Queering Drama - Or Let the Classics Going Beyond Limits

Abstract

Abstract This article proposes, explains and describes an original method called Queering Drama, which is the result of this article’s author one decade of research. Queering Drama is not just a theoretical work hypothesis, but also a practical performing method of going beyond limits by Queering the characters of any classic play (the Queering Drama method can be applied to modern plays as well, but the classic plays are the ones most staged, in greater need for new meanings and refashioning). What happened if one character from a classic play would not be put on stage and played as the dramatist dictates, from a sex and gender perspective? What if, instead of a heterosexual woman (labeled by the dramatist as the wife of..., the daughter of...), the character were played as a bisexual male, or a lesbian female, or a plurisexual hermaphrodite? How would that change the relations between the characters? Would it make a difference? Would such staging change the meanings of the play? Queering Drama involves rethinking and discovering new ways of reading old iconic plays, more specifically through their (iconic, by now) characters, and implicitly uncovering new ways of putting them on stage. The possible performance results are infinite new meanings of old plays, original ways of looking at classic characters and unseen, maybe unimaginable ways of staging the classics. The multidisciplinary theoretical base of this daring aim at Drama and Stage, coming from Pirandello the dramatist, entangles the academic fields of Drama, Feminist Theory, Literary Theory and Epistemology.