While the rumor that Minneapolis has more theatre seats per capita than any other major city has proven false — we’re second to New York City and with all the recent building closures and buyouts, it is probably even less true now — it is vehemently true that the Twin Cities is a hotspot for theatre, and progressive theatre in particular. This means we are lucky enough to live in a place where queer and atrongly allied theatre artists abound.
Our scene isn’t perfect of course — but readers can probably think of several queer or otherwise progressive shows that have flourished in the past couple of years. And while it’s easy to name actors, companies, or even directors doing this groundbreaking work, there’s an unfortunate name and role in most show that tends to go in one ear and out the other once we hear it — that of the playwright. There are many reasons for this, and it is true that too often the plays getting produced are telling the stories we want, but not through the lens we want it. The writer is an ally or otherwise well-intentioned playwright who is not actually LGBTQQIAP+ themselves. But in the Twin Cities, we have a plethora of queer voices telling crucial queer stories, and a celebration of those voices is long overdue.
How would Gadfly, 20%, Boom, Day In, Day Out, or a number of other fabulous theatre companies doing queer work consistently turn out quality work without these unspoken heroes of the theatre community? How would progressive companies like Mixed Blood, Freshwater, or Theatre Unbound continuously incorporate a queer lens without the writers doing the work? They couldn’t, and as both a writer and producer/director I see the joy of that symbiotic relationship from all sides. Additionally, as an unabashed “theatre person,” I’m always thrilled to talk about some of the hidden theatrical treasures here in the Twin Cities, many of which are geared towards playwriting.
A thriving center that’s well-known in the international theatre conversation, aptly titled “The Playwright’s Center,” sits proudly in Seward. The Playwright’s Center hosts a variety of staged readings and new work for their core members and other emerging and important voices in the scene. Workhouse Theater Company is another advocate for local playwrights. The company hosts a regular staged reading series for playwrights with serious ties to Minnesota, many of whom have moved forward with plans for full production. So while the big houses are eager to pull in established scripts from New York or London, the Twin Cities sees art in it’s truest form when companies like Savage Umbrella or Freshwater Theatre choose to devise, create, or produce solely Minnesotan voices and see those writers through a full process until production.
Even in our queer arts scene, we have stunning examples of local work getting done. One of the strongest examples is 20% Theatre Company’s Q-STAGE which puts the creation of local art right back into the hands of local queer writers, and that’s in addition to their groundbreaking project The Naked I, which pulls in writers from all mediums to create shows about gender identity. Most queer companies in town have an ongoing script submission policy, and local writers frequently get considered more seriously.
I was elated to interview several successful playwrights in the Minneapolis/St. Paul theatre scene about their process and how they perceive their place in the artistic community themselves. I’m always interested in why people create the way they do, and how that extended to other playwrights.
When point blank asked this question, Eli Effinger-Weintraub responded “What’s any one person’s role or place overall? I’m a single player in an unfathomably vast pageant that’s been going on for millennia. The pageant looks different if you remove any one player, but it goes on. All I can do is write to the best of my ability, reflecting the world as I see it, or as I’d like to see it. Anyone can write a play, if they’ve a mind to. The only unique thing any of us can bring is our perspective.”
I’m impassioned about how writing from one’s own perspective can still heal and illuminate others, and Effinger-Weintraub has written plays from queer, female, and Pagan perspectives that have met much acclaim. Part of it is her sense of humor—she is a consistent crowd favorite at Theatre Unbound’s 24 hour theatre festival, and her show Girl Gumshoe and Detective Dad saw audiences sympathizing with and relating to it’s queer characters all three moments of it’s incarnation—at Little Lifeboats’ annual new script showcase TEASE, in the staged reading it received for being fan favorite of that event, and finally as a full-length show with Gadfly Theatre Productions last fall. Eli is a playwright who intentionally sets out to use those comedic and conversational writing styles to “point out the broken things in our world and ask how they could be better for queer people and other marginalized communities,” and to “do so with love and discernment, building up more than I tear down.”
Eli’s not alone in wanting to use her strengths and connections as a playwright to make the world better for queer people. That seems to be a contributing factor to all of the playwrights I talked too. Even though there are a lot of long-running jokes about theatre being a virtual queer playground, the statistics of who’s story is being told — and who the people paid to tell those stories actually are — don’t match up to the stereotype all that well. It’s crucial to include queer people in conversations about themselves, and while that statement may sound like a no-brainer, somehow mainstream theatre hasn’t quite gotten there.
