Gay theatre plays
Celebrating pride month helps promote diversity, equality, acceptance, and respect of the LGBTQ+ community. We’re proud to share a list of 35 non-musical plays that bring these issues to the stage, from to present day.
Pick up one (or all of them) today!. From journeys of self-discovery to the fight for equality, these shows celebrate the resilience, joy, and spirit of the queer community. Here’s the full list of LGBTQ+ musicals, sorted by time period. Celebrate Playbill Pride with a look at some of the plays that amplified LGBTQIA+ stories on stage. Concord Theatricals proudly represents a great number of cornerstone plays and musicals in the LGBTQ+ canon.
In celebration of Pride Month, we’ve assembled a timeline of influential and groundbreaking LGBTQ-themed theatrical works, placed in the context of queer history. The best LGBTQIA+ gay theatre shows and gay plays in London can be found at the following venues and if you’d like to purchase theatre tickets then please click on the link to the Theatre where you’ll find theatre tickets.
Best Gay LGBTQ+ Queer Theatre in London for July onwards. Subsequently made into a feature film with the original cast, The Boys in the Band was scathing and unapologetic in its frank portrayal of gay men in New York. The attitudes of the play are pre-Pride in every way; the characters seem resigned to live in a world that refuses to accept them. The conflict and ensuing protests are widely recognized as the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement.
In the bathhouse, he encounters towel-clad chubby chasers, go-go boys, bumbling detectives, and Googie Gomez, an over-the-top would-be Bette Midler looking for her big break.
contemporary queer plays
Now middle-aged women, they were teenagers when Dean filmed Giant two decades earlier in nearby Marfa. One of them, an extra in the film, has a child whom she says was conceived with Dean during the shoot. Radically honest, hilariously contemporary and deeply moving, Torch Song Trilogy is constructed of three one-act plays International Stud , Fugue in a Nursery and Widows and Children First!
In his uniquely appealing voice, Arnold tells of his struggles through love, loss, the challenge of child-rearing and the fight for acceptance. In Berlin on the eve of the Nazi incursion, Max and his lover Rudy, both avowed homosexuals, flee persecution by the murderous Nazis. Rudy and Max are captured and, after a failed escape attempt, Rudy is beaten to death. In a death camp at Dachau, Max and fellow prisoner Horst, both branded with the pink triangle, hope to survive with only each other for comfort and courage.
Based on the hit French film, the hilarious musical comedy presents a family headed by two gay men. Relentless in his public and political fight, Ned confronts the personal toll of AIDS when his lover dies of the disease. Presented in the midst of a staggering rise in deaths from AIDS, The Normal Heart was both a desperate political wake-up call and an abiding artistic triumph. This first play, Voyage to Lesbos, takes a darkly humorous look at the warping effects of internalized homophobia and phallo-centrism on the lesbian psyche.
In Lesbos, Illinois, in a vaguely defined pre-Stonewall, post-Freudian period of American culture, five inextricably intertwined women ostensibly prepare for a wedding, while their every action serves to sabotage it. Highlights include several rousing musical numbers and a jerk-off session between the cousins Bonnie and Connie, involving banal heterosexual fantasy and a vacuum cleaner.
Act One captures him in on the eve of his arrest. He still has a chance to flee to the continent but chooses to let the train leave without him. In the second act, Wilde is in Naples more than two years later, after his release from Reading Gaol. In exile, he is drawn to a reunion with his unworthy lover and a final betrayal. Alan Bennett raises, with gentle wit and pitch-perfect command of character, not only universal questions about the nature of history and how it is taught but also questions about the purpose of education today.
He also explores, with deadpan humor and forthright dramatic tension, the consequences of sexual assault and the social stigmatization of same-sex attraction. The proposition is later declared unconstitutional. A kaleidoscope that interconnects to portray growing up gay and black, Bootycandy tells the story of Sutter, who is on an outrageous odyssey through his childhood home, his church, dive bars, motel rooms, and even nursing homes.
Mixing puppetry, mask and dance with modern devices such as digital media, Rights of Passage explores the struggle of Wayan, a young, gay Hindu man in Indonesia. When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life.
Hodges , US Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage. State Department employees struggle to maintain their cover — and their sanity — in s America. Reaching back over 60 years before its premiere, Perfect Arrangement addresses the predicament gay and lesbian citizens faced in pre-Stonewall America, turning a harrowing period in American history into a riotous but thought-provoking comedy. It premiered off-Broadway at Lincoln Center in Set in Uganda, a country subjected to severe anti-homosexuality laws, The Rolling Stone is an intimate yet explosive family drama about two brothers at odds — one a gay man in a clandestine relationship, and the other a church pastor who fervently rails against the lifestyle his brother is forced to conceal.