Bailiwick claims to be “the largest festival of GLBT theatre and performance in America,” operating two spaces (150-seat Mainstage and 75-seat Studio) and having over 1,200 households on their subscription list. In operation for 18 years, they produce both gay and non-gay work. (They have an unusual relationship with Equity; their “Primary Series,” running fall to spring and mixing gay and non-gay work, is an Equity Tier Three contract. But due to the great amount of experimental work they do during the summer, their “Pride Series” is allowed to be non-Equity.) Bailiwick casts from the Chicago area and accepts unsolicited scripts. This is their 13th summer-long Pride Series, offering 13 productions, running the gamut from heavy drama (Stephen House’s “Go By Night,” “a shocking look at teens at risk”) to sexcapades (“Posing Strap Pirates,” “a riotous romp about a sexy sailor who is captured and taken prisoner by a devilish pirate crew”). The line-up includes three world premieres, one American premiere, and the Midwest premieres of “Naked Boys Singing” and Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi.”

Artistic Director David Zak says that the hallmark of Bailiwick is its “diversity,” offering lesbian and multicultural works as well as the plays of gay white males. They are “a directors’ company,” says Zak, “interested in achieving the director’s vision,” and currently have about seven directors who work there regularly. Their audience is “left of center and willing to tackle unusual projects,” and Zak sees a real overlap between straight and gay audiences during the year.

Bailiwick was the first theatre to throw David Dillon’s “Party,” which generated some controversy. “There were a couple of years here in town when we got a lot of criticism for still doing ‘boys in their underwear’ plays or plays that really were celebrational in their terms of dealing with sexuality. But, frankly, it’s a part of the community, and now people go ‘it’s really great you’re doing that’ as one component in a festival that includes the African-American experience, parents and children, lesbian issues, politics — a lot of serious and weighty stuff.” Zak is proud of the wide range of material, but does lament that audiences “only pursue the shows that they’re most interested in.” Still, he adds, “Some will go on the whole journey with us, and that’s exciting.”

Curiously, it was the suggestion of a marketing firm that moved Bailiwick toward gay work, in order to gain a profile in the crowded Chicago theatre scene by “reaching audiences that were underserved,” recounted Zak. “And we were located right in the heart of ‘Boys’ Town’ [Chicago’s gay neighborhood]. It was a good match of location and company and work and audience.” Ultimately, says Zak, Bailiwick is “a blue collar democratic theatre. You can walk in off the street with an idea.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Richmond’s Triangle Players is completely non-Equity. Technically, it’s a community theatre, but they do pay their actors and crew, who tend to come from the local area, which boasts four professional theatre companies and three universities. Situated, according to Managing Director Michael Gooding, “in a gay, after-hours nightclub, in the upstairs club lounge” seating 65-75, they were born in 1992 with the production of three Harvey Fierstein one-acts (the first two acts of “Safe Sex” coupled with “Forget Him”) and produced their first full season in 1993. They do four to five shows a year for about 10 performances each. Gooding says, “Getting word out about AIDS was the impetus. Richmond was at least eight years behind the rest of the country.”

Like Bailiwick, Triangle Players, which has no artistic director, looks to directors to bring them projects, most of which are works that have been done elsewhere first. Successes have included “The Secretaries,” “When Pigs Fly,” and “Elegies for Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens.” “If it’s not a gay and lesbian theme,” says Gooding, “then it must be something that the other theatre companies in Richmond would not do. We call our work entertaining, adventuresome, and progressive.” Despite their Bible Belt location, a full 25-40% of their audience is non-gay, and they have received considerable support from the conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch. In a bow to the prevailing cultural attitudes around them, they have stayed away from shows that are highly sexual (“we haven’t done some things we’d like to, like ‘Jerker,’” admits Gooding) or involve children (which is why they replaced Act III of “Safe Sex”). Still, they’ve had full frontal nudity in Jack Heifner’s “Key West” and nobody blinked an eye. More recently, they had a tremendous success with Jonathan Harvey’s “Beautiful Thing,” even though it offered two adolescent boys kissing on stage. “Nobody ever said a word about it,” says Gooding.

