This chapter traces a strand of contemporary queer American drama that replays key figures and texts of the modernist era. With its recurrent return to canonical works and figures of literary and theatrical modernism, this late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century drama literalizes Marvin Carlson’s notion that theatre is a fundamentally haunted art, in this case by the queer figures and texts of its cultural past, and resonates with Carla Freccero’s view of spectrality as a mode of queer historiography. Adaptations, too, are ghostly, haunted, as Linda Hutcheon notes, by their source texts and dependent on repetition and change. In the contemporary queer replays, the modernist era serves as a touchstone against which to consider continuity and change in the historical and cultural representation of gender and sexuality. Queer modernism thus haunts contemporary queer drama, often literalizing this haunting by featuring ghosts. This chapter considers linked works spanning these two temporalities to suggest key moments in and features of the history of queer American drama, and theatre’s role in representing and reimagining how queer lives have been, are, and might be lived.

Canadian playwright Linda Griffiths's Age of Arousal (2007) is recognisably based on George Gissing's novel The Odd Women (1893), yet she described her play as ‘wildly inspired’ by Gissing's text rather than an adaptation of it. Griffiths's resistance to categorising Age of Arousal as an adaptation may be explained in part by her ambivalence about the Merchant Ivory production company's popular movie adaptations of classic British and American novels. Recalling her research process for Age of Arousal, she wrote of ‘dreaming [her] way through many hours of perfectly produced costume drama’ while ‘[feeling] guilty at the same time’:

To recapture something of the original newness of Gissing's novel about the emergence of modern gender roles and related ideas about female sexuality in the late nineteenth century, Griffiths chose to foreground sex in a more explicit way than was possible for Gissing as a writer bound by the social and literary conventions of his time. She also wanted to correct some residual misogyny that she perceived in Gissing's text, despite his extraordinary accomplishment in portraying so many central female characters together in a single work. In Griffiths's note at the start of the published text of Age of Arousal, she describes her approach to Gissing's novel as taking ‘his basic characters and situation and leap[ing] off a cliff’ that she was ‘dying to leap off’. Her writing of Age of Arousal was, in her words, a ‘dance of thievery and creativity […] danced with Gissing floating above, patron saint or appalled spectre’.

In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon notes a critical tendency to view popular adaptations of canonical literary works as ‘inferior and secondary’ to their source texts.

As a young journalist in New York in 1914, Djuna Barnes voluntarily underwent forcible feeding in order to write about the involuntary experiences of hunger-striking British suffragists. In “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed,” she recalls being bound to the operating table and held down at the head, hips, and feet by three men while the doctor inserted the feeding apparatus through her nose; and although she states that “it is utterly impossible to describe the anguish” of the experience, she proceeds to describe it with extraordinary vividness and power: “If I, playacting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits. I saw in my hysteria a vision of a hundred women in grim prison hospitals, bound and shrouded on tables just like this, held in the rough grip of callous warders while white-robed doctors thrust rubber tubing into the delicate interstices of their nostrils and forced into their helpless bodies the crude fuel to sustain the life they longed to sacrifice.” In summing up her experience, Barnes observes, “For me it was an experiment. It was only tragic in my imagination. But it offered sensations sufficiently poignant to compel comprehension of certain of the day's phenomena.”