Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy

Sawyer K. Kemp

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 19, Number 4, Fall 2019,
pp. 265-283 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0047

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/765326

[ Access provided at 22 Nov 2020 06:24 GMT from University Of Nevada @ Las Vegas ]
 Transgender Shakespeare Performance:
A Holistic Dramaturgy

sawyer k. kemp

abstract

Shakespeare’s plays have long been viewed as a space where the boundaries of binary gendered
sex, sexuality, and desire become murky. However, the contemporary social justice call for
trans/gender-­inclusivity has been ambivalently integrated into standing conventions of the
Shakespeare theater. This essay close reads reviews and advertising materials to argue that con-
temporary Shakespeare performance is space in which a public makes meaning of gender non-
conformism; as such, it is vital for performance institutions to become self-­aware of their role in
potential education or misrecognition. Recent productions at the African-­American Shake-
speare Company, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and the California Shakespeare Theater offer
examples of complex and holistic strategies for engaging transgender themes through staging,
casting, and outreach programming.

5
These are the axes:
1
Bodies are inherently valid
2
Remember death
3
Be ugly
4
Know beauty
5
It is complicated

the journal for early modern cultural studies

vol. 19, no. 4 (fall 2019) © 2020

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 266 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  19:4

6
Empathy
7
Choice
8
Reconstruct, reify
9
Respect, negotiate
—Mark Aguhar1

Bodies are inherently valid

A lthough many theaters have backstage tours and opening night supersti­-
tions, perhaps no space in the contemporary theater is as highly coveted
or as strictly ritualized as the house bathroom. The typical theatrical event
involves an implicit regulation of the body and bodily functions. The regula-
tion is fairly straightforward: once the play begins, the body must remain
seated until intermission. Free movement, including use of the bathroom,
may not occur until the approximately fifteen (sometimes as few as ten) min-
utes allotted for intermission, after which bodily autonomy is again ceded to
the play until the event is over. With few exceptions, control of the body is
given over to the theater by the implicit consent of the audience. Moreover,
the regulation is primarily enforced by the audience itself: we get annoyed if a
neighbor needs to walk over us to leave the seats, or blocks our view by stand-
ing up to leave. It is at once a normalized and extremely rigid (indeed, to-­the-­
minute) scheduling of the body’s movement through space.
Even when the policies governing the space strive for inclusivity, that
accessibility can be practically unenforceable. As Penelope Woods reminds us
in her discussion of gendered spectatorship at the Blackfriar’s Playhouse,
“Space is rarely if ever ‘empty’ but always negotiated through its cultural and
social signifiers” (152). Rather, the body is often put to the project of trying to
exist in the right space.2 The Stratford Festival, for instance, has two gender-­
neutral bathrooms in the lobby of its main festival stage, but these are also the
theater’s disability-­friendly bathrooms. The rest of the gendered bathrooms
are removed down a flight of stairs, which means that a majority of the the-
ater’s older patrons—a not insignificant proportion of their audiences—wait

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 267

in a haphazard, forking line for the disabled/gender neutral bathrooms.

When the potential “accessibility” that a gender-­neutral restroom signifies for
the transgender body is folded into a catch-­all fix for any bodily exceptional-
ism, as we see here, it creates antagonism between the non-­disabled trans
body and non-­trans disabled bodies. The body is trying to exist in the correct
space, but from the perspective of the other members of the line, they appear
to be taking away accessibility from the disabled or elderly.
If the theater has long been functionally obsessed with restroom usage,
this fixation prefigures a contemporary spike in U.S. social and political
debates around legislation that also desires rigorous bodily control. In early
2016, a number of “bathroom bills” were introduced to regulate (and limit) the
bathrooms available to trans and gender-­nonconforming citizens. The Public
Facilities Privacy & Security Act, the lightning rod piece of transgender bath-
room legislation passed in March of 2016 by North Carolina, generated signif-
icant media attention for stipulating that a person must use the restroom
that specifically corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate.3 Shortly
after the bill was passed, Asheville’s Montford Park Players (“North Caroli-
na’s Longest Running Shakespeare Festival”) posted the following announce-
ment to the front page of their website:

We in Asheville have a long tradition of being welcoming toward all. You

may have read about recent legislation that inhibits the rights of individu-
als. Please know that the Montford Park Players rejects discrimination in
any form, and will provide you with a welcoming, affirming atmosphere
during your stay. #WeAreNotThis. We are humans, we are people, we are
citizens, we are family. We Are United For Equality.4

