Title

"Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama": (Im)Possibilities in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs

Campus

Oconee

Publication date

1-21-2022

Publisher

Southern Spaces

Book or Journal Information

Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces is a collection of interdisciplinary, multimedia publications that explore, trouble, and traverse intersections of queer experiences, past, present, and future. From a variety of perspectives, and with an emphasis upon the US South, this series, edited by Eric Solomon, offers critical analysis of LGBTQ+ people, practices, spaces, and places.

Keywords

musical theatre, queer studies, LGBTQ+, U.S. South, melodrama, drag, Max Vernon, 1973 Up Stairs Lounge Fire

Abstract

Stephanie Rountree examines the relational possibilities of queer performance in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs, a play that dramatizes the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge fire in New Orleans. Rountree contextualizes the fire within the scope of the twentieth century gay liberation movement and explores how the play's various production sites both embody and transcend the time and place of the tragedy.

Author Biography

Stephanie Rountree is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia where she specializes in U.S. literature and media, gender studies, and southern studies. Her research has appeared in several scholarly publications, and together with Lisa Hinrichsen and Gina Caison, she is co-editor of Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (LSU Press, November 2021) and Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU Press 2017). Her current monograph project, titled American Anteliberalism: Literatures of Enslavement and Public Health, investigates black enslavement’s formative role in the development of U.S. Public Health as evidenced in post-Emancipation literature. Currently, she serves as a Georgia Governor’s Teaching Fellow (2021-2022) and as the Program Coordinator for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s 2022 Biennial Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

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"Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama": (Im)Possibilities in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs

Stephanie Rountree examines the relational possibilities of queer performance in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs, a play that dramatizes the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge fire in New Orleans. Rountree contextualizes the fire within the scope of the twentieth century gay liberation movement and explores how the play's various production sites both embody and transcend the time and place of the tragedy.