Cross-gender Casting Research Articles

‘And All Is Semblative a Woman’s Part’: Japan’s All-Male As You Like It

ABSTRACT The practice of cross-gender casting, which has been a long-standing convention in Japanese theatre, has shaped the audience’s expectations of actors performing the opposite gender. Consequently, the audience’s lived experience in Japan is distinct from that of Western audiences. It is challenging to assess the kinaesthetic experience of viewers from different cultural backgrounds, given that the reception of a performance is influenced by culturally determined frames of reference. Traditional cross-gender casting relies on contrast, which may inadvertently reinforce gender stereotypes. This may be how the Japanese approach to cross-gender theatre is perceived, but the current cross-gender theatre is not constrained by the traditional forms of stylisation in male or female impersonation. Surprisingly, gender stereotyping and gender ambiguity/fluidity appear to be able to coexist in Japanese culture, which is reflected in cross-gender theatre. Following a discussion concerning the impact of gender representation in subculture and culture on contemporary Japan, I examine Studio Life’s latest Shakespeare production of As You Like It. It is noteworthy that this production does not reinforce traditional gender norms but instead challenges them, presenting a reimagined portrayal of female characters through the male body.

Reversing the tradition of the boy player: Female actors playing male children on British radio

Four hundred years ago, boy actors played the female characters on the British stage, but when UK radio was established a century ago, it was often the other way around: women played the boys. This continued almost until the turn of the millennium but has been a largely hidden history, with many of the actresses billed in such a way as to not reveal their gender. This article argues that these vocal performances are a specific adaptation technique and particularly focuses on its use in BBC Radio adaptations of Shakespeare plays. By examining contemporary accounts and existing audio recordings, it establishes what these women sounded like and the reaction of critics to their portrayals. It also compares these female performances in boys’ roles with productions where genuine children were used, exploring why producers frequently chose adult women over young boys to play these parts and why the public appears to have accepted their voices in these roles. This unacknowledged tradition of acting has taken place for generations in an organization where cross-gender casting in adult Shakespearean roles is very rare. This article reclaims these roles for the women who played them.

Woman Undone by Brokentalkers: Activism with a Difference

Brokentalkers theatre company first set up in 2001 may be described as a fearless, innovative organisation which has from the outset tried to balance the inequalities prevalent in Irish society. It comprises of Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan who describe their ethos as to devise original, accessible live performance and explore new forms that challenge traditional ideologies of text-based theatre. They use the postdramatic medium in order to convey the urgency of a particular situation and in line with this, their performances can often include slapstick, violent physical action, pop cultures, breaking of the illusion and hysterical outbursts from the actors. One of their more recent performances, Woman Undone, which premiered in 2018, is an impactful reimagining and reconstruction of an aspect of blues singer, Mary Coughlan’s life. This essay investigates the use of dramaturgical strategies such as musicality, bodily movement and cross gender casting in the performance in order to highlight the situation of those who have been abused in Ireland. The microcosm of one well known woman’s experience is brought to the macrocosm of society to educate and enlighten all women.

Comical Treatment of Queer Identities in The Merchant of Venice (Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 2004)


 By analyzing the performance of The Merchant of Venice directed by Egon Savin, this paper explores the connection between the queer and the comic in contemporary Serbian theatre. The theoretical premise is that humor is a deeply paradoxical phenomenon: although it is usually perceived as a positive, vitalist, and subversive force, humor also functions as a repressive and conformist cultural mechanism that strengthens social norms. Our case study is a typical example of the stereotypical representation of queer identities which aims at inducing the comic effect. Antonio, the merchant of Venice, is portrayed as a typical inauthentic, superficial, and promiscuous gay man, while the character of Bassanio strengthens the most common representation of a bisexual as manipulative and mischievous. The most complex is the queer identity created by cross-gender casting in the interweaving of the physical body of the actor Dragan Mićanović and the semiotic body of the character of Portia. Considering the fact that there is no conceptual vindication for the cross-gender casting in the case of Portia, the incongruity of the man in a woman’s role primarily functions as a source of laughter. The excluding humor, based on the ridicule of queer identities, is partially amortized by the nuanced acting of Dragan Mićanović, which denaturalizes the Portia’s gender, emphasizing her queerness.

Is She A Woman?: Alternative Critical Frameworks for Understanding Cross-Dressing and Cross-Gender Casting on the Victorian Stage

As the study of nineteenth-century theatre has expanded over the decades, the extent and popularity of cross-dressing and cross-gender casting on the Victorian stage is being revealed. Yet there is an enduring tendency in Victorian theatre criticism to situate transvestite performances within broad-brush assumptions of binary attitudes towards gender amongst theatre audiences. Universalised gender norms and assumptions of binary thinking have long been discarded in critical analysis of Victorian fiction, and their lingering influence on Victorian theatre studies has arguably been unhelpful. Building on the vital pioneering work of Jacky Bratton, this article will focus on the careers of Louisa Cranstoun Nisbett and Mary Anne Keeley, two prominent and acclaimed mid-century actresses, drawing on reviews, memoirs, and commentaries on their performances to attempt to construct alternative theories for how they were viewed and understood. The critical and popular success of their performances and the language and ideas employed by reviewers and commentators to record and explain them reveal far more flexible, multiple, fluid, complex, and imaginative attitudes to gender roles and identities than allowed for in established critical narratives.