In Montford Park, Shakespeareans were motivated by a specific proximity to

a political situation that called for action, but transgender discrimination
and legislation should be of interest to all Shakespearean theaters and critics.
This article makes a case for a presentist methodology in Shakespeare criti-
cism and performance: a methodology that puts contemporary trans social
issues at the center of early modern trans studies, a methodology that unapolo-
getically and necessarily embraces the contemporary, the personal, the affec-
tive, and the positional. By embracing a transhistorical and presentist lens,
trans studies can make visible the cisnormative assumptions about trans and

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proto-­trans identities that underpin the way Shakespeare is studied and

­performed and highlight modes of critique and performance that push back
at these norms.
This disciplinary intervention anticipates an audience compulsion to inter-
polate the contemporary Shakespeare theater into a role of epistemological
production, but also strives to sharpen the critical tools with which we
approach Shakespeare’s texts to cohere with the strategies trans scholars,
activists, and communities have pioneered. We need more dynamic tools for
investigating and representing the figure of trans as both a passing and non-
passing entity, a person who may be either dysphoric or coherent, a body that
may be content or at odds with itself, a body that may be an object of desire or
ridicule. A wider range of narratives and images can serve us better as both
producers and critics of theater, and is made possible by a more robust under-
standing of the stakes for contemporary trans discourse. In the tradition of
Jack Halberstam’s “perverse presentism,” in which he argues for a model of
analysis that “can apply insights from the present to the conundrums of the
past” (52–53) or Madhavi Menon’s unapologetically presentist “queer Shakes,”
which “asks us to think of queerness as a phenomenon out of time” (19–22), I
argue that there is a value in evaluating these gender categories and our use of
them by our contemporary understanding of the label.
This methodology is in part inspired by watching Shakespeare audiences
themselves. With or without the theater’s implicit encouragement, the repre-
sentation of gender-­nonconforming behaviors and characters that is intrinsic
to so many of Shakespeare’s plays means that patrons do read the “transgen-
der” onto and into Shakespeare when they bring their knowledge of contempo-
rary gender discourse to the theater. In a review of the 2013 Oregon Shakespeare
Festival production of Cymbeline, one critic wrote of Dawn-­Lyen Gardner, who
played Imogen:

Lovely in face and figure, Gardner perhaps didn’t carry her part as well as
she might have. Given her slightness, she may not have been the right
physical type to carry off this transgendered role, but she could have
played up the incongruity more . . . [T]here was no real attempt to show
her transformation from coquette to hunter/soldier—a missed opportu-
nity, as it would have been fun to see her struggle more with becoming a
boy, if only to highlight one of the play’s major themes: how concealment
and disguise lead to transformation. (Schaefer 5)

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 269

Even with incomplete or limited knowledge of the rhetoric she is invoking,

and with no support or provocation from the playbill materials, Schaefer
describes Imogen’s travelling disguise as evidence of the “transgendered”
nature of the role itself.5 Although the reviewer’s relationship to trans narra-
tive is one of casual consumption—writing that “it would be fun to see” what
she considers a transgender person “struggle more”—within the idea that
such a “transformation” would necessarily also contain the marks of “becom-
ing” is a desire for greater realism. Schaefer’s comment suggests that there is a
lack of verisimilitude between Imogen’s easy cross-­dressing and familiar
media narratives of transition. Even alongside Schaefer’s imperfect knowledge
about transgender identity is her awareness that this representation is itself
imperfect. Schaefer’s impulse is both to bring the contemporary rhetoric of
trans studies to answer questions raised by the situated comedy of cross-­
dressing presented in the play, but also to bring the scenario seen in the play
to the questions raised by increasing cultural awareness around transgender
advocacy.
A similar misidentification occurred at a talkback during the run of OSF’s
2015 Much Ado About Nothing, in which female actor Regan Linton played
Don John. At the talkback, a considerable portion of the audience members
called the character and the casting “transgendered,” even though the role was
played as female, with Benedick referring to his “sister.” Other audience mem-
bers also commented on Christiana Clark, the actor playing Beatrice, and one
patron asked if she was a dancer because she moved “so gracefully, even though
she was so tall” (emphasis original, and the comment was repeated by the speaker
multiple times). While this remark definitively plays into gender norms of
femininity and acceptable size, the audience member’s surprise that Clark,
who is black, would move gracefully also betrays a misogynoir conflation of
size, race, and unfemininity.6 From the audience’s perspective, neither of these
actors was the “expected” casting choice for the roles because of the specific
intersections of their gender(s) with the expectations of the part.
This collapse of gender roles and gendered roles—of cross-­gendered parts,
cross-­gendered casting, and contemporary transgender gender identity—is
a feature, not a bug, of Shakespearean performance that is a result of the
theater’s own ambivalence about transgender bodies. In that same season’s
production of Pericles, the bawd was played by a male actor in drag. If director
Joseph Haj was attempting to recapture some of the humor that Shakespeare
might have intended for his boy actors in this scene, it loses this winking

