Passing Performances : : Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History / / edited by Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra ; foreword by Jill Dolan.

• TeilnehmendeR: Dolan, Jill, 1957-; Marra, Kim, 1957-; Schanke, Robert A., 1940-
• Place / Publishing House: Ann Arbor : : University of Michigan Press,, [1998]; ©1998
• Year of Publication: 1998
• Language: English
• Series: Triangulations.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource:; illustrations.

Publisher description: Passing Performances gathers a range of critical and biographical essays on notable personalities whose major contributions to the stage occurred before 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots that kicked off the gay rights movement in the United States. How these theater practitioners variously "passed"-- i.e., managed unconventional sexual inclinations both on- and offstage--significantly determined the course of their personal and professional lives and thus the course of U.S. theater history. The actors, directors, producers, and agents examined here include Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Adah Isaacs Menken, whose personal lives and careers traded on the same-sex erotics of "true love" in the antebellum period Elisabeth Marbury, Elsie de Wolfe, Elsie Janis, Nance O'Neil, and Alla Nazimova, whose intimate female liaisons were variously interpreted around the turn of the century the "lavender marriages" of Alfred Lunt to Lynne Fontanne and Guthrie McClintic to Katharine Cornell the lesbian collaborations of Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford the comic antics of Monty Woolley, which negotiated codified constructions of homosexual perversion in the post-Freudian interwar years and the on- and offstage performances of Mary Martin and Joe Cino, which resisted the paranoid enforcements of heterosexual normality in the McCarthy era. Central to these investigations are the complex connections of performances of sexuality and gender and their different implications for men and women practitioners working under pervasive sexism and homophobia. The volume also includes striking archival photographs of the performers and their performances, and an index to facilitate the cross-referencing of subjects' intersecting careers.

Table of Contents

Introduction / Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra -- "My noble Spartacus": Edwin Forrest and masculinity on the nineteenth-century stage / Ginger Strand -- "Such Romeo as we had never ventured to hope for": Charlotte Cushman / Denise A. Walen -- Bohemian on horseback: Adah Isaacs Menken / Noreen Barnes-McClain -- Rebels of their sex: Nance O'Neil and Lizzie Borden / Jennifer Jones -- A lesbian marriage of cultural consequence: Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe, 1886-1933 / Kim Marra -- Alla Nazimova: "the witch of makeup" / Robert A. Schanke -- Elsie Janis: "a comfortable goofiness" / Lee Alan Morrow -- Staging heterosexuality: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne's design for living / Sam Abel -- Kit and Guth: a lavender marriage on Broadway / Lesley Ferris -- Webster without tears: a daughter's journey / Milly S. Barranger -- Cheryl Crawford: one not so naked individual / Jay Plum -- Monty Woolley: the public and private man from Saratoga Springs / Billy J. Harbin -- Mary Martin: washin' that man right outta her hair / Stacy Wolf -- Joseph Cino and the first off-off broadway theater / Douglas W. Gordy.