Reality Theatre and Columbus' Gay and Lesbian Community Thesis
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Growing Tribes: Reality Theatre and Columbus’ Gay and Lesbian Community Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Shannon Savard, M.A. Graduate Program in Theatre The Ohio State University 2018 Thesis Committee: Dr. Beth Kattelman, Adviser Dr. Jennifer Schlueter Copyright by Shannon Savard 2018 Abstract Reality Theatre provides a rich example of a professional theatre company which operated in a Midwestern city and directly engaged with both the local gay and lesbian community and performed primarily gay and lesbian plays, challenging the trend of what Judith Halberstam terms metronormativity in queer studies. Reality's Tribes represents a series of community-based performances which were explicitly created by, for, and about Columbus, Ohio’s local gay and lesbian community. Tribes was a performance created collectively by the members of Reality Theatre and included sketch comedy, vignettes, monologues, and songs written in direct response to happenings in the local gay and lesbian community as well as the larger political arena. The series of performances which were adapted and restaged eight times over the course of fourteen years was directly rooted in the gay and lesbian community of Columbus, Ohio. This thesis examines Tribes through the lenses of Jan Cohen-Cruz’s conception of community-based theatre and the theatre as a space of gay and lesbian community building. Reality Theatre carved out a space in Columbus’ theatrical landscape which presumed the gay and lesbian viewpoint to be the norm and reimagined mainstream pop culture forms to fit it. The company used camp, queer humor, and the privileging of gay and lesbian perspectives as community-building strategies. Informed by the queer and feminist performance criticism of Jill Dolan, Tim Miller and David Román, I advocate for a critical allyship for community-based gay and lesbian theatre in order to combat the heteronormative and metronormative forces which erase the history of gay and lesbian theatre and the communities with whom they engage. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my adviser, Beth Kattelman for introducing me to Reality Theatre and for her guidance through the research and writing process; my second committee member, Jen Schlueter for her support and enthusiasm for this project; Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd who agreed to be interviewed and generously shared their stories; and the staff in the Special Collections reading room of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute without whom this project would not have been possible. iii Vita 2015………………………………………….B.A. English and Theatre, William Smith College 2016………………………………………………………….M.A. Teaching, Secondary English, Hobart and William Smith Colleges 2016-2017……………………………………………………………...……University Fellowship The Ohio State University 2017 to Present………………………….Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Theatre iv Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2: Tribes as Gay and Lesbian Community-Based Theatre……………………………...12 Chapter 3: Reality Theatre as a Gay and Lesbian Communal Space……………………………39 Chapter 4: Troubling Past Criticisms of Tribes……………………………………………….…61 Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………76 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..83 Appendix A: Reality Theatre and Tribes Production History………………………………...…88 Appendix B: Annotated Scene Listings of Tribes Scripts……………………………………….93 Appendix C: Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd Interview Transcript………………………....106 v Chapter 1: Introduction In May of 1985 Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd, two recent graduates of Ohio University, placed an announcement in the Columbus Dispatch for auditions for their new theatre company. Frustrated with the minimal professional theatre opportunities in Columbus, Barnhart called Shepherd and armed with their experience in low-budget student theatre, they were able to pull together five other cast members to begin a season of experimental original works and premieres of local playwrights.1 Barnhart and Shepherd’s Reality Theatre soon became established as one of two semi-professional theatre companies in Columbus (the other being Contemporary American Theatre Company, or CATCO).2 One spring night in 1986, the cast of Reality Theatre were gathered at Mellman’s, a hole-in-the-wall bar in Columbus’ Short North neighborhood, after a rehearsal to discuss their plans for their second season of plays. In a recent interview, Shepherd recalled Barnhart turning to her to say, “We should do a show about gay people!”3 Barnhart wrote in his director’s note in the program for a later rendition of said show: “The topic of Homosexuality came up and I said ‘Someday I would like to be involved in a play that treated the subject with pride, honesty, and understanding.”4 Little did they know, the show that started as a discussion over late-night drinks would become Tribes, a fourteen-year-long, ever-evolving, and wildly popular community-based theatre production. The seven productions of Tribes that Reality Theatre collectively created as a company and presented to audiences largely made up of members of the gay and lesbian community in Columbus each consisted of dozens of vignettes, monologues, songs, and sketch comedy that engaged directly with the local gay and lesbian community, politics, and pop culture. This thesis will focus on Columbus, 1 Barnhart, Frank and Dee Shepherd. Personal Interview, 31 Jan. 2018 2 Fiely, Dennis. “Local Theatre Scene to be Busy, Ambitious.” Columbus Dispatch, 15 Sept. 1985. 3 Shepherd. Personal interview. 4 Barnhart, Frank. “Directors Note.” Tribes Program. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, OH. 1 Ohio’s Reality Theatre, specifically on their fourteen-year-long performance series, Tribes. Reality Theater will serve as a case study of a company with a repertoire that consisted largely of gay and lesbian plays operating in the Midwest from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s. The study will link geography, queer cultural production, and community, ultimately examining the ways in which this company functioned as both a space and voice for Columbus’ gay and lesbian population. This research aims to fill a geographical gap in both theatre history and gay and lesbian history. The history of gay and lesbian performance in the Midwest is largely undocumented and routinely erased with theatre historians favoring cities with large and well-established gay and lesbian communities. Multiple scholars have explored the work of the Ridiculous Theatre Company, Theatre Rhinoceros, the WOW Café, and Split Britches in addition to that of dozens of individual theatre artists. New York and California-based theatre artists’ participation in activist organizations responding to the AIDS crisis such as ACT UP have been well documented. However, when it comes to gay and lesbian theatre companies and artists operating outside of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, particularly during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, information is sparse. While multiple gay and lesbian-oriented theatre companies existed across the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century, little has been documented in scholarship beyond the fact that these companies existed. The Richmond Triangle Players of Richmond, Virginia; The Theatre Offensive of Boston, Massachusetts; Oh SNAP! Productions of Omaha, Nebraska; and the HAG Theatre of Buffalo, New York were all in operation by the 1990s. The Lionheart Gay Theatre of Chicago began working in 1979. None of these, as of yet, have received critical attention. Chicago’s About Face 2 Theatre has attracted scholarly attention over the last decade for their recent work with LGBTQ youth, but their work in the 1990s with their adult company has gone uncommented upon. The pattern in theatre scholarship of ignoring artistic activity in the middle of the United States in favor of that on the coastal urban centers such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles perpetuates what Judith Halberstam calls metronormativity. Metronormativity illustrates a larger problem in queer studies in which binary oppositions are reinforced by scholarship: urban/rural, East Coast and West Coast/Middle America, forward-thinking/backward, queer- inclusive/heteronormative.5 Ultimately, the exclusive focus on queer artists in large urban centers reproduces the popular narrative of the repressed, small-town, gay man or lesbian who must escape to the progressive cities on the coasts as the only way to find the freedom to express himself or herself. This narrative works to erase the existence, histories, and creative work of gay and lesbian people in communities outside of coastal urban metropolises. In order to uncover and understand the histories of the ways in which gay and lesbian theatre functioned outside of the gay Meccas of New York and San Francisco, there needs to be an adjustment to the lens through which gay and lesbian theatre is viewed. While the works of individual gay artists such as Terrence McNally, Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and Harvey Fierstein have received recognition for their commercial