Two Encounters with Dan Fishback's "Waiting for Barbara"

photo: The New Museum

1: 2013

It is the tenth anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The New Museum has organized a reading and conversation around Dan Fishback’s early play Waiting for Barbara, written in 2006 as the aftermath of the invasion continued to play out. The play focuses on Bryce and Davenport, two gay “21-year-old Yalie cokeheads,” on the night of the bombing of Baghdad. As they wait for Barbara, the president’s daughter, to arrive and escort them to an “Opening Night War Party,” Bryce and Davenport pass the time by getting blitzed, dancing around their sexual tension, and being absolutely horrible to one another. In these two characters, Fishback creates a surgically incisive portrait of a certain kind of rich, white, conservative cis gay man. Solidarity with other marginalized groups is actively repellent to them; their frustration that their sexual desire bars them from the very top echelons of power expresses itself in vicious rage and empty self-loathing.

The anniversary reading was a memorable one. The room was packed full. Bryce and Davenport were played, with gusto, by Chris Tyler and Gideon Glick; Erin Markey made a virtuosic cameo as a blacked-out Barbara. Afterwards, during the animated conversation, Fishback expressed dismay at a lack of cultural work addressing the abuses of the Iraq war, both at the time and currently surrounding the anniversary. The evening as a whole felt fiery and astute, an artist responding to the political climate not with broad polemics (“war is bad!”) but with detailed attention to a specific manifestation of greater social ills.

2: 2016

Donald Trump is on the ascendant, but not yet elected. The gay alt-right is having a moment, most visibly personified by Milo Yiannopoulos. I am in my first semester at Carnegie Mellon, looking for material to propose for my second-year production, and think back to the New Museum reading—given the rise of homofascism, perhaps it’s a good time to revisit Waiting for Barbara. I write Fishback asking for the script and whether he’d consider greenlighting a production at CMU. The playwright sends back not only the script, but a thoughtful letter explaining why doesn’t think his play should ever be performed again.

After reading the letter, I read over the script. I had forgotten the prominence of the racist language thrown around by Bryce and Davenport; that alone is enough to convince me the piece does not belong at an institution struggling to deal with its own white supremacy. But Fishback’s larger point is that the play, while intended to reveal Bryce and Davenport’s monstrosity, actually undercuts its own purpose. It makes their awfulness delicious and entertaining; it makes it easy to enjoy the play too much. This is not to say the play isn’t also doing the work described above—but that work is being obscured by the titillating effect it has on white audiences, who experience “a sort of release” (in Fishback’s words) at the characters’ hateful speech.

Fishback’s forthrightness, and his ability to step back and look objectively at his own work, left a great impression on me. It is easy to get stuck inside your own artistic perspective, to be so secure in your intentions—in what you want the work to do, in what you think it’s doing—that you fail to notice what it is actually doing in the world. It’s also easy to write off your youthful work and put it away in a drawer, embarrassed. To instead contextualize and continue to make the work available in private forums, inviting dialogue about its failings, is a remarkable and generous act.

A closing footnote that suggests to me the truth both of Fishback’s diagnosis of his play’s reception, and of the social power dynamics that drive Bryce and Davenport to their obsession with Barbara and their orgy of self-medication. I mentioned Milo Yiannopoulos—let’s not forget that he was ultimately brought down not by any of his incendiary, hateful, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric, but by a remark he made suggesting that initiatory sexual relationships between older and younger men—depending on age, and if taking place outside of institutional structures of power like the Catholic Church—might not automatically be pedophilic abuses. This, while certainly a challenging and complicated statement, is perhaps the most authentically queer sentiment Yiannopoulos ever expressed, and it got him cancelled. As a society, we amplified the voice of the nasty, provocative clown who made us gasp and titter while allying himself with repressive, imperialist power structures. The genuine faggot, though—his voice was too dangerous to be heard.