Christopher Grobe
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479829170
- eISBN:
- 9781479839599
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479829170.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Television
This essay centers around two queer British men who came to New York to perform the story of their lives in a confessional mode: Quentin Crisp in 1979 with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, and ...
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This essay centers around two queer British men who came to New York to perform the story of their lives in a confessional mode: Quentin Crisp in 1979 with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, and Bette Bourne in 2010 with his performance A Life in Three Acts. Both shows posed as evenings of plain, immediate chat, but both, in fact, were complex, remediated things. This essay argues that such complex media schemes are, in fact, a crucial characteristic of confessional monologue, which has pervaded American theater since the 1980s.Less
This essay centers around two queer British men who came to New York to perform the story of their lives in a confessional mode: Quentin Crisp in 1979 with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, and Bette Bourne in 2010 with his performance A Life in Three Acts. Both shows posed as evenings of plain, immediate chat, but both, in fact, were complex, remediated things. This essay argues that such complex media schemes are, in fact, a crucial characteristic of confessional monologue, which has pervaded American theater since the 1980s.
