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| Sky Gilbert as Jane and Greg MacArthur, OUT-STUDIO 303 Factory Project (photo: Pierre Bourque, reprinted with permission) |
The 'Gay Play' - Straight Up
by David KingIf anyone in Canada has both practical and academic expertise on queer theatre, it is Buddies In Bad Times founder Sky Gilbert. So when Gilbert predicts the death of gay theatre by 2012, one can't help but perk up and listen.
In Playwrights' Canada Press' series Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English (volume 7 entitled "Queer Theatre in Canada"), Gilbert takes aim at the once subversive, now mainstreamed 'gay play' as an endangered species that even queers have abandoned to avoid "the notion of being outsiders and different." While Gilbert continues to suggest that the trans movement is still unexplored stage terrain, he does raise a good point about our Canada's quarter-century old "gay play".
The definition of a 'gay play', or a 'gay' film, is as subjective as terms like 'culture', 'edgy', queer' and 'subversive'. Over-emphasis on the 'gay' subject has led to its misinterpretation as too 'marginalized', not universal enough, or not focused enough on quality or professionalism in production (struggling low-budget and poor production efforts in plays and films have contributed to that hit-and-miss scenario). Queers, who struggled for years to be included as 'same' and not 'other', often manifest that philosophy into both a lack of activism within their own community(ies) and by walking 'straight' past the ticket counters of gay plays that they feel would only mirror the 'marginalized' or 'ghettoized' aspects of their lives.
