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The Great Divide.

Author: ADAM FELDMAN
Date: Summer 1999
From: The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review(Vol. 6, Issue 3)
Publisher: The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
Document Type: Theater review
Length: 1,108 words

Full Text:
THE so-called "rock musical" has always been an unwieldy concoction. Broadway purists have trouble reconciling the blunt posturing
of rock music with the narrative demands of a Broadway show; rock fans reject Broadway as phony, self-conscious, and dull. Lushly
orchestrated and earnestly sung by musical theater professionals, "rock musicals" have never quite managed to shake their
unsettling kinship with Muzak.

The originality of Hedwig and the Angry inch is its recognition of the structural incompatibility that exists within the term "rock
musical"; its master stroke is in transforming this incompatibility into the thematics of the show itself. Enormously entertaining, with a
raucously melodic rock score, Hedwig is also unusually ambitious. Its subject is no less than the divided self, which it explores with
unblinking bravery and wit.

Hedwig kicked off its run at Off-Broadway's Jane Street Theater in February, 1998, but the title character had been gestating for
years. John Cameron Mitchell debuted as Hedwig in 1994 at New York's Squeezebox--a weekly oasis of gay rock 'n' roll--fronting for
Cheater, the house band led by Stephen Trask. In expanding the show to its current form, Mitchell and Trask have cannily maintained
the basic format of the earlier incarnation: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, on its surface, is simply a live performance by the Hedwig
character. The show thus elides the suddenly-we-break-into-song artifice that's anathema to rock's ethic of straightforwardness.

Hedwig herself is a cross, as one critic put it, between Ziggy Stardust and Marlene Dietrich, an "internationally ignored song stylist"
with a punk rock edge. Between songs, she tells us about her life: her youth as Hansel, a neglected "girlyboy" in East Berlin, listening
to American rock music on the radio and dreaming of escape; Hansel's sexual initiation at the hands of Luther, an American GI; and,
fatefully, Hansel's decision to undergo a sex-change operation at the urging of his mother and Luther. The operation was botched,
leaving him with a one-inch mound of flesh--a "Barbie-doll crotch," and the "angry inch" of the title--and Hansel became Hedwig.
Before long, Luther was gone and Hedwig was living in a Kansas trailer park, baby-sitting and turning occasional tricks.

In a song called "The Origin of Love," Hedwig recounts her mother's version of an argument from Plato's Symposium. Many years
ago, according to this myth, people had two faces, four arms, and four legs, but the angry gods divided these early creatures in half.
Now men and women, trying to regain that primordial wholeness, must find their complements for union. In Kansas, Hedwig found the
person she knew to be her missing half: Tommy Speck, an awkward, pockmarked teenage boy. Together, they reinvented him as the
rock star Tommy Gnosis and he became a huge success--abandoning her in the process. Now, coincidentally, Tommy Gnosis is
playing a huge stadium show right across the river from where Hedwig is performing, and through the side door we can occasionally
hear the roar of his crowd.

Hedwig is backed on-stage by a band called The Angry Inch, and joined by her husband/manager Yitzhak, from whom she is
"inseparable." The bearded and surly Yitzhak, we learn, is an aspiring drag queen, but Hedwig, hardened by her loss of Tommy, has
vengefully insisted that Yitzhak give up drag to be with her. Of course, even this is not as simple as it seems: Yitzhak is played by a
female actor.

The Symposium story resonates deeply throughout the play. Hedwig' s operation has left her with genitalia that are neither fish nor
fowl, and her mutilated anatomy introduces a new category to the either/or binarism of gender politics: neither/both. Whom can she fit
with now? Hedwig, as she puts it, exists "in the divide between East and West, Slavery and Freedom, Man and Woman, Top and
Bottom." To this list we might add "Musical Theater and Rock." Hedwig cannot quite be the sentimental heroine of the Broad way
musical, and her "angry inch" is a constant reproach to the priapic obsessions of "cock rock." Yet inasmuch as Hedwig is not just less
but "more than a woman or a man," she is able to blur and transcend the boundaries of both genres.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show starred a rock 'n' roll drag queen too, but that show's considerable energies were channeled mainly
into camp satire. For all its bawdy humor ("It wasn't a conventional wedding-when Luther popped the question, I believe I was on my
knees"), Hedwig is a more serious work. Despite her superficial resemblance to the current mold of fiercely "empowered" drag-queen
super-divas, Hedwig is not self-sufficient. Beneath the feathered wig and leather miniskirt, she radiates pain and anger without irony,
and her sexual philosophy has more to do with sacrifice than control: the isolated self, born in fission, dies gloriously in fusion.
Hedwig is not merely about gender-fucking; it's about making love.

The play's themes explode to climactic life in the blistering "Exquisite Corpse." Writhing in Dionysian frenzy, Hedwig abandons herself
and becomes mesmerizingly, ferociously vulnerable. She strips off her trappings, and she flips her wig. Of course, the triumphant
tearing off of the wig has long been a feature of drag performance, but here it is enacted not as the dramatic unveiling of the drag
queen's artifice but as a spontaneous, "integrated" character moment. So powerful is the gesture, in fact, that it disrupts the formal
integrity of the play itself: suddenly, Hedwig is not Hedwig but Tommy Gnosis, performing in front of his stadium, with new lighting
and sound to enforce the change. The cabaret musical we have been watching rips off its wig and becomes--a rock show. But in that
very gesture, paradoxically, it breaks with the formal seamlessness of rock shows and becomes--a musical.

At the end of Tommy's number--a reprise of the gorgeous "Wicked Little Town"-we are back to Hedwig, or perhaps to Hansel.
Wigless, nearly naked, with tomato breasts squashed flat against his chest, he is achingly human. (It is in this scene that John
Cameron Mitchell is most sorely missed as Hedwig; his replacement in the role, the capable Michael Cerveris, has a less wounded,
less wounding presence.) Realizing that he has no choice but to follow his destiny with Tommy Gnosis, he sets Yitzhak free. Hedwig
and the Angry Inch does not provide answers about gender so much as it makes the questions moot. Hedwig/Hansel's final number,
"Midnight Radio," ends with a repeated invocation: "Lift up your hands." It is a gesture of celebration and of surrender, and it is
Hedwig' s fitting epitaph.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Jane Street Theater, New York Music and Lyrics by Stephen Trask Book by John Cameron Mitchell

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

http://www.glreview.org/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
FELDMAN, ADAM. "The Great Divide." The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, vol. 6, no. 3, summer 1999, p. 67. Gale Literature
Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A55220431/LitRC?u=concordi_main&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=dcdd88f7. Accessed
26 Dec. 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A55220431