Theatre Rhinoceros: A Gay Company

Abstract

Yet Theatre Rhinoceros is one man's story. While Estes was the driving force behind its founding, Theatre Rhinoceros is a company which epitomizes a movement's coming of age. No longer hiding in, or hidden by a heterosexual theatre world, these gay-oriented artists actively explore the dimensions of their own sexuality and the dynamics of same-sex relationships in an environment ostensibly free from the hegemony of traditional, heterosexual, mainstream theatre. In 1976 the 22-year-old Estes moved to San Francisco from Boston. He had received his baccalaureate in theatre from Emerson College in 1975, and worked as a directing intern at the O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut. But until he saw Loretta Lorman's I975 production of Trans-Lesbianic Follies for the Gay Academic Union's national conference at Columbia University, he had considered committing himself to a gay theatre. Suddenly it became the only choice: It just seemed like the answer to on a personal level [. . .] to do theatre that was meaningful to me (Estes I98ob:42). The need for a gay theatre company, a theatre for and about gays, not only for the audiences, but for the artists themselves (I98ob:42), seemed of central importance to Estes. San Francisco was the obvious place to establish such a theatre, both because of the burgeoning Castro Street gay scene, and because of the city's theatre tradition.