Abstract
This article considers how André De Shields performance in Hadestown (2019), and the musicals Fun Home (2015) and A Strange Loop (2019) can be seen to respond to the present moment and argues that they disrupt heteronormative temporality through queer dramaturgy. It explores musicals that present queer performativity and/or queer dramaturgies, and addresses how they enact queer strategies of resistance through historical materialist critiques of personal biographies. It suggests that to do this, they disrupt the heteronormative dramaturgical time of the musical, and considers how they may enact structural change to the form of the musical. The article carries out a close reading of De Shields’ performance practice, and analyses the dramaturgy of Fun Home and A Strange Loop through drawing on the methodologies of José Muñoz and Elizabeth Freeman. It considers how they make queer labour visible by drawing on post-dramatic strategies, ultimately suggesting that to varying extents, these musicals offer resistance to the heteronormative musical form.
Highlights
José Muñoz, in his development of queer futurity as a critical methodology, writes that ‘Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’ (Muñoz 2009, p. 1)
Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier in their work on queer dramaturgy reflect on moments of performance that offer a suspension of the regular, heterosexual, rules of the social
Queer Dramaturgy in Existing Readings of Musical Theatre. Both Fun Home and A Strange Loop participate in historical materialist critiques of queer pasts, and both musicals challenge the heteronormative dramaturgy of the musical that works towards
Summary
José Muñoz, in his development of queer futurity as a critical methodology, writes that ‘Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’ (Muñoz 2009, p. 1). Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier in their work on queer dramaturgy reflect on moments of performance that offer a suspension of the regular, heterosexual, rules of the social These moments, they argue, offer a queer audience the possibility of contemplating ‘other ways of being in the world, play[ing] out non-normative identities [to] imagine, rehearse and form new ways of expressing an experience of the world’ Like Fun Home, it reflects a queer experience; in this case, a version of Jackson’s own lived experience as a black queer writer Jackson described his musical as ‘self-referential as opposed to autobiographical’ Douglas Hofstadter’s (2007) concept of understanding one’s self-identity, and the Liz Phair song of the same name Both Fun Home and A Strange Loop sing, to quote Hadestown, ‘sad songs’: they present complex and difficult material, and both musicals use queer dramaturgical structures to enact queer resistance
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