BLOG

Engendering Genders

Posted by DCA Theater on February 8, 2012 in January - July 2012 Season, Incubator Series: Vintage Theater Collective

Submitted by Kristin Idaszak, Playwright currently working with Vintage Theater Collective on Lion on the Cheesegrater in the DCA Theater Incubator Series

As I’ve spent the past few days feverishly working on a new draft of Lion on the Cheesegrater, Sarah and the ensemble have been diligently exploring the environment and the physical world of the play. Our ensemble is composed of eight women, all of whom will be playing both men and women. On Saturday the cast did a reading of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and found connections between the original play and our reimagining, and then we dove into the tropes of noir headfirst.

The hardboiled writer James Ellroy called noir “The Secret Pervert Republic,” and goes onto write (in his introduction to The Best American Noir of the Century): 

“The thrill of noir is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titilliation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption. The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.
The inhabitants of the Secret Pervert Republic are a gas. Their intransigence and psychopathy are delightful. They relentlessly pursue the score, big and small. They only succeed at a horrific cost that renders it all futile. They are wildly delusional and possessed of verbal flair. Their overall job description is “grandiose lowlife.” […] A twisted professionalism defines all strata of the Secret Pervert Republic. The society grants women a unique power to seduce and destroy. A six-week chronology from first kiss to gas chamber is common in noir.”

We spent all day in rehearsal Sunday exploring the physicality of masculinity and maleness, finding a range of hyper-alpha males to more effeminate, beta males. The actors all brought in their best “guy” outfit, most borrowed from their partners or friends, and we tried to unpack the physiological differences between our own bodies and the bodies of these men. The ten of us (the actors plus our director Sarah and myself) run a gamut on the spectrum of how femininely we present ourselves, but we all noticed that the more we try to present as male the more femaleness we notice in ourselves. By the end of the day we had some pretty convincing gangsters, and had also started having the larger conversation about why we’re gender bending in this production.

It’s an important question. I’m deeply interested in mining the assumptions we make about maleness and femaleness, and the way those forces interact with each other. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata explicitly forefronts that interaction in a way that few other Greek plays do, which makes the gender bending feel very appropriate for this story. The Greek comedy was originally performed by all men, and it is exciting to overturn—or at least subvert—our original understanding of the source material. Conflating this with the genre of noir, where that clash between masculinity and femininity is similarly perilous and pivotal to the story, also helps illuminate our assumptions about power structures and gender dynamics.

Last night we immersed ourself in that sultry, sinful world of the femme fatale—for whom sex is a weapon and everyone she encounters is a potential conquest. Everything is heightened and dangerous for the femme fatale, who is running from an unsavory past. Her hardened exterior belies a previous powerlessness. As we explored extreme feminine physicality, all of these things came out, but mostly we were blown away by the palpable—almost overpowering—sexuality we discovered in these characters.

As Ellroy knowingly points out, “Noir will never die—it’s too dementedly funny not to flourish in the heads of hip writers who wish they could time-trip to 1948 and live postwar malaise and psychoses. The young and feckless will inhabit the Secret Pervert Republic, reinvent it, wring it dry, and reinvent it all over again.”