Copyright 1994 Carolyn Gage

Published in The Dramatists Guild Quarterly, Spring 1995, NYC.

LESBIAN MUSICAL THEATRE: SUBVERTING THE GENRE

There are several conventions in mainstream musical theatre which do not translate well

to lesbian-feminist musical theatre, and it is a challenge for the lesbian playwright,

working with the extreme compression of the art form, to find ways to subvert these

conventions even as she exploits them for dramaturgical purposes. In this article, I will

describe some of these conventions and present examples of my attempts to subvert

and appropriate them.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

Love-at-first-sight is an effective and efficient convention for advancing the action,

allowing for the establishment of intimacy in the space of a song. But sex-and-love

addiction is a serious issue in lesbian communities, because we lack the institutions to

support or legitimize our partnerings. Where love-at-first-sight may be an unreliable index

of compatibility for couples of all orientations, the partnership sanctioned by the church,

validated by the family, recognized by law, rewarded with federal and corporate perks,

and consolidated by the presence of children and joint property laws, is more likely to be

able to withstand the vicissitudes of changing fortunes as well as the ebb and flow of

passion which attend cohabitation.

The stability of lesbian social structures must depend on genuine intimacy, and although
the "stranger across a crowded room" may be good for an enchanted evening or two,

such a liaison is most likely to end in trauma and drama, couple counseling, infidelity,

and a break-up which is divisive for the whole community.

When I use the falling-in-love ballad, I use it to lament the fact that such ballads don't

work. In The Amazon All-Stars, the lead character, a notorious womanizer, sings "She

Doesn't Even See Me" when she meets the elusive left-fielder. In the song, she

acknowledges the fact of her attraction, laments her inability to catch the other woman's

attention, and finally attributes it, correctly, to the fact that her presentation is utterly

insincere—a commentary on the very convention she exploits to make her point.

In this same musical, the emcee opens the show by coming out into the house and

teasing the audience with the sexy torch song, "Cruisin'":

THAT'S WHAT WE'RE HERE FOR,

JUST SO YOU KNOW—

THE CAST AND THE CREW,

WE'RE DOIN' THE SHOW
SO YOU CAN ALL GO
CRUISIN', CRUISIN' TONIGHT—

CRUISIN' KINDA HEAVY,

CRUISIN' KINDA LIGHT.
CRUISIN', CRUISIN', OH, BABY—

WE'RE CRUISIN' TONIGHT!

Later, when the lead's attempts to seduce the left fielder have failed, she confronts the

fact that her "cruising" behaviors have been a front for her terror of intimacy. In the final

scene, she apologizes to the woman she has hurt, and the two slowly and tentatively
reach out their hands to each other in an act of genuine touching. The lovers hold this

position, while the emcee reprises "Cruisin'" in a minor key, closing the show with a

bittersweet commentary on the price of casual liaisons.

In Babe: An Olympian Musical, a musical about the lesbian aspects of Babe Didriksen's

career, the love ballad, "I Was Once Just Like You" is sung by the mother to the

daughter, as she tries to manipulate her daughter into accepting the role of a traditional

female. Specifically, she is trying to convince her to wear a gown and go to a school

dance with her sister. In the lyric, the mother sings how she was "...once just like you/ I

was seventeen too/ And I know how it feels to be young," rejecting boys in favor of

athletic activities. But then the lyric changes for the bridge:

BUT THE DAY COMES TO PASS

WHEN YOU LOOK IN THE GLASS
AND A WOMAN LOOKS BACK AT YOU.
YES, A WOMAN, A WOMAN,
A YOUNG, LOVELY WOMAN—
A WOMAN LOOKS BACK AT YOU.

Later, in the second act, when Babe has become a renowned athlete and has met the

woman with whom she will spend the rest of her life, she sings a reprise of this ballad,

with no change in the lyrics, but with obvious reference to her love for Betty—thus

completely subverting the intention of the mother's original rendering of the ballad.