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self-­awareness when the ingenue Marina is not also played by a male actor.
Instead, this casting decision echoes a media trope that uses transfemininity
as synonymous with villainy, changing the effect of Marina’s line “Are you a
woman?” into a seemingly cruel joke. From a theater whose mission is explic-
itly about diversity and inclusion, this line reading seems unexamined. Indeed,
a web of gendered juxtapositions takes place around this particular set of
performances.
Across OSF’s patio from the intimate Thomas Theater where a man in a
dress gets laughs for being a man in a dress, Much Ado’s Beatrice takes the
stage in the Bowmer Theater, where her most devastating line, “Oh that I
were a man, I would eat his heart in the marketplace” (4.1.1956–57), rings loud.
These performances are sandwiched between OSF’s 2014 Two Gents and 2016
Twelfth Night. Do representations of transition in the cross-­dressing plays val-
idate or invalidate the Pericles joke? Do they validate or invalidate Beatrice,
who bewails her gendered limitations? Does the Pericles joke validate or inval-
idate the OSF initiative, completed in 2015, to have a gender-­neutral restroom
in all its theaters? There is a failure in continuity between mission statement
and praxis, and sometimes between plays within the same theater.7 The prom-
ise of inclusivity is jarring, since it is both tantalizing and patronizing. OSF as
an institution attempts to send a message, but the effort is undercut by this
central transphobic joke that says trans people are funny, men dressed as
women are funny, and the commitment to accessibility and inclusivity is only
valid until a director really, really needs to make a man-­in-­dress joke—in
which case, why bother having a gender-­neutral restroom at all? The political
ramifications of which particular door a fraction of your audience enters to
quickly pee during intermission is probably low on the agenda for many the-
aters, but it does provide a frame for exactly this issue: a schism in the logic of
the theater, perhaps facilitated by the uncritical assumption that because it
hosts a canonical representation of queerness and gender noncomformity, it is
necessarily a progressive and inclusive space.
These are moments when it is clear that a presentist attention to real trans
lives can offer a valuable dimension to readings of Shakespeare’s work with
real-­world consequences. As Gay McAuley writes, “Theatre is a place where
fiction and reality come together to problematize each other” (127). To see this
productive problematization, I turn to three gender-­diverse casting decisions
that offer interesting modes of critique for Shakespearean trans studies.
These are not meant to be perfect models, but rather heuristic modes of taking

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 271

the temperature on the feedback loop between Shakespeare producers and

their audiences.

Remember Death

This article continues work in which I have argued for the importance of
incorporating contemporary trans perspectives in queer Shakespeare analy-
sis, and the value of identity-­specific perspective to potential early modern
trans studies.8 I have argued previously that the collision of trans studies with
the legacy of transvestism as an object of Shakespeare criticism is one that
requires careful differentiation and would benefit from more explicit atten-
tion to the material realities of transgender people. This is not to displace the
valuable readings of gender nonconformity performed by cis scholars, many
of whom have produced critically important works of allyship. But these read-
ings exist alongside, and sometimes embedded within, painful and exclusive
rhetoric that risks alienating those it would encompass. Take, for example,
Carla Freccero’s use of scare quotes around the name and male pronouns of
Brandon Teena when she uses Teena’s story as an object of analysis in Queer/
Early/Modern. Freccero explains in her notes to the chapter:

I put “Brandon Teena” in scare quotes because part of what is at stake in

the story is the way the proper name is linked to gender and also because
the person in question used several proper names. As C. Jacob Hale
notes, “Insistence on ‘Brandon Teena’ produces a representation of some-
one more solidly grounded in gendered social ontology than the subject
(recon)figured by that name actually might have been.” (132, n.7)

Although I share Freccero’s impulse to resist overly simplistic ontologies of

gender and concur that Brandon Teena’s gender is/was more complex than
anyone (except the now-­deceased Teena) could possibly unspool, the use of
scare quotes directly participates in the conservative grammars of transphobia
that continue to dog transgender and gender-­nonconforming people in media
representation.
Freccero’s intention was clearly to use quotation marks to unsettle too-­
eager co-­option of Brandon Teena, and to signal through her demarcated
“Brandon Teena” the larger assemblage of “event and person,” of media,
affect, and identities of becoming rather than a single fixed person. It is a fair

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 272 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  19:4

assumption that Freccero simply did not know that scare quotes or verbal air
quotes were already familiar tools in the lexicon of delegitimizing gender
identification—indeed, tools for ironic mockery that haunt trans obituaries.9
The use of scare quotes around pronouns and chosen names is such a common
and familiar marker of discriminatory media bias that it specifically appears
in the GLAAD media style guide (next to a big red exclamation point, no
less). GLAAD writes: “It is never appropriate to put quotation marks around
either a transgender person’s chosen name or the pronoun that reflects that
person’s gender identity” (23). The difference between scare quotes and out-
right deadnaming or misgendering is one of scale but not of kind—its func-
tion as a tool of transphobia is to suggest that the name or pronoun is in some
way deceptive. Scare quoting intentionally draws attention and suspicion by
suggesting ironic and dismissive distance between that which is said and that
which is meant.

