Crossing the Stage

Controversies on Cross-Dressing

Lesley Ferris, Lesley Ferris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134924523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Crossing the Stage brings together for the first time essays which explore cross-dressing in theatre, cabaret, opera and dance. The volume contains seminal pieces which have become standard texts in the field, as well as new work especially commissioned from leading writers on performance.
Crossing the Stage is an indispensable sourcebook on theatrical cross-dressing. It will be essential reading for all those interested in performance and the representation of gender.

1
INTRODUCTION
Current crossings

Lesley Ferris

VARIETIES OF SHAKESPEAREAN ILLUSION

In the fall of 1991 Declan Donnellan’s London Cheek By Jowl Theatre Company produced As You Like It with an all-male cast. Hailed by some as a bold experiment, others as a misguided disappointment, and still others as insensitive to the politics of theater employment (always more actresses are “resting” and out of work than actors), the production echoed a similar London undertaking more than twenty years earlier. In 1967 the National Theatre produced an all-male As You Like It. Why this apparent longing for a theater convention long dead? Do such experiments attempt to capture—however ephemerally—a Shakespearean authenticity, a sense of how it really was back then, during one of the so-called “golden ages” of theater?

A much more radical departure from the all-male casting of As You Like It is Neil Bartlett’s production of Twelfth Night which opened at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in January, 1992 (Plate 1). Bartlett primarily reversed the all-male- actor convention of Shakespeare’s England. Although Viola and her twin brother Sebastian were played by two 16-year-old boys, all the men, except the clown Feste, were played by women. Bartlett comments on his innovative reading of Shakespeare:

If you did Twelfth Night as it was written, as an all-male production, it would be the “gay” Twelfth Night even before it opened…. The piece would be about whether the characters in the play are really homosexual and it would be about whether gay love is as good as straight love. And quite frankly, these are questions which are behind us.

(Raymond 1992:34)

In 1991 Stage West in Springfield, Massachusetts, produced Hamlet with an actress in the title role (Plate 2). Despite the director’s claim that he did not cast the role to “make a sexual statement,” at least one critic disagrees with this intention:

By casting Kelly Maurer in the role, director Eric Hill had ignited the anguish of Hamlet’s psycho sexual crisis like a Molotov cocktail. By turns masculine, feminine, androgynous, Maurer’s great Dane, like Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa, smiled inscrutably at the audience from a no-man’s-land of sexual equivocation.

(Holmberg 1992:12)

Stage West’s Hamlet follows an historically well established casting choice. The tradition of female Hamlets apparently began in 1776 when Sarah Siddons, the great tragedienne of the English stage, initiated this theatrical experiment (Edmonds 1992:59). By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was commonplace for the actress to have a selection of acceptable male Shakespearean roles—principally Hamlet and Romeo—in her repertoire.

Eva Le Gallienne supported her 1936 interpretation of the role by stressing the role’s suitability for actresses:

If one thinks of Hamlet as a man in his thirties, the idea of a woman’s attempting to play the part is of course ridiculous. But Hamlet’s whole psychology has always seemed to me that of a youth rather than of a mature man… It is possible for an actress at the height of her powers to give the impression of being a boy, while having at her command all the craft, range, force, and subtlety which such great roles require. This has always been true of Rostand’s L’Aiglon, which, with a few insignificant exceptions, has always been played by women; also DeMusset’s Lorenzaccio, and—in a very different mood—Barrie’s Peter Pan.

(Le Gallienne 1983:51)

Le Gallienne’s Hamlet is part of a theater tradition primarily undertaken to give accomplished actresses an opportunity to play significant Shakespearean roles, in effect to show off the actress’s range.

Erika Munk critiques the cross-dressed Hamlet as a reaffirmation of the prevailing gender system:

Hamlet, stereotyped as a waffling neurotic prone to violent fits, is considered proper for women to enact, unlike Lear, Henry V, Caesar, Coriolanus, or Falstaff… Basically such casting comes from producers’ gimmickry and actresses’ frustration, from the fact that most playwrights and most big roles are male; as long as men aren’t clamoring to play Mother Courage or Juliet or Amanda Wingfield, Hamlet as a woman reemphasizes the universalist pretensions of maleness, the specific limitations of femaleness, in our culture.

