Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances is an edited volume of writer and artist Anthony Hudson’s plays, monologues, and performance writings. It is for students, directors, teachers and professors, scholars, artists, and anyone interested in contemporary theatre, contemporary Native American culture, and performance as activism. Hudson’s work speaks loudly to the current crisis in American theatre as the regional system is crumbling and articles appear on a weekly basis about what to do. In Hudson’s work, he filets beloved cultural figures like Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily and also the system of exploitation in which artists live and work; his tools are clowning, drag, genderfuck, whiteface, horror, cabaret, and queer theory. Hudson's humor is both buoyant and dark—his evisceration of Land Acknowledgements in The Carlalogues changes views about this practice; this is echoed in Lamp Back, a short land acknowledgement that begins the collection, and which serves as the book title. Hudson’s revisiting of Tiger Lily invites not just another look at that story, but at the foundations of Anglophone North American culture. Hudson is scathing and simultaneously glamourous and ugly—all in service of drawing attention to our very broken society. This is what Hudson’s project is: to illuminate and then gut cultural norms and desires. And, while often biting and dark in subject, Hudson’s work consistently points to a better way forward, and revels in a deep love of performance, art, and pop culture.

In this book, Hudson's performance writings are accompanied by his foreword, in which he speaks about his work from an artist perspective. Theatre historian Kate Bredeson's introduction focuses on the texts within a critical/historical context of queer performance, pedagogy, and teaching; her meticulous editing frames the structure and presentation of this book.

The selected writings in Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances share a deep reconsideration of things thought to be known—a familiar childhood character, a painting in a museum, the daily life of hot pockets and celebrities, and the ways in which we make art today. These writings are united by how teachable they are for contemporary students.

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Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Siletz) is a writer, artist, and cultural critic in Portland, Oregon. Finalist of the 2023 Farrar, Straus and Giroux FSG Writer’s Fellowship, and winner of the prestigious 2023 Creative Heights Award from the Oregon Community Foundation, Hudson wields writing, performance, and dark humor to explode ideas of gender, sexuality, race, and Indigeneity. Hudson's award-winning play Looking for Tiger Lily has been performed internationally. His other plays include GLOOP (with Pepper Pepper), The Carlalogues, Clown Down 1 and 2, and Girl with a Cigarette. Hudson has been featured at New York Theatre Workshop, LaMaMa, Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Dartmouth College, Portland Community College, Stanford University, PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Center Stage, Talking Stick Festival (Vancouver, BC), Yirramboi Festival (Victoria, Australia), APAP, Oklahoma City Rep, among many other venues. In 2018, Hudson was announced as one of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellows in Artistic Innovation. In December 2023, he was selected for a 2024 Tin House summer residency. At Portland’s historic Hollywood Theatre, he programs the only LGBTQ horror film and performance series in the country. Hudson's writing has appeared in American Theatre, Arts and International Affairs, and the National Performance Network. Canonized as a saint by the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Hudson is also known as the city's premier drag clown, Carla Rossi.

Kate Bredeson (she/her) is a theatre historian, dramaturg, director, and translator. Her project as a scholar and artist is to research, document, and practice the ways in which performance can be a tool for radical activism and protest. She is the author of three books, all published with Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68 (2018); The Inheritor, co-translated with Thalia Wolff (2024); and The Diaries of Judith Malina, (forthcoming from Northwestern, 2026). Recent publications include essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Fellowships and awards include a Fulbright, NEH Summer Stipend, a Furthermore Foundation grant, the Edith and Richard French Visiting Research Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and residencies at Camargo in France, Maison Dora Maar in France, Bellagio in Italy, and Loghaven in Tennessee. As a dramaturg, she collaborates with choreographer Tahni Holt, and has worked theatres including the Court (Chicago) and Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), and is the recipient of two fellowships from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. Kate is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.