Cast Out

Series

• Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance

Cast Out is a collection of memoirs and interviews by twenty-two leading performers, playwrights, technicians, producers, critics, educators, and passionate spectators.

Cast Out also offers a backstage pass to the personal and creative lives of some of the most important and influential theater artists of the past fifty years: Edward Albee discusses the homophobic critical attacks he endured in the 50s and 60s; Cherry Jones talks about the first time she accepted a Tony Award—and her decision, in that moment, to come out; Peggy Shaw speaks of the drag queen who first inspired her stage career; Craig Lucas issues an impassioned call for theater practitioners and other artists to unite for the sake of art, creativity, and social change. Also included are memoirs by and interviews with Kate Bornstein, Lisa Kron, Tim Miller, and George C. Wolfe, among others. These diverse voices dispel the cliché of theater as a "safe haven" and replace the stereotype with a nuanced group portrait of the ways in which theater and queerness intersect.

Featuring writing by:

Edward Albee
Kate Bornstein
Richard Bracho
Bree Coven
Terry Galloway
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez
Cherry Jones
Lisa Kron
Craig Lucas
Tim Miller
Jim Provenzano
Peggy Shaw
George C. Wolfe

and more

Robin Bernstein teaches in the Program of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Visit the author's website at: www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~rbernst/index.html.

Praise / Awards

• "Robin Bernstein's Cast Out is my latest must have, an important new mapping of the intersection of gender and performance studies."
  —Holly Hughes

• "Editor Robin Bernstein has assembled 21 wonderfully enlightening entries that will appeal both to those in the theatre business and to those who simply enjoy the fruits of the industry. . . . From the tiny, theatre-laden paradise of Key West to a high school play in East Texas, all of these pieces offer something important and vital on the history and the current state of queer theatre today. It's truly an amazing accomplishment."
  —Bay Area Reporter

• ". . . an impressive and seminal contribution to the art, creativity, and social changes of American theatre over the past five decades with respect to the gay community."
  —Midwest Book Review

• "Amidst all the academic concern with the questions of gender identity, sexual liberation, and queer theory, a very old-fashioned notion keeps recurring: the magic of the theater."
  —Laurence Senelick, Tufts University