largely lacks a visible traditional family on stage (parents only materialize in messages left on an answering machine), the musical presents an assembled family of bohemians living in New York City’s East Village. In Act II, these friendships and romantic relationships begin to deteriorate, peaking at drag queen Angel’s funeral. Angel’s lover Collins calls some of the group out for their behavior, singing, “You all said you’d be cool today / So please – for my sake… / I can’t believe he’s gone (to Roger) I can’t believe you’re going / I can’t believe this family must die / Angel helped us believe in love / I can’t believe you disagree.”44

Collins’ interjection brings peace, if only temporarily. Performance artist Maureen and lawyer

Joanne reconcile, become a couple once again, and exit. Drug-abuser Mimi and her developer boyfriend Benny depart together, leaving wannabe rocker Roger and filmmaker Mark alone.

Though Angel has died from AIDS, Collins invokes him in order to reunite the family. Even from beyond the grave, the gay male serves to hold the family unit together.

Another trope common to many ’90s musicals with gay male characters is the characters’ work in arts professions and hobbies. In The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina is a department store window dresser with a deep love for the cinema.45 Rent features a drag queen performer in its queer community. Two additional musicals include gay male artists: Hello Again has The

Writer (an aspiring screenwriter), and Hedwig of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a singer/songwriter on the fringes of fame, eclipsed by a young man she once mentored.46

Noticeably absent from this list are Marvin and Whizzer from Falsettos, whose professions go

44 Jonathan Larson, Rent (New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1997), 120. 45 If there is any question about window dressing as an artistic pursuit, Molina explicitly explains his craft in the song “Dressing Them Up,” sharing examples of how he dressed mannequins. 46 Though Hedwig details her botched gender reassignment surgery in the musical and uses female pronouns, gay men consistently play the role of Hedwig, lending her to a drag queen interpretation. Actors who have played Hedwig include John Cameron Mitchell, Neil Patrick Harris, Andrew Rannells, and gay-for-pay actor of stage and screen Darren Criss. 65 unnamed; however, John M. Clum claims Marvin as a participant in an artistic world with a heightened awareness of artistry and artifice. He writes that Marvin “is presented within a self- reflexive work of art that, as musical theater tends to do, celebrates the acts of creation and performance as it celebrates the ways in which Marvin and the members of his family bravely forge their lives and the links between them. Marvin and his family are highly conscious of language. Created within a world of verbal and visual metaphor, the characters seem always aware of the power of metaphor and of their own experience as metaphor, a gift denied most inhabitants of the real or realistic worlds.”47

For Clum, these artistic endeavors represent the gay male’s relationship with the power of imagination, which serves “first as a means of separation and isolation, then as a tool for forging a gay identity, and finally as a bridge to other people.”48 He explains, “The metaphoric actions of performance and writing are joined in the creation of the gay self, a work of art, the product of a critique, revision, and, to some extent, rejection of the self-image and the language that have been taught by an education in a heterosexist society. Only when the gay character has embarked on such a self-creation can he forge relationships that meaningfully and honestly connect him to other people – lovers, friends, family.”49 Theatre and metatheatre, then, become the safe spaces of artifice in which to perform gayness and fashion one’s gay self. Placing these characters in artistic professions works as a clear code to audiences that indicates the characters’ homosexuality, riding on the stereotype that gay men are inherently and essentially more predisposed to creative work than heterosexuals because they are more in tune with their feminine emotional centers. Additionally, these musicals instruct audiences what to appreciate

47 John M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 275. 48 Clum, Acting Gay, 245. 49 Clum, Acting Gay, 248. 66 about gay men and why they are valuable. Gay men have value in society because they contribute to its creative output, bringing art and culture to their communities. The gay male’s role as creative maven and cultural provocateur extends beyond the theater, setting up an expectation of how gay men can and should behave in order to find acceptance and appreciation in society.

Aside from coding gay men as artists, many of these aforementioned musicals place gay male characters in settings of death, frequently staging their near-death experiences in hospitals or other medical settings. In The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina ingests a poison intended for his cellmate, sending him to the prison’s infirmary. Whizzer in Falsettos contracts AIDS and ultimately passes away; the musical relocates to his hospital room for the latter half of the second act. Rent displays Angel dying of AIDS in a hospital bed (“Without You”), and then he passes away in the next number (“Contact”) during “a sensual life and death dance.”50 Though Hedwig and the Angry Inch does not include an illness or a hospital setting, Hedwig describes her failed gender reassignment surgery in graphic detail in her song “The Angry Inch.” She likens her surgery to a near death experience, singing, “Six inches forward and five inches back / The train is coming and I’m tied to the track / I try to get up but I can’t get no slack / I got an / Angry Inch

Angry Inch.”51 Hello Again’s gay characters are both spared from illness and medical settings, but The Young Thing and The Husband (cheating on his wife with The Young Thing) end their scene on the sinking Titanic as people flee for safety. Death (or near-death) in ’90s musicals becomes an inescapable context within which to frame gay men. To know a gay man is to come into contact with histories of death.

50 Larson, Rent, 116. 51 John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, music and lyrics by Stephen Trask (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), 45. 67 In some of these musicals, a dance accompanies these brushes with death – specifically a tango. Similarly, as Molina succumbs to the morphine used to cure him from poisoning in The

Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina and the male orderlies dance a tango. The Husband and The

Young Thing in Hello Again dance a tango “while all around, the world falls apart. The ship of dreams [the Titanic] develops a serious tilt; terrible groans and screams are heard.”52 The tango in these musicals is a convention employed to illustrate male-male desire.53 Known as a passionate and seductive dance, the tango gives the gay men an acceptable movement vocabulary within which they may safely engage with each other both emotionally and physically.

Physicalizing gay male desire becomes a particularly important measure of gay representation in theatre at this time. For example, Clum laments about the original Broadway production of

Falsettos, “Unfortunately, the overly cautious production turned the script against itself. The male lovers barely touched, and the one kiss exchanged by the lesbian couple was turned into a laugh by the ‘take’ of the actress playing the wife, Trina, who walks in on this kiss. The show was played totally from a heterosexual point of view.”54 Not only does the tango provide a moment of contact, it also hints at sexual activity. The male bodies move passionately in tandem.