Romeo at the Girls’ School: Fantasy of the Girls’ Queer Teen Adaptation of Shakespeare

Abstract This article adopts a transnational approach to the practice of cross-gender casting and the queer fascination with women playing Shakespeare’s male roles. It offers a case study of the South Korean film Fantasy of the Girls (Jungmin Ahn, 2018), exploring the film’s both strategic transgression of gender norms and boundary-crossing adaptation in the transnational context. Fantasy of the Girls features an all-women school theatre group staging Romeo and Juliet and joins similar cross-cast Shakespeare productions in exploring the interaction between the narrative text and the actor’s gendered embodiment, including in terms of the potent effect of gender-transgressive casting on audiences. To trace the ways in which the film uses the device of cross-cast Shakespearean performance to consider young South Korean women’s queer desires, and to examine the special geo-cultural contexts at play, I turn to a distinctive form of queer youth culture which emerged in 1990s South Korea: iban. In this cultural practice, cross-dressing functions as a crucial means of identity production, as another, albeit implicit, reference underpinning the gender-nonconforming Hanam’s performance of Romeo. The coming-of-age film offers a reflection on the connection between the iban fantasy and Shakespeare’s text, which, in turn, provides a model for identity construction, through which the queer teen girls can voice and explore desires that are otherwise inexpressible. Ultimately, Fantasy of the Girls leverages Shakespeare to foreground the unique experiences of queer teen girls in twenty-first century South Korea.

Re-defining the Shakespearean Actor: Casting and Diversity at Shakespeare’s Globe under Emma Rice and Michelle Terry

This paper evaluates casting practices at Shakespeare’s Globe under the artistic directorships of Emma Rice (2016-17) and Michelle Terry (2018-) in the context of diversity. It explores the casting and subsequent optics of two productions: Rice’s Twelfth Night in 2017, and Terry’s Hamlet the following year. I argue that traditional ideas of the “Shakespearean actor” have shifted in an age where companies move towards greater inclusivity, allowing for more diverse casting of people of colour, people with disabilities, and cross-gender casting. Through the processes of embodiment, these casting choices add paratextual readings onto productions, which can provide improved agency for traditionally-marginalised communities, but can also replicate problematic readings. In essence, this article argues that diverse casting practices alone are not enough to provide opportunity and agency for underrepresented identities in theatrical productions. If such diverse casting practices are happening – which they should – then care must be taken not to perpetuate out-dated and harmful stereotypes of Black, disabled, and/or queer people. Inclusive casting fails in its aims if it reduces already marginalised people to the margins yet further, therefore representation onstage is not enough: the stories that these bodies tell must be empowering before the bodies themselves can be empowered.

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Performer’s Body: Cross-Gender Casting as an Estrangement Technique in Theatre

The main thesis of the present article is that cross-gender casting can function as a Brechtian estrangement technique, an approach which denaturalizes gender and other social constructs. The term “cross-gender casting” is preferred to the term “travesty”, which is mainly used by Serbian theatre critics, because it is more precise and refers directly to gender studies. The theoretical framework of our analysis is constituted by theatre and performance studies on the one hand, and gender studies on the other. The concept of performance introduced by Erica Fischer-Lichte helps us to understand the tension between the “phenomenal body” and the “semiotic body” of the performer, which is increased by cross-gender casting. The result of this tension is the phenomenon we call “cross-gender effect”. The new amalgam-body is best described as queer because it is simultaneously perceived as both male and female. The ambivalent impact it has on the audience could be understood through the concepts of otherness and Julia Kristeva’s abjection. In order to explain the difference between male-to-female and female-to-male cross-gender casting, we discuss two Serbian performances: Gospođa Ministarka / Mrs Minister (Boško Buha Theatre, 2013) and Skup (Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 2002). The cross-gender effect is more intense in the first example because female physical bodies are generally more easily absorbed by male semiotic bodies. By its capacity to denaturalize “the normal” in the patriarchal worlds of Nušić and Držić, the cross-gender technique brings about new meanings, some of which may even have eluded the creators of the analyzed performances.

Female Prospero: Analysis of Change of Gender in Julie Taymor’s the Tempest (2010)

Julie Taymor’s cross-gender casting is neither new nor shocking in any sense since this choice of change in Prospero’s gender can be seen in theatrical productions produced before Taymor’s movie. F...