Be Ugly
Know Beauty

The ubiquity of this scare-quoting punctuation as the calling card of garden

variety transphobia is an unfortunate haunting of Freccero’s attempt at figur-
ing spectral identity. In devotion to preserving historicity, Freccero has
allowed the text to participate in contemporary rhetorics of transphobia that
will pass unnoticed to most cis readers—except, of course, to those for whom
it will seem a clear dog whistle. Freccero’s scare quotes are like OSF’s male
bawd: they signify a deference to the historical at the expense of contempo-
rary trans people. I critique this oversight not to make a scapegoat nor a straw
man of Freccero, but to suggest that increasing transgender participation in
early modern criticism is not a neoliberal inclusivity quota, but rather a form
of self-­awareness that can have real impact on the types of work scholars are
able to do. Until critics and scholars make a shift from using trans and gender-­
nonconforming people as abstract tools of literary inquiry to prioritizing
meaningfully giving voice to this diverse set of experiences, the ways in which
we perform epistemology will continue to be fundamentally transphobic.
Some performances of Shakespeare are beginning to grapple with these
material realities. Messages like Montford Park’s “#WeAreNotThis . . . We
are family” suggests that Shakespeare theaters are increasingly aware of their
role in making comprehensive meaning of transgender bodies and lives. This

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 273

is a mark of a specifically post-­Trumpian political era, one in which national

scale anti-­trans rhetoric, legislation, and executive orders have made transgen-
der issues more visible than ever before through primetime news coverage.
Infusing Shakespeare’s texts with contemporary political meaning is fre-
quently to elicit investment from the audience. Former OSF artistic director
Libby Appel, for example, says, “It’s essential that we use Shakespeare’s plays
to reflect on our lives now,” and her successor Bill Rauch suggests, “We at the
Oregon Shakespeare Festival are committed to Shakespeare the populist”
(Appel and Rauch in Ney 18; 49). Among the kinds of “Shakespeares” Rauch
lists for their potential value, he includes “the Shakespeare whose work can be
mined for its political, class-­dissecting, psychological, philosophical, and spir-
itual insights.” As these and other directors suggest, the potential resonance
of the early modern material with contemporary issues is a way that theatrical
institutions construct the cultural value of Shakespeare. As such, the rise of
trans issues as a ready political context plays into the value-­consolidating
models of the Shakespeare industry described by Kate McLuskie and Kate
Rumbold in Cultural Value in Twenty-­First Century England. As they write,
“ ‘Shakespeare’ seems to require the institutions that bear his name to remove
obstacles . . . to full engagement with his work” (189), which increasingly
includes issues of gender equity. Shakespeare institutions can generate inter-
est and relevance by seeming to engage transgender sociopolitical themes—in
McLuskie and Rumbold’s terms, “They are in fact constituting that value by
constructing ‘Shakespeare’ as important, engaging and relevant” (190)—but,
in doing so, they must also grapple with what has been a history of transpho-
bic stage tropes that continues to be an unexamined cornerstone of comedy
and drama.

It is complicated

At the crux of interpreting cross-­gendered casting is the question of how and

what the actor’s body signifies. Roberta Barker uses Anthony Dawson’s argu-
ment that the actor’s body is “participant in, (rather than subject or agent of)
representation” (16; emphasis Barker’s) to show how the audience is an agent
in interpretation. However, as Dympna Callaghan (following Laura Mulvey)
shows, when an identity is represented on stage without participation in the
performance, they become unduly the “bearers, not the makers, of meaning”
(15). Callaghan specifically investigates the effect of this convention for early

