Abstract
This essay provides new critical readings of two defining queer performances: The Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Camille (1973) and Split Britches/Bloolips’ Belle Reprieve (1991), demonstrating how these two pieces reinforce a notion of queer be/coming from a comparative historical perspective. Edgecomb and Gillespie investigate how pastiche and drag are (re)envisioned in these performances to formulate approaches to camp that are distinctly queer, while also gender-specific, both reflecting and troubling the limited definitions of gender provided by the identity politics of the gay liberation movement and the decade following.
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Notes
- 1.
Video documentation of Belle Reprieve is available through the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library in the Split Britches video collection (http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/p8cz8wk3.html). Images of the production and promotional materials, along with a history of the company, are available through Split Britches’ website (http://www.split-britches.com).
- 2.
Camille was one of the most coveted roles for a nineteenth-century actress and was played by the most celebrated, including Sarah Bernhardt and Elenora Duse. The play would inspire Giuseppe Verdi to write his opera, La Traviata (1853), and also inspired dozens of silent films before the release of George Cukor’s starring Garbo in 1936. See Lintz, B. C. ‘Concocting La Dame aux Camellias: Blood, Tears, and Other Fluids’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Vol. 33, No. 3–4, pp. 549–63.
- 3.
The American Psychiatric Association would not declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1974. See Katz, J. (1995) ,Gay and American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the United States. New York: Thomas Cromwell.
- 4.
To read more about the origin of the Ridiculous genre, see Marranca, B., and Dasgupta, G. (1997) Theatre of the Ridiculous. New York: PAJ Books.
- 5.
Dozens of interviews that I completed during my research for my book, Charles Ludlam Lives!, corroborate the political influence of Ludlam’s plays regardless of their original non-political intentions.
- 6.
Because The Playhouse of the Ridiculous claimed ownership of Ludlam’s script, he renamed the play When Queens Collide and proceeded with his own production, the premiere of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
- 7.
This era ushers in the rise of identity politics in the complex, polychromatic landscape of the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century when the gay community would face entirely new challenges with the nightmare of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Although HIV had been present in the United States since at least the 1960s, the disease entered the mainstream media and public consciousness on 11 May 1982 when The New York Times reported on GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). Following the sexual freedom of the post-Stonewall period, the disease came on with a ferocious speed that would change gay culture forever. Urban centres with substantial gay male populations, including New York City and San Francisco, became the failing heart of the epidemic and the larger cultural response was split between fearful silence and rampant homophobia. AIDS hit the arts community (theatre, dance, design) particularly hard, with almost an entire generation of gay men being wiped out in the 1980s and 1990s. Sadly, this would include Charles Ludlam in 1987, as well as several other original members of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. For more about HIV/AIDS and theatre, see Román, D. (1998) Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- 8.
Casting Blanche as a drag queen and Stanley as a butch lesbian foregrounds the queerness inherent to those roles, recalling the accusations made against Tennessee Williams in 1966, following the play’s premiere, by New York Times critic Stanley Kauffmann. He claimed that Williams was masking homosexual experiences behind his female characters since queers were not permitted on Broadway stages (Kauffmann, p. 1).
- 9.
Stylistically, the play is a hybrid of realism and expressionism, but the conventions of the genre from a narrative standpoint still hold true.
- 10.
It is also important to note that, in Williams’ play, Blanche’s psychological breakdown was largely caused by the suicide of her presumably gay husband long before the play begins.
- 11.
As Case argues, ‘From a theatrical standpoint, butch-femme roles take on the quality of something more like a character construction … these roles qua roles lend agency and self-determination to the historically passive subject, providing her with at least two options for gender identification and with the aid of camp, an irony that allows her perception to be constructed from outside ideology, with a gender role that makes her appear as if she is inside of it’ (Case 2009, pp. 36, 41).
- 12.
Sue-Ellen Case documents that in the notebooks for Belle Reprieve, Shaw and Weaver referred to the performance as ‘four actors escaping from a script—a heterosexual script’ (Case 1996, p. 28).
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Edgecomb, S.F., Gillespie, B. (2022). Queer Becomings: The Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Camille and Split Britches/Bloolips’ Belle Reprieve. In: Halferty, J.P., Leeney, C. (eds) Analysing Gender in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85574-1_3
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