Hedwig in Upland, and the Backlash of Identity Politics

A World of Walls
BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

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Janelle Kester, Michael Davanzo and Sean Alexander Bart in HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, presented by Ophelia’s Jump Theatre (Photo by Beatrice Casagran)

When playwright/performer John Cameron Mitchell and composer/lyricist Stephen Trask’s glam-rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered off-Broadway in 1998 (before heading to Broadway, around the world, and into an indie film that Mitchell directed), it was a different century and a different world. It was the world of Lou Reed and Davie Bowie taking walks on the wild side, taking an eraser to the once fortified wall between the masculine and the feminine.

A revival production of the play is currently being staged at Ophelia’s Jump Theatre in Upland, through April 14.

Girly-boy Hedwig Robinson, née Hansel (Michael Davanzo), grew up in East Germany before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, before East melded into West, Communism into Capitalism, North into South, Male into Female.

It’s not a long story, but to make it shorter, Hedwig fled East Germany with an American GI named Luther, who requested/demanded that Hedwig become a she in order to be with him in the U.S. After a botched sex-change operation, Hedwig was left with one “angry inch” and was eventually dumped by Luther in a Kansas trailer park to pay her bills by prostituting herself. There, Hedwig also turned to composing and singing music, met a balladeer named Tommy Gnosis, née Speck. They fell in love, they split up. Tommy rose to superstardom on the power of songs written by and stolen from Hedwig. Tommy claimed throughout his meteoric rise that he (Tommy), and he alone, was responsible for his own success.

Of course, this cruelly ignores Hedwig’s contributions to Tommy’s career and, though such heartless ambition is a showbiz trope, it nonetheless foreshadows our Age of Narcissism.

Now on the margins (Hedwig describes herself as an “internationally ignored song-stylist barely standing before you”), and abusing her Croatian husband, Yitzhak (Janelle Kester) — whose dream of being a drag artist Hedwig perpetually stifles — Hedwig and Yitzhak exist somewhere between genders, shadowing Tommy’s sold-out concerts while doing one-night stands in studio theaters such as Ophelia’s Jump in Upland — itself in a mall just beyond the Los Angeles County line.

How do we know all this?

Hedwig tells us.

With the exception of occasional scenes with Yitzhak, Hedwig is a one-person show of sardonic, satirical autobiography and commentary, with songs (sung pleasingly by Davanzo) in styles ranging from punk to pop to R&B, accompanied by a stellar backup band (“The Angry Inch”) led by music director Sean Alexander Bart on keyboard, with Zak Ryan on drums, Jay Hemphill on bass; and Alec de Kervor on guitar, with vocals shared by Kester.

This is the second consecutive production (in the company’s seventh season) that grapples with themes of gender and power, coming on the heels of its solid, February production of David Ives’s Venus in Fur.

It’s a vivacious show, in Caitlin Lopez’s interactive staging. Davanzo’s Hedwig leaps in and out of the audience, attired in the requisite denim vest and hot pants, and almost electric boots. Her wig is pure glam, as is the coral glitter eye-shadow (costume and hair by Kester, make-up by Dani Bustamante). What Davanzo lacks in physical dexterity, he makes up for in vocal prowess, while Kester’s Yitzhak, in a quasi-satirical style, embodies the quiet rage and pathos of suffocated ambition.

It would be too broad a sweep to say Hedwig is now a boisterous relic for the disenfranchised, though it does now traffic in the nostalgia of its more compassionate era. Even if it is a saga of abject cruelty, it mocks that cruelty, as it mocks itself, as Hedwig mocks herself. It spares us the untethered dogmatism of our times.

A Tale of Two Eras

In 1998, when gender-bent Hedwig was starting to accrue its cult following, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Golden Boy were making the regional theater rounds, giving voice to an Asian-American set of experiences. August Wilson’s plays were bringing a perspective from black America to national stages, while Tony Kushner’s “gay fantasia on national themes,” Angels in America, had rocked the theater world internationally and was five years away from being broadcast in an HBO mini-series.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum’s founding artistic director Gordon Davidson had established a series of in-house Asian, black, Latino, and disabled-person laboratories for the development of new work.