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modern women but a similar situation is currently unfolding for trans peo-
ple—indeed, it evolved contiguously with the phenomenon of impersonation
that she describes. Professional Shakespeare theaters have been slow to cast
transgender actors—Oregon Shakespeare Festival hired their first trans-
gender actor in 2018, the same year that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
“Redefining Juliet” project cast its first ever transgender Juliet—despite a pro-
liferation of discussion of the merits and potential in cross-­gender casting and
cross-­dressing characters. In contemporary drama, the stage has been mar-
ginally better than television or film in its willingness to cast trans people in
transgender roles.10 Plays like Hir by New York performance artist Taylor
Mac have casting stipulations in the script, and Terri Power has written at
length about her play Drag King Richard III and the trans actors who have
played the title role. Although practices of cross-­gender casting and trans-­
inclusive casting both enact a project of accessibility by allowing more non-­
cismale actors to take up space on the stage, casting trans people in trans parts
seems to be a project of the realist emphasis on lived experience informing
craft, rather than the experimentalism that inspires cross-­gendered casting.
This suggests that the trans body is so overloaded with signifiers that we can-
not trust the audience to correctly interpret them (and, as a corollary, rein-
forces the idea that the cisgender body is a normative and blank canvas upon
which we can project gender diversity). In spite of which, cross-­gendered cast-
ing invariably gives rise to reviews and criticism that emphasize the androg-
yny or genderqueerness of the performance, as we saw with Schaeffer’s reading
of Gardner’s Imogen.
While male-­to-­female cross-­casting is used for comedic effect or to down-
play sexist violence, female-­to-­male drag is often endowed with a radical, rec-
lamatory significance. A reviewer for Chicago Shakespeare’s 2017 all-­female
Shrew, directed by Barbara Gaines, wrote, “The switch here to all women is a
smart one, since it allows the mostly independent women of 1919 to comment
on aspects of ‘Shrew’ many have found objectionable” (Lockwood 6). Simi-
larly, the all-­female production by New York City’s Public Theater drew the
comment that director Phyllida Lloyd “has proved herself a master of using
women to plumb the murk of manliness in Shakespeare” (Brantley 4). If the
reclamatory all-­female Taming of the Shrew has become something of a genre
trope for cross-­dressed Shakespeare, one wonders about the extent to which
this casting tactic is premised on expectations of binary gender as a mode of
producing critical distance in performance.

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 275

Empathy

Recent productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor provide insight into the
limits and potential of cross-­ gendered casting as a tool of reclamation.
Falstaff’s brief drag scene in act four textually offers us a uniquely relevant
visualization of transphobic violence, one in which Falstaff is physically and
verbally abused by Ford because of his failure to pass as a normative enough
woman. This comic moment in Merry Wives, when our self-­conscious and
discomforted Falstaff is beaten by an enraged Ford for being “a witch, a quean,
an old cozening quean!” (4.2.149) is almost too apt a representation of the
threat of physical violence which attends gender transgression. If we seek a
transtemporal resonance in Shakespeare, it is to be found here, when Ford
beats the “trans” body, is lightly reproved by Mistress Page (“Are you not
ashamed? I think you have killed the poor woman”) and then validated by Sir
Hugh Evans: “I think the ’oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a ’oman has
a great peard; I spy a great peard under his muffler,” a sort of trans panic
defense avant la lettre (4.2.164–65). The threat of physical and sexual violence
persists as a trope of trans representation in modern media, sometimes in ser-
vice of pathos but also as a comic bit exactly like Shakespeare’s. As a joke, the
gag relies on the idea that the transfeminine character is “really” a man and a
benefactor of traditionally masculine strength (often supernaturally so).
Compare Merry Wives to “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie New-
mar” where Patrick Swayze-­ as-­
drag queen knocks out the wife-­ beating
yokel—a hero move, but one that participates in this trope of preternaturally
strong transfeminity. More on the nose, in the episode “The Speech” of the
British office comedy “The IT Crowd,” the boss character “accidentally” dates
a transwoman for an episode. When the mistake is clarified, the two have a
tremendous fistfight which ends in him throwing her through a glass door—
which ends the fight, despite leaving few visible marks of harm. The humor in
these scenes relies on an audience belief in the transfeminine body’s ability to
withstand (and perhaps deserve) extreme violence. Merry Wives seems to pre-
figure this legacy of normalizing violence against trans (particularly transfem-
inine) bodies.
But curiously, a 2013 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the
African-­American Shakespeare Company and another from the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival in 2017 have cast a female actor in the role of Falstaff,
meaning that the old woman of Brentford scene becomes one of doubled drag,

