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Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan (Lesbian & Gay Studies) | 
| Author: Sean O'connor
Publisher: Cassell
Category: Book
List Price: $33.95
Buy Used: $7.33
You Save: $26.62 (78%)
Media: Paperback
Pages: 245
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0304328642
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.91099206642
EAN: 9780304328642
ASIN: 0304328642
Publication Date: November 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Free tracking of all orders so you know where it is and that it was delivered. Please no correctional institutions. On occasion we may substitute a hardback for a softcover as inventory allows
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Histories of British gay male playwrights have tended to begin with a nod to Oscar Wilde and then skip right to the transgressive and overtly sexual antics of Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton, and Neil Bartlett. In Straight Acting, Sean O'Connor begins his study with Wilde, but rather than simply use him as a bellwether of witticisms, he boldly charts how Wilde's politics of individualism and sexual disruption influenced gay writers over the next half century. He examines in detail the lives, times, and works of three extraordinarily successful gay playwrights who wrote from the 1920s to the 1950s: Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, and Terence Rattigan. While he is always sensitive to individual lives and careers, O'Connor explores and explicates a gay male tradition in popular theater that--under the nonthreatening rubrics of gentle humor and sentimentality--manages to subvert, challenge, and sometimes even shock. Beautifully written and filled with constantly surprising insights, Straight Acting almost single-handedly reinvents what we think of as the history of modern gay theater. --Michael Bronski
Product Description
Between the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the beginnings of legal reforms in the 1960s, the West End stage was dominated by the work of gay playwrights. In a book that covers both familiar and lesser-known works, Sean O'Connor examines the legacy of Wilde as a playwright and as a gay man, and explores in the works of Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan the resonance of Wilde's agenda for tolerance and his creed of individuality. O'Connor contextualizes these plays against the enormous social and historical changes of the twentieth century. He also examines the legal restrictions which regulated the personal lives of these writers and required them to evolve sophisticated strategies in order to express on stage, albeit obliquely, their dilemmas as gay men.
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