Created for general and scholarly audiences alike, this volume offers ten of the best recent plays by and about gay men, all of which have been successfully produced and critically acclaimed in the United States and England. The playwrights, who reflect multicultural origins ranging from Anglo to African American and Latino, have crafted powerful and insightful depictions of the roles gay men play in gender politics.Each play is explosive, politically and socially relevant, and enlightening, whether it be Martin Sherman's much-praised A Madhouse in Goa or the avante-garde Pomo Afro...

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, NoAl Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England and Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William...

This is a collection of seven contemporary American plays (six of them by gay playwrights) that depict the lives of gay men in the years before gay liberation and in our own time. All of these plays have been successfully produced by major American theaters and all have received critical acclaim. The first three works in the collection-Robert O' Hara's Antebellum, Joseph and David Zellnik's Yank , and Jon Marans's The Temperamentals-demonstrate gay playwrights' impulse to share the history of oppression and liberation gay men have faced. The remaining four plays-Guillermo Reyes's Deporting...

This first book-length study on the relationship of the plays by Terrence McNally, one of America's celebrated major dramatists and award-winning playwright about gay life in New York City, to the history of gay theatre during McNally's career, which has spanned more than half a century. The book written by theatre expert John Clum examines McNally's work from the political movements of the 1960s and the history of gay men in New York during the early years of gay liberation, the age of AIDS, and the new reality of gay marriage and families.
"This is an original contribution to the...

Arthur Laurents's career as a playwright, screenwriter, book writer for musicals and director spanned over half a century. His first Broadway play, Home of the Brave, was produced in 1945; his last play, Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are, was produced in 2009 when he was ninety-one. Although he is best known for his work on the classic musicals Gypsy and West Side Story and for his screenplays for Rope, The Way We Were, and The Turning Point, Laurents is the author of seventeen full-length plays, numerous screenplays and three volumes of memoirs. Despite the length and distinction of...

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England and Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William...