Shakespeare's Feminist History Plays: The Case of Henry V and Queen Margaret

Two recent productions of Shakespeare's history plays in England were held up in the press as exemplars of 'feminist' Shakespeare performance: Jeanie O'Hare's conflation of the three Henry VI plays, Queen Margaret, and a production of Henry V that absorbed Katherine's role into that of the Dauphin, transforming King Henry's bride-to-be into a soldier. This article highlights three ways in which O'Hare and Elizabeth Freestone, who directed both productions, reshape their female characters against Shakespeare's text: through their compression of the 'public' and 'private' spaces in the plays; through their erasure of feminized styles of speech; and through cross-gender casting. I argue that each of these methods suggests a conservative understanding of the potential roles of women in history and in history plays, and the performances thereby reinforced the stereotype that there is no place for women in the plays as written. I suggest that this stereotype is untrue, and that O'Hare and Freestone's choices flatten and reduce rather than enhance the avenues of feminine involvement in the plays. Their choices suggest that mainstream feminist performance of Shakespeare has yet to keep pace with recent feminist scholarship, which increasingly recognizes the unique and essential contributions such characters make to the history plays in spite of their limited stage time.

Hamlet by Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by: Hamletby Shakespeare's Globe Michael J. Collins HamletPresented at Shakespeare's Globe, London. 04 25- 08 26, 2018. Directed by Federay Holmes and Elle While. Designed by Ellan Parry. Music composed by James Maloney and directed by Adrian Woodward. Choreography by Sian Williams. Fights directed by Yarit Dor. With Catrin Aaron (Horatio), James Garnon (Claudius), Colin Hurley (Ghost/Grave-digger/Player), Bettrys Jones (Laertes/Player), Richard Katz (Polonius/Priest), Jack Laskey (Francisco/Player/Fortinbras), Nadia Nadarajah (Guildenstern), Pearce Quigley (Rosencrantz), Shubham Saraf (Ophelia/Osric), Helen Schlesinger (Gertrude), Michelle Terry (Hamlet), and Tanika Yearwood (Marcellus/Reynaldo/Player). Michelle Terry's Hamlet, her first production as Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe, seemed designed not simply to reflect the recent [End Page 691]change in leadership, but to reverse certain practices of her predecessor. Emma Rice, who served for two years as Artistic Director, resigned at the end of the 2017 season because the Globe's board found her productions, marked by strong directorial concepts and employing contemporary sound and lighting techniques, at odds with the organization's central tenets. At the start of her Twelfth Nightin 2017, for example, the cast on the SS Unity, prior to the shipwreck, sang along with a recording of Sister Sledge's We are Familyas they danced up and down a gangplank that extended diagonally from the balcony to the stage. Hamlet, on the other hand, was played throughout on an entirely bare stage. The balcony was used primarily for a brass ensemble that appeared intermittently during the production to provide sound effects (flourishes at the King's entrance, for example). No stairs led from the stage to the yard, as is often the case at the Globe, and thus no exits and entrances were made through it and no action took place in it. Although two directors were credited in the program, the production was shaped by the actors and the creative team working openly (members of the Globe staff and visiting students attended the rehearsals) and collaboratively over ten weeks on both Hamletand As You Like It, in an attempt to replicate, in contemporary terms, the rehearsal process of Shakespeare's company. As Elle While described it in the program, "the worlds of the plays have evolved out of our interaction with each other and the texts. The task has then been to develop the threads that tie our ideas together." With only twelve actors, equally divided between male and female, some cross-gender casting was not just inevitable, but a deliberate choice. Hamlet, Horatio, and Laertes were played by women. Guildenstern was also played by a woman who is Deaf: she signed her lines with Rosen-crantz acting as her interpreter. Gertrude and Hamlet also communicated with Guildenstern through British Sign Language. Ophelia was played by a young man and Rosencrantz by a man who looked old enough to be Hamlet's father. While imagination, as Theseus reminds us ( A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.209), must always to some degree amend what it encounters on the stage, the production, in an admirable attempt to embrace diversity in its casting across age, gender, and disability, went further than most in challenging literal renditions of characters and lines. The discrepancy in height between the diminutive female actor who played Laertes and the tall, thin male actor who played Ophelia led to some unintentional comedy (and laughter from the audience), as did Laertes's reference to Ophelia's "chaste treasure" (1.3.30). The King, following the script in [End Page 692]3.4.250, called "Ho, Guildenstern" through the door on the right to bring Guildenstern on to the stage, although Guildenstern would have been unable to hear him. The gray-bearded Rosencrantz did not in any way suggest that he was, as Claudius puts it, "neighbored" to Hamlet's youth (2.2.12). Perhaps the point of the casting was not simply to provide a new way for the actors to replicate the conditions of Shakespeare's theater, but also to extend this replication to an audience watching an ensemble of actors performing a play. The production, for the most part, let much of...

Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction

Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction Christine Mok (bio) and Aimee Bahng (bio) Gods are crumbling somewhere, Machines are rumbling somewhere, Ways are being found, Watches being wound, Prophets being crowned Somewhere out there, not here. Here we plant rice. —Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Pacific Overtures We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. —José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia Theatergoers who took their seats in the Winter Garden Theatre on January 11, 1976, to watch the premiere of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Pacific Overtures found themselves in the dawn of a new era, plunged into the geopolitics of an earlier Asian-Pacific arena.1 The musical dramatizes Commodore Matthew Perry’s mission in 1853 to open trade relations with isolationist Japan, the closed “Floating World,” through good old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy. Constructed as metatheater to reframe this transpacific encounter of how the West forcibly opened the East, Pacific Overtures is a queer mix of Orientalist theatricality and postcolonial critique as Sondheim and Weidman metaphorically turned the gunboats on the audience. While the kabuki-inflected production, directed by Harold Prince, with an all-Asian ensemble and cross-gender casting, provided a familiar exotic spectacle of the Orient, the musical [End Page 1] stages a critique of British and U.S. imperialism, by situating audience members with the Japanese. To experience narratively and sonically the inevitability of empire, commerce, and “progress” must have been particularly resonant for that 1976 audience, with Vietnam and other Asian theaters of war (including those formerly colonized by Japan) fresh on their minds. Furthermore, following this staging of the “opening” of Japan’s economic markets, Japan would lead a global acceleration into finance capitalism, threatening to overtake the United States as the most dominant force in the international futures and exchange markets. Even with the waning of Japan’s tiger economy as its Lost Decade extended, by way of ecological disasters (natural and man-made), into a lost generation, and because of China’s rapid ascendance in global capitalism, anxieties over Asian imminence have metastasized. Fast-forward to the longue durée of the 2016 election year, when the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a speculative trade agreement of Pacific Rim countries, excluding China, became a hot-potato/hot-button issue, the very emblem that sutured “the end of the Asian Century” to “make America great again.” We now find ourselves the stunned spectators of another spectacle, on the brink, perhaps, of the “closing” of the United States. It is the dawn of Trump’s America, a few days after an election that revealed for some, and substantiated for others, that racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, hatred, and fear are alive and well. Knowing that you, our readers, will be reading this special issue during another dawn of Trump’s America, shortly after the inauguration in January 2017, we revisit the draft of this introduction. We revise as many gather in cities and college campuses across the nation to exercise their right to protest. We write as fellow Asian Americanists remind our students and the general populace that waves of fear can and do separate people based upon race and that we have seen this happen before. Even as we turn in on ourselves as a nation, whether to protect broken hearts and bodies inundated by the rise in hate crimes and overt racism, to affirm the divisiveness depicted in the electoral maps, or enact a new nationalist stance over previous centuries of globalisms, we write to you in twilight, about possibility. Possibility persists, even as projection falters. Yet another moment has come to pass when statistical speculations—even founder of fivethirtyeight.com Nate Silver’s models that showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning to be less outright—failed to predict these outcomes. Among the contributing factors to such extrapolative errors may be a lurking, under-reported, and complex cluster of resentments embedded in subcutaneous strata of the American voting populace. White supremacy, antielitism, misogyny, xenophobia: these may very well constitute the most formidable [End Page 2] presentations of those frustrations, and they are all variables that belie easy accounting...

Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology by Laura Monrós-Gaspar

