Exporting America: Theatre, gay male identity, and anti-Americanism in Denmark and West Germany

As a second generation gay theatre history, Exporting America offers an analysis of how US American plays concerning male homosexuality were performed and received in Western Europe, exemplified by Denmark and West Germany. Through analysis of The Boys in the Band, Bent, Torch Song Trilogy, and Angels in America as text and in performance, this dissertation argues that it is necessary to understand US plays in light of intercultural performance rather than as plays expressing universal desires, dreams, anxieties, and identities. In stressing the particularity of local cultures---employing a method of radical contextualization--- Exporting America discusses how meanings travel across borders and how international reception adds to or subtracts from meaning, determined as a set of consequences for the individual and the society in which the production and reception of the original production takes place. Focusing on a specific identity, that of gay men, I offer a discussion of how gay male identity is performed theatrically and how a particular construction of this identity initially emanating from the USA arises in particular Western European countries. In the first chapter I offer a discussion of the theoretical framework informing the dissertation. Building on Raymond Williams, I argue that operating analytically with "structure of feeling" allows the theatre historian to reevaluate the construction of gay identity in the theatre. Furthermore, the first chapter argues that the Danish and West German reception of these plays must be understood as informed by a cultural anti-Americanism. Chapter two offers an analysis of performances of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band and Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy as examples of a domestication of the gay man in relation to discourses of gay sexual liberation in the United States and in Denmark. In chapter three I analyze the reception of Martin Sherman's Bent in England, Denmark, and, in particular, West Germany. The chapter argues for a particular relationship between gay identity and the performance of history and points out the ways in which the reception of the gay holocaust as performed in Bent must be understood in relation to the West German broadcast of Holocaust, the miniseries. The US genesis of Tony Kushner's Angels in America is discussed in chapter four, and the fundamental American nature of the play is highlighted by an analysis of the Danish and German reception.