Research Guide to American Literature

victims of the Holocaust. A lesbian with terminal cancer discovers true love in
Last Summer at Bluef ish Cove (1980), by Jane Chambers. David Mamet’s comedy
Boston Marriage (1999) depicts love between “women of fashion” in the early
twentieth century. In pioneering presentations of homosexuality in Chicano/a
theater, Cherríe Moraga dramatizes lesbian desire in Giving up the Ghost: Teatro in
Two Acts (1986); in Heroes and Saints (1989), with a subplot about a gay character
who contracts AIDS; and in The Hungry Woman (2001). Homophobia, homo-
sexuality, and racism in a baseball team help fuel Richard Greenberg’s complex
play Take Me Out (2002).
For more than thirty years Terrence McNally has treated with humor,
honesty, and eloquence such gay-related concerns as AIDS, homophobia,
and relationships. His works include The Ritz (1971), André’s Mother (1988),
Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and Cor-
pus Christi (1998). McNally also wrote the books for the musicals Kiss of the
Spider Woman (1993) and A Man of No Importance (2002), which feature gay
protagonists.
Harvey Fierstein drew on aspects of his life to create the three one-act plays
tracing the loves, losses, and triumphs of a Jewish drag queen in Torch Song Trilogy
(1983). He wrote the script for La Cage aux Folles (1983), notably featuring gay
characters in the principal roles of a French nightclub owner and his longtime
love, a female impersonator.
From more than two hundred interviews Moisés Kaufman and the members
of Tectonic Theater Project assembled The Laramie Project (2000). Through the
reactions and stories of the town’s residents, this moving docudrama presents the
events surrounding the brutal assault on and death of Matthew Shepard, a gay
twenty-one-year-old university student, in Laramie, Wyoming.
Provocative dramas, comedies, and musicals about AIDS and this country’s
responses to it proliferated after the disease was first diagnosed in the 1980s and
labeled “the gay plague.” Representative plays include As Is (1985), by William
M. Hoffman; The Normal Heart (1985), by Larry Kramer; Before It Hits Home
(1989), by Cheryl L. West; Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
(1991; Pulitzer, 1993), and Part Two: Perestroika (1992), by Tony Kushner; The
Baltimore Waltz (1992), by Paula Vogel; Jeffrey (1993), by Paul Rudnick; Patient
A (1993), by Lee Blessing; and Lonely Planet (1993), by Steven Dietz; and the
popular musicals Falsettos (1992), by William Finn and James Lapine; and Rent
(1996), by Jonathan Larson.
Homosexuality also figured in productions that were not specifically AIDS,
gay, or lesbian works. They included Six Degrees of Separation (1990), by John
Guare; The Young Man from Atlanta (1995), by Horton Foote; As Bees in Honey
Drown (1997), by Douglas Carter Beane; and the long-running musical A Chorus
Line (1975), by Michael Bennett, James Kirkwood Jr., Nicholas Dante, Marvin
Hamlisch, and Edward Kleban.
In these and other plays and musicals created in the four decades from
1970, American theater addressed transformative societal and moral concerns.
However, the breadth of this nation’s contemporary theatrical offerings reflect
the breadth of audience tastes. Thus, attractions also embraced plays on religious

Contemporary American Drama 9