Reviewed by: Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology by Laura Monrós-Gaspar Elizabeth Wellman Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology. By Laura Monrós-Gaspar. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. iv + 298 pp. $112 hardcover. Laura Monrós-Gaspar's annotated text is a welcome addition to the few published collections on Victorian burlesque, including those compiled by Richard W. Schoch, W. D. Adams, and by the Historical Libretto Series. To date, it is also the only one of its kind focused exclusively on Victorian classical burlesques—that is, theatrical travesties rooted in classical Greek and Roman texts and Victorian sensibilities. As Monrós-Gaspar argues in the first section, classical burlesques moved between classical and Victorian mythologies and are, therefore, best understood "en masse" rather than as "solitary cases, exemplify[ing] … the social correlation of collective imaginaries and articular cultural and social realities" (8). The frequent use of topical humor may have immediately assigned these texts an expiration date in the public imagination, but considered as a larger body of work, Victorian classical burlesques offer a complex picture of cultural anxieties and ideological warfare. The four plays in this collection cover a wide range of political and cultural topics under hot debate in Victorian England. The author's significant focus on gender, though resisting any overessentialized reading of these burlesques as overtly political or revolutionary, also demonstrates that [End Page 351] "the ambivalence of the politics of burlesque with regard to women gives voice to transgressive moulds which remained concealed in other cultural representations" (12). The book is divided into five parts. The first section, "Why Classical Burlesque?: Enacting the Past and Present," offers important historical context for the popularity of classical work on the Victorian burlesque stage and the inherent familiarity audiences had for classical mythology and themes. This section also outlines Monrós-Gaspar's major justifications for the particular burlesque selections included in this anthology. The texts chosen were first staged between 1845 and 1859, the time in which classical burlesques experienced their greatest level of popularity. These texts also exhibit the key conventions of Victorian classical burlesque, many of which characterize other burlesques in the same period, as well as twentieth-century burlesque practices, including the use of dance, physical comedy, metatheatricality, parodies of famous classical passages, heightened theatricality and spectacle, and, as the author quotes Schoch, "traffic … in topical allusions" (9). The following four sections each include a play accompanied by detailed annotations of sociohistorical commentary, including performance history, topical references, and slang. Situating each script in conversation with its particular historical production history is, in some ways, this anthology's greatest contribution to the field. In Edward L. Blanchard's Antigone Travestie, Sophocles's Antigone is retold in a shortened, parodic form that, most significantly, juxtaposes the familiar mythology with ruminations on the "Woman Question" as it permeated Victorian culture. Blanchard's Antigone, for example, intones a rhyming couplet: "Oh, silly belle, your language is a fiction/The diction of our sex is Contra-diction" (66). The annotation of this playtext reminds us that, to further complicate a reading of gender politics in this production, Antigone was played by the male actor George Wild. The second play in this collection, Alcestis, the Original Strong-Minded Woman, by Francis Talfourd, builds upon Euripides's version of the myth. In the burlesque, Alcestis regrets having ever married Admetus, who is "such a milksop" and looks forward to her trip to the Underworld (112). As the annotation notes, "strong-minded" operated as a Victorian shorthand for a "type" of woman—spinsterly and professionally independent. The third play, Robert Brough's Medea, or, the Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband, is of particular note for the cross-gender casting in its premiere: Orpheus and Jason were played by two female actors and Medea by a male actor. The stage directions and allusions to circus entertainment in this script would also be especially interesting to scholars of popular entertainment stagecraft. The fourth and final play is Francis Talfourd's Electra in a New Electric [End Page 352] Light, which refashions Sophocles's Electra in the figurative glow of the newly minted electric light technology with which...

Antonio’s (Happy) Ending: Queer Closure in All-Male Twelfth Night

Antonio’s (Happy) Ending:Queer Closure in All-Male Twelfth Night Chad Allen Thomas (bio) It is more or less common knowledge, popularized by John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love, that in Shakespeare’s time male actors played female roles because women were forbidden from appearing on the public stage. Young men (called “boy-actors”) played romantic ingénues, such as Juliet, whereas mature male actors played comic roles and older women, such as Juliet’s Nurse and Lady Capulet. Whatever the historical context, and whatever response these performances elicited from their original audiences, the tradition of the “transvestite stage” (male actors playing female roles) has helped make early modern plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries compelling for scholars of early modern sexuality.1 Shortly after the start of the English Civil War in 1642, Parliament closed the theaters and banned public stage plays altogether; however, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II lifted the restriction against women on the public stage, and cross-gender casting quickly became more or less an antiquated practice in the professional theater. Certainly cross-gender casting remained common enough at all-boys and all-girls schools, and even resurfaced on the professional stage as part of British pantomime in the nineteenth century, but the practice was regarded mostly as a relic of days past. In fact, when Ben Greet directed a professional all-male production of As You Like It at the Central London YMCA in 1920—the first such production in 250 years—he explicitly sought to reconstruct the historical past by capitalizing on the premise of recuperating original stage practices.2 After Greet, the next professional all-male production of Shakespeare did not occur for another forty-seven years; however, it broke with Greet’s proposition that historical re-creation was the main reason to present [End Page 221] an all-male production. The National Theatre’s all-male As You Like It (Clifford Williams, 1967) toured across Europe and the United States to great acclaim, extolling “the infinite beauty of Man in love—which lies at the very heart of As You Like It.”3 In Williams’s production, “Man in love” is a metaphor for humanity in a spiritually transcendental state, and he argues that the Forest of Arden is akin to heaven on earth, a place that “transcends sensuality in the search for poetic sexuality.”4 Yet Williams staunchly rejected the notion that his casting of men in women’s roles in this romantic comedy might be affirmative of homosexuality; of course, this is not surprising as Gay Liberation would not start in earnest until 1969. Instead, Williams insisted that his production embodied Jan Kott’s idea of “eroticism free from the limitations of the body…a dream of love free from the limitations of sex. It is for this reason that I employ a male cast, so that we shall not—entranced by the surface reality—miss the interior truth.”5 Even though Williams’s production represents a shift from cross-gendered casting as historical recreation to all-male casts in a modern, conceptual context, it nonetheless seems more aligned with the performative traditions of Panto and was lauded chiefly for its comedic effect. For example, in one of his early roles, Anthony Hopkins as Audrey yodeled and sported a blond wig styled in a big bouffant. More recently, however, a return to the practice of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare has taken place, challenging our modern sensibilities, especially in regard to staging erotic possibility, sexual identity, and gender fluidity. As I argue elsewhere, this movement began in the 1970s at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow (or Citz), which reintroduced cross-gender casting as one of several radical aesthetics of performance in an all-male production of Hamlet (Giles Havergal, 1970). Throughout the 1970s, the Citz presented many cross-gender cast productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which, I argue elsewhere, were performed frequently within the context of the Gay Liberation movement. A few years later, in 1991, Declan Donnellan’s company Cheek by Jowl presented an all-male As You Like It that shared in the Citz’s interest in gay male culture, but...

