Fluxus Experience (review)

people of color. An angry Brian Freeman (“When We Were Warriors”) challenges his black community: “Why do we other each other so in a community of others?” (250). Randy Gener (“The Kids Stay in the Picture, or, Toward a New Queer Theater”) offers hope with School’s OUT, a public program in New York City that brings together queer teenagers of color with theatre professionals to “explore the thistly themes in their lives—coming out, race, loneliness, sex, dreams and fears of the future, homophobia, racism, and AIDS—through art” (255). Another key tension running through the volume concerns the functions of queer theatre. Whereas coauthors David Román and Tim Miller (“ ‘Preaching to the Converted’ ”) attest to its power to forge community amid political struggle, David Savran (“Queer Theater and the Disarticulation of Identity”) emphasizes its capacity to destabilize and disarticulate identity. Savran claims that “the necessity of multiple identifications and desires that theatre authorizes—across genders, sexualities, races, classes—renders it both the most utopian form of cultural production and the queerest” (164). So, Savran asks, why not include John Guare, Mac Wellman, and Suzan Lori-Parks among queer theatre’s luminaries? His query prompts another, one not pursued in the volume’s modern and contemporary coverage: What about the community-building and disarticulating operations of queerness and same-sex desire in ostensibly “straight,” more conventionally canonical theatre? But when it comes to defining the lubricious boundaries of queer theatre, the volume only deserves credit for raising more questions than it answers. The critical point, made powerfully by all the essays, is that scholars and practitioners of queer theatre must continue to collaborate. In a moving endnote, Carmelita Tropicana evokes the memory of Frank Maya, an actor dying of AIDS backstage at the closing festivities of the 1995 conference. The special ephemerality and perilousness of queer existence onand offstage make this volume’s excellently rendered project of documentation through performance, writing, and publication not only admirable and necessary but urgent.