Organized as “a multicultural collective of theatre artists,” according to Artistic Director Margaret Smith, Hag Theatre is “a non-Equity professional theatre. We pay ourselves last; we pay all the bills first.” They have “a primary focus on presenting the lesbian voice and story on stage.” Works are chosen “based on our own collective of theatre artists, knowing what talents and resources we have available. Men we audition outside of the company when necessary, and we have guest artists perform with us often.” Playwrights they’ve produced include Carolyn Gage, Sarah Dreyer, and Claire Chaffee. Recently, they did what was only the second production of Emma Donohue’s “Kissing the Witch,” “a great play,” says Smith. Upcoming are one-acts by Linda Eisenstein, and Dorothy Dittrich’s sung-through musical, “When We Were Singing.”

The company was founded “to bring notice and light to lesbians and women, who remain invisible in our culture,” and to provide production opportunities for established lesbian writers “desperately looking” for them. Smith believes that, “although the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered theatres are supposed to be doing the work of all of the members of our community, most of the queer theatre in America is boy queer theatre. Run by boys, cast by boys — it’s a boy game.” Hag’s audience is mostly female, though it does have a loyal male component, and is drawn from the healthy alternative arts scene in Buffalo, fueled by several surrounding universities, arts centers, and regional theatres.

Despite her plainspoken sentiments, Smith is not a separatist artist. Hag is planning to collaborate with “another queer theatre company in town — Buffalo United Artists [also a collective]. They do predominantly boy work and we do predominantly girl work. On occasion, we exchange artists with one another, and will be doing projects together in the future.” Hag also hopes to present more self-created work in the future. Vows the passionate Smith, “For seven years now, we’re changing the world one audience at a time in a 100-seat theatre.”

Although New Conservatory Theatre is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it is only on its seventh Pride Season of gay programming. The theatre was founded, says Artistic Director Ed Decker, “primarily as a youth conservatory and educational theatre company.” The company is a non-union one, using mostly San Francisco actors, but with an occasional Equity guest artist.

New Conservatory has a facility with three theatres (55, 75, and 125 seats) and programming consists of three separate series: “We do seven projects in the gay Pride Series, four in the Musicals-in-Concert series, and another six or seven in our Youth Series,” rattles off Decker. “We also have a co-production program working with individual artists or smaller, nomad companies that don’t have a home.” These days, they primarily target the gay male audience. (Even the Youth Series offers works about “issues of tolerance.”) But that isn’t completely by choice. “Our Celebrating Women program no longer exists,” laments Decker. “We tried that for three years, but we had a hard time capturing that audience. Our most vocal critics never set foot in here. There seemed to be this lingering doubt in peoples’ minds that, as a man, I must have this secret agenda of exploitation of women.”

The religious right behaved similarly over New Conservatory’s production of Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi.” “The few protesters that we had out front had never read or seen the play,” comments Decker. “It was the idea of it that was so upsetting to them.” Interestingly, “Corpus Christi,” unlike McNally’s other plays, is finding most of its productions in gay theatre companies and universities. “If ACT or Berkeley Rep had wanted it, I wouldn’t have gotten the Bay Area premiere. It would have gone where the money was,” opines Decker.

Decker programs mostly new work. “New work to us includes work new to San Francisco. I really try to bring together what’s happening in Toronto, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London, the places that have major gay theatre markets.” The upcoming season includes West Coast premieres of Bill C. Davis’ “Avow” and Buddy Thomas’ “The Crumple Zone.” But it also features a world premiere: “Legion,” by Hal Corley, exploring “the secret legion of suburban husbands whose worlds blur the boundaries of sexual orientation.” And Decker is also commissioning two new plays based on popular gay novels, one of which will be penned by playwright-in-residence, Prince Gomolvilas, whose “Debunking Love,” about an Asian-American love triangle, premiered there earlier this season. “The repertoire is limited in terms of revivals,” warns Decker. “We need to be making new contributions to the field.”

This is the ninth year of SNAP! Productions, which opened with a 1992 production of “Bent,” and the fourth year for SNAP!fest, their annual summer theatre repertory festival. A non-Equity, all-volunteer organization, utilizing local talent, SNAP! was started to raise money for and educate people about AIDS. “But there are better ways to go about raising money than putting on theatre productions, at least in this area,” says producer Tom Bertino, so education is now the sole focus and “our mission has moved from strictly AIDS-related education pieces to AIDS, domestic violence, women’s issues, gay and lesbian issues — and if we find another issue, we’ll tackle that!”