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

Anxious Audiences and the Early Modern English Transvestite Theatre

Anxious Audiences and the Early Modern English Transvestite Theatre Robert I. Lublin (bio) Intersecting the interests of theatre historians, New Historicists, and feminist scholars, the early modern English convention of having boys play the women's roles has proven a compelling subject of analysis, drawing considerable attention over the last thirty years. Despite the broad range of methodologies employed to address the issue, one aspect of cross-gender casting has not been fully considered: the importance of audiences. This is significant because our understanding of the convention during the early modern period is tightly connected to the practice of spectatorship. To begin with, extant historical responses by those who attended the theatre inform our notion of how cross-gender casting was understood at the time. Additionally, along more theoretical lines, audiences, in the act of engaging the convention, helped to construct its meaning. Within theatre studies, we needn't invoke Barthes's notion of the "death of the author" to acknowledge the importance of audiences to the making of meaning in a performance.1 I plan briefly to survey the responses to cross-gender casting that came out of the period. Then, I wish to reflect upon the nature of the available evidence to consider the range of arguments it supports. Finally, I hope to consider how audience responses shaped the experience of cross-gender casting when it was employed in performances of early modern English drama. Despite the extraordinary amount of recent scholarship devoted to the topic, the practice of having boys play the women's roles actually elicited very little commentary at the time. In his book Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, Andrew Gurr attempts to record all of the significant comments on the theatre that survive from the period. Among the wide variety of references to playgoing Gurr has unearthed, discussion (or even mention) [End Page 66] of the ubiquitous practice of having boys play the women's parts is almost conspicuously absent.2 That stated, the convention did elicit responses, rather strong ones, from a particular demographic: individuals who found the practice opprobrious. Antitheatrical writers published a number of tracts during the early modern period that attacked the institution of theatre, and some of them specifically mention the iniquity of transvestite drama in the theatrical enterprise. The primary members of this group are Stephen Gosson, John Rainoldes, and William Prynne.3 The commentaries these writers offer on the theatrical practice of cross-gender casting are not identical, but share the general opinion that the convention breaks with religious orthodoxy and inappropriately inspires lust in the observer. Gosson, for instance, in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), first invokes the argument from Deuteronomy (22:5), which states that men who put on the apparel of women are an abomination to the Lord. He takes this further by arguing that, if merely wearing a woman's apparel is damnable, how much worse is the actor who puts on "not the apparrell onely, but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman?"4 In Th' Overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), Dr. John Rainoldes, a leading Oxford divine, argues that having boys play the part of women inspires sexual desire in the audience. "The appareil of wemen is a great provocation of men to lust and leacherie . . . A womans garment beeing put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the rememberance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stirr up the desire."5 Dressed as a woman, a male actor stirs up lust by provoking the audience's imagination and memory of a woman. Rainoldes further asserts that the spectator experiences homoerotic lust for the boy beneath the apparel: "an effeminate stage-player, while he faineth love, imprinteth wounds of love."6 William Prynne, in Histriomastix (1633), expands upon the fear that cross-dressed boys would elicit homoerotic desire: "players and play-haunters in their secret conclaves play the sodomites; together with some modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamored with players' boys thus clad in woman's apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them."7 Taken...

Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece (review)

