Dramaturgy of Sex on Stage in Contemporary Theatre explores the dramaturgy of sex in contemporary works for the stage in the social, cultural and historical context of the time and place during which they were written and performed.
Comprising chapters by writers from across North America and Europe, the book covers an expansive range of plays, musicals and dance performances, from Broadway to the Fringe, from post-AIDS epidemic to post-COVID-19 pandemic. Analysing these intimate moments—both textually and as staged—through an intersectional and critical lens illuminates the way power structures are maintained and codified, and how they can be queered and dismantled onstage and off. This examination of depictions of sex on stage attempts to understand from a dramaturgical and sociological perspective how these depictions have developed over time, and how the rise of intimacy directors has responded to the changes within the contemporary theatrical landscape and in the world at large.
This is an essential companion for any scholar or practitioner looking to stage, discuss or understand intimacy in performance.
Introduction
Kate Mulley
Part I: Depicting Sexual Discovery and Identity
1. (Still) Shopping and (Still) Fucking: The Stylistics of Queer Desire on Stage
George Sampatakakis
2. Respectable Queer Sex: Criteria for Permissible Representations in Contemporary Mainstream Theatre
Joey Baseil Massa
3. Depicting Queer Sexual Discovery in Contemporary British Fringe Theatre
Alexander Millington
4. All Tomorrow’s Parties: Structures of Feeling in Verbatim Theatre
Shane Kinghorn
Part II: Depicting Stylized Sex
5. Disability and Desire: Multimodal Exploration in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening
Lindsey R. Barr
6. Dancing on a Knife’s Edge: Performing Violent Co-Dependency in Bryony Lavery and Frantic Assembly’s Stockholm
Karen Morash
7. A Dramaturgy of Precariousness: The Real, Realness, and Spectatorship of Sex in Dead Centre’s Good Sex
Huayu Yang
8. Mette Ingvartsen’s “The Red Pieces” Series: Sex, Dance, Erasing Power Structures and Ungendered Bodies
Anne Lempicki
Part III: Depicting Transactional Sex
9. Commodification of Women’s Bodies: Staging the Consequences
Sophie Bastien
10. Masculinity and Commercial Sex from the Perspective of Giuliana Musso’s Sexmachine
Stefania Lodi Rizzini
Part IV: Depicting Female Desire
11. Context, Cliche, and Other Considerations for Staging Female Desire
Cristina (Cha) Ramos and Claire Warden
12. Monstrous Desires: Writings of Sexuality in Contemporary Feminist Dramatic Writings in France
Leïla Cassar
Part V: Depicting Sexual Violence
13. Patriarchy Structures and Depictions of Patriarchal Sex in Contemporary Theatre
Kate Mulley
14. Interrogating Racialized Sexual Violence in Slave Play
Jessica Ellison
15. Sexual Assault and the Criminal Justice System: The Naked Female Body in Breach Theatre’s It’s True, It’s True, It’s True
Hannah Simpson
16. Sex Between Macabre Lust and Clinical Dissection in Dea Loher’s Dramaturgy
Youn Le Guern-Herry
17. Applications of Dramaturgy in the Physical Creation of Sexual Violence on Stage
Meron Langsner and Cristina (Cha) Ramos
Biography
Kate Mulley is an internationally acclaimed playwright, librettist, lyricist, producer and dramaturg whose work explores gender, power, place and desire through a feminist, and often historical, lens. Her plays and musicals have been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and China.