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 276 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  19:4

or what trans people sometimes call “backpassing.” Backpassing of course

does not necessarily “solve” any issues—as Judith Butler would caution, there
is no prescriptive way to do gender, no “subvert gender in the way that I say,
and life will be good” (xxi). And yet, backpassed casting can have effects that
elide this kind of textually cross-­gendered performance. ACT’s 2012 Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream, for instance, cast a female actor in the role of Flute, but
had her perform a gliding liquids (R/W) speech impediment (so that “Pyra-
mus” became “Pewamus” and “love” “wuv”) thus removing some of the gen-
dered humor in the Pyramus and Thisbe play within a play by substituting
ablist humor for potentially transphobic gags.
But the Merry Wives casting coincidence is uncanny. In both productions,
only Falstaff is cast cross-­gendered, and one wonders if and how this is con-
nected to the Brentford scene. Backpassing seems to flag the cross-­dressing
scene, presenting viewers with a moment in which we are uncertain how to
read the layers of costume. The AASC production seemed intent on dragging
drag as the “Old Woman of Brentford” layer draped uncomfortably over actor
Belinda Sullivan’s Falstaff costume, with an oversized hat covering the face,
the brim nearly touching the inflated fat suit in places. The actor seemed to
swim within the layers of characters and genders. Sullivan’s Falstaff, who
already walks with a paunchy swagger, is now forced to waddle. The actor’s
loud moustache, polka-­dotted tie, and winking, grinning facial expressions
are, for a moment, subsumed by a huge muffler, as if the costumes (perhaps
the genders) were literally swallowing her up.
The emphasis remains altogether on the clothing, and on the construction
and hasty labor of Falstaff’s quick-­change self-­fashioning. The violence against
Falstaff is exaggerated to a comedic point. As the violent Page and Ford chase
the ungainly Falstaff, Mistress Page and Ford chase their husbands, and
Falstaff (as usual) chases the ladies. Eventually, Falstaff breaks free of the cir-
cle and the train splinters into many frantic directions as they shift into the
next scene. Perhaps casting a woman in the role of Falstaff lessens the impact
of what would otherwise seem to be a scene that signals transphobic violence,
but the accumulation of clothing signifiers suggests not just a gender anomaly
but also a performative awareness of that transphobic violence. The cross-­
dressing scene promises to be a truer rendering of a trans [-­ish] body because it
is a body that undergoes violence. The doubled drag both highlights the vio-
lence and attempts to insulate against it. In Roberta Barker’s gloss, “Comedy
offers a fantasy of escape from social constraints; tragedy enacts a fantasy of

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 277

entrapment that allows us to see those constraints and their effects more
clearly” (22). Perhaps by this definition, a city comedy like Merry Wives of
Windsor poses a fantastically escapist comedy situated between the history
plays that realize Falstaff’s death. Although the violence directed at Falstaff
by Page and Ford is precisely the result of societal constraints, the fantasy
(unrealized by the dozens of transwomen who are killed in the United States
every year) is to survive it.11

Choice

Falstaff’s doubled drag offers us a way to have it both ways in performance—

to visualize trans themes in a cross-­dressing scene without explicitly making
Falstaff into a trans character. The cross-­gendered casting in Pittsburgh Pub-
lic Theater’s 2019 production of The Tempest invites audiences to a more com-
plexly gendered space. Directed by Marya Sea Kaminski, the production is
billed on the PPT website as one “told from a female perspective” and
described by some critics as an “all-­female” production, despite the fact that
Rad Pereira, who played Ferdinand, identifies as nonbinary and genderfluid.
When asked whether they felt the so-­called “female perspective” was one they
identified with, Periera said, “I wouldn’t say I’m not ‘female,’ but I would say
I’m ‘not only female.’ I resonate with indigenous ideas of gender” (1). Their
response, triangulated through the intersection of both gender and race, mir-
rors some of their descriptions of the show’s thematic elements.

Marya said she hoped an all female cast would throw gender out the win-
dow. I also think our racial makeup, sort of allows race to also be thrown
out the window, since in a lot of ways it can be perceived as a story about
colonization. In my approach to this version, we are in a dreamworld
where there is a long reigning Queendom ruled by femmes of color, who
do not operate [sic] a culture of the western gender binary. (2)

Kaminski’s decision to cast Pereira as Ferdinand is generative and atypical. It

varies from casting a trans actor in a role like Rosalind, for example, because it
is not acting as a substitution for or explanation of Shakespeare’s crossdress-
ing plots. More significantly, it varies from the androgyny stunt casting we
have grown used to seeing with regard to The Tempest’s Ariel or Caliban, where
androgyny works as shorthand for “the Other,” a way to mark the island’s