I also use the romantic ballad in Women on the Land. The disillusioned lead, Stevie,

has returned to visit the idealistic lesbian land collective which she founded fifteen years

ago. She sings "Where Is She?," a haunting love song to a mysterious woman from her
past. It is only in the final verse that she discloses the identity of this woman who has

"always been the one:"

IF YOU SEE A GIRL WHO'S LOOKING KIND OF LONELY,

A GIRL WHO LOOKS A LITTLE BIT LIKE ME—
TELL WHAT I WISH THAT I HAD TOLD HER:
THAT I LOVE—AND I MISS—THE GIRL I USED TO BE.

EXORCISING THE DEVIANT

This is a time-honored convention in musical theatre which allows for the development

of conflict and eventual restoration of "normalcy"—but it is problematic for an outlaw

culture rooted in deviancy. Like the Phantom, lesbians have been compelled to create

our culture in the underground, to wear masks to protect others from our reality. Like

Judd Fry in Oklahoma, we have been banished historically to our lonely cabins—or

closets—to indulge in hopeless fantasies of acceptance by the "Laurie’s" of the world.

And like Lancelot and Guinevere, we have transgressed all the rules which would

assure orderly transfer of power through males from one generation to the next. The

threatening deviant of mainstream culture is the heroine of lesbian theatre, and we

lesbian-feminist playwrights can hardly execute, exile, or convert our leading ladies!

In Women on the Land, both leads are social deviants: Stevie, who runs a lesbian erotic

video company in LA and Catherine, who is a radical separatist on a land collective. The

question is not how to exorcise them, but how to find common ground for their mutually

exclusive survival strategies, so that both can maximize their potential for deviancy.

In The Amazon All-Stars, the ostensible outsider is Ruth, the older alcoholic who won't
surrender her position as short-stop or her relationship to the team manager. When

attempts to kick her off the team fail, the members all decide to quit, and it is Ruth who

reminds them of the realities for lesbians who walk out on each other—Ruth, who has

been disinherited, expelled, dishonorably discharged, arrested, beat up, raped, fired,

evicted—but who still comes out of her corner swinging.

Her ballad "Pour Me" acknowledges the drinking problem, but sets it in the context of

the hellish reality for a working class dyke in a homophobic society:

"I'M SOMEBODY SPECIAL!

I'M SOMEBODY GRAND!
POUR ME OUT THAT GIRL WHO DIED,
'CAUSE NO ONE GAVE A DAMN!...

POUR ME OUT SOME LOVIN'—

I'LL TAKE IT IN A CUP—
POUR ME LIQUID LOVIN'
AND WATCH ME LAP IT UP!"

TAMING THE TOMGIRL

This is another convention which poses obvious problems for the lesbian playwright.

The writing of Babe: An Olympian Musical brought to mind many scenes from Annie Get

Your Gun, where a woman's competency and ambition set her at odds with traditional

notions of femininity. But where Annie is willing to sabotage herself (as is Fanny Brice in

Funny Girl), Babe ups the ante by cheating against her own Olympic teammates—not

only to establish her athletic prowess, but as a deliberate attempt to distance herself

from the ethic of "niceness."

Babe's professional ambition places her outside the women's amateur golf circuit, and

she is compelled to seek her peers in exhibition games with the male pro golfers. Falling

in love with a younger woman golfer, Babe catches a vision of new possibilities, and

instead of putting down women, she pulls them up into her league by founding the

Ladies Professional Golf Association—a league which will provide the financial

autonomy necessary for unleashing, not taming, the tomgirls.

THE CHORUS AS A MALE FANTASY

In heterosexual mainstream musicals, the female chorus frequently reflects a male

attitude towards women as infantile nymphomaniacs, sophisticated vampires, or

husband-hunters who get together to sing about getting a man, pleasing a man, waiting

for a man, coping with a man, etc.

Appropriating the female chorus for lesbian-feminist purposes requires some ingenuity,

because although our culture is vibrant with celebrations of women's sexuality, it is also

at the forefront of the fight against the sexual exploitation of women. The question

becomes one of how to make a number sexy and fun, without fetishizing the female

body or exploiting women as a class.