The tango is sexy, but it is not sex. It merely suggests sex. Dancing a tango as the gay male lays brain dead, or incapacitated by drugs, or as the world falls apart, then, draws the link between sex and death that surrounds AIDS rhetoric (and, by extension, rhetoric of male homosexuality) during the ’80s and ’90s.

Above I identified four different tropes of New York musicals in the 1990s that prominently feature gay male characters: images of how the gay male can fit within the

52 Michael John LaChiusa, Hello Again: A Musical (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995), 51. 53 For this reason, I left out “Tango: Maureen” from Rent. 54 Clum, Acting Gay, 356. (Emphasis mine.) 68 heterosexual family unit, the gay male’s worth as an artist figure, gay men framed in life- threatening contexts, and the tango as an erotic dance with death. A New Brain also uses these same tropes to similar ends. Protagonist Gordon is coded as a creative gay artist; he is a composer for a children’s television program who longs for the time to write for his own projects. Although his boss criticizes his talent and creative output, by the end of the show

Gordon redeems himself and composes more beautifully than ever. Nearly the entire musical is set in a hospital as Gordon fights a life-threatening illness and then survives a life-threatening surgery, reinforcing the notion that homosexual lives are contaminated with death. He and his partner Roger dance an imaginary tango as Gordon’s real-life body lies comatose (discussed in detail in the previous chapter), providing a sterilized, acceptable way for heterosexual audiences to envision male-male erotic desire.

Most importantly, the musical is a portrait modeling how to take care of the afflicted gay male and incorporate him into the family unit. In A New Brain, Gordon is practically bedridden in a hospital with a mysterious disease that goes unnamed for almost half of the musical. His ailments include emotional outbursts, limited mobility, and poor balance. Regardless of whether

Gordon’s brain arteriovenous malformation is a metaphor for AIDS, A New Brain displays how lovers, family, and friends should take care of a hospitalized gay male at risk to die. Despite

Gordon’s flaring temper and grim prospects, his lover Roger, his mother, and his friend Rhoda never abandon him in his hospital stay; moreover, they actively support him and take care of him throughout.

Roger introduces the sailing metaphor that sees Gordon through to his recovery. “I’d

Rather Be Sailing,” Roger’s first song, is a lush ballad that Gordon envisions Roger singing when he learns that Roger is delayed in getting to the hospital. Though Roger sings that he

69 prefers sailing over sex, food, and even people, ultimately he longs to be by his lover’s side: “I’d rather be sailing / Yes, I’d wanna go sail / And then come home to you.”55 Though one could read these lyrics as a listing of priorities (first sailing, then Gordon), another reading suggests that Gordon is Roger’s anchor, the thing to return to; in other words, Gordon is home. Roger’s vocal line reflects this as well. Every time Roger sings “you” in the phrase “And then come home to you,” the melody returns to do (in solfège), the tonal center of the key signature.56

Roger’s love for sailing becomes a calming reference point for Gordon in other parts of the musical. To alleviate Gordon’s claustrophobia during his MRI, Roger instructs Gordon to “Think sailing.”57 The entire MRI experience becomes akin to “Sitting Becalmed in the Lee of

Cuttyhunk” – a waiting game on a boat at sea with no wind.58 Toward the end of the MRI, a wind kicks in. As the ensemble exclaims, “I think we’re moving! / Not becalmed! / Cuttyhunk is in our past,” Gordon wonders out loud, “Could that be a metaphor? / Getting somewhere at last /

Is a sign of things improving.”59 By the end of the musical, Gordon adopts Roger’s melody and sings his own sort of reprise of “I’d Rather Be Sailing”: “I feel like I’m sailing / I’m slowly exhaling / Holding on for life.”60 Despite his late arrival, Roger’s presence in the musical demonstrates how gay males can (and should) take care of their ill partners.

Gordon’s mother Mimi serves the same sort of function, modeling proper behavior of mothers of hospitalized gay sons. At her entrance, she proclaims, “Mother will attend. / Mother’s

55 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 21. 56 William Finn, A New Brain, book by William Finn and James Lapine, prepared by Emily Grishman Music Preparation (New York: Samuel French, 1999). 57 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 36. 58 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 36. 59 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 39. 60 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 69. 70 gonna fix things. / Mother’s gonna mend. / Mother’s gonna make things fine.”61 She promises to stay by Gordon’s side and to dote on him throughout his ordeal. She only leaves the hospital to clean Gordon’s apartment. Additionally, in Gordon’s coma sequence post-operation, Gordon dreams of his mother. Gordon casts his mother in a sentimental cabaret moment, singing a ballad as if he died in surgery. Mimi tells the audience:

This is how he thinks

I’ll be

When he dies.

I’ll be gracious and aloof;

Or I’ll climb on the roof

Shouting obscenities.

He was here and now he’s gone,

The music still plays on.62

In this number, Mimi demonstrates how properly to mourn for a dead gay son. She does not want sympathy; instead, she consoles herself with the memory of Gordon’s music. The music plays on, just as time moves forward.

Gordon’s affinity with his mother is particularly important given that his father is not in the picture. Gordon chronicles the divorce of his mother and his gambling, temperamental father in the song “And They’re Off.” Though the musical does not depict a negative father-son relationship, Gordon’s boss Mr. Bungee stands in as a surrogate for Gordon’s father, and their relationship is anything but friendly. The absence of a direct paternal character combined with

61 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 19. 62 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 63. 71 the demanding father figure of Mr. Bungee highlights the necessity of a strong mother-son bond in order to get through the hardships of life.

In all of these ways, A New Brain falls in line with other musicals of its time by utilizing tropes that promote a specific representation of the gay male. This chapter overall serves the greater purpose of my thesis: to illustrate how queerness is central the musical’s content and its function – even if, as noted, the representation of queerness in musicals depends upon an essentialized and ultimately nonexistent gay male identity. This argument challenges the prevailing notion that representation on stage equals power for minority groups. The Broadway musical scripts the lives of its spectators, promoting specific ideologies and ignoring or even disavowing others. It constructs an image of the gay male, suggesting that there is a “real” gay male identity that can be defined and represented; however, as I have indicated, there is no such thing as a “real” gay male. The only “reality” is the ideology that materializes in the actions carried out by spectators outside of the theater. The musical hails the gay male into being as a subject, yet in staging him, the musical fails to spark the identificatory processes that hail him in the first place. Instead, the musical ends up calling to a heterosexual audience, packaging the gay male into an easily recognizable set of codes for heterosexuals in order to assert an assimilationist agenda. Even if there are potential benefits from this assimilationist strategy, only the select few who can reproduce this image outside of the theater can reap those benefits. The musical legitimizes a very narrow scope of “acceptable” queerness, and in doing so it denigrates anyone who falls outside of that scope. In a world where the gay male’s position in society remains unstable, this work is both a betrayal and an erasure of the gravest kind.

