Towards A Pop Queer Theatre:The Popular Artiface of Tsai Pao-Chang's Plays

Since the year of 2000, issue-oriented queer theater has lost its popularity and has gradually converged with mainstream commercial theater. This paper intends to explore the needs and fantasies for Queer Popular Theater through looking into the intimate relationship between the uprising of queer theater and LGBT social movements and the decline of politics within, and thus discover the ambiguity and uniqueness of the manifesting strategies of Tsai Pao-Chang: queering popular melodrama with gay/queer politics. This will provide Pop Queer Theater with a reference for systematic development. This paper proposes the word ""Pop Queer Theater"" in order to mark the interaction of queer theater and popular theater, which takes features of both queer political theater and popular theater. The artifices and themes of Tsai Po-Chang''s script and stage presentation established his renowned brand that teases the queer/public agency, which challenges the social norm through its strategies. This paper focuses on Tsai Pao-Chang''s Mulan, Quest and Amnesia Episode I, and Re/turn, all narrate the main characters'' exploring of self-identity. Specifically, this paper observes the interaction between queer representation and popular methods and proposes a queer reading on Tsai Po-Chang ''s texts, in which the playwright restructures melodrama and produces the possibility of troubling the system. By proposing a critique that juxtaposes popularity and queerness, this paper aims connect the past and the future of queer lives on stage and open up a new possibility for the development of Pop Queer Theater.