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Growing Tribes: Reality Theatre and Columbus' Gay and Lesbian Community

Savard, Shannon N, Savard
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524152632871631

Abstract Details

2018, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Theatre.
Reality Theatre provides a rich example of a professional theatre company which operated in a Midwestern city and directly engaged with both the local gay and lesbian community and performed primarily gay and lesbian plays, challenging the trend of what Judith Halberstam terms metronormativity in queer studies. Reality's Tribes represents a series of community-based performances which were explicitly created by, for, and about Columbus, Ohio’s local gay and lesbian community. Tribes was a performance created collectively by the members of Reality Theatre and included sketch comedy, vignettes, monologues, and songs written in direct response to happenings in the local gay and lesbian community as well as the larger political arena. The series of performances which were adapted and restaged eight times over the course of fourteen years was directly rooted in the gay and lesbian community of Columbus, Ohio. This thesis examines Tribes through the lenses of Jan Cohen-Cruz’s conception of community-based theatre and the theatre as a space of gay and lesbian community building. Reality Theatre carved out a space in Columbus’ theatrical landscape which presumed the gay and lesbian viewpoint to be the norm and reimagined mainstream pop culture forms to fit it. The company used camp, queer humor, and the privileging of gay and lesbian perspectives as community-building strategies. Informed by the queer and feminist performance criticism of Jill Dolan, Tim Miller and David Roman, I advocate for a critical allyship for community-based gay and lesbian theatre in order to combat the heteronormative and metronormative forces which erase the history of gay and lesbian theatre and the communities with whom they engage.
Beth Kattelman, PhD (Advisor)
Jennifer Schlueter, PhD (Committee Member)
153 p.
Glbt Studies; Performing Arts; Theater; Theater History; Theater Studies
gay and lesbian theatre; Midwest; Ohio; queer humor; gay and lesbian community; community-based performance; community-based theatre; metronormativity; critical allyship; queer performance; camp; pop culture; historicization; devised theatre

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Savard, Savard, S. N. (2018). Growing Tribes: Reality Theatre and Columbus' Gay and Lesbian Community [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524152632871631

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Savard, Savard, Shannon. Growing Tribes: Reality Theatre and Columbus' Gay and Lesbian Community. 2018. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524152632871631.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Savard, Savard, Shannon. "Growing Tribes: Reality Theatre and Columbus' Gay and Lesbian Community." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524152632871631

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1524152632871631
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© 2018, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.