72 CHAPTER 4

“WHERE THE HELL’S MY SENSE OF HUMOR?”: CAMPING IN THE HOSPITAL1

In A New Brain, camp functions as a device to inject levity in what is otherwise gloomy subject matter with a gloomy central character. Finn presents camp as a tool both to combat the macabre and to queerly traverse a heteronormative world. “Traverse” here holds dual meanings: to travel through; to go against or in opposition to.2 This chapter analyzes the dream-like liminal space created in Gordon’s AVM-fueled fantasies as a neuroqueer camp/site, paying specific attention to the musical numbers that take place during Gordon’s post-surgery coma. I use

“camp/site” to mean both a place where camp is located and a place in which a camper enacts camp strategies; the forward slash emphasizes the importance of “camp” to this site. Though

Gordon’s recovery renders the camp/site inaccessible, the finale of the musical suggests that

Gordon and the other characters in his life all possess the tools to set up camp elsewhere.

In David Bergman’s introduction to his compendium on camp, he claims that scholars and artists agree that “the person who can recognize camp, who sees things as campy, or who can camp is a person outside the cultural mainstream.”3 This positioning outside of the cultural mainstream or dominant normativity is a queer positioning, and everyone – regardless of their sexual desires or practices – can claim this queer space for themselves. Another agreement reads,

“Camp is affiliated with a homosexual culture, or at least with a self-conscious eroticism that

1 William Finn and James Lapine, A New Brain, music and lyrics by William Finn (New York: Samuel French, 1999), 60. 2 See Mary Karen Dahl, “Constructing the Subject: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7, no. 2 (1993): 149-159. 3 David Bergman, introduction to Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 5. 73 throws into question the naturalization of desire.”4 While this may seem to run counter to the prior statement that anyone can utilize the queer practice of reading camp, emphasizing the homosexuality of camp helps me reinforce Gordon’s own homosexuality. Gordon’s camping practices are a product of his queer sensibility. It marks Gordon as an insider existing within and referencing a gay culture. Camp’s affiliation with homosexual culture marks it as queer, while the practice of reading camp – open to everyone – is a queer practice. These two definitions validate my inclusion of a chapter on camp in arguing for A New Brain’s queerness overall.

Though what specifically camp is seems almost indefinable, Bergman states, “Everyone agrees that camp is a style (whether of objects or of the way objects are perceived is debated) that favors ‘exaggeration,’ ‘artifice,’ and ‘extremity.’”5 Within Bergman’s presented debate, I locate camp within the spectator. As Esther Newton insists, “Camp is in the eye of the beholder.”6 Camp as I use it here is a form of reception, a way of reading performance. As David

Halperin explains, “Camp is not about attribution, but about recognition. It declares your delight and participation in the cultural subversions of camp.”7 Bergman’s qualities of exaggeration, artifice, and extremity are helpful for recognizing camp, yet they are somewhat vague. I prefer

Newton’s characteristics and expanded descriptions: “incongruity is the subject matter of camp, theatricality its style, and humor its strategy.”8 Recognizing the incongruity, theatricality, and humor as camp proves very useful not only for articulating the campiness of A New Brain but also for demonstrating how camp functions as culturally subversive both within and for the musical.

4 Bergman, Camp Grounds, 5. 5 David Bergman, Camp Grounds, 4-5. 6 Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 105. 7 David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 189. 8 Newton, Mother Camp, 106. 74 Halperin names the purpose of camp quite succinctly: “Camp works to drain suffering of the pain that it also does not deny.”9 Because heterosexual cultural and behavioral norms call for seriousness and sincerity in emotional expression, camp may be seen as trivializing serious issues. In a sense, yes, that is a major aim of camp; however, camp is not without reverence or respect for gravity. Instead of taking serious things seriously, camp’s humorous approach

“implies that no tragedy, not even yours, can or should claim so much worth as to presume an unquestionable entitlement to be taken completely seriously – that is, to be taken straight – in a world where some people’s suffering is routinely discounted.”10 The pain is still present, but artists who use camp question and ultimately weaken the suffering caused by that pain by identifying and exaggerating it.

This suffering is a performance of its own, an expected societal response towards specific stimuli. Camp points out the contrived nature of this expected performance; in doing so, camp becomes a way to honor the weight or importance of a painful subject while simultaneously critiquing the structures that script how people should respond to that subject. Within this strategizing is room for community building, specifically for the purpose of confronting pain together. As Halperin says, “The effect is not to evade the reality of pain, but to share it and, thus, to cope with it.”11 This acknowledgment of pain “explains why horror can cohabit with hilarity in the poetics of gay male discourse, and human calamities like the HIV/AIDS epidemic can become vehicles of parody without the slightest implication of cruelty, distance, or disavowal.”12

9 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 186. 10 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 187. 11 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 186. 12 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 186. 75 Camp, then, is a coping device for gay men facing senseless pain and suffering all around them – be it due to a health crisis given inadequate attention, a repressive state apparatus, a culture that demonizes homosexual practices, or, in the case of A New Brain, a debilitating illness that robs the body and mind of conscious control. Camp brings a mainstream ideology of pain to the fore, calls it preposterous, derides it, and then opens up other possibilities of responding to it and navigating through it. Camp deflects social judgment and pity. Camp beats people to the punch – it makes itself the joke without devaluing the pain of the situation.