JamieAnne Meyers, fresh off a nearly sold out run of her first major show, First Person: A Life in Transition as part of 20%’s Q-STAGE earlier this year is passionate about giving trans and queer artists a direct line to the audience, hence making the actual creative space of “theatre” better for those performers.
“Another role I want to fulfill as a queer playwright is to write for trans actors. We face so many barriers to performing our craft, and I will do whatever I can to help change that. In “First Person” I went one step further and was careful to cast trans and gender non-conforming actors to play cisgender parts.”
That subversive method of casting was a huge hit with critics and audience alike, and created a new experience for audiences who, in spite of what producers think, are constantly aching for something new in art to get excited about. That aching for something new strikes a significant chord for Matthew Everett, who is perhaps best known for his “don’t ask, don’t tell” inspired work on Leave (or the Surface of the World) which was done as a fellowship for the Minnesota Arts Board in 1999 and revamped in 2008 to much acclaim. Everett says “I write the stories I needed to see when I was younger. I write the stories I still need to see and don’t. I write them because most other writers have the straight stories covered. They don’t need me to add to that pile. Queer stories are something I can add to the conversation.”
Another driving force for playwrights is to express one of the rights queer people have been fighting for since the dawn of time: to express ourselves, and in doing so show other people they aren’t alone. As important as it is to be a driving force for change in our world, so much of that change can be obtained so subtly. As a queer woman growing up in the Bible Belt, I know firsthand the difference that seeing queer women on television made on me — and that representation was not substantial, and often harmful but I still took away “there are more of me” and normalized the very confusing feelings and experiences of my youth. Hector Chavarria is a personal favorite artist of mine. He’s an actor turned playwright who’s been sitting on his recent show The Big Gay Mexican for awhile. This show came about as a way to raise visibility for the intersection of Mexican-American and gay identity.
Says Chavarria, “I feel it’s very important to have my voice heard. I create my art to be seen, to show the world that someone like me exists and it’s about time people like me get recognized.” In these situations, the playwright is not being self-serving or creating vanity projects at all. That “people like me” is crucial to the creation process. When talking about art and creation in general, Chavarria also remarked “I am a big, gay, Mexican-American so with my writing I try to bring out my point of view, my voice, my stories because people like me are not being presented positively in the art world or social media. I want to be an inspiration to anyone who has dealt with acceptance by peers or themselves. I want to let them know that they are not alone.”
That last sentence really hits hard for most LGBTQQIAP+ people. That feeling of solitude is why so many of us get into the arts to begin with, because that’s frequently where we find community when we don’t connect well with classmates or teammates. It also drives right at the reason that art and media matter in the first place. Every generation has gotten lambasted for so-called addictions to the art and media they take in, but it’s so often that art and media that saves us from isolation and allows us to see ourselves reflected.
Unfortunately, as JamieAnn Meyers pointed out in her earlier quote, we’re still not putting enough queer bodies on stage to truly comfort those who fit outside the heteronormative—and if someone fits outside the homonormative, forget it. In these case, creation become advocacy itself. Chavarria sums up this issue and how it drives one to create. “When I started auditioning and attempting to break into this business, I quickly learned that I was going to have a hard time making it because I was not what producers and directors were looking for. So, what did I do? I started to make my own opportunities, I started to create my own work. It’s kind of like I’m taking my dream into my own hands by creating my dream.” Meyers adds “When I first performed on the stage with 20% Theatre back in 2012 I quickly realized how much more effective I could be as an actor and playwright in achieving my advocacy goals. This understanding was reinforced and informed by the work of Peterson Toscano, who uses theater as a way to do education and entertainment around the queer perspective of identity.”
Theatre is a field that is always changing, and innovation is a huge factor in it’s ability to sustain. In spite of those factors we still don’t see the visibility and inclusion that we need to see in the medium, but here in Minneapolis our scene is at least a couple steps ahead of the game. We’re actually very lucky to have such a solid group of artists to call upon to start the hard conversations and instigate change. One of my absolute favorite things about the group of queer playwrights that are the most successful in the Twin Cities is their ability to feel out the social and artistic changes happening around them and react accordingly.
