Greater Tuna

Two performers portray numerous characters in this stage comedy of life in imaginary small-town Tuna, Texas ... "where the Lion's Club is too liberal and Patsy Cline never dies!"

Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontag’s 1964 cornerstone essay “Notes on ‘Camp’.” It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from television, film, and literature. These essays create a scholarly conversation that understands camp as not only signifier or aesthetic but also a language, mode, and style that goes beyond its initial linguistic and semiotic guise. The contributors, representing a diverse group of established and rising scholars, explore camp as a largely queer genre that includes varying modes of understanding of desire and of the self outside a hegemonic model of heteronormativity.

Two performers portray numerous characters in this stage comedy of life in imaginary small-town Tuna, Texas ... "where the Lion's Club is too liberal and Patsy Cline never dies!"

Ask anyone to name an archetypal Texan, and you're likely to get a larger-than-life character from film or television (say John Wayne's Davy Crockett or J. R. Ewing of TV's Dallas) or a politician with that certain swagger (think LBJ or George W. Bush). That all of these figures are white and male and bursting with self-confidence is no accident, asserts Leigh Clemons. In this thoughtful study of what makes a "Texan," she reveals how Texan identity grew out of the history—and, even more, the myth—of the heroic deeds performed by Anglo men during the Texas Revolution and the years of the Republic and how this identity is constructed and maintained by theatre and other representational practices. Clemons looks at a wide range of venues in which "Texanness" is performed, including historic sites such as the Alamo, the battlefield at Goliad, and the San Jacinto Monument; museums such as the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum; seasonal outdoor dramas such as Texas! at Palo Duro Canyon; films such as John Wayne's The Alamo and the IMAX's Alamo: The Price of Freedom; plays and TV shows such as the Tuna trilogy, Dallas, and King of the Hill; and the Cavalcade of Texas performance at the 1936 Texas Centennial. She persuasively demonstrates that these performances have created a Texan identity that has become a brand, a commodity that can be sold to the public and even manipulated for political purposes.

"In this hilarious sequel to Greater Tuna, it's Christmas in the third smallest town in Texas. Radio station OKKK news personalities Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie report on various Yuletide activities, including hot competition in the annual lawn display contest. In other news, voracious Joe Bob Lipsey's production of 'A Christmas Carol' is jeopardized by unpaid electric bills. Many colorful Tuna denizens, some you will recognize from Greater Tuna and some appearing here for the first time, join in the holiday fun."--

Red, white, and Tuna is the third play in the four-play saga that began wtih Greater Tuna. It is Fourth of July in Tuna, the third smallest town in Texas, and the occasion is ripe with tension ... it's just another typical day in Tuna where nothing ever changes while everything does.

Two jurors on a grisly murder trial become romantically involved. As the trial progresses, they realize they disagree adamantly on the verdict. Their story unfolds to a frightening climax while a couple in a different time frame occupies the same apartment and plays out a bizarre relationship also tied to the Stanway case. Here is a psychological thriller by the veteran playwright of Norman Is that You?, Murder at the Howard Johnson's and Remember Me.