Halperin sums up camp’s objectives nicely:

Camp returns to the scene of trauma and replays that trauma on a ludicrously amplified

scale – so as to drain it of its pain and, in so doing, to transform it. Without having to

resort to piety, camp can register the enduring reality of hurt and make it culturally

productive, thereby recognizing it without conceding to it the power to crush those whom

it afflicts. In this way, camp provides gay men with a cultural resource for dealing with

personal and collective devastation: a social practice that does not devalue the suffering it

also refuses to dignify.13

This chapter uses Newton’s three hallmarks of camp (incongruity, theatricality, and humor) and follows Halperin’s explanation of camp’s functions (to drain suffering, cope with pain, critique social norms, and forge community). Using these descriptions of camp’s characteristics and functions, I will start my analysis of A New Brain by describing what is not camp. Whereas all of the other characters in the musical fail to see Gordon’s hallucinations, Gordon fails to see his hallucinations as humorous or campy. He takes his surroundings – both real and imaginary – far too seriously. Gordon’s function in the musical is what I name the “failed camper.” He bears the

13 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 200. 76 burden of taking his life-endangering predicament seriously so that the audience does not have to; instead, we can revel in the campy delights that result from Gordon’s illness. His near- constant severity and pessimism absolve the audience of any guilt about not treating the subject matter with solemnity; in fact, Gordon’s extremely heightened emotional state works to show the ridiculousness of his own reactions to his medical situation. The campy elements juxtaposed with

Gordon’s lack of humor bring the camp into sharper relief – both clearer to read and more potent as a coping strategy.

Gordon is overreacting. Nearly everyone around him attempts to calm him down or show him that his life is not as bad as he makes it out to be, but Gordon stubbornly refuses to see others’ points of view. For example, Richard “the nice nurse” laments that he will always be

“Poor, Unsuccessful, and Fat,” especially in comparison to Gordon. He sings to Gordon:

Surely in no time

You’ll be back to normal

In your evening formal

I’ll be poor, unsuccessful

Poor, unsuccessful and fat

And getting older.14

The only characters who do not work to soothe Gordon are Dr. Jafar, his boss Mr. Bungee, and

Nancy D. “the thin nurse,” but all of these characters can easily be discredited. More specifically, the musical gives us reasons not to give considerable weight to these characters’ opinions. Dr.

Jafar by and large occupies the same serious mental and emotional space as Gordon; however, even at his most serious (delivering Gordon’s diagnosis or explaining medical procedures), Dr.

14 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 34.

77 Jafar’s vaguely Eastern European accent colors everything he says in a humorous tone.15 Even when Gordon agrees to have a craniotomy to fix his AVM – what may be the most foreboding moment in the whole show – Dr. Jafar kills the heavy mood by announcing that he must leave to take his family to see a musical (Chicago in the original production, Fun Home in the revival).

Earlier in the show, he abruptly leaves a conversation to address another patient’s cerebral hemorrhage; this time, the crisis is an impending show time. This juxtaposition places seeing a musical on the same level of importance as a medical emergency and marks it as certainly more important than tending to Gordon’s needs and fears. The revival takes Dr. Jafar’s ego further than the original by giving him a reprise post-surgery in which he sings his own praises and hopes that Gordon will write him a song.16 As for Mr. Bungee, he only appears in Gordon’s hallucinations. He is the product of Gordon’s AVM and his work anxieties. Mr. Bungee himself is an exaggeration of the archetypal terrible boss: always yelling, insistent, demanding, and demeaning. Thin nurse Nancy D. is, well, simply not nice (as Richard says, she is a bitch).17

Or maybe she just has a morbid sense of humor. Nancy D. uses dark comedy to cut through the severity of Gordon’s predicament. In both the original and revival cast recordings of

A New Brain, both actresses playing Nancy D. (Kristen Chenoweth and Jenni Barber, respectively) color their vocal deliveries in a mocking cheerfulness, evidenced by the exaggerated warmth in their tone that leans toward Julie Andrews’ prim and proper, sugary sweet musical elocution. This choice in vocal quality gives a sardonic tone to some otherwise grim lyrics:

15 A vocal choice made in the revival production. See the 2015 New York Cast Recording. 16 See “Craniotomy (Reprise)” on the 2015 New York Cast Recording. 17 As supported by Richard’s lines, “’Cause the others [other nurses] won’t help you. / (Those bitches…)” Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 22. 78 Today is not a good day.

Because today is MRI day.

MRI day’s the day you feel they bury you alive.

I jive.

The shape, the feel.

An airtight seal.

Today is not a good day.18

Occasionally, both Chenoweth and Barber interrupt this vocal quality with jarring abrupt switches into deadpan, brassy, lateral vowel sounds (particularly when they have to repeat themselves).19 Nancy D. has no time for Gordon’s wallowing in self-pity; she teases Gordon for it and gets on with her job. This approach is a way of simultaneously acknowledging and debilitating the gloomy atmosphere of the hospital.

There is something (deliberately?) un-campy about the Homeless Woman, yet she still plays a role in the overall camp. Nothing about her persona reads as funny; she, too, takes her position in society rather seriously: she begs on the street for survival. Her presence serves as another reminder to Gordon that there are other problems in the world besides his own. Unlike

Gordon, she possesses the self-awareness to see that there are issues greater than herself. She asks the audience:

Change the government,

Kill the mayor.

It’s not fair how lives evaporate.

18 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 36. 19 For examples of both vocal colors, see “Family History” on both the Original Cast Recording and the 2015 New York Cast Recording, and also “MRI Day” on the 2015 revival recording. 79 Change the system

That made us what we are.20

In the original 1998 production, Gordon sits in a wheelchair upstage right slightly in the shadows and watches the Homeless Woman beg and preach to the audience.21 In the 2015 revival, the

Homeless Woman alternates between pontificating to the audience and directly to Gordon as he lies in a hospital bed at center stage.22 By keeping Gordon on stage during her solo number, both productions juxtapose Gordon’s medical problems with issues occurring in the world outside of his hospital room. This contextualizes his medical dilemma and reduces it to a personal drama in a sea of societal ills. By crossing through the invisible walls of Gordon’s room to speak directly to him, the revival production both implicates Gordon and suggests that these larger institutional issues permeate the hospital space as well. The Homeless Woman and her solo do much more work than offer a pun on “change” to the audience; she is another significant piece of the puzzle undermining Gordon’s melodramatic woe.

