Abstract
Critics and academics have mentioned Lord's queer repertoire only briefly,1 but James Wenley and Nathan Joe recently suggested that his plays are 'overdue a queer re-reading' in order to foster 'meaningful contemporary connections with our queer theatre history'.2 Such a re-reading might explore how Lord's plays pre-empted several key impulses of queer theory, a set of perspectives that coalesced after 1990 but drew upon literatures and activisms with a longer history.3 Lord also critiqued suburban life and the nuclear family, tacitly drawing upon feminist and gay liberationist ideas as he invited audiences to think about new ways of living that departed from rigid social hierarchies.4 Robert Lord worked on his earliest plays while based in Wellington, New Zealand, between 1969 and 1974, the year he went to the USA to attend the Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut. [...]he moved to New York, with its 'peep shows, adult cinemas and pickpockets', and lived an openly gay life there.5 Lord returned to New Zealand for frequent visits, spent time in Sydney, and had plays staged in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. 'If I had been born in America, I think I would not have found it necessary to enter the theatre.'8 Since the 1960s, the gay enclaves of Greenwich Village and Fire Island afforded opportunities for closeted as well as openly gay men to take a break from their otherwise constrained lives, and sex between men became legal in New York State in 1980.9 As male- male sex remained outlawed in New Zealand until 1986, many of the intimate activities that appear - or were alluded to - in his plays were illegal when Lord wrote about them.10 From 1987, when he took up the Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University, he began to spend more time in the land of his birth. The women brush each other's hair and hug, although sometimes an embrace goes on too long.