Footlights Theatre Company

07/14/2022

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We aim to promote conversation and learning by illuminating art, performance, society, and culture.

06/30/2022

06/24/2022

Our last post we talked about, what we will call one of the fathers of classic American Theater, Tennessee Williams. We mentioned that there were plays that dealt directly with gay these. In this post we will, very briefly, discuss that idea in his play A Streetcar Named Desire.
A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, is a play about Blanche DuBois, a former school teacher, who travels to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski after the loss of Blanche’s family home in Mississippi.
Blanche’s personal anxieties and Stanley’s constant questioning and brute behavior send Blanche into a downward spiral after it is revealed that her dead ex-husband was gay. It is never explicitly stated that Allan is gay, but it is strongly implied. (“There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking—still—that thing was there”

06/23/2022

a few days ago we talked about Oscar Wilde as the one of the predominant LGBTQ theatre writers. Today we’d like to feature another well-known writer, Tennessee Williams. He was an American playwright, best known for some of the best known staples of classic American Theater. Those works being, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Maned Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Williams grew up in Mississippi, where his life was less than easy. His father was abusive, his mother was intense and overbearing, and his sister ended up being placed in an institution and lobotomized after accusing their father of abuse. These elements of this personal life became the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie.
Throughout his life, Williams’ homos*xuality was an open secret, and was confirmed in the post-Stonewall era. Many of his short stories and plays dealt with gay themes directly. At the height of his career, he wrote many successful plays, many of them were adapted into award-winning/nominated films. Unfortunately, later in his life, Williams’ life was consumed by drugs, alcohol, and depression at the death of his longtime partner, Frank Merlo.

06/22/2022

The deadline for submitting your Medusa monologues is fast approaching! What we are looking for is female identifying people to write a monologue that is 5-10 minutes in length about any subject speaks to your heart! If your submission is chosen there will be a small stipend. Email your submissions to [email protected]

06/14/2022

The deadline for submitting your Medusa monologues is fast approaching! What we are looking for is female identifying people to write a monologue that is 5-10 minutes in length about any subject speaks to your heart! If your submission is chosen there will be a small stipend. Email your submissions to [email protected]

06/13/2022

Many of you may have first been introduced to Andrew
Garfield as the title character in 2012’s The Amazing
Spider-Man, or if maybe Superhero movies are not your
thing, you may have seen Andrew play Jonathan Larson in
the Lin Manuel Miranda directed Tick Tick Boom.
However, in keeping with the theme of Pride, did you also
know that Mr. Garfield played Prior Walter in Tony
Kurshner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Angels in America.
This production is a complex portrayal of the AIDS
epidemic in the Reagan years. It takes on political themes,
homos*xuality, day to day life of New Yorkers as they deal
with the trails of life and death, love and s*x, heaven and
hell, change and loss.
This is was an important story to tell, in a time when those
illuminated within the pages of the script, were being
marginalized and not having their stories told. This was an
important piece in the National Theatre’s history. It was
not only an American play, but one that talked about AIDS
to a National audience.

The paperback copy and audio book are available at the Central Branch of the Brown County Library.
The 7+ hour production is also available to rent on the National Theatre website at the following:
https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/angels-in-america

06/10/2022

In this post we will take a moment to highlight the Tectonic Theatre Project. In our last post we mentioned the play Gross Indecency by Moises Kaufman. We mention Mr. Kaufman here again as the founder of the Tectonic Theatre Project. Since it’s founding in 1991, the company has created and staged over twenty plays and musicals, including Gross Indecency, Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, and the Tony Award-winning 33 Variations.
One of the best-known plays produced by Tectonic is The Laramie Project. Published in September 2001, this play is a culmination of interviews, done by Kaufman and members of his company, of the people of Laramie, Wyoming about the reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and the subsequent play is often used as a method to combat homophobia and teach about prejudice and tolerance.
Ten years after Shepard’s murder, members of the Tectonic Theater Project returned to Laramie to conduct follow-up interview with residents featured in the play.
This powerful work is available from the Brown County Central Library. We at Footlights highly suggest this as your next read.

06/09/2022

Footlights would like to highlight a “theatre person” of the LBGTQ community. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an English novelist, playwright, and poet. He was born in Dublin and attended Trinity College and Oxford. It was during his formative collegiate career he gained his reputation for flamboyance and decadence. It was his with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, a novel of decadence and thinly veiled homos*xuality decried as immoral. Wilde’s success in theatre came with his satirical comedy The Importance of Being Earnest.
In 1891, Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he was engaged in a long term romantic relationship. Despite being married to Constance Lloyd and having two sons, this was not Wilde’s first homos*xual affair. Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of being a “posing somdomite” on a public calling card. At this time in England being a homos*xual was against the law. Due to this accusation, Wilde became the one of the first, and certainly most famous, people convicted under the UK’s “gross indecency” laws. He was given its harshest sentence: two years hard labor. He died only a few years after his release.
During the trial, Wilde defended all of his relationships beautifully in court, and although he did not publicly identify as homos*xual, believing instead that he was imprisoned for being an artist and nonconformist. Yet being outed turned him into a permanent icon for the gay community.
If you’d like to learn more about Oscar Wilde’s trail, we here at Footlights, would invite you to take a look at Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman.

06/08/2022

From Stonewall Uprising (2010)
"There were no instructions except, put them out of business. The first police officer that come in with our group said the place is under arrest. When you exit, have some identification and it'll be over in a short time. This time they said, We're not going.That's it. We're not going." Unnamed NYPD Officer

05/21/2022

The Inside/Out Space below the Margaret Lockwood Gallery is ready and waiting for YOU!

Limited tickets are still available for both performances of Art- on the Road! by Yasmina Reza, hosted by Isadoora Theatre Company. Doors open tonight, May 21, at 7pm, and tomorrow at 1:30pm. Reserve your seat at footlightsartdoorco.eventbrite.com

📸 Eric Westphal, 'Marc' in "Art"