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 278 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  19:4

inhabitants as distinct from the Italian castaways and, indeed, as distinct

from the Human. This shorthand as a form of societal casting mimics the
tendency that Ayanna Thompson notes in Passing Strange for directors to cast
black actors as one of the witches in Macbeth “because of the stereotype of
the ‘magical negro,’ a stereotypical, stock character employed in many genres
of contemporary popular culture, a figure who helps to save a white protago-
nist: a kind of negro ex machina” (78). Often, the “magical negro” and the
“Magical Drag Queen/Trans Person/Effeminate Gay/Queer Sexworker
With A Heart of Gold” stereotypes work hand in hand to save cis, white pro-
tagonists from themselves (Netflix’s 2018 film Dumplin’ is a recent and quint-
essential exemplar). Kaminski’s casting of The Tempest is specifically resistant
to these stereotypes. The attention to racial diversity in casting leads to a
cross-­cultural model that, as Pereira suggests, transposes the play’s setting to
an entirely different culture and location.12 Casting a genderfluid actor as one
of the play’s romantic leads creates the opportunity to engage contemporary
understandings of transgender identity outside of stereotypically acceptable
“uses” for androgyny. It allows a trans body to be the object of narrative (and
ostensibly, audience) desire. It allows a trans body to push against the gender
norms that are still embedded even within the reclamatory logos of an “all-­
female” production. But it is significant that Kaminski enacts diversity of gen-
der through a diversity of race. Pereira says, “Ferdinand is Ferdinand, accepted
in their homeland exactly as they are, which feels ancient and also futuristic.”
The value of a genderqueered Ferdinand is produced through the embedded
intersectionality of the production; it does not stand alone.

Reconstruct; Reify

Trans bodies need a right to take up space in the physical theater, to be com-
plex subjects of representation, and also to participate in the loop of conversa-
tion between performance and criticism, to participate in the meaning-­making
systems of gender, identity, and performance that the theater facilitates. This
involves a holistic attention to production design that permeates all parts of
the audience experience. A critical performance pedagogy in this respect is
effectively modeled by the California Shakespeare Festival’s 2017 As You Like
It. Director Desdemona Chiang’s production drew heavily on the Bay Area’s
queer history and community, and largely succeeded at presenting a unified
vision that invited trans and gender-­nonconforming people to the stage as well

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 279

as the table. CalShakes is known for its extensive community engagement

programming, in this case, working with Youth UpRising, a Bay Area non-
profit, to facilitate a story circle with cast, director, and members of the
LGBTQ youth program We OUT Here!:

Over food and stories, they met with self-­identified trans spectrum, gender-
queer, nonbinary, two spirit, gender non-­conforming, and gender-­expansive
youth to hear each other’s stories about gender journeys and their impact
on relationships, inviting a deeper investigation of the character of Rosalind
and her own journey. (13)

Poems, journal entries, and pieces of writing from these story circles were dis-
played in the plaza (an outdoor lobby space) as an exhibit called “Loving out-
side the binary.” Across the plaza, audiences were encouraged to bring their
own experiences to a pair of chalkboards that prompted “GENDER IS:” and
“LOVE IS:”—the day that I attended, the board displayed contributions like
“LOVE IS: Love” and “GENDER IS: Fake News.” If this participatory
approach to justice seems pat, consider that the chalkboards were only a few
steps from signs near the bathrooms that read: “We welcome gender diversity
here: please use the restroom that best fits your gender identity or expression.”
This lobby-­staging decision supported Chiang’s directing choices: the casting
call for Rosalind specifically invited genderqueer and nonconforming actors
to apply, and Chiang chose to eschew Rosalind’s “reveal” at the end of the play
in favor of a re-­entrance with the same casual butch Ganymede costume that
Orlando fell in love with. When taken holistically with the “front of house”
choices and outreach programming, we see a production that is willing to
engage with a trans community and use the privilege of the preeminent the-
ater to bring attention to ongoing social justice issues.
What makes this production accessible from a gender-­inclusivity perspec-
tive is the continuity across different pieces of the production. The casting call
specifically invited trans and gender-­nonconforming actors into the space; the
production made choices to present a modern and genderfluid Rosalind/Gan-
ymede; the lobby space and bathrooms were made accessible to nonbinary
patrons; the educational materials prepared for schools even discuss queer
homelessness under the section “Core Concepts of the Play.” The guide, pre-
pared by Trish Tillman and Alicia Coombes explains, “Often people with
perceived differences are forced to leave their birth homes or communities

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 280 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  19:4

because they are not accepted into that particular place,” and even links to an
activity about “Cultural Norms.” The effectiveness of this production relies
on its ability to use the entire extended theater space to make meaningful and
actionable connections among the text, the audience, and the community of
trans people who are not just invoked as part of the play’s concept, but are
clearly contributors and co-­creators in the performance event.