(Munk 1985b:80)

But what happens when the role of Lear is played by a woman? Writing in 1985 Munk could not foresee that five years later two King Lear productions would cast females in the title role. In May, 1990, Robert Wilson cast the 77-year-old actress Marianne Hoppe as King Lear in his production in Frankfurt. One of the significant features of this unusual casting choice is that Hoppe does not attempt to create the illusion of masculinity by disguising herself as a man, although the text remained consistent with Shakespeare.

In contrast to Wilson’s single instance of cross-gender casting, Lee Breuer’s production of Lear which opened in the same year attempted to rework the gender hierarchy of the play. Breuer and his company Mabou Mines began working on the Lear project in 1987 in Atlanta. The southern locale convinced the company to update the script to Georgia in the 1950s with Lear as a southern matriarchal figure with three sons.

Despite difficulties in justifying all the gender switches and updates, the company found enough intrigue, excitement, and contemporary resonance in these ideas to pursue them through a series of residencies in which they developed their concept until they presented their final interpretation of Lear in New York City. Ruth Maleczech, who played the role of Lear, described the astonishing effect this gender switch had for her: “When a man has power, we take it for granted. But when a woman has power, we’re forced to look at the nature of power itself.” Breuer, in considering Maleczech’s desire to speak Lear’s lines, said:

It took me a while to understand that there were certain political imperatives inherent in that desire. What’s one of the first things you see? That Lear’s story, at least in part, is about the relationship between power and love. A man can be powerful and still be loved, but it’s rare to see a woman loved for her power—women must be powerless. So as women gain power in our society, they also find love more difficult to attain.

(Wetzsteon 1990:40)

BACCHIC RITES AND WRONGS

In 1986 the Royal Court Theatre, London, produced Caryl Churchill’s and David Lan’s A Mouthful of Birds which reworked several thematic elements of Euripides’ The Bacchae (Plate 3). In this contemporary script the androgynous god Dionysus is a character who encourages and oversees a variety of metamorphoses. One of these metamorphic manifestations centers on the life of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite. In the Royal Court production, a woman entered the stage cross-dressed in the clothes of a nineteenth-century French man. During her moving monologue, she slowly, ritually opens her small suitcase removing her lace shawl, her petticoat, a rose, which she is now forced—by French law—to discard. She says: “Was I really Herculine Barbin, playing by the sea, starting school at the convent, nobody doubted I was a girl. Hermaphrodite, the doctors were fascinated, how to define the body, does it fascinate you, it doesn’t fascinate me, let it die” (Churchill and Lan 1986:51).

This interest in Herculine Barbin was initiated by Michel Foucault’s republication of his/her memoirs in 1980. In his introductory essay to the memoirs Foucault asks, “Do we truly need a true sex?” (Foucault 1980:vii). Foucault provides a brief historical overview of the status which medical authority and law granted to hermaphrodites. He points out that records surviving from the Middle Ages display a much more tolerant attitude toward hermaphrodites, who were free to decide themselves which sex they preferred to maintain through their adult life. By the time of Herculine’s story, which took place in the 1860–70s, the medical profession was obsessed with investigating and determining the true and only sex. As Foucault explains:

Henceforth, everybody was to have one and only one sex. Everybody was to have his or her primary, profound, determined and determining sexual identity; as for the elements of the other sex that might appear, they could only be accidental, superficial, or even quite simply illusory. From the medical point of view, this meant that when confronted with a hermaphrodite, the doctor was no longer concerned with recognizing the presence of the two sexes, juxtaposed or intermingled, or with knowing which of the two prevailed over the other, but rather with deciphering the true sex that was hidden beneath ambiguous appearances.

(Foucault 1980:viii)

This medical insistence on one true sex and the Herculine Barbin story have provided other theater artists with potentially fascinating performance material. Kate Bornstein performed a work-in-progress based on the life of Herculine Barbin at the Ninth Annual Conference for Women in Theater in San Diego, August, 1988. The significant, perhaps startling, aspect of this performance of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite is that Kate Bornstein is a transsexual.

