This talk considers how Queer Iranian American Theatre Reza Abdoh's Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990)  interrogates the what Hilton Als calls the damage of patriarchy in U.S. American culture. In particular this talk thinks about what we can learn from this artist, who was working in a different time in the history of Neoliberal violence so as to understand queer and feminist imaginings of the present and its violences. Analysis of the theatrical, casting and dramaturgical practices of the play will be discussed, as will the possibility of thinking Abdoh in relation to the authors' former work on transnational violence. 

Patricia Ybarra is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico(Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009) and Latinx Theatre in the Times of Neoliberalism (Northwestern UP, 2018), as well as co-editor with Lara Nielsen of Theater and Neoliberalism: Performance Permutations(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; paperback 2014). Ybarra is the former President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She is also a director, dramaturg, and the former administrator of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.