Reviewed by: Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece Jason E. Cohen Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece. By Elizabeth Klett. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp x + 208. $80 (cloth). Elizabeth Klett's Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity considers the impact of women performing central male roles in Shakespearean productions across a recent decade (1995-2004) of English theatre. This trim package of six chapters includes an appendix of production details, and taken together, it provides teaching faculty or students of theatre with an introduction to recent concerns relating to cross-gender casting and performance. It will supplement contemporary assessments of gender, nationality, class, and race on stage. Klett's insights about cross-cast performance are sensitive first to the power dynamics of characterizing women as powerful and motivated men, and second to news media and scholarly reactions to these English experiments in gendered representation. Klett's argument expands on her discussion of all-female productions at the Globe in James Bulman's 2008 edited volume, Shakespeare Re-dressed (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), which situates cross-dressed and cross-gendered casting variously across contemporary performance and political categories. While the current volume remains in conversation with Bulman's collection, [End Page 485] the extended treatment Klett offers in Cross-Gender Shakespeare exchanges the breadth of Bulman's volume for a critique focused on what Klett sees as the "androgynous" double-gendering of cross-cast female bodies. This book extracts an iconoclastic reading of body politics from conservative male performance and scholarly traditions: that is, by casting women in central male roles, Klett maintains, these performances challenge an understanding of Shakespearean works that associates them with male hegemony, and moreover, disrupts a narrow vision of the avenues open for theatrical innovation on the English stage. Her project is at its best in describing and reviewing the stage productions it studies; unfortunately, the monograph at times lacks the nuance to convincingly develop its twinned central claim that cross-gender casting disrupts the assumption of a continuous English national identity, and, in addition, questions the canonical authority of Shakespearean performance in English stage traditions. The six chapters in Cross-Gender Shakespeare treat each of Shakespeare's dramatic genres: after an introduction, four individual chapters are devoted to discussions of, respectively, Fiona Shaw's title role in Richard II, Kathryn Hunter's in King Lear, Vanessa Redgrave's Prospero in The Tempest, and Dawn French's Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the volume concludes with a combined discussion of all-female casting in the Globe Theatre's Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Richard III. The analysis, like the chapter structure, situates these performances within the discrete theatrical contexts provided first by gender switching in the central role, and second, by the scholarly traditions associated with interpreting and performing those characters. One wonders why Cross-Gender Shakespeare, given its substantial investment in the politics and ontology of visual representation, lacks production or promotional images from these recent productions as they could supply readers with visual points of descriptive and analytical reference. In addition, when Klett broaches the provocative thesis that recent Shakespearean theatre reflects a fragmented and postcolonial moment in the construction of British national identity, she falls short of establishing a broader historical or social context for her claims about the contemporary implications of Shakespearean productions. The book is nevertheless buoyed up by insightful discussions of cross-casting, including topics such as cross-dressing, androgyny, textual and performative citation, and homoerotic desire. Klett's introductory chapter explores the implications of "wearing the codpiece" (2) as the literal and figural practice of female-to-male cross-gender casting. Cross-Gender Shakespeare finds its theoretical points of reference initially in Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity, and secondarily in Benedict Anderson's articulation of national identity as an imagined community. Klett's strongest assertion uses androgyny to link cross-casting to the "the simultaneous presence of both [male and female] gender identities" rather than to "the lack of sexed characteristics" (11). At times, Klett's formulation remains unclear about the distinction between physical androgyny and a conceptual androgyny represented...

Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance Deirdre O’Rourke Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. Edited by James C. Bulman. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008; pp. 255. $52.50 cloth. Inspired scholarship, the unearthed remains of Elizabethan playhouses, and Gwyneth Paltrow in breeches, have not quenched the desire to recreate the experience of Shakespeare’s theatre. In Shakespeare Re-Dressed, James Bulman offers a collection of essays that take a fresh look at one aspect of the Elizabethan theatre experience: cross-dressing. While the authors discuss early modern conventions, their primary emphasis is on the implications of cross-dressing in contemporary Shakespearean productions. The eleven essays, which explore contemporary cross-gender casting, cover both male and female cross-dressing, US and British productions, unisex and mixed-sex casts, actors’ processes, and audience reception. The greatest strength of Shakespeare Re-Dressed lies in the points of intersection between the pieces that reveal conflicting and complementary perspectives on its subject. In the volume’s first essay, Jennifer Drouin uses contemporary understandings of cross-dressing to complicate the convention in Shakespeare’s plays. She attempts to distinguish between “cross-dressing, drag, and passing” and the slippages between them, both within the fictive worlds of Shakespeare’s dramas and their reception in production. Although the lines between the three remain blurred despite Drouin’s attempts to clarify them, the discoveries she makes in the process are revelatory and useful. Roberta Barker’s essay “Acting Against the Rules” engages existing scholarship on the eroticism of the “boy actress.” She contends that “only in a situation in which both actors and audiences risk losing detachment by participating in a theatrical cross-dressing that they recognize as an active part of their own world could we truly remember the erotic significance of the Shakespearean boy actress” (70). For Barker, this situation is created not by the reconstructed Globe’s all-male performances or Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It, but rather by an all-male school production of As You Like It that she attended. Bulman follows Barker’s essay with the first of two contributions to the volume, this one focusing on Cheek by Jowl’s production in 1991 of As You Like It in which he outs the production’s queer agenda. Bulman’s analysis of the production’s victimization of the flamboyant Jaques reveals that the interpretation was intended as commentary on the violent homophobia prevalent during Thatcherism. Orlando’s simultaneous embrace of his feelings for both Rosalind and Ganymede, coupled with Jaques’s queering, illuminated the production’s queer agenda, which, Bulman argues, led to the “queering of the audience as well” (88). Although audiences were probably unaware of their queering, Bulman’s insightful application of queer theory to contemporary all-male productions is intriguing. In his analysis of the same production of As You Like It, Cary Mazer argues for cross-dressing as a means of inviting audiences into the theatricality of gender. Like Drouin, Mazer distinguishes among types of cross-dressing by putting the camp of Charles Busch’s Psycho Beach Party in conversation with Cheek by Jowl’s cross-dressed performances. Drawing on Rhonda Blair’s work on cross-dressing, Mazer argues that actors who embrace the “not me” and the “not-not-me” of their characters allow audiences a double vision that is not only pleasurable, but also questions gender essentialism. [End Page 139] P. A. Skantze’s and Andrew James Hartley’s pieces both analyze selectively cross-gendered productions. Skantze examines Mabou Mines’s Lear, which boasted a mixed-gender cast, cross-gender roles—including a female Lear—and cross-dressed characters. Skantze’s project is to tease out the implications of this gender play, its interaction with race, and its impact on the universality of Shakespeare’s plays. Skantze argues that Mabou Mines’s production choices disrupt the supposed universals of Shakespeare’s King Lear by focusing the narrative on a particular woman. Skantze’s response to Mabou Mines’s work reveals the possibilities opened up by subverting the universal Shakespeare. Hartley’s work as dramaturg for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s The Tempest informs...