In 1998, “identity politics” meant weaving people into the American quilt. Today, in a kind of backlash, that same term has come to mean keeping people out.

“Our country is full,” the U.S. president recently pronounced. Enough said.

You could see the portending of things-to-come in 2005, when the Taper’s new artistic director Michael Ritchie banished Davidson’s labs from the Taper facility. Ritchie was not alone. By the time Ritchie made his decision, Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory had already dismantled its Hispanic Playwrights Project. Across the region, the employment of artists working in extended residencies inside our institutional theaters (while interacting with various ethnic communities in order to build new alliances, and new artistic works) was being outsourced — a financial efficiency. Tiny local theaters such as, in Los Angeles, Playwrights Arena, and the Celebration and Skylight theaters, could take up (or continue) the more inclusive mantle of identity politics. The larger theaters’ fiscal efficiency argument masked the larger, lost point of community engagement inherent in such in-house programs.

True, both Center Theatre Group and South Coast Repertory have since invited a handful of local companies to appear on their stages, in fleeting festivals, where the local community, or communities, can be represented. And though it’s better to have outreach programs such as CTG’s Block Party than not to have them, in the larger context, the change of era marks a downgrade of artists who used to work inside the theaters on a kind of artistic Green Card, now to be invited sporadically on temporary work visas.

The eviction of ethnic laboratories was one tiny symptom of a tectonic cultural shift in the making, then bubbling beneath the tides of our consciousness. This shift was propelled in part by what was then a nascent social media, wooing readers into tribes of the “like” minded. Then came right-of-center monetary policies leading to growing financial inequities, arts funding cuts, and other eroding opportunities for swaths of people (from artists to automobile assembly workers) accompanied internationally by rising waves of nativism, tribalism and intolerance.

And here we are in 2019. One tribe inside the United States wants to build a physical wall ostensibly to keep out Guatemalan, Honduran and Venezuelan families who have found life in their native countries financially insupportable and physically dangerous. In Great Britain, one tribe wants to sever as many ties with the European Union as possible. Each of these tribes, along with their many opposing tribes, countenances almost no compromise to their increasingly strident positions. To paraphrase W. B. Yeats, the center is not holding. 

In the Washington Post, Ian Dunt (editor of politics.co.uk) writes on Brexit:

“How is a country [the UK] that was once famed for its moderation, stability and practical judgment turning into a political abattoir?

“The answer is identity politics. Brexit is a right-wing culture war conducted in populist terms. It is not really about the E.U. It is about people’s sense of who they are. It is about wanting a world of walls, separating people and ideas and political structures from one another. But it is not just a desired outcome: By now, it is also a way of doing things. The Brexit mind-set does not compromise or accept caveats. It is politics in primary colors. There is victory or national slavery, and nothing in between.”

In 2019, Hedwig speaks to and for a tribe still aching to be woven into the American fabric, even if other tribes are now apathetic or even hostile.

And the musical has one insight that now reaches beyond the constraints of identity politics, and for that alone, it may emerge as a kind of classic.

Hedwig frequently opens a stage door, through which booms Tommy’s voice praising himself — “Me! Me! Me!” while the crowd roars its reverberating approval. Hedwig then slams the door shut, and the stage goes silent.

Gender politics aside, fame aside, Hedwig is our theater, mutilated and abandoned, fighting for its identity, its relevance, weaving tall tales from the margins, aiming to thread those fictions into larger truths that ennoble audiences. Meanwhile, our theater has to endure the indignity of working in the looming shadow of politics, which gleefully traffics in fictions that degrade us all. Politics now grabs the spotlight yelling, “Me! Me! Me!” as the crowd roars. And with that, it seems, there is no competing for attention. At least not for a while. Unless and until the world returns to a more empathetic view of justice.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH | Text by JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL, Music and Lyrics by STEPHEN TRASK | Presented by Ophelia’s Jump Theatre | 2009 Porterfield Way, Suite H, Upland | Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; through April 14 | (909) 734-6565 | www.opheliasjump.org | Performance runs 90 minutes without intermission