It does not seem coincidental that Finn makes the outsider both the most well-adjusted character and a sort of diva figure. Diva idolatry and identification is a hallmark of gay male culture and a frequent camp trope.23 The Homeless Woman is not a typical diva, at least not visually – she lacks glamorous fashion; nevertheless, the Homeless Woman possesses an

20 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 45. 21 William Finn, A New Brain, book by William Finn and James Lapine, directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, performed in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, New York, NY, Summer 1998, digital video file, 94 min. 22 William Finn, A New Brain, book by William Finn and James Lapine, directed by James Lapine, choreographed by Josh Prince, performed at New York City Center, New York, NY, Summer 2015, https://youtu.be/Zku0VVSyUZU. 23 See Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993) and David Román’s Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) for descriptions and examples. 80 unapologetic, gutsy air. She has no shame, openly admitting, “I don’t ask for hugs. / Just need money to buy more drugs. / And if you folks pay, / I’ll go away.”24 She knows exactly who she is and where she fits in society, and she owns it. She also prioritizes her own interests above others; though she comforts Roger while Gordon is in a coma after surgery, she has no problem later selling off all of Gordon’s books to make a few bucks. Additionally, she possesses a powerhouse belt voice; Mary Testa and Rema Webb perform in the original and revival recordings, respectively.

The diva comes into full camp glory during Gordon’s coma sequence. While in recovery after his craniotomy, Gordon dreams a series of musical numbers that place the diva on full display and parody various musical and theatrical styles. In the original 1998 production, after dancing a zombie tango with Roger in “Brain Dead” (a diva-esque dance of drama and sexual tension discussed in my “‘Stories of Illness’” chapter), his friend Rhoda becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy. Her number “Whenever I Dream” is a send-up of the musical Chicago, particularly the number “We Both Reached for the Gun.” Yet the number is not hers; rather, it is truly Gordon’s song. He articulates his anxieties over his work and his dreams, physically manifesting his thoughts through Rhoda. By playing her ventriloquist, physically moving her body as a puppet, and using her voice to convey his emotions, Gordon demonstrates an affiliation with both Rhoda and with Roxie Hart, the it-girl of the Cook County Jail in Chicago.25

When Rhoda begins lashing out (acting of her own accord, displaying her own sentience), Gordon tosses her offstage, and nice nurse Richard enters with a song of his own.

Immediately, choreographer Graciela Daniele presents Gordon’s identification with Richard – they mirror each other’s movements, dragging their hands back and forth from their waists up to

24 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 45. 25 Finn, A New Brain, Summer 1998, digital video file. 81 their faces. His song “Eating Myself Up Alive” is a disco funk, complete with a bass groove, brassy horn interjections, and heavy drum rhythms. Finn describes the number as “sort of an

Aretha with the Pips.”26 Not only does this sonically mark a stark shift in musical genre from the

Kander-and-Ebb-informed song before it, Finn’s composition also situates Richard within the musical code of a disco diva. Vocally, Richard (played by Michael Mandell) inflects his soulful diva performance with the speech qualities of a mad scientist: a slight grovel and an exaggerated dipthong of the word “alive.” His vocal performance befits his long white doctor’s coat over black scrubs. His backup singers are ensemble members also clad in black scrubs, hunched over in the shoulders, arms bent like a T-Rex, and wiggling their splayed fingers; in other words, they are zombies. They sing “ohs” and “ahs” in the background to Richard’s verses, then punctuate the chorus of the song by chanting “Eat!” Richard later commands his background zombie singers to “Spell it!” and they spell out the title of the song.27 The combination of musical funk with elements of mad scientist and zombie make “Eating Myself Up Alive” the soundtrack to a

1970s Halloween party. It combines the camp of diva identification and admiration with the creepy dead vibes of a hospital. The number is a bizarre and silly mix of cultural references, reminiscent of other camp objects like the “Monster Mash” or even The Rocky Horror Picture

Show.28

“Eating Myself Up Alive” devolves into a mash-up, overlapping with verses from

“Whenever I Dream” and “Brain Dead.” Amidst the chaos of the overwhelming competing preoccupations in Gordon’s comatose brain, Gordon sits on Rhoda’s lap in a chair at center stage. The roles have reversed: Gordon is now the lip-syncing puppet and Rhoda is the

26 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 60. 27 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 61. 28 Finn, A New Brain, Summer 1998, digital video file. 82 puppeteer. Here Daniele presents a double-identification with the diva figure. On one level,

Gordon is physically occupying the diva space once held by Rhoda representing a 1920s celebrity criminal. At the same time, Rhoda as puppet master supersedes Gordon’s conscious control; in other words, the female diva is now (literally) pulling the strings, shaping Gordon’s vocal and physical presence. In this image, Gordon is simultaneously placing himself as the female diva while allowing a female diva to influence his being.29

Gordon and the ensemble clear the stage, and in walks his mother Mimi in a floor length black evening gown.30 For a visual reference, picture Rosemary Clooney’s black mermaid evening gown in the number “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me” from the film White

Christmas.31 Just like Clooney’s performance in the Carousel Club, the stage space in A New

Brain becomes a cabaret setting for Mimi’s torch song. She too sings a mournful ballad (“The

Music Still Plays On”), but her lyrics give away that this moment is still a product of Gordon’s imagination. (In fact, according to the stage directions, Gordon accompanies her on the piano.)32

She sings:

I see the keys,

And I freeze:

No surprise.

This is how he thinks

29 Finn, A New Brain, Summer 1998, digital video file. 30 Finn, A New Brain, Summer 1998, digital video file. 31 Rosemary Clooney, “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me,” White Christmas, dir. Michael Curtiz (Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 1954), video, 2:00:10, https://www.netflix.com/title/60003082. 32 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 63. I cannot see Gordon playing on the video file I have of the 1998 performance, but he may just be out of frame. 83 I’ll be

When he dies.33

Mimi explains to the audience, “I don’t want sympathy. / He was here and now he’s gone. / The music still plays on.”34 Gordon stages his mother’s mourning practice of his own death as a diva performing a torch song in a cabaret, dressed for the occasion. Not only does Gordon himself perform an identification with diva culture, he also uses the diva vehicle to articulate his thoughts and feelings, specifically about death. Though Gordon resides in a dark headspace, Mimi (by way of Gordon) eschews the maudlin and asks the audience not to indulge in it either – at least not for her sake. Gordon’s Mimi participates in camp as a form of self-protection from grave tragedy. By telling us to withhold our sympathy, she suggests that we are part of the normative structure that camp renounces. Mimi models how we can use camp, that camp is also available to us as a way to deflect negative energies without completely emptying the heart of pain.

