Before I Disappear
Productions like Victor/Victoria, Tony ‘n’ Tony’s Wedding, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom rely on camp and burlesque traditions for their box-office appeal. Whatever political subtext may pulse beneath the sometimes brutal wit and careful excess of drag storytelling, these shows usually feel more like romps than revolutions. Somehow, knowing that there are really a man’s wide feet in those size-12 pumps makes everyone but those on the far right feel safe. And if it’s Julie Andrews, of course everyone can rest easy–it’s just a game. It may be a queer game, but it’s a game nonetheless.
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Bailiwick’s Before I Disappear, directed by Mary C. Beidler, raises the political stakes of drag even farther, disrupting more subtly than Blakk’s street theater or Nomenil’s shock-style fragmentation. Writer-performer Alexandra Billings, literally a self-made woman, has recast her life as musical theater, thereby confronting her hometown audience with an entertaining and disturbing paradigm shift. Her dream of performing conventional musical theater has twisted itself into testimony as a transsexual woman that reflects the increasing flexibility of gender in contemporary theater and daily life. The show’s power comes from Billings’s ability to reflect maleness, femaleness, and multiple combinations of masculinity and femininity, finally morphing into a hybrid gender with a theatrical integrity of her own.
Billings’s talk-show-host character, for example, grins with an inane rictus that combines Sally Jessy Raphael’s perky therapist pose with Ricki Lake’s earnest banality. This character rips into the unbelievably naive Billings, who thinks she’s been invited on the show simply to talk about overcoming addiction, exposing her transgender status and repeatedly dismissing our heroine’s complicated life as a symptom of “what’s wrong with society today.” This scene effectively shifts the audience’s attention to its own socially conditioned internal monologue, which for radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike can be reduced to one question: “Is this a man or a woman?”
Finally Scott becomes Alexandra, the narrator and brassy singer we’ve come to think of as the central self in the play. Alexandra walks without the exaggerated hip glide of a man playing a woman; she leans her shoulders back and leads with her breasts, small but beautiful beneath her silk shirt. She relaxes her body in a way Scott could never do. And yet when the light hits her face at a certain angle, she looks like a handsome young man. Then she shifts, giving her head a slight tilt to become seductive in a womanly way again.
But Billings is no circus oddity either. She creates a stage self that defies even the most sophisticated categories we use to contain our fear of difference. She is herself, and more than herself–a remarkable performer I’d like to see in more conventional roles. Her gender misfit could be our theatrical blessing.
