Gender-Bending Idea Gone Wrong

The recent article on the Women’s Shakespeare Company, which limits all roles and production crew to women, correctly notes that in Shakespeare’s day all stage roles were played by men, but doesn’t tell us why (“It’s Women’s Turn to Be or Not to Be,” Calendar, April 22).

As noted in the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre and the Oxford Companion to the Theatre, female impersonation has a long cultural history dating to early European and Asian religious cults, in which women were forbidden to perform. Early Greek and Roman theater observed the convention of having males portray females--even Nero was said to have acted the role of an incestuous sister in mime drama.

Men dressing as women was a tradition of pagan and medieval festivals such as Saturnalia, Feast of Fools and New Year’s. Men playing women was observed as normal in Europe into the 17th Century, and into the 20th in Asia, especially in Chinese opera and Japanese Kabuki drama, which banished women from the stage for fear of provoking wantonness.

Except for amateur roles in morality dramas in the medieval era, such as portraying Eve in the Garden of Eden, it was not until the 16th Century that women first appeared as professional actresses in commedia dell’arte troupes in Italy and somewhat later in France. Charles II of England had seen women portraying women in Europe and brought the custom with him when he was restored to the English throne in 1660, after the English civil war. The first woman to act on the London stage played Desdemona in Shakespeare’s “Othello” on Dec. 8, 1660, and thereafter, women were regularly seen playing female roles.

Even after the Restoration, however, men continued to take roles of comic female characters, called “dame” parts, from the English pantomime of the 18th Century and 19th Century to plays on the modern American stage (“Charley’s Aunt”) and films (“Some Like It Hot”), in which cross-dressing or being “in drag” is the main plot device. That term, which originally compared the train of a gown to the drag or brake on a coach, entered theatrical parlance around 1870.

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During World War II, all-male “drag” reviews were popular in the armed forces. Female impersonation was later exalted in such clubs as Finocchios and La Cage aux Folles, in films such as “The Rocky Horror Show” and “La Cage,” by troupes such as Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, and in the androgyny of rock musicians such as Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Boy George.

Some ballets have female impersonator roles, such as the evil witch in “Sleeping Beauty,” the sisters in “Cinderella” and the mother in “La Fille Malgarde,” all of which have a comic aspect. The audience always knows that the performer is a man dressed as a woman, and that is part of the fun.

Male impersonation by females, on the other hand, has had little sanction from either ancient religion or folk tradition and has usually been condemned by society. During the 17th Century, when women were first seen on the London stage, actresses were frequently dressed in men’s garb--knee-breeches--to show off their legs; Samuel Pepys noted in his diary of such a performer, “She had the best legs that I ever saw, and I was well pleased by it.”

These “breeches” roles continued through the early 20th Century in the English music hall (“Burlington Bertie From Bow”) and in English and American theater, with women playing children or adolescents (“Peter Pan”), but not mature males. They were thus non-sexual or sexually ambiguous.

“Breeches” roles are still common in opera as a relic of 18th-Century castrato singing and an effort to supply a certain vocal balance.

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After World War I, with its radical changes in both dress and culture, the theater saw much more sexually explicit, unambiguous cross-dressing; for example, Marlene Dietrich in her tuxedo conveyed a clear lesbian image.

Women have long been cast in certain male Shakespearean roles, such as children, or the young princes, or as Puck or Ariel, who are sexually ambiguous characters. And I have seen current productions in which male roles have been changed to female for the sake of diversity, at Shakespeare’s expense.

But convincingly portraying a mature male has proven elusive. Sarah Bernhardt essayed Hamlet; one critic said she lacked only the buttons to her flies, while another said she was tres grand dame. Judith Anderson also made the experiment. The problem is that the audience never believes that the woman performer is really a man; its attention is concentrated on the technique of how well the woman portrays a man, rather than on the substance of the play itself, again at Shakespeare’s expense.

To have men play the females roles, as in the 16th Century, deprived those audiences of seeing realism and true feminine attributes on the stage.

To revert to that antiquated, but reversed, situation in which women play the male roles is certainly not theatrical progress.