The entire coma sequence also exemplifies another important function of camp: to illustrate how role-playing is part of everyday life. The minor characters (the hospital staff) and even some of the principal characters take on different roles between the reality grounded in the hospital scenes and the flights of fancy fueled by Gordon’s AVM. As seen in the coma sequence, hospital staff become zombies, the doctor plays a divalicious mad scientist, and even Gordon’s mother drags up in cabaret glamour. In nearly each hallucinatory musical number, the ensemble members take on personae completely different from their own. This theatricality when viewed through a camp lens suggests that no person’s role in life is fixed. One’s identity is continuously shifting even within a singular person’s outlook. Both a person’s identity and her relationship to the people, places, and things around her are completely subjective. This awareness of role-

33 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 63. 34 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 63. 84 playing in everyday life calls into question any understanding of “normal.” It recognizes that

“normal” itself is a social construction, and that the roles people occupy are conventions. Camp provides opportunities to defy conventionalized roles and imagine new ones. A New Brain, in all of its hallucinatory campy madness, stages this possibility.

Halperin explains the effects of this awareness of role-playing in everyday life quite thoroughly:

By refusing to accept social identities as natural kinds of being, as objective descriptions

of who you are, and by exposing them, instead, as [theatrical] roles, and thus as

inauthentic, stigmatized groups achieve some leverage against the disqualifications

attached to those identities. By putting everything in quotation marks, especially

everything “serious” – and thereby opening a crucial gap between actor and role, between

identity and essence – camp irony makes it possible to get some distance on “your” self,

on the “self” that society has affixed to you as your authentic nature, as your very being.

Embracing the stigma of homosexuality becomes possible as a tactic for overcoming it

only when those who embrace it also refuse to recognize it as the truth of their being,

when they decline to see themselves as totally, definitively, irreprievably described by

it.35

Gordon sees himself as totally, definitively, and irreprievably described by his AVM/AIDS, a marker that labels him as homosexual and therefore the subject of stigma. He struggles to achieve any sort of distance from the ascription deemed essential to his being by mainstream heteronormative society – and by himself, for in taking his illness so seriously, he reaffirms this limiting cultural position. All of the other characters dance around him, performing all sorts of

35 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 195. 85 identities – mother, lover, friend, doctor, minister, boss, diva, frog, zombie, and more – in order to illustrate to Gordon that these totalizing identity labels that society utilizes and maintains are inauthentic and incomplete descriptors. Placing his AVM/AIDS in quotation marks (“AVM,”

“AIDS”) would allow Gordon to see how he himself performs the established roles of afflicted patient, victim, and gay man, and even how he follows a scripted performance of suffering. This awareness would remove some seriousness from the diagnosis, for it would illuminate how these roles are constructions created and maintained by dominant hegemonic structures, without necessarily removing any gravity from the material conditions and situations of the diagnosis itself.

Does Gordon learn this lesson? He begins to embrace these ideas at the end of the coma sequence by staging his mother’s mourning. Rather than getting (literally) pushed around by the competing anxieties and characters in his brain, Gordon takes control over his raging, racing mind. Gordon’s staging of Mimi’s cabaret performance accords with all three of Newton’s elements of camp. He presents the incongruity of death and grief next to cabaret glamour. The cabaret setting along with Mimi’s own self-awareness of her performance suggests a camp theatricality. The incongruity and theatricality together bring a queer sort of humor to the overall moment – it is silly to imagine a mother mourning her son’s death in a stylized solo ballad. The effect is elegant and touching. Not only does his staging of his mother’s mourning spark camp/fires, but also the act of staging demonstrates an awareness of the conventions of role- playing a mother. By placing his “mother” in quotation marks – casting her as an actress performing sorrow, setting her in a cabaret club, styling her in an evening gown – Gordon turns the societal expectations of a grieving mother on their head.

86 Before Gordon gets to apply these camp tactics to himself, he awakens from the coma. It seems his boss Mr. Bungee’s uplifting song with the message “‘Don’t Give In’ to dark feelings” inspires Gordon to regain consciousness. With the AVM successfully removed and his brain somewhat healed, Gordon’s normative brain function is restored, and the portal to this campy neuroqueer space full of potential seems shut for good.

But all is not lost! Finn provides us with two more moments of Gordon attempting this new camp approach to life. First, while showering in the hospital with his lover Roger after two weeks of recovery, Gordon sings a sort of reprise of Roger’s earlier ballad “I’d Rather Be

Sailing.” Gordon sings:

I feel like I’m sailing.

It’s insane.

But I choose to live.

Before was a failing

Of my brain

Which you must forgive.

The water hits my neck;

The wind is in my face.

All gone is incredible strife.

And

I feel like I’m sailing

I’m slowly exhaling

Holding on for life.36

36 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 69. 87 Though the lyrics suggest a disavowal of everything that comes before this moment, Gordon picks up Roger’s melody here, carrying both the sailing metaphor and a sonic pattern out of the campy AVM world into the “healthy” brain reality.

The second and more significant display comes when Gordon and Roger fight the

Homeless Woman on their first public outing post-operation. After Mimi disposes of Gordon’s whole library in a cleaning fit of anxiety, the Homeless Woman takes the collection of books and sells them on the street to make some money. Gordon and Roger stumble across the Homeless

Woman, and Gordon recognizes his books (some of which have his name inside the front cover).

At first, Gordon is pleased that the Homeless Woman has preserved his legacy after near-death.

The Homeless Woman, however, refuses to give Gordon his books back, enacting the “finders keepers” rule.

The resulting fight is hilariously ridiculous and can be read as campy in its own right.

There are multiple levels of incongruity: the highbrow and lowbrow assortment of books that constitute Gordon’s library (from Thackeray to porn), the Homeless Woman’s agency and control over a financial exchange, and her power next to Gordon and Roger’s helplessness, for example. The shift in power dynamics between the Homeless Woman and Gordon and Roger points to a theatricality as they each adapt to their new roles. Aware of this sudden reversal of power, the Homeless Woman assumes an air of superiority over the men, who now want something that she has; similarly, the men appear completely flummoxed by the Homeless

Woman’s lack of generosity and try different tactics in order to achieve their objective of getting the books back. Watching gay men fight (and fail) to recover their gay porn from the clutches of the Homeless Woman becomes a very humorous scene.