Despite their conservative surroundings, President Roxanne Wach and Bertino both insist they have “a broad audience, as many gay as straight. It’s a really diverse group, from high school students to senior citizens. We get a chunk of the Jewish community. And a lot of theatre people come. There are around 40 producing theatre companies in the surrounding area.” Some of those will do the occasional gay play (Chanticleer Theatre did “The Boys in the Band” in the mid-’70s!), but only SNAP! does such work on a regular basis, trying hard to include multicultural and lesbian voices in the mix.

The three-weekend SNAP!fest, according to Wach, focuses on “pieces that have never been done in Omaha. We’ve even done some world premieres.” And they bring in authors to interact with their audience. This year brings Doric Wilson’s “Street Theatre,” a play about the Stonewall riots (Wilson was present for them all three nights) and Dory Apple’s “Mothertree Cat,” which, according to Bertino, “centers around a young woman growing up in a Jewish family and her relationship with her lesbian aunt and the aunt’s lover.” The regular season will offer, among others, Noël Coward’s “A Song at Twilight,” the musical “Splendora,” Paul Rudnick’s “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” and “Corpus Christi.” “We’re hoping to get protesters. It’s an easy drive for the Rev. Fred Phelps to come from Topeka to Omaha,” says Bertino. SNAP! believes that part of its mission is to generate controversy.

The itinerant SNAP! has just acquired its first permanent space, to be shared with the Shelterbelt Theatre. Says Wach, “We feel that there will be a good amount of crossover in our patrons, which will really benefit both groups.”

The Ivy is the youngest of the theatres profiled here. The first of its three Equity 99-seat Theatre Plan productions to date was done in 1998, and they cast from the local talent pool. “We put our ads in Back Stage West,” says Artistic Director Marian Jones brightly. “Our main focus,” she continues, “has been to produce lesbian playwrights. The piece itself doesn’t have to be lesbian-focused, although all three of ours have been.” But Jones is now altering her company’s focus. “People get irritated with this, but it’s just the truth for me. I found I was boxing myself in. I had gotten some submissions from men with very strong lesbian focus that were absolutely beautiful. And I couldn’t produce them. So I’m broadening the focus to plays that, in some way, relate to the lesbian experience, no matter who writes it. My primary desire is to hit a community of people — lesbians — who don’t have the opportunity to see themselves on a stage and hear themselves speak.”

Jones is interested in as broad a range of work as possible, and Ivy’s productions have been radically different. “The first was a mystical Latina love story, ‘Shame on the Moon,’ by Alicia Madrid, very culturally rich,” she enumerates. “The second, ‘The Rape of Djuna Barnes,’ by Dee Jae Cox, told the story of the famous author and other women from the Left Bank [of Paris]. The third, ‘Letters Home,’ also by Cox, was about women in the military.” Back Stage West chose “Moon” as a Critics Pick. The Los Angeles Times called “Djuna Barnes” “poignant and mind-exploring. A PBS docudrama couldn’t have done a better job.” “Letters” won a 1999 Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Playwriting Grant.

Ivy Theatre’s funding initially came from individuals, predominantly lesbians, who formed a membership base. “But it eventually petered out,” says Jones. “It just stopped coming in on a regular basis,” which is one reason why Ivy is in the process of regrouping. Jones has toyed with the idea of doing theatre in coffeehouses, churches, etc, not unlike the early days of Off-Off-Broadway. “That was my initial intention; and then it just got bigger, and all of a sudden we were in 99-seat houses. It just adds so much stress to what it is you’re trying to do. To tell you the truth, in the whole coffeehouse, smaller church kind of environment, you can do what you want to do and get the same response. But you don’t get the critics.”

Unfortunately, it takes good reviews to bring in the audiences in a city like L.A. “The people in this city who are major theatregoers read reviews,” Jones analyzes. “‘Djuna Barnes’ was a very mixed audience, straight and gay, men and women, due to outstanding reviews, which brought in the straight theatregoing audience. I saw people in that theatre that I was stunned to see there.”

Triangle Productions is undoubtedly the theatre with the most radically mixed programming of those profiled here. Artistic Director Don Horn alternates material as diverse as the heterosexual mating ritual musical, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” with Tony Valenzuela’s one-man show, “The Bad Boy Next Door,” a coming-of-age story about an HIV-positive man, barebacking, pornography, and prostitution. Horn’s Mainstage Series offers five shows at Theatre! Theatre!’s Arena Stage (which contains two 120-seat spaces), while his Musical Series consists of three shows, performed in the larger, 223-seat auditorium at World Trade Center Portland Conference Center. All are cast locally, Equity and non-Equity, under an umbrella contract.

