THE QUINTESSENTIAL IMAGE
Danny: As a physical preference, or from political beliefs? –from Sexual Perversity in Chicago, by David Mamet
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Moving to New York at age 20, she found a niche for herself in the artistic avant-garde of the fledgling off-off-Broadway movement. She also worked in television, eventually winning the distinction of writing the first black situation comedy ever optioned for the medium (it went unproduced because the powers that be considered it too much too soon). Then, in her 30s, she hit her professional and personal stride. The emergence of a proud and liberated gay and lesbian culture in the 1970s and ’80s, in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots, provided her with a cause and an audience.
Though not a particularly subtle artist, Chambers won a loyal following on the strength of several plays that depicted lesbian passions and problems with an unabashed emotionality that made Erich Segal look like Samuel Beckett. A Late Snow, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, and My Blue Heaven sent shock waves through a community of women hungry for affirmation after years of depressing images such as those projected by Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George.
One also can’t help questioning whether the play’s premise doesn’t rest on somewhat shaky ground, even allowing for deliberate exaggeration. Would anyone seriously ask whether a male photographer–Alfred Eisenstadt, say, or Douglas Davis–pursued his art for such simplistic reasons? Even Robert Mapplethorpe, as committed as he was to expressing his vision of erotic beauty in his photos, had something else going on. Certainly a male writer who dared to suggest that a woman’s accomplishments were tied so much to her sexual needs would be attacked as the most extreme kind of chauvinist. But then, Chambers was never too concerned with being politically correct; she defied more ideologically oriented lesbian critics with her unashamed linking of her art with her personal feelings, for better and for worse.
I’ve previously written in these pages about the deaths from AIDS of three valued members of Chicago’s performance community: actor J. Pat Miller, actor-stage manager Tom Biscotto, and sound designer Mike Rasfeld. Last Sunday’s Tribune carried an obituary for the man who helped launch Miller, Biscotto, and Rasfeld on their careers: Gary Tucker, who died in Atlanta December 17 and whose death was only revealed here last week. The Tribune obit noted Tucker’s personal and professional association with Tennessee Williams–he directed Williams’s A House Not Meant to Stand at the Goodman, and also worked with the playwright down south.
