27 - Performance: Queerly Jewish/Jewishly Queer in the American Theater

Summary

Boys in the Band, as the breakthrough play in one of several genealogies one might trace through queer and Jewish performance, highlights a trope that has sustained surprising power. The 'Jew fairy' provides a useful starting point for examining the intersection of queer Jewish expression on various kinds of American stages. This chapter focuses on the fusing of moral seriousness and campiness in a variety of formal and nontraditional performance genres. Solo performance art has been an especially hospitable genre for the investigation of queer conundrums, as it is a form that often highlights the complicated construction of the self. Queer Yiddishkayt has found expression through what Jeffrey Shandler calls postvernacular Yiddish, a mode in which the symbolic fact of saying something in Yiddish is more important than the content of the utterance. Queer new Jews take to performance to reimagine Jewish rituals and festival observance to imbue them with new efficacy for confronting contemporary concerns.