Drag drops its edgy persona for the mainstream

Back in the ‘70s, Gloria Steinem famously saluted Bette Midler’s Carmen Miranda-ish performances for “giving drag back to women.” It was a short-lived return. The then-underground drag queens of Midler’s early years soon emerged, peopling bigger and bigger hits, from “Outrageous” and the French language “La Cage aux Folles” to such mainstream fare as “Victor, Victoria,” the musical “La Cage,” “Torch Song Trilogy,” “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” and “The Crying Game.”

Midler’s once campy female “drag,” her row of Rockette-like mermaids in wheelchairs, once again on view in her concert tour launched here earlier this month, is now tame stuff.

The once subversive, gender-threatening drag persona is not only omnipresent but, in its most lovable incarnation ever, in the Broadway musical “Hairspray,” is downright cuddly.

The character of Edna is drag queen as underdog turned arriviste, a Cinderella who goes from overweight, agoraphobic housewife to glamour puss, all to fawning audience approbation.

And unlike “La Cage,” a story about drag queens, with men dressed as women playing men who dress as women, “Hairspray” is about a woman played by a man. It’s not about drag; it is drag.

Girl, or guy, you’re everywhere: in “Hairspray”; in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’s all-male version of “Twelfth Night” that played UCLA in October, and the all-male trifecta, “Rose Rage,” through Jan. 18 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater; and in two New York stage shows, “I Am My Own Wife” on Broadway and “Lypsinka! As I Lay Lip-Synching” off.

Earlier this month, ceramist Grayson Perry, known for his transvestite appearances as Claire, won the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious nod to the visual arts.

Why so many now, and why does it all seem so safe, reassuring and, er, wholesome?

“I did ‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ twice,” notes Jamie Baron, referring to Charles Ludlam’s two-man drag obstacle course he performed in Chicago in 1987 and again last spring. “The difference was amazing. The edge and danger were gone. The second time, it was more like a Carol Burnett sketch than avant-garde theater.”

“Drag and other once-experimental theater devices, including nudity, have been tamed and brought into the mainstream,” says Alisa Solomon, author of “Redressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender” and professor of business journalism at City University of New York. “It’s just no longer so surprising to challenge the idea that gender roles are innate.”

“I think it’s much healthier,” agrees Barbara Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare’s artistic director. “We’re all filled with both testosterone and estrogen, and at the heart of every man, there’s a woman, and vice versa. Imagine how far we’ve come from the 1950s, when married couples on TV slept in two beds, and you couldn’t utter the word ‘pregnant.’ ”

Bingo: One reason drag is warm and fuzzy now is the epic scope of the sexual revolution. Though Milton Berle kept comic drag alive on TV in the ‘50s, followed by the reluctant drag of “Some Like It Hot,” cross-dressing was a mostly underground affair in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, often part of a gay lib political manifesto.

“I think of a group in the ‘70s who called themselves the Cockettes,” Solomon says. “They dressed in glitter and lived in communes.”

Drag for a long time meant gay lib; now gays populate sitcoms. Says Baron, “ ‘Will & Grace’ is a far cry from a time when gays or drag queens were psychotic killers, if seen at all.”

Unseemly sex scandals, tell-all talk shows and reality programming have altered our notion of shock. “In terms of sexual whatever, reality TV and the Internet have changed the face of the globe,” Gaines says.

Not necessarily for the better. “People shouldn’t be judged by their sexuality, but you pray, as an artist, that none of this is done too cheaply.” John Epperson, a.k.a. “Lypsinka,” a drag artist since the early ‘80s, does smart a bit that the culture as a whole is playing catch-up.

“I’m glad audiences are catching on to what some of us were doing 21 years ago,” he says. “Now, we’re G-rated. But are we sanitizing drag for the worse? I wonder. Drag is disturbing, and if it weren’t, it wouldn’t fascinate. And if it doesn’t fascinate, people will quit buying tickets.”

Cross-dressing in Shakespeare is another, deeper enterprise, exploring the acting tradition of the author’s era. It illuminates the text of “Twelfth Night,” a murky, bottomless pool watered by issues of sexuality, gender and identity.

“I mostly just studied the words,” says Peter Shorey, who plays the calculating servant Maria in “Twelfth Night.” “I approached her as another character as much as a woman.”

“An actress in my part is trying to pull off being disguised as another man,” says Michael Brown, who, in the role of Viola, is in disguise as a male. “But, as a man, I have to keep the illusion alive of being a woman in male attire. I need to work to remind the audience I’m actually a woman underneath.”

Says Scott Parkinson, who plays a woman in “Rose Rage,” “You go to certain areas inside yourself that the other gender isn’t likely to discover.”

All of this would delight Lud- lam, the American actor-author-director and central figure of off-off-Broadway’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous until his death in 1987.

Ludlam, the creator of “Irma Vep” and a host of others, delighted in aggressive, subversive drag.

“He challenged the idea of gender as a category at all,” Solomon says. “In ‘Bluebeard,’ a mad scientist invents a third sex. His drag was always self-consciously theatricalized, showing off his chest hair while wearing a wig and makeup.”

Britain’s Cheek By Jowl and other Globe efforts, including some all-female ones, are raising the intellectual ante, elevating Ludlam’s fringe techniques to the supreme arena of achievement in Western theater: Shakespeare.

But why the one-way street? Men in a dress are funnier than women in tuxedos or slacks, a la Marlene Dietrich. Women in drag, glimpsed so less often, still seem mostly tragic and dour: Think “Boys Don’t Cry.”

Thus, even drag has a whiff of male chauvinism.

“It’s about power, “ Solomon says. “Even today, in our society, men have more power than women. We see it in wages and even language, as in such phrases as ‘the rights of man,’ referring to all humankind. So whenever someone in power chooses to put himself in a reduced position, whether wearing blackface, which we no longer accept, or putting on female attire, it’s funny because it’s seen as a step down. Milton Berle was funny because we knew he was a guy surrendering power.”

In other words, a man in drag is a bit beneath us, like a clown slipping on more banana peels in five minutes than real humans are likely to encounter in a lifetime. Shorey admits, “We don’t do ‘Twelfth Night’ for reverence. We do it for laughs.” But, notes Solomon, “When it’s in the other direction, it’s suggesting women can take on the trappings of power and step up. Then, it’s threatening.”

*

Sid Smith is an arts critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.