88 Be it because of the stress of the situation or the campiness of the moment, Gordon reaches a boiling point, crying, “You’re making me crazy.”37 Gordon’s fight with the Homeless

Woman seems to threaten his mental health. It is as if these ridiculous circumstances have the potential to throw Gordon back into his former “crazy” mental state fueled by his AVM. Roger manages to calm him down by reminding him, “They’re only books.”38 With this, Gordon suddenly realizes the ridiculousness of the situation and how intensely he handled the entire event. Gordon has an epiphany, aware of a paradigm shift within him. He sings to Roger:

Everything’s changed and nothing’s changed.

What am I doing?

I mean, I’m different, but I’m still the same.

I still complain.

But I’m not the same that I was,

Except I’m the same as I was.

But different.

At least I hope I’m different.39

Gordon is, in fact, different. He possesses a newfound perspective on his own life (not so serious anymore), he has a new concept of how people play various roles in their lives, and he can now begin to embrace a camp approach to interpreting and moving through the social structures around him. As evidence of these discoveries, Gordon then invites Roger to begin their

37 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 72. (Emphasis mine.) 38 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 72. 39 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 72. 89 relationship anew: “On this new day, / Let’s begin from scratch.”40 Roger obliges, playing along with this theatrical (re)staging of the day they first met.

In this refreshed beginning, the show restarts musically as well, recycling two songs from the beginning of the musical. To be clear, neither song is campy; each is earnest and un-ironic in its expression. Instead, these songs point toward embracing a camp sensibility. These reprises are, like Gordon, the same but different. The melodies, harmonies, and the vast majority of the lyrics to “Heart and Music” get repeated in the finale, only now Gordon and the cast assert that time and music are the key ingredients for getting through life. Gordon’s philosophy has changed, and “Time” reflects that new outlook. This shift is even evident in Gordon’s own original songwriting. At the beginning of the musical, Gordon works on “Frogs Have So Much

Spring (The Spring Song)” for his children’s television show job before becoming incapacitated by his AVM. He borrows the melodic line and overall metaphor of that song for his ultimate finale number, “I Feel So Much Spring.” In it, he and all of the other characters sing about a change in perspective they all have undergone through this ordeal. As Gordon observes:

Something’s taken wing within me.

What was dark so long

Had felt like winter.

Finally there’s sun;

And so I sing

That I feel so much spring.41

But it is the Homeless Woman and the Minister’s verse that truly exemplifies the possibility for future camping. Together, they sing, “I think I’m finally / Losing my mind.” Whereas Gordon’s

40 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 72. 41 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 74. 90 earlier cry of “You’re making me crazy” in the scene just before reads as a dangerous threat to his recovery, here losing one’s mind is embraced as a site of potential. For Gordon, losing his mind meant envisioning camp dreams that called into question his idea of his own self, how he saw others, and how to respond to traumatic events (such as a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness). To finally lose one’s mind states that now, in the present reality, I am accepting this newfound perspective. Losing one’s mind also suggests losing an older, more established, conventional, normative way of perceiving the world in order to adopt a different one; in other words, the characters of the musical are shedding their old ways of thinking and taking on a new mindset – a new brain.

This new brain is decidedly queer. Its logic runs counter to heterosexual culture even for the characters who are not gay. Despite sexual difference – but also because of it – each character asserts, “I feel so much spring” at the very end of the piece – all except Gordon’s mother and Mr. Bungee. They simply sing, “Time and music,” echoing Gordon’s new philosophy, which itself is a product of a camping trip.42 Regardless of the character’s sexual desires and practices, gender, age, or socioeconomic status, everyone in the musical appears not only to undergo change through their camp experience, but now also to possess camp in their arsenal as they embark on new life adventures. The musical leaves us with an image of a newly formed network of disparate people leveled by their empathy for each other. Halperin describes this camp future beautifully:

When you make fun of your own pain, you anticipate and preempt the devaluation of it

by others. You also invite others to share in your renunciation of any automatic claim to

social standing, and you encourage them to join you amid the ranks of people whose

42 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 76. 91 suffering is always subject, at least potentially, to devalorization – and whose tragic

situations, thus, always susceptible of being laughed at. You thereby repudiate the

hierarchies of social worth according to which modern individuals are routinely classed.

You build a collective understanding and sense of solidarity with those who follow you in

your simultaneous pursuit and defiance of social contempt. And in that way, you lay the

foundation for a wide, more inclusive community.43

In A New Brain, “a really lousy day” at the hospital still proves to be a good day at camp.44

43 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 188. 44 Finn and Lapine, A New Brain, 54. 92 CHAPTER 5

CAMP REMAINS, HIV REMAINS, AND CONCLUSIONS

Though I focused the previous chapter on the role of camp in the musical, I want to return, as every reviewer of A New Brain seems to do, to the musical’s creator. On a metatheatrical scale, because A New Brain is loosely autobiographical, remembering that Finn is setting up these camps allows us to recognize his existence in a gay culture, re-inscribing the homosexuality that pervades the musical. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains how setting up camp can mark the homosexuality of the creator of the work:

I think it may be true that, as Robert Dawidoff suggests, the typifying gesture of camp is

really something amazingly simple: the moment at which a consumer of culture makes

the wild surmise, “What if whoever made this was gay too?” …What if, for instance, the

resistant, oblique, tangential investments of attention and attraction that I am able to bring

to this spectacle are actually uncannily responsive to the resistant, oblique, tangential

investments of the person, or of some of the people, who created it?1

But perhaps even more important than asserting Finn’s own queerness, A New Brain can be read as Finn’s campy response to his own personal trauma – his own AVM. In every review of the

1998 and 2015 productions that I have found, the reviewer at least mentions the fact that this story parallels Finn’s own life experiences. The New York Times even ran a publicity piece

(separate from its review) during the run of the 1998 production. Part interview with Finn about his AVM (along with insights from other members of the cast and creative team) and part detailed timeline of events that intertwines his medical history with the making the musical (from

1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 156. 93 the first signs of medical issues during his acceptance speech at the 1992 Tony Awards to rehearsals for A New Brain in 1998), the article illustrates the heterosexual severity bestowed upon health crises and the high expectations for Finn’s major return to the New York theatre scene.2 Critics and journalists alike set up A New Brain to be read as Finn’s personal story musicalized – and of course, naming the gay Jewish composer protagonist Schwinn only adds to the analogy.

