Two characters named Boy and Girl, ghostly conjurings of his feverish imagination, torment him with happier memories of the male lovers who would, in days past, sign their names above his bed. ‘I grow brittle and break,’ Bright cries out in desperation. ‘Can’t you see I’m losing my mind?’
The Madness of Lady Bright (1964) was 27-year-old Lanford Wilson’s breakthrough play, a tragicomic monologue for a lonely drag queen, inspired – he later claimed – by one of his gay co-workers at the reception desk of the Americana Hotel in New York. To write a queer character as fiercely outspoken and sympathetic as Bright was still taboo in those pre-Stonewall years. Little did Wilson realize, however, when his one-act play premiered 60 years ago this month, on 19 May 1964, at Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, that it would represent the birth of queer theatre.
The Cino, as it was called, had been established six years earlier in a small storefront on 31 Cornelia Street, the brainchild of Joe Cino, a retired Sicilian-American dancer from Buffalo who nurtured dreams of running a coffee shop. During the 1960s – on a tiny, two-and-a-half-metre stage built out of recycled milk cartons, old rugs and fairy lights – the Cino hosted a series of late-night readings of homoerotic plays by Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams. To avert a possible raid, Cino paid sizeable sums of money to the local police and, by the mid-1960s, the venue had become a regular queer hangout, a safe and fashionable alternative to the nearby bars and bathhouses.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 243 - May 2024-Ausgabe von Frieze.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 243 - May 2024-Ausgabe von Frieze.
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Open Invitation
HOSTING PERFORMANCE in institutions, particularly those that have historically presented more traditional formats, is both tempting and tricky.
Winner Takes It All
IN THE EARLY 1990S, Donald Rodney assembled a collection of more than 100 cheap sporting and academic trophies, such as those typically available in local shops, and displayed them on shelves that ran the length of the gallery wall, and in purpose-made glazed and mirrored cabinets.
Graham Little
There is no formula for beauty, no reliable unit of measure.
Marcel Dzama
Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is where the great Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson occasionally lived and worked – and where, at the age of 39, he drowned.
Shuvinai Ashoona
Crawling with tentacled creatures, flipper-footed beasts and beaked hybrids, Shuvinai Ashoona’s colourful pencil drawings are playful and fantastical depictions of Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic.
Regina José Galindo and Iva Lulashi
The female figure predominates in the works of Guatemalan visual and performance artist Regina José Galindo and Albanian artist Iva Lulashi.
Bettina Pousttchi
‘Progressions’, Bettina Pousttchi’s survey at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, is a striking illustration of the idea that urban space is not only the physical environment of a city – from pedestrian and surveillance structures to actual buildings – but also a projection, subject to both time-bound ideologies driving urban policy and to city dwellers’ subjective memories. Spread across three floors, the exhibition highlights the fluidity with which Pousttchi moves between industrial-scale readymades, urban architecture and photography.
Nidhal Chamekh
Taking its title from philosopher Édouard Glissant’s question, ‘What If Carthage Hadn’t Been Destroyed?’ – posed in his book of collected poems Le Sel Noir (The Black Salt, 1957) – Nidhal Chamekh’s latest exhibition, ‘Et si Carthage’, is inspired by the ancient city whose ruins are a ten-minute drive from Selma Feriani’s new gallery space in downtown Tunis.
Green Snake: Women-Centred Ecologies
When I was younger, my mother told me a story about a man who travelled to a faraway lake in China, where he met a beautiful young woman dressed in white and spent the night on her boat.
Whitney Biennial 2024
With this year’s Whitney Biennial already having been dismissed by many critics (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture) as riskless, I felt hard-pressed to agree.