Her performance at the conference—a kind of autobiographical collage— encompassed a variety of scenes from her acting past in addition to her new work on Barbin. (For example, the first scene she performed was from her previous— male—life as an actor. It was the role of the macho make-out artist in Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack.) An important aspect of Bornstein’s Herculine Barbin piece, entitled Hidden: A Gender, examines the suicide of Barbin. Bornstein states that her sense of humor has kept her from ending up like Barbin:

[T]he journey I want to portray is, did [Barbin] really have to be a he or a she? We he really some other gender that was trying to survive? And that’s the way I feel myself…. I certainly don’t feel I’m a man, and many times I question whether I’m a woman. I laugh at a world that permits me to be only one or the other.

Bornstein and her performance work center on her personal journey through masculinity to the feminine, a journey that overtly questions our culture’s rigid gender system; these concerns starkly contrast another transsexual performing artist recently analyzed in Morris Meyer’s provocative essay, “I dream of Jeannie: transsexual striptease as scientific display” (Meyer 1991:25–42). Jeannie is a striptease artist who performs solo several times a year as part of a Milwaukee drag revue. Unlike other female impersonators in the show who manipulate clothing and makeup to create and maintain an illusion of femininity, “Jeannie’s art was marked by a process of costume reduction that terminated in a theatrical display of her nude body” (25). At the end of the performance the show’s director enters the stage and announces “Don’t get yourself too worked up over her. It’s all man-made” (29). This announcement is made for those audience members who have not “read” Jeannie’s transsexual body correctly.

Lindsay Kemp returned to Sadlers Wells in April, 1992, to perform his production of Onnagata. The title of this performance piece refers to the term applied to the male actor in Japanese Kabuki theater whose specialty is playing female roles. Kemp is best known for his roles as Salomé and Divine (from his Genet-inspired production Flowers) and his performance in this most recent work continues his aesthetic of over-the-top theatricality created by his elaborate cross-dressed roles. In Onnagata Kemp’s first stage entrance was from above the stage itself. He descended on invisible wires wearing an elaborate Japanese gown and carrying a parasol. During the rest of the performance he impersonated Isadora Duncan, Lady Macbeth, Loië Fuller, and the Virgin Mary.

Kemp’s work in Britain is often considered the radical excess of a long theatrical tradition of comic cross-dressed men. It is a tradition that comes alive seasonally with Christmas pantomime and the comic Dame role. Popular entertainment—both in live and in televised performances—has promulgated the outrageous Dame figure with the most recent work of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage. It is a tradition with which commercial producers often attempt to create a money-making theater event. Witness the two recent shows in London’s West End which opened in 1992. One is the reworking of the Jules Styne/Bob Merrill musical Sugar, now titled Some Like It Hot after Billy Wilder’s 1959 film comedy and taking the same storyline but adding a musical score. Tommy Steele and Billy Boyle play the roles that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon originated in the film—two on-the-run musicians who disguise themselves as women to join an all-female band. The second piece is a rock version of Moby Dick which takes place in a girls’ school under the tutelage of a transvestite headmistress. One reviewer, bemoaning the failures of both productions, commented, “It has not been a good week for drag” (Hirschorn 1992:26).

Running parallel to these mainstream drag images is the alternative or experimental form of drag performance. Charles Ludlam, who founded his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, considered himself the pioneer of a new kind of performance—a female impersonation that could be serious acting, in the same way that Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet was considered serious acting. Ludlam is best known for his role as Marguerite Gautier in Camille (Plate 4). He stated: “Camille is a profoundly feminist work. There is a prejudice against a man dressing up as a woman because women are considered inferior beings. For a man to dress as a woman is a step down” (Ludlam 1992:19). Ludlam’s innovations appear to offer an important direction for those performers and theatre practitioners who seek a new meaning in female impersonation other than the tendency to parody and degrade. Other performers who have taken Ludlam’s lead are Charles Busch, Ethyl Eichenberger, and Lypsinka.

