directed by PhD student Jesse Marchese and adapted from Ben Jonson's Epicoene, or The Silent Woman by Emmalias, Jesse Marchese, and the company.PLEASE NOTE! All performances start at the times they are listed. Please come on time (there is no rewind) Thank you.
“Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘person’ and ‘thing.’) But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene.”
-Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp
In many ways, the early modern era was as queer and avant-garde as our current moment. Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman is proof of that. One could argue that the play reinforces heteronormative ideals—as scholar Richmond Barbour writes, “many critics find the relevant Jonson in the finales, reimposing patriarchal strictures. But without unruliness, terminal rigor has nothing to clarify; wantonness must first be mobilized before it can be expelled.” In our queer, irreverent, and contemporary adaptation, the “unruliness” and “wantonness”—or, rather, queerness—of Jonson’s play is indeed mobilized, but never clarified or expelled. Instead, our Epicene: A Queer Extravaganza fully indulges in queerness—both celebrating and satirizing its gallery of queer deviants. Our production reimagines the play as a celebration of queerness—highlighting its ruminations on the joys of queer sex and its celebration of gender non-conformity. It also aims to decenter and problematize our very notion of queer identity, asking instead, “what does queer do?” We have adapted the play, playing fast and loose with Jonson’s dialogue while applying a queer, twenty-first century lens to its characters and themes. We have also embraced queer theory, such as Jack Halberstam's concept of queer failure, and an interest in queer “camp” aesthetics through production. Throughout our process—and in the true spirit of “queering”—we have decentered the play’s canonical, white, (presumably) hetero, cisgender, male author and embarked on an exercise in further queering the already-queer canon.
Event Venue
UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093, United States
Tickets