Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Reviewed by: Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans Alan Sikes Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans. By Robert A. Schanke. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hardcover $64.99. 262 pages. The latest book by Robert Schanke is the work of a seasoned scholar who clearly relishes the pleasures of academic research and publication. Schanke takes evident delight in recovering the life and work of Cal Yeomans, a now-nearly forgotten pioneer in the gay theatre movement of the Post-Stonewall era. Frank and explicit in his portrayal of gay male sexuality, Yeomans found early success in the emerging gay theatre scene of the 1970s and early 1980s, but at the advent of the AIDS epidemic he refused to compromise the unconstrained sexual [End Page 165] expression that marked his writings; his plays fell from favor, and since his death in 2000 he has been little more than a postscript in the emerging narratives of gay theatre history. Until now, that is. Through meticulous research and patient reconstruction of Yeomans's life and work, Schanke has written an academic "page turner” that restores this early maverick of Post-Stonewall theatre to his proper prominence. Simultaneously, however, Schanke situates Yeomans within the larger contexts of his cultural moment, demonstrating how his plays reflect and resist the various discursive trajectories of gay life during the second half of the twentieth century; in this sense, the book performs a valuable double duty, operating as both biography and social history. Schanke opens his text with a preface that offers crucial insights into his research and writing process. He credits his colleague Kim Marra for directing his attention to Yeomans; she first perused his collected papers at the University of Florida archives and alerted Schanke to the "gold mine” of as-yet-unexamined original documents. Shanke likewise extends thanks to the University curatorial staff, who responded to his interest in the papers by quickly cataloguing the materials. Yet he also recounts with good-natured humor how the staff restricted his access to some of Yeomans's personal letters and journals because their intimate references to still-living individuals might land them all in trouble with the law. As Schanke tells it: "If Cal described in his journal an actor having ‘a big old dangling dick,' could the actor sue the library for allowing me to read about it? Could the actor sue me as well?” (xvii). Through his candid observations on the challenges he faced not only in his archival work but also in his interviews with Yeomans's friends and colleagues, Schanke supplies a useful mediation on the legal, and indeed ethical, negotiations that can accompany academic research. The first chapters of the book recount Yeomans's years as a "horrible misfit” born into an affluent family in small-town Crystal River, Florida, in 1938. Yeomans's first recognition of his homosexuality, it seems, occurred in tandem with his introduction to the theatrical profession in the late 1950s, and the book relates his early work as an actor and acting teacher throughout the 1960s South, as well as his work with the famed La MaMa Theatre in the early 1970s. Schanke writes candidly about the emergence of Yeomans's bipolar disorder, a condition that would affect him the rest of his life, and observes that Yeomans's plays and poems were, from the beginning, explicit and sometimes surreal takes on unconventional sexualities; the early and unproduced Swamp Play #2, for example, featured a transvestite nymphomaniac and a pedophilic minister quite literally haunted by the phallus-shaped demons of their desires. In later chapters, Schanke details Yeomans's rise to prominence in the national gay theatre scene, most notably for two plays, Richmond Jim and Sunsets. The [End Page 166] first premiered at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco in 1979, and later had another successful run in New York City. It is a story of the sexual awakening of the titular Jim, a young man from the South whose sexual encounter with an older man in Manhattan introduces him to the world of bondage and leather sex. Sunsets premiered in New York City in 1981 and subsequently played in Chicago and San...