Theatergoers may have expected a more serious drama of a musical given the personal subject matter; instead, they got a camp-filled comedy that parodies Finn’s life and society’s tendencies to reel in the negative emotional space. Before anyone can begin to pity Finn, he beats her to the punch with a send-up of his experiences. He asks audiences not to take his plight too seriously and provides a generative alternative for coping with such heavy life events. Camp is both the coping mechanism and, through my reading, the method in which he presents that coping mechanism.

***

In the 2015 revival of A New Brain at City Center Encores!, director James Lapine set the production in the present. Despite their revisions to the original 1998 libretto and score, Finn and

Lapine kept the HIV scare in the revival production. In response to Nancy D.’s question “Is he

HIV?,” revival Rhoda says, “I can’t be absolutely sure but I don’t think so. No. The answer is no.

I think.”3 According to Dr. Rajesh Sriraman, a pulmonary ICU specialist whom I interviewed on

July 4, 2018 when conducting dramaturgical research, Nancy D.’s HIV question bore no medical

2 Ellen Pall, “The Long-Running Musical of William Finn’s Life,” New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1998. 3 William Finn, A New Brain (2015 New York Cast Recording), with Jonathan Groff, Dan Fogler, Ana Gasteyer, Aaron Lazar, et. al., PS Classics, 2016, AAC audio. This matches what is published in the 1998 libretto; however, in my video recording of the 1998 production, Rhoda’s answer is different. See my AIDS choreography chapter for those lyrics. 94 relevance to AVMs in 2015. In the 1990s doctors determined that those suffering from fungal and parasitic diseases of the brain or lymphomas of the brain were more prone to developing

AVMs and aneurisms. Lymphomas are associated with a weakened immune system, but the cause of lymphomas is still unknown. People with HIV could have also been at higher risk for

AVMs by this same reasoning (because of their weakened immune systems). Today, medical intervention can suppress HIV (stop it from duplicating and reproducing) to such an extent that people with HIV are not more likely to have AVMs. Additionally, most people with HIV today are receiving treatment. (Avoiding treatment can lead to tuberculosis and lymphomas.) Dr.

Sriraman says that the HIV question, “if not irrelevant, it’s very close to it” if the patient is already being treated for HIV. In carrying this reference into the revival, Finn and Lapine keep the habitus of HIV/AIDS alive, foregrounding the potential for audiences to read the narrative as a metaphor for AIDS despite the updated setting and advancements in medical technologies.

Queer significations continue to ghost the musical even in its new form.

***

Applying queer lenses to A New Brain has been a generative way of understanding the musical and exploring its historical context. I had other queer angles in mind that simply did not make their way into the thesis: neuro-queerness and disability studies (which I begin to hint at in the camp chapter), mental health, queer dramaturgies, and queer musicology, just to name a few options. Other areas for further investigation include placing A New Brain in conversation with

Finn’s oeuvre. This thesis compares A New Brain with Finn’s Falsettos, but it does not examine other works such as Elegies: A Song Cycle or The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Although I spend a chapter contextualizing A New Brain with queer musicals that come before it, future research could expand this project to include more recent queer musicals. As Matt

95 Windman remarked in his review of the 2015 revival, “The original Off-Broadway production received only a short run at Lincoln Center Theater. Given the unexpected success of Fun Home, another musical featuring unlikely subject matter and a dysfunctional family, a larger audience may finally be ready to embrace A New Brain.”4 For now, this thesis takes a step in reclaiming queerness in Finn’s work and will hopefully open the door to exciting queer futures ahead.

4 Matt Windman, “A New Brain Theater Review – 3.5 Stars,” amNewYork, Newsday, published June 25, 2015, https://www.amny.com/entertainment/a-new-brain-theater-review-3-5-stars- 1.10579989. 96 APPENDIX A

HUMAN SUBJECTS OFFICE LETTER OF DETERMINATION

p 1 of 1

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY OFFICE of the VICE PRESIDENT for RESEARCH

Date: September 24, 2018

To: Nickolas Richardson

From: Florida State University Institutional Review Board

Study Title: Thesis on A New Brain

The Office of Human Subjects at Florida State University has received your request for determination for the above-referenced project and has considered the attestation of those associated with your project that the data utilized was not identifiable.

Based on this information, it has been determined that your project does not constitute “human subjects research” as defined by DHHS and/or FDA regulations, and thus does not require IRB review or approval.

Note that this determination applies only to the activities submitted as part of the current review, and does not apply should any changes be made to your project or if new information is presented. If changes are made or new information is presented, and there are questions about whether these activities are research involving human subjects, please submit a new request to the Office of Human Subjects for a determination.

Please retain a copy of this memo for your records.

Thank you

Institutional Review Board, Human Subjects Office [email protected]/850-644-7900

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Windman, Matt. “A New Brain Theater Review – 3.5 Stars.” amNewYork. Newsday. Published June 25, 2015. https://www.amny.com/entertainment/a-new-brain-theater-review-3-5- stars-1.10579989.

102 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Nick Richardson is finishing his Master’s in Theatre Studies at The School of Theatre at Florida State University. A proud FSU alumnus, Nick previously earned his B.A. in Theatre and a minor in Spanish in 2017, graduating summa cum laude. Nick’s primary research interest is representations of race, gender, and sexuality in musical theatre. He has presented papers in this vein at Mid-America Theatre Conference; Song, Stage & Screen; and Southeastern Theatre Conference, where he was named their Undergraduate Young Scholar in 2016. He also enjoys contemporary British theatre, dance studies, and dramaturgy. As a performer, Nick made his professional theatre debut at 16 in Virginia Musical Theatre’s production of Oklahoma! He later played Enoch Snow, Jr. in VMT’s Carousel. At FSU, Nick’s performance home was in the College of Music with Florida State Opera, where he performed in 11 productions. Highlights include Toby in The Medium, The Witch in Hansel and Gretel for the Opera Outreach program, and the chorus of The Rake’s Progress. He also acted in student films with the College of Motion Picture Arts. Nick continues to study voice privately and hopes to balance performing and scholarly work in the future. In Summer 2019 he will serve as the dramaturgy intern at The Glimmerglass Festival. Nick originally hails from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

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