Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Theatre and Performance
Advisor
David Savran
Committee Members
Hillary Miller
Annette J. Saddik
Subject Categories
Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Queer Studies | Theatre History | Women's Studies
Keywords
adaptation, kinship, performance, drama, queer, feminist
Abstract
This project focuses on queer feminist adaptations of mainstream, well-known, and well-regarded (canonical) dramas by white men. Adaptation, I contend, creates an important framework for queer feminist world-making. As staged drama, theatre enables lesbian artists to try on and rehearse modes of being and ways of relating—of building kinship—in ways that other non-dramatic and/or non-performative arts cannot offer. Yet adaptation poses affective risks, as well. It is not guaranteed, for example, that adaptation will form the world—its pre-existing narratives or legal and social structures—to oneself. It is just as likely that a lesbian dramatist will ultimately adapt her stories (and herself) to the limiting available structures.
I attend to the plays in each chapter as art objects and as cultural artifacts, attending to the intersections of life, politics, and aesthetics. The chapters are divided temporally and by theme, to best facilitate this multifaceted mode of inquiry. In Chapter 1, And Baby Makes Seven by Paula Vogel (1984/1993) and Belle Reprieve by Split Britches and Bloolips (1991) are considered as key examples of a then-burgeoning lesbian aesthetics of camp. These plays each take up a Great American Drama (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, respectively). Yet whereas Albee’s and Williams’s plays showcase the problems of heteronormative society, these queer feminist adaptations jump off from their source texts into sillier, more tender, more survivable queer worlds. Home, these plays insist, must be available to queer feminist artists in/as the theatre. And doing a play should feel like playing.
In Chapter 2, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherríe Moraga (1995/2005) and Oedipus at Palm Springs by The Five Lesbian Brothers (2005) each take up a narrative from the canon of Greek tragedy, Western Drama’s well-recognized roots. In turning to tragedy, these stories, populated by bad lesbian moms, serve as cautionary tales for readers, audiences, and actors alike. In the political fight to achieve marriage equality and so-called normal nuclear families, these plays ask, what is lost? Furthermore, how can we do better in building homes and families if we have no strong examples outside the harmful norms of the mainstream? Theatre cannot solve the problem of lesbian longings for home, these plays demonstrate, but it can be a forum for experimenting with new ideas and new possibilities.
Chapter 3 considers contemporary queer feminist theatrical adaptations on the cusp of disaster. O, Earth by Casey Llewellyn (2016) and Hurricane Diane by Madeleine George (2017/2019) adapt a canonical American drama (Our Town by Thornton Wilder) and a Greek tragedy (The Bacchae by Euripides), respectively. Expanding their home-making scopes beyond the household or family to include allyship and a full (if still fraught) community, these plays nonetheless demonstrate that these expansive, utopic impulses are unstable. Political backlash, misappropriation of the language of consent as a means of refusing collectivity, global climate disaster, and even the shadow of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic all cast their shadows at the horizons of these plays. In as much as queer efforts to build a more livable world continue—and continue to seek new horizons of inclusivity, bodily autonomy, and access to resources—we must nonetheless remain vigilant—and vigilantly hopeful—against the very real risks of losing our horizons of hope. Ultimately, I suggest, theatre’s capacity to practice interdependent world-making as theatre-making is the greatest gift that queer feminist adaptation can offer in and for the theatre.
Recommended Citation
Werther, Janet, "No Place Like Home: Dyke Dramas and/as Queer Feminist Worldmaking" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6275
Included in
Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Queer Studies Commons, Theatre History Commons, Women's Studies Commons