Much of the available material on cross-dressing has a straightforward bias for male-to-female transformations, as several authors in this collection make clear.¹ Elizabeth Drorbaugh suggests that “women’s cross-dressing is comparatively underexplored.” And Alisa Solomon says “to make male-to-female drag the point from which all discussion of cross-dressing follows simply reinstates the presumption of the male as universal.”² With some significant exceptions, discussed above, examples of contemporary female-to-male performance are harder to come by, mostly confined mainly to actor-training or educational theater. Rhonda Blair, for example, employed cross-gender casting in Albee’s Zoo Story at the University of Kentucky for the purpose of examining connections between gender and aggression. The production used a round robin performance mode in which two men and two women rotated in and out of Jerry and Peter’s roles (Jenkins and Ogden-Malouf 1985:68). In two productions at Bryn Mawr and Haverford, Susan Ogden-Malouf cast women in all the roles of Molière’s The School for Wives with the exception of Arnolphe in order to shift focus on the female characters (Jenkins and Ogden-Malouf 1985:68). Another production of a “classic” text using an all-female cast to highlight male oppression of women was Julia Fischer’s production of Aphra Behn’s The Rover at the University of Minnesota (Walen 1991). As a director, I have produced Brecht’s Man is Man with an all-women cast in 1984 at Middlesex Polytechnic, London. I wanted to experiment with gendered body language as a way of staging Brecht’s connection between militarism and masculinity. As Sande Zeig says: “Gestures are material, as material as clothing which one may ‘put on’ and ‘take off.’ Gestures are a concrete means of producing meaning, both the gestures that have been assigned to us and those that have not been assigned to us” (Zeig 1985:13). In addition to examining the gestural language of men, the actresses/soldiers toted batons. This displacement of a key prop—rifle as baton— created an alienating stage image juxtaposing the frivolous nature of the twirling female majorette with the serious masculine stance of the soldier.

DIFFERENCE AND MEANING IN PERFORMANCE

In June, 1991, a production titled Sarrasine by the British Gloria company opened in London (Plate 5). The production was a post-modern performance based on Balzac’s 1830 short story (which is supposedly based on historical events that took place in the eighteenth century). Sarrasine is a young, impetuous, talented sculptor who, in Rome for the first time, sees La Zambinella at the opera. He considers her to be the epitome of feminine perfection, falls madly in love with her, and is blind to the fact that “she” is a castrato, a male actor performing female roles owing to the ban on actresses in the papal states. Sarrasine’s illusion is shattered and he dies at the hands of hired assassins who are protecting La Zambinella for the Cardinal, who claims to own “her.” This story is framed by another telling, that of an anonymous young man trying to seduce Madame de Rochefide by telling her the story of La Zambinella and Sarrasine. In the Gloria production the story of La Zambinella is framed by the Comtesse who becomes obsessed with finding the aged La Zambinella in order to hear his celebrated singing voice.

The Gloria production unfolded as a series of interwoven monologues, songs from both opera and cabaret, and ensemble moments. ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION: CURRENT CROSSINGS
• 2: CROSS-DRESSING, THE THEATER, AND GENDER STRUGGLE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
• 3: GOETHE’S “WOMEN’S PARTS PLAYED BY MEN IN THE ROMAN THEATER”
• 4: “WHEN MEN WOMEN TURN”: GENDER REVERSALS IN FIELDING’S PLAYS
• 5: BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER: SUBCULTURAL ORIGINS OF GLAMOUR DRAG AND MALE IMPERSONATION ON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY STAGE
• 6: THE TRAVESTY DANCER IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BALLET
• 7: “I’M THE QUEEN OF THE BITCHES”: FEMALE IMPERSONATION AND MAE WEST’S PLEASURE MAN
• 8: SLIDING SCALES: NOTES ON STORMÉ DELARVERIÉ AND THE JEWEL BOX REVUE, THE CROSS-DRESSED WOMAN ON THE CONTEMPORARY STAGE, AND THE INVERT
• 9: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO SWITCH: CROSSING TOWARD POWER
• 10: CRISSCROSSING CULTURES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY