LAX Festival: The Queering of Beach Musicals with Gina Young

In STRAIGHT PLAY, no one is straight and everyone is queer. Los Angeles-based director, singer, and playwright Gina Young flips the quintessential heteronormative beach blanket musical formula to unveil deeper messages around gender and sexuality. Young’s work is undeniably fueled by her queer identity and desire to disrupt the art forms she touches. I asked Gina a few questions for a deeper look into her creative process.

What specific “beach blanket musicals” did you turn to in your research for STRAIGHT PLAY?

I was raised on Beach Blanket Bingo, Beach Party, and other musicals of the 1960s including Bye Bye Birdie and everything Doris Day. These musicals are extremely gendered and shape a lot of our expectations of heterosexual relationships, but when you watch them, they’re also actually very queer. Some of this of course is the whole concept of ‘camp’– and when you dig deep, you find out that a lot of the writers and actors were gay men. But of course a lot less is known about which of the women involved may or may not have been queer. I’m always interested in reading lesbian subtext into things or even beyond that, just looking at ways that women relate to each other under varying forms of oppression.

Can you go into a bit more detail about why you started to look to the beach blanket musical as a form to disrupt?

We started developing STRAIGHT PLAY back in 2019 and it was so easy to find queer artists interested in disrupting the form– ironically, most of the actors, being in their 20s and 30s, hadn’t even seen a lot of the classic beach blanket musicals. But they still KNEW them, intrinsically– the idea of The Bad Boy, The Good Girl– everybody loves and has seen Grease, of course— and everyone understands and relates to this idea of teenagers living wild and free on the beach, while some sort of threat looms to ruin their summertime fun. 

What do you find interesting and challenging about the archetypes you’re challenging in this piece?

Part of the joy of STRAIGHT PLAY is seeing the performers to embody so many different archetypes, both playing into and resisting ways they might normally be cast. And the storytelling is inherently queered– partly because the performers are queer and nonbinary, but also because the form is questioned every step of the way as we try to decide, what do we like about these movies (the bright colors! the song and dance!) vs. what did they erase about the 1960s that they shouldn’t have…

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STRAIGHT PLAY will be performed at the Live Arts Exchange (LAX) Festival presented by the Los Angeles Performance Practice on Friday, November 5, 2021. Tickets and more information are available here.

Elaine Nguyen is a recent graduate of USC with a focus in public relations and marketing. She is currently the 2021 Development Intern at Los Angeles Performance Practice.