In Women on the Land, the lesbians on the land collective are feeling demoralized

about the drought and their lack of resources. The leader gets the juices flowing with an

old-fashioned gospel stomp called "The Dousing Song."

 DON'T BE BASIN' YOUR ASSESSMENT
ON THE OUTWARD LOOK OF THINGS—
UNDER EVERY WOMAN'S SURFACE,
RUNS A DEEP ARTESIAN SPRING!

YOU'VE GOT TO GET YOURSELF EXCITED,

YOU'VE GOT TO FILL YOUR OWN SWEET CUP,
YOU'VE GOT TO LET THAT PASSION FLOW, GIRL,
TO DRAW THAT WATER UP!

In one of the bar scenes from the same show, there is a full-chorus drinking number,

"Pick Up The Tab," which sends up the pick-up scene:

I FELL IN LOVE IN THE CHEMISTRY LAB

WITH A TEACHING ASSISTANT WHO WAS AWESOMELY RAD.
WHEN SHE GAVE US A LECTURE ON NUCLEAR FUSION,
I FELT THE MELTDOWN RIGHT DOWN TO MY SHOES AND
I ASKED HER IN MY MOST PROVOCATIVE MURMUR
IF SHE'D LIGHT THE FLAME ON MY BUNSEN BURNER!

WELL, LIT IT SHE DID—

I GOT BURNED PRETTY BAD,
WHEN SHE FELL FOR ANOTHER—
I PICKED UP THE TAB!

In the Amazon All-Stars, an even rowdier musical, there are several numbers which
celebrate lesbian sexuality. In one number, the coach (the emcee in disguise) is giving
the Desert Hearts a hard rock lesson in how to play ball:

I NEVER USED TO GET ON BASE,

I NEVER USED TO SCORE,
UNTIL THE COACH SAID, "LISTEN, GIRL!
THAT'S WHAT YOUR KNEES ARE FOR!"

YOU GOTTA GET DIRTY -

YOU GOTTA GET DOWN!
YOU GOTTA PLAY BALL
THE WAY YOU MAKE LOVE—
YOU GOTTA GET UNDER THE GLOVE!
UNDER THE GLOVE!
UNDER THE GLOVE!
 YOU GOTTA GET UNDER THE GLOVE!

There are other mainstream musical theatre conventions which violate the ethics of

lesbian-feminist culture, and these include the eroticizing of inequality, the fetishizing of

little girls, the mythologizing or trivializing of old women, the whore/madonna polarity for

"desirable" women, rampant fat phobia, the presumption of the universality of Judeo-

christian or christian traditions, the marginalizing of racial or ethnic minorities as "the

other" (which includes their exploitation in positive "other" roles as well as negative),

uncritiqued representation of class privilege as positive, the depiction of prostitution as

harmless recreation, and the conflation of disability with the role the disabled character

plays.

These conventions, which serve mainstream playwrights as a kind of theatrical

shorthand derived from shared experience, are based on values and assumptions

which are not shared by lesbian-feminists, and which actually disrupt, distract, and

disturb our audiences. The lesbian-feminist playwright must create her own

conventions, drawing on the mores of our contemporary culture as well as on the

traditions of older women-centered cultures. Where too much of our history has been

erased or appropriated, we must heed French feminist Monique Wittig's battle cry:

"Failing to remember, invent!"

And finally, mainstream musicals—having exorcised the deviants, tamed the tomgirls,

colonized the women-only chorus, neutralized the strong woman by annexing her to a
representative of the dominant male culture—can ring down the curtain with a

reassuring celebration of the status quo as being the best of all possible worlds. The

lesbian-feminist musical, obviously, cannot do this. But can we still find an upbeat

ending which will infuse our audiences with self-esteem, optimism, and affirmation? This

question lies at the heart of the lesbian experience, and it is one which African-

American author Alice Walker has answered in her recent novel about the horrors of

female genital mutilation. Walker reminds us, amid the smoke of battle, that we can still

possess the secret of joy—because that secret is resistance.