Xavier Lemoine

Censorship or the Limits of Representation in Terrence McNally’s Gay Theatre at the End of the 20th Century

This paper explores the controversy around two contemporary American plays by acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally, Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) and Corpus Christi (1998). By detailing the ways these two plays were attacked by politicians and conservative religious groups, it becomes apparent that censorship is still at the heart of American democracy as is manifested by the ferocious debates around free speech as a result of the conservative revolution. Attitudes to homophobia then appeared to be a litmus test for free speech. The reception of these plays also highlighted the inner mechanism of censorship as a productive discourse that entails the risk of suppressing the artistic distance that provides a dissenting voice and a necessary criticism of the human condition.

Embodying Hybridity: Anna Deavere Smith’s Identity Cross-Overs

Anna Deavere Smith’s embodiment of a series of characters offers a postmodern version of performing hybridity. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities1 and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,2 created in the early 1990s, brought her fame across the United States most obviously because they provided an artistic answer to the racial tensions that had sparked urban riots in New York City and Los Angeles. By performing groups and individuals from different communities on her single body, she not only confronted various points of view, she involved the art of theater in the decoding, interrogating, and possible reconstruction of multifaceted American identities. Both plays were the culmination of Smith’s long-term project “On the Road: A Search for American Character,” started in 1982 (Richards 1993: 35) to the extent that they were the high-water mark of her popularity. They placed her on the artistic map as a major African American performance artist whose unique verbatim style served to address crucial social issues.