J. Paul Halferty – författare

Famously rejected in Toronto, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, John Herbert’s autobiographical prison drama based on his incarceration for “gross indecency,” became an off-Broadway hit when it premiered in New York City in 1967. Less than twenty years later, Sky Gilbert’s Drag Queens on Trial premiered in a Toronto transformed: by 1985 the gay and lesbian community was at the vanguard of politics and activism, and Gilbert’s theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times, was establishing itself as a vital space for queer performance.Against a backdrop of profound cultural and social transformation, Political Stages examines the role of theatrical performance – and of openly gay, politically engaged playwrights – in the emergence of gay liberation and the development of the alternative theatre movement in Toronto. Adopting a cultural materialist framework, Paul Halferty traces the history of gay theatre through close analysis of four key productions: Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), the Tarragon theatre’s production of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna (1974), Robert Wallace’s No Deposit, No Return (1975), and Gilbert’s Drag Queens on Trial (1985). Halferty’s richly detailed treatment of the biographical, social, cultural, and political contexts shaping each work’s production and reception positions these plays as salient examples of gay theatre’s transformative impact on the city, its theatre, and its politics.Charting the dynamic relationship between gay politics, gay theatrical production, and the ideological and artistic commitments of alternative theatres, Political Stages provides a fresh perspective on the political evolution of Toronto’s queer communities.

Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.