Respect, negotiate

None of these productions is singlehandedly the solution for casting reform,

nor is any one of them a complete model for transgender representation in
Shakespeare. Even as they offer seemingly more sensitive or productive exam-
ples of transgender inclusivity, these productions enact the process of generat-
ing and consolidating cultural value for Shakespeare that McLuskie and
Rumbold have criticized. Indeed, efforts like Chiang making Rosalind/Gany-
mede a queerly gendered character and an object of Orlando’s queer desire, or
Kaminski’s decision to stage a genderqueered Miranda/Ferdinand pairing,
anticipates Andy Kesson’s argument that Shakespeare forecloses queer possi-
bilities for his characters in order to consolidate that cultural value by creating
queer possibility through performance. Yet, these performances offer import-
ant and intentional variation. If Shakespeare continues to be a lens through
which audiences encounter gender diversity and look for transgender themes,
it is paramount that Shakespeare performance institutions become self-­aware
of their role in either potential education or misrecognition.
These productions attempt to facilitate the shift toward an awareness of
issues faced by the transgender community like homelessness and the threat
of physical violence, as we saw in the Merry Wives and As You Like It produc-
tions, or with the interplay of gender with race and nation that Pittsburgh
achieved with The Tempest. These examples also offer us equally crucial
efforts to begin actually incorporating trans-­identified actors into perfor-
mance to diversify the types of bodies presented as marked and unmarked,
romantic and tragic. To enact this at an institutional level will mean chang-
ing even the most fundamental and banal parts of casting. It may involve
reaching out to LGBT community centers rather than actor hubs or changing
the language we use in casting calls that reinforce the gender binary and type-­
casting. In the long term, it means consciously inviting trans-­identified creators

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 Kemp  • Transgender Shakespeare Performance 281

into the structural and decision-­making roles within the theater to begin top-­
down institutional change. Diversity and inclusivity are different goals—
inclusion necessitates agency in the act of creation.
The industry of Shakespeare performance offers us a holistic opportunity
to see an ecosystem in which gendered meaning is being actively constructed
in the moment of live performance. Even as a cultural understanding of how
Shakespeare is doing gender is informed by recursive, transhistorical, and cul-
turally enforced conceptions of a gender binary, audiences must make sense,
too, of hyper-­presentist ideologies of gender that ask them to be attentive to
contemporary activist and civil rights issues. Trans Shakespeare studies nec-
essarily will have to operate, like trans bodies do, in a mode of code switching.
Trans Shakespeare studies will have to be accountable to the gendered ideolo-
gies of the past as well as to the ideologies being crafted in the present.

notes
1. Mark Aguhar, also known by her popular Tumblr username CallOutQueen, was a
performance and visual artist whose work explored the dynamic relationships of beauty,
gender, race, and embodiment. Through her work, she stressed the importance of taking
up visible space: “My work is about visibility. My work is about the fact that I’m a gender-
queer person of color fat femme fag feminist and I don’t really know what to do with that
identity in this world. It’s that thing where you grew up learning to hate every aspect of
yourself and unlearning all that misery is really hard to do.” Aguhar died by suicide in
2012, after which selections from her Tumblr circulated in a memorial zine. For more on
Aguhar’s life and work, see Garza.
2. For more on the interplay of space, performance, and audience, see MacAuley.
3. HB2 originally stated that the birth certificate rule applies to government build-
ings, schools, and public facilities. HB2 was partially repealed in 2017, after economic boy-
cotts by various commercial and entertainment companies (most notably the NCAA),
although the bill still did not provide the necessary legal protection for trans people to use
restrooms matching their gender identity. In 2019, after a three-­year legal battle backed by
Lambda Legal, a federal judge signed an agreement affirming North Carolinians’ right to
restroom use congruent with gender identity in state-­owned facilities.
4. The announcement has since been removed from the Montford Park Players’ front
page but prior to its removal some time in 2017, it had been up for over a year.
5. “Transgendered” with the -­ed suffix is considered incorrect usage to refer to a trans-
gender person. Grammatically, this is because “transgender” is already the adjectival form,
but the seemingly past tense -­ed construction also suggests a before/after narrative that
the community has rejected. For a thorough discussion of the -­ed suffix, see Steinmetz.
6. We see shades here of what Wagner has described in her article within this issue as
the technology of race being deployed by a white gaze to delegitimize and ungender the
body it surveys.

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 282 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  19:4

7. See Thompson for a very thorough examination of this breakdown through the lens
of race in American theater.
8. For this earlier argument, see Kemp.
9. It is worth noting, too, that the reporter who “broke” Brandon Teena’s story has
since issued an apology for the way she presented her coverage; see Minkowitz.
10. Film and television representations of trans characters overwhelmingly cast cis
actors in the part—see Transamerica, Transparent, The Danish Girl, Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas
Buyers Club, The L Word, Three Generations.
11. The Human Rights Campaign has kept a running tally of fatal violence against the
trans community on their website since 2016. For statistics and descriptions, see Human
Rights Campaign.
12. Usage here follows Thompson in adopting the language set forth by the Alliance
for Inclusion in the Arts describing four models of racially inclusive casting.

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