Elisabeth (review)

Reviewed by: Elisabeth Alisa C. Roost Elisabeth. Music by Sylvester Levay. Book and lyrics by Michael Kunze. Originally adapted and directed by Koike Shuichiro. Snow Company, Takarazuka Revue Company. Takarazuka Grand Theatre, Takarazuka, Japan. 5 June 2007. Takarazuka Revue Company performs musical revues and Western-style musicals with all-female casts for predominately female audiences. With five different companies, ten shows a week at a permanent house outside of Osaka that seats over 2,000, a second theatre in Tokyo, tours throughout the country, and occasional international performances, the group is a commercial and cultural phenomenon: performing to over 2.5 million people a year, it has also inspired a video game, several anime series, and a number of YouTube clips. In a country where the mass culture of digital entertainment and manga (comic books) dominates the youth scene and traditional culture is revered but rarely attended, Takarazuka has a unique niche, appealing primarily to young women through fairly conventional live theatre productions. Unlike the all-male kabuki and noh theatres, Takarazuka has little recognition outside of Japan. The companies perform various styles, from Broadway shows like West Side Story to a musical adaptation of War and Peace, to Las Vegas–style dance revues, to all-women kabuki/noh pastiches. Elisabeth, a German musical with music by Sylvester Levay and book and lyrics by Michael Kunze, is a plot-driven show with little character development mostly in the English-language style of sung-through mega-musicals, with many reprises of catchy songs. Elisabeth has been in Takarazuka's repertoire, with only minor costume changes, for over a decade. It amalgamates numerous theatrical and popular traditions and demonstrates a somewhat unusual approach to cross-dressing that focuses on women's strength while eschewing sexualized objectification. The production additionally evokes many elements of youth culture, including rock concerts, manga, and anime. Unselfconsciously theatrical and almost completely earnest, it employs myriad commercial techniques (manipulating the amplification levels; large-scale, repeated use of stage fog; hydraulic lifts toward heaven; and obviously mechanical manipulation of scenery) with only a single hint of the irony or pastiche that seems so common in many Western musicals today. An epic tale based on the life of Elisabeth of Bavaria, the show begins as her murderer—an anarchist—is undergoing a trial in purgatory. Claiming that Elisabeth (Yuri Shirahane) and Death (Natsuki Mizu) always loved each other, the anarchist stages Elisabeth's life as his defense. Throughout her life, Elisabeth and Death continually flirt with mutual love. Toward the end of her life that attraction becomes overwhelming; at one point, Elisabeth finally asks Death to take her, but Death refuses, wanting not just her life but an affirmation of her love. This only happens after the murder, as the couple transcends toward heaven, dressed all in white on a hydraulic platform evoking, Cats-like, a tire with the requisite fog and lights. While originally written for both male and female performers, the Takarazuka production of Elisabeth subverts Western expectations about the sexualized nature of cross-dressing. While men wrote the original show and adapted and directed it for the Takarazuka Revue Company, Elisabeth employs crossgender casting without the familiar objectification of women for a presumably male viewer: the company portrayed male roles in a passionate, dramatically committed, and esthetically minimal style by altos in tailored but not tight clothes (the performers of male roles are known as otokoyaku), while sopranos in skirts portrayed women (musumeyaku). The musumeyaku dancers freely wore skimpy outfits; there was no need to hide any voyeuristic elements under the guise of cross-dressing. The makeup and wigs emphasized European facial characteristics, but all the women had a strong "feminine" style. No stubble, facial hair (with the exception of one mustache), or lines tried to trick the eye; close-up photos demonstrate that the male characters clearly are played by conventionally "attractive" women, although a willing suspension of disbelief worked to make the male characters believable. The representation of Death seemed inspired by manga and anime: black leather, high boots, long blond hair turning green at the edges, green lips, and intricate embellishments along one hand. Death generally read as an effeminate male character, but sometimes...