She\u27s not allowed to do that: performing stigmatized same-sex sexuality

In the summer of 2018, an emerging theatre company produced Stop Kiss by Diana Son in Waterloo, Iowa, a mid-size industrial town adjacent to the city of Cedar Falls, which hosts a small public university. In Stop Kiss, the two lead characters are women fall romantically for each other, so that in performing their characters the actors embody same-sex sexuality. This paper will explore how the actors playing these two characters engaged with this embodiment, and how doing so affected them