Triangle is on a high, having just won seven of Portland’s Drammy Awards — including Best Production — given by the Portland Drama Critics Circle, largely for their recent productions of “Perfect/Change” and “When Pigs Fly.” Horn is adamant about his mixed programming approach. “There aren’t a lot of theatres that do 100 percent gay work because the audience is not there anymore. They can get the video or the DVD. You can’t keep preaching to the choir. You’ve got to keep bringing more people in. Portland is a problem because we’re not a tourist town.” He has a new idea for reaching out to his gay audience. “We’ll do strictly gay-themed shows, two gay and two lesbian, during a certain period of time [this summer] where the boys from Seattle drive down, and the boys from San Francisco drive up.”

Triangle’s core audience is made up of gay males. And they can be very fussy. “If I tell my subscribers I want to do a play about AIDS, they literally say, ‘Do not put that on stage. We don’t want to know about AIDS anymore; we already live it.’ They don’t want message shows; they want to be entertained. [And yet] they ask me, ‘How come you didn’t get the rights to these shows? — like ‘Love! Valour! Compassion!’ and ‘The Laramie Project’ — and then another theatre in town is doing it and people are mad at me for not doing it. And I can’t because of budget, Equity status, etc. But the gay community doesn’t understand.”

Funding also presents problems. “[Funding sources] ask, ‘Is it all gonna be gay? Because, you know, we have older people that are on our board and they don’t understand gay issues.’ So they have this whole dichotomy of we want to fund you, but… It’s very tough to get dollars for gay theatre. So that’s why you do other pieces of work, to get funding for those so that you can also do gay theatre.”

But despite the frustrations, Horn clearly believes passionately in what he does. “I have a lot of gays and lesbians around me that work in the theatre company simply because they want to be touched, somehow, to make sure theatre is good for the community. So it’s not just what happens on stage for me, it’s what happens backstage: costumers, lighting designers, people like that who want to still be involved.”

With The Glines all but closed down, Wings Theatre, founded in 1986, has become NYC’s longest-running theatre with an ongoing commitment to gay work, operating under an Equity Tier Three Code Agreement from their 71-seat basement theatre on Christopher Street. They place their casting notices in Back Stage and “keep enormous files,” says Artistic Director Jeff Corrick. Their contract allows them to use non-union actors as well. Production budgets are minimal, in the $2,000 range.

Wings began “simply doing American plays by American playwrights,” says Corrick, including gay plays. “It became confusing to people,” he continues. “Since 1987, we’ve done a gay play series alongside a variety of other series.” Those have included “a children’s theatre series, a women’s/lesbian series, and, for the last three years, a musicals series. There’s a lot of crossover audience there, about 30 percent, so it works well for us. It also gives us more of a focus in the New York market. Our audiences are really diverse. The gay play audience is only slightly over half gay.”

The artistic focus is on brand new work, says Corrick. “We tend toward plays that are traditionally structured and generally realistic. We’re not a particularly avant-garde company. We also try to do things that are distinct from what’s being done in television and film.” In the gay plays series, “We try to do things a little bit outside the norm.” One example is “The Jocker,” which studied forced sexual relationships between hoboes and teenage boys during the Great Depression. Another is “Cowboys,” a big hit last year, a sweet-tempered musical, “sort of a gay version of a Roy Rogers movie,” now running at a mainstream suburban theatre in Dallas. Corrick avoids “generic coming out plays, generic AIDS plays, coming-home-from-the-holidays plays. Unless, of course, a really superb script in one of those forms comes in.”

Wings’ most recent play, “Strange Bedfellows,” is another example. Written by house playwright Clint Jeffries, it’s set in a trailer park in Oklahoma, and tells a wrenching, gripping story of a sexually uncertain, drug-addled adolescent, his pregnant prostitute fiancée, his controlling, judgmental mother, and the mother’s best friend since high school, now a 40-ish Chelsea party boy who has returned to his hometown fleeing an unhappy gay relationship. The play examines emotional damage inflicted in the name of love, and how such damage may be addressed. Written for the four fine actors who performed it — all Wings veterans — it contained an amazingly visceral performance by Daniel Carlton as the adolescent son.

Unfortunately, few people saw it. Wings has little or no money for advertising, and has always had trouble attracting the critics. Notes Corrick matter-of-factly, “We even have to fight for coverage in the gay press. And in 16 years, The New York Times has been here once — it was a mixed review — the Daily News twice, and the Post never.”