Matthew Everett in particular is a fan of writing about social issues that seemingly resolve. “I tend to write about things that bug me, problems that I think need to be solved. It’s why I wrestled so long with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. It’s why my marriage equality play But Not For Love bounced around from a college in PA where it was born, out to Los Angeles during their Prop 8 woes, and back again to Minneapolis when we put the issue on the ballot for Minnesota. It’s also why I spent several years writing and rewriting a touring show for Project 515 as they tackled the changing marriage equality issue. Nothing makes me happier than to write about something that then gets resolved and turns my play into a period piece about a problem we used to have.”
Chavarria likes to handle this community’s evolution a different way, but it achieves much of the same purpose Everett’s accidental period pieces do: creating a piece that assesses that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Much of the root cause of social problems doesn’t get resolved, even as specific legislative progress moves forward.
Says Chavarria “With my work I write about the past, because the past is what causes the future, and we need to understand the past in order to move on from it.”
Eli Effinger-Weintraub has seen the community evolve in a way that has changed her overall approach to writing. “Definitely when I first started writing plays, and somewhat when I first came back to it, my works were very personally focused—one or two people’s personal struggles within their personal context. And that was fine at the time. But as I’ve continued on the path, I find myself wanting to, while still centering personal struggles and relationships, place them more explicitly within some sort of larger context.”
I’m fascinated by the cycle that begins when artists become more culturally aware and act on it. We have a playwright becoming more aware of social issues, so she begins highlighting social issues. As such, more artists take in her work, becoming aware of these issues and highlighting them as well, and so it goes on. This cycle in the Twin Cities has contributed substantially to the overall playwriting community, and more and more we see allied playwrights trying their hand at these social issues. While often this ends up in a questionable matter, the state of theatre overall in the Twin Cities finds itself drastically improved. The new work we crave is getting done, and it’s including more voices. I’m consistently so proud to be in both a queer and artistic community with so many firestarters.
JamieAnn Meyers does the whole queer community proud when she says, “My biggest challenge as an elder queer bisexual transfeminine artist is breaking down barriers that are systemic in a cis-white- male-dominated theater world. Opening doors will take a lot of perseverance and networking, and all of this has to be done in the face of continuing to build personal relationships that create solid ground on which I can stand to push forward.”
She makes those communities even prouder when she does the hard, necessary work of opening these doors. She’s currently looking at taking First Person on the road, which will open doors well beyond the Twin Cities, as well as bring us back to some of the earlier points the playwrights made: seeing yourself is crucial to figuring out yourself, and everyone deserves to see themselves represented on stage. Sometimes that means you have to create your own opportunities, an idea that other playwrights adamantly support.
Luckily we do live in an incredibly rich artistic community where people like Meyers, Chavarria, Effinger-Weintraub, Everett, and so many other wonderful writers are making space for us, and presenting stories that represent some of the most underrepresented among us.
To find out more about the playwrights featured here:
JamieAnn Meyers
JamieAnn is taking First Person: A Life in Transition on the road and fulfilling her long goal of using art for advocacy while on the road. News about that is TBA
Hector Chavarria
Hector doesn’t have anything immediately in the works, but keep checking facebook.com/BigGayMexican on Facebook for updates on this show and new work from him as it develops.
Eli Effinger-Weintraub
Eli’s one-act Your Princess is in Another Lair is part of Gadfly’s Final Frontier: Heroes and Villains. More info here.
Eli will be presenting various reading and panels on geekiness and writing at CONvergence this year. Info here.
Matthew Everett
Matthew’s latest work TV Boyfriend will see a scene performed at this year’s TEASE. Details here.
Matthew’s plays are available for purchase at www.lulu.com/spotlight/matthewaeverett
His theater reviews and Fringe blogging happens on swfringegeek.blogspot.com
His official website is matthewaeverett.com
Some of his work is at New Play Exchange at newplayexchange.org/users/5558/matthew-everett
Matthew moderates a new play series called The Greenhouse Project through Workhouse Theatre Company. More info is available on that at workhousetheatre.org
To find out more about new playwrights or new work in general, please visit newplayexchange.org, minnesotaplaylist.com, or check the calendars of your favorite theatre companies here in town.