Joan Jett Blakk did not enter politics because she believed politics was already a performance. She entered because performance could expose who was permitted to appear as political in the first place.
That distinction matters as the Vineyard Theatre opens Ms. Blakk for President on November 8, 2026. Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Tina Landau, directed by Landau and starring Ato Blankson-Wood as Terence Alan Smith and Joan Jett Blakk, the production brings a 1992 queer presidential campaign into an established Off-Broadway institution. Its immersive staging begins in the lobby and moves through the forms of a campaign rally, nightclub and confessional.
The question is not whether a radical political history belongs in a theater. Of course it does. The more difficult question is what happens when a campaign designed to disrupt respectable politics becomes a professionally produced, ticketed evening of culture.
Ms. Blakk for President arrives as a follow-up, and a complication, to the argument that theatrical protest can be preserved by the institutions that once would have excluded it. The production may give Joan Jett Blakk new audiences and make an important history physically present. It may also make dissent easier to admire than to confront.
The campaign was not a joke about politics
Smith, a gay Black performer and activist, created Joan Jett Blakk as a drag persona in Chicago’s performance and organizing communities. Smith became a founding member of the Chicago chapter of Queer Nation and appeared in AIDS-related benefits and gay performance events before campaigning for mayor of Chicago in 1991 and president in 1992.
The Schomburg Center’s Joan Jett Blakk/Lick Bush in ’92 archive preserves campaign speeches, press coverage, promotional material, ephemera and documentary-related material from the period. The archive describes the campaign as an effort to increase queer visibility and challenge homophobia, not as a theatrical diversion from more serious politics.
Its slogan, “Lick Bush in ’92,” was deliberately vulgar, funny and impossible to file under the usual language of electoral seriousness. That was the point. The campaign did not ask conventional politics to become more polite. It made politeness look like one of the mechanisms by which queer people were kept outside the frame.
The New-York Historical Society’s campaign poster record identifies Blakk’s 1992 presidential campaign as an assertion of queer visibility and notes that Smith announced the candidacy at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden. The appearance dramatized a particular contradiction: Blakk could be visible within the spectacle of national politics without being granted the authority that spectacle claimed to represent.
This is why calling the campaign “performance politics” can be misleading. The phrase may suggest that the politics were secondary, decorative or symbolic. For Blakk, performance was the political method. The drag persona, the slogans, the exaggeration and the public disruption were ways of testing the boundaries of political recognition.
The theater is not discovering Joan Jett Blakk
There is a temptation surrounding institutional revivals of marginalized histories to describe the subject as newly discovered. That language flatters the institution. It implies that a cultural figure becomes historically significant when a respected organization decides to present her.
Joan Jett Blakk was not waiting for the Vineyard Theatre to make her real. The campaign was documented at the time, preserved in activist and cultural archives, and recorded in documentaries including Drag in for Votes and Lick Bush in ’92. The new development is not the recovery of an absent history. It is the change in the conditions under which that history can be encountered.
An archive asks a visitor to approach the past through documents, labels and the patient discipline of reconstruction. Theater asks an audience to share time and space with an interpretation. It supplies bodies, voices, music, tempo and atmosphere. It can make history immediate in a way a campaign poster cannot.
But immediacy is not the same as understanding. A vivid theatrical event can produce the sensation of political participation without requiring much political risk from the audience. One may cheer the refusal of respectability while remaining comfortably respectable oneself.
What does the production preserve?
The production’s immersive structure is an intelligent response to Blakk’s legacy. A campaign rally, a nightclub and a confessional are not arbitrary theatrical settings. They suggest that queer political life has often had to move among public demonstration, communal pleasure and private testimony because conventional institutions offered no single place where all three could exist.
The challenge is to preserve more than the campaign’s visual vocabulary. Drag, camp and political slogans can be reproduced as style. The harder task is to preserve the organizing intelligence beneath them: the insistence that visibility is connected to housing, health care, safety, dignity and the right to define one’s own public existence.
The AIDS crisis must therefore remain more than period atmosphere. It was not a dramatic backdrop against which Joan Jett Blakk became colorful. It was the political emergency that made questions of visibility, abandonment and institutional indifference immediate. Any production that borrows the era’s anger without conveying its material stakes risks turning history into a particularly well-costumed mood.
Nor should the play treat Blakk as a novelty—the first drag queen candidate, the outrageous candidate, the campaign that anticipated a later era of celebrity politics. Those descriptions are not entirely false, but they are culturally lazy. They make the campaign interesting by making it exceptional, then leave the surrounding political world unexamined.
Recognition can preserve dissent—and soften it
Theater institutions are not automatically enemies of radical history. They can provide resources, visibility, skilled collaborators and the shared attention that political work is often denied. Institutional recognition can also establish a record that is less vulnerable to disappearance.
Yet the institution changes the encounter. A campaign that once interrupted political spectacle is now part of a carefully designed theatrical experience. Its slogans acquire lighting, pacing and dramaturgy. Its anger is placed inside a structure that tells audiences when to laugh, when to listen and when to applaud.
That does not invalidate the production. It gives the production its real subject.
Ms. Blakk for President will be most valuable if it allows audiences to feel the tension between preservation and domestication rather than resolving that tension too neatly. It should not reassure us that Joan Jett Blakk was inspirational because she was ahead of her time. It should ask why the political institutions of her time required such theatrical force before queer lives could become visible at all.
In that sense, the production’s success cannot be measured only by the quality of its performances or the ingenuity of its immersive staging, though both matter. It should also be measured by what remains difficult after the applause: whether audiences understand that Blakk’s performance was inseparable from organizing, whether the campaign’s concrete demands remain legible, and whether the theater directs attention toward living queer political work rather than treating dissent as a completed chapter.
Arthur’s earlier essay, “The Performance Was the Politics,” argued that theaters risk turning protest into a safely admirable artifact. This production offers the opportunity to test that claim rather than repeat it. The question is not whether the Vineyard has institutionalized Joan Jett Blakk. It plainly has. The question is whether the institution can make that process visible enough for audiences to examine.
A successful production would leave viewers with more than affection for a remarkable campaign. It would make them uneasy about how easily institutions can celebrate the people they once excluded—and about how quickly a political demand can become a cultural memory.
