#queer playwrights

[blackqueernotables]

Mary P. Burrill: an early 20th-century playwright and educator.

[blackqueernotables]

Georgia Douglas Johnson: One of the earliest African-American female playwrights. 

[blackqueernotables]

Aziza Barnes: Poet; Playwright. 

[ennaih]

The queerness of identification

So I realised that after a lifetime of avoiding Tennessee Williams (inasmuch as I can being a Classic Hollywood fan), I've seen three of his plays in about four months. And each time there's like this shockwave of identification. Leaves me profoundly unsettled not just on a viewer level but on a writer level.

First time was at the Belvoir production of The Glass Menagerie. That was like an earthquake. Of all the ways I had mentally prepared myself for that play, it was this notion of autobiography and remaking the past that completely unnerved me. I remember sitting in that audience, half listening to the play because my brain was fizzing and roaring, near tears because I never knew that about Tennessee Williams. Never realised I could respond to his work and identify with him on that deeply horrifyingly intimate level.

Then watching the NT broadcast of A Streetcar Named Desire and again seeing how he remade and reimagined and projected a past that never was, a past for someone else, for someone he loved.

And then yesterday watching the STC production of Suddenly Last Summer and suddenly overwhelmed with tears because I never realised the poetic side of Sebastian and how that totally reconfigures his death and why would Tennessee write that, why?!

Noel Coward and Tennessee Williams ... I shouldn't be surprised that I am so drawn to queer playwrights, sometimes even despite myself. It's like the fucking Portkey sensation.

[fyeahqueertheatre]

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

Lorraine Hansberry.