so i began talking with someone about directing a short two hander play i wrote about not-wally webb falling in love with a guy joel who is not named in the third act of our town and so obvi it's a queer story about queer people living their life but then he asked if i'd be okay with casting a female-identifying person as one of the characters and i was fucking stumped
i had never considered it and the fragmented answer i was able to give was that i'd be okay with a non-male-identifying person playing the role but i wasn't sure about a female person
and that made me think like why can't it be a female playing a male character? what's so wrong about that? is it a (ew) fetish thing that it has to be two guys? theatre interacts with gender and race so intricately that how could i write a play as a non-gender conforming person that could not possibly be flipped?
but first, the audience. most audience members, even if they see that a fem person is playing a masc character, can't get the fact that that's a fem person playing that character out of their head. that's just the impact of gender on theatre. and i didn't write a story about two girls falling in love in the 1900s (been there done that) and would making them fem dillute the story? i'll put it out there that neither of the characters are written to be fem. they're just people. masc people but still people
and i think intention has a lot to do with it. how unfair is it that i write, literally in the title "to thornton wilder's probable queerness," for a story that he may not have been able to tell about himself only for it to not have been about him but about the lesbians from next door? but would he care? i say thornton wilder was almost definitely not straight (i mean unless he just wanted to live alone his whole life on purpose) but there's a lot of speculation on his sexuality and that's just not great. while he was nearly definitely "not straight" there's almost no subtext that implies that he was gay in any of his works and that's sort of why i wrote the play. but might he just be pleased (if he was queer) that any sort of queer story can be told?
but the story isn't just about thornton wilder's unable to be queer, it speaks to all the queer stories that have disappeared in time so, yes lesbians, but also to the queer men. the story makes mention of gay balls (a less concerning google search is cross-dressing balls) which in the time period was recorded as gay male culture. and the story reminds the audience of the soft relationships men had at this time even if they were heterosexual.
back to intention, i'd never intended to write a story meant to be told by female actors, and i think that's why i was against the idea in the back of my mind. is it bad to write a story that doesn't work if the genders flip? tbh idk. maybe. but i don't necessarily think so. a lot of society wouldn't get it if gender roles were flipped. and that does impact theatre, regardless of whether or not we want it to. i think that flipping gender roles of an established play is fascinating to see where biases lie and it's one of my favorite things to do but i also think that if the story only gets to live once, it's okay to want it to live in the way that honors the people who were meant to be honored. i'll just have to write about two lesbians falling in love in the 1900s. watch out rebecca...