Pies!
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Glasgow Bell about a Scottish cultural institution that I love: A Play, a Pie, and a Pint. This theater company has a very clear mission statement, which I'll tell you about by quoting from my story:
A Play, a Pie, and a Pint was dreamed into being in 2004, when David MacLennan’s radical theatre company lost its funding, and publican Colin Beattie was looking for a way to bring cultural programming to Òran Mór, the new venue he was launching in the West End.
MacLennan hated the performing arts’ dependence on the vicissitudes of public subsidies and vowed to create a theatre project that would cover its own costs. The principles MacLennan and Beattie came up with — a new play every week, lasting under an hour, performed at lunchtime, with food and drink included in the ticket price — still apply today.
These days, A Play, a Pie, and a Pint doesn’t quite pay for itself (it recently received multi-year funding from Creative Scotland, lasting until 2028), but it’s extraordinarily successful by any other measure. With 30 new plays each season, not to mention two pantos per year, it produces more new work than any other theatre in Europe or North America — and Glaswegians show up for them in droves. Both the PPP productions I see in the space of two weeks play to full rooms; drawing 150 people to see a brand-new play on a drab Monday in March is no small feat.
If we are pals, and you visit Edinburgh during the PPP season (the shows originate in Glasgow, but they tour to other locations in Scotland—many, but not all, play at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre the week after their Òran Mór premiere), there's a good chance I'll suggest that we go see that week's play. I probably won't even check what it is. The stakes are very low, both literally—it costs £18.50 for all three P's—and figuratively, since it's not going to take up much of your time, little more than going into a cafe for lunch (in Glasgow, punters eat at their seats, though in posh Edinburgh, we take our pies and pints in the Traverse's cafe, so it's a slightly bigger time investment in the capital). All the PPPlays I've seen—somewhere between six and 10 since we moved here—have been good to great, and all had a political message, which, given their Glasgow origins, you will not be surprised to hear was progressive, going on radical.
A play, a pie, and a pint is a genius concept—and it led me to think about feminist/queer/dyke theater, and how it has been one of the less-well-developed performing arts under the broad umbrella of "lesbian culture." In one way—specifically, how the "my dad's got a barn, let's put on a play" ethos has shaped so many lesbian-feminist projects (almost all the ones I wrote about in A PLACE OF OUR OWN)—it's surprising. But given how tight the gate-keeping process is in most professional theater, it's no shock at all.
I am reminded of an interview I did with Sarah Schulman back in 2005 (!) about the unacknowledged borrowings Rent made from her 1990 novel People in Trouble. That situation was especially messy because Rent's writer, Jonathan Larson, died just before the musical's premiere, which made pressing her (righteous—consult her book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America for more background) claim especially challenging. At the end of the conversation, I asked if she worried that speaking out about the rip-off might cause her to be "blacklisted" in the theater world. She responded:
In a country in which there’s no lesbian play in the repertoire—which is the case—to tell me that I’m going to be blacklisted is not really much of a threat. Because the only way to overturn the status quo and allow this work to be seen is to fight like hell. If you sit back, it’s blacklist accompli.
Of course, there are successful lesbian playwrights—Paula Vogel, Lisa Kron, Carolyn Gage, and surely others I'm forgetting, including writers like Schulman and Jackie Kay who are mostly known for other genres but have plays in their bibliographies—but it is a shockingly short list. (I'm also conscious that "successful" is a subjective standard—Gage's accomplishments came a long way from the geographical locations that are generally considered the pinnacle of theatrical achievement.)
I genuinely believe that the increased visibility of queer people on network TV had a massive effect on the transformation in the straight world's attitudes toward us. Where it was once almost impossible to show even a reluctant same-sex kiss between adult women, our TV screens are now teeming with queers. And a lot of playwrights now earn their living writing for TV. When I made the insider podcast for the FX show The Americans, I couldn't help noticing that although there had never been a lesbian storyline in the show (at least that I remember), at least two queer women were in the writer's room (Tracey Scott Wilson and Tanya Barfield).
Maybe this is just evolution in action. That feels like the right word for what's going on in music. "Women's music" might not be a genre anymore—I was going to say "section of the record store," but that's something else that has evolved—but it sure seems like there are more out lesbians in the mainstream music industry than ever before. And if they did some same-sex kissing at an awards show, it wouldn't be a stunt the way it was back in the day.
RECOMMENDATIONS: This is a very late recommendation, but we finally figured out which UK channel airs The Brokenwood Mysteries and are just catching up on the most recent two seasons. I always liked the actors, and who can resist a New Zealand accent, but the last few seasons have taken it up a notch. It's still a bit daft in the style of Midsomer Murders—and please God, let me never have to watch another episode featuring a once-successful band that had a rancorous breakup getting back together again, only for one of them to come to a grisly end—but it got much better once DC Chalmers joined the team, and the Maori presence became more constant and central. I know DJT wouldn't want to hear it, but representation makes a difference! (OK, everything involving Gina is awful, but it's so bad when everything else is pretty good that I don't even know what they're going for.)
UPCOMING EVENTS: On Wednesday, June 4, I'll be appearing with Jane Cholmeley, one of the owners of London's Silver Moon Bookshop (1984-2001) and author of A Bookshop of One's Own at Edinburgh's Lighthouse Bookshop. I'm also going to be visiting the Pacific Northwest in mid-October. I'll definitely be in Eugene, Oregon, and I very much hope to add stops in Portland and Seattle, but more on that once we figure it all out!
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