Gender Agenda: Learning to count higher than two. (Hidden: A Gender) First published in Bay Area Reporter, December 7, 1989, pp. 28, 52. © Wendell Ricketts, 1989, 2003. All rights reserved.
I was a woman who was a man playing a man written by a woman using a man's voice directed by a woman and coached by a man. Then I was a woman who was a man playing a woman written by a man using a man's woman's voice directed by a man coached by a woman. And finally I was a woman who was a man playing a not-man/not-woman in a woman's voice written by a not-woman/not-man and directed by myself. And I hope that clarifies it.—Kate BornsteinThe night after seeing Les Misérables, I took in playwright Kate Bornstein's Hidden: A Gender, recently premiered in the Studio at Theatre Rhinoceros. Happily, the two shows have absolutely nothing in common, which is all to the credit of Bornstein, director Noreen Barnes, and their extraordinary cast (of which Bornstein is also a member).In addition to being a great relief, Hidden: A Gender redeems the conviction that theatre ought to be risky business—quirky, prickly, a triumph of substance rather than of form, even a bit subversive. Hidden: A Gender is all of these things, and more. It is one of the most remarkable pieces of organic theatre to come along in some time, and is all the more significant for being, so to speak, home-grown. (Personal to Eureka and Life on the Water Theatres: One of you should snap this show up while the getting is good.)
Hidden: A Gender marks the second time in recent memory that Bornstein has trod Rhinoceros's stages. Last April, Bornstein appeared in The Balcony, Genet's tale of ambiguous identity and sexual delusion, made all the more lacquered by the presence of Doris Fish, Miss X, and Tippi—a trio of gender benders if ever there was one. Bornstein's own gender pluralism in the role of The Judge brought a delicious sizzle to her B & D scenes with The Thief and The Executioner. (Okay, so Charles Ganim's deltoids helped, too.) A few months later, to no one's surprise, Bornstein won a Bette Rhino award for her performance in that part.
At the awards ceremony, Bornstein strode to the stage, clad in a leather vest and more-or-less identifiably "female" outerwear. When she reached the podium, however, statuette in hand, Bornstein paused just long enough for the audience to register the full impact of the bushy blonde mustache growing across her upper lip. As anxiety mounted, Bornstein dispelled it with a quip: "Being in The Balcony did this to me."
This was because, in addition to being a scamp ("Gender is a hoot!" says she), Bornstein is a transsexual lesbian. The terms are reductive, but let that go for the moment. Like all actors, but to a degree not common in the craft, Bornstein has allowed her body to become the clay upon which identity is molded. Also unlike many actors, Bornstein is her own potter. Hidden: A Gender, then, is Bornstein's story, the articulate, fearless dramatization of an examined life.
Hidden: A Gender is framed as a circus sideshow, traditionally the province of society's curiosities, misfits, and oddballs. But, Bornstein points out, modern "tabloid TV" has replaced the freak show, and host "Doc" Grinder (Bornstein) is thus half snake-oil salesman, half Geraldo Rivera (on whose program Bornstein appeared earlier this year).
Among other things, Grinder is hawking his miracle elixir, Gender Defender (guaranteed to keep you straight—two bottles and your family can breathe a sigh of relief!). The alternative, Grinder warns, is "Gender Blur," and so begins his cautionary tale of "suicide, piety, mutilation, and scientific anomalies."
Hidden: A Gender is, however, a production not just of scenes, but of layers, and the next two hours are a series of trips back and forth through time. At one end of history is Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century French hermaphrodite, raised as a female to her 22nd year, then forced by doctors to change her name to Abel and live as a man. As Herculine, Justin Bond is luminous, and he conveys Herculine's agonies—as her personal sense of self is demolished by the weight of civil authority—with grace and passion. Remarkably, Bond never appears as that most familiar sight: a boy in a dress. Instead, he dissolves distinctions and actually accomplishes the illusion of becoming an individual whose gender is neither only male nor only female. It is a nifty piece of work.
At the other end of time is juxtaposed the story of the child, adolescent, and adult Herman Amberstone (the playwright herself—"Amberstone" is a translation of Bornstein's own surname). As Herman, Sydney Erskine is a delight, by turns crude, miserable, strong and, in the end, self-possessed and sexy as hell. She is particularly poignant as the awkward, squeaky-voiced, 13-year-old Herman, anticipating his Bar Mitzvah and praying that the utterance of the magic words, "Today I am a man," will somehow make it so.
These two halves, as it were—Herculine/Abel and Herman/Kate—eventually meet across time in a dream ballet that suggests reconciliation, but which is too fraught with doubt to be of ultimate comfort. Here, Bornstein and Barnes employ a mélange of movement, lighting, percussive sound, and slightly distorted voice-over to achieve an effect not unlike that for which Laurie Anderson is justly famous.
Perhaps all that remains to be said is that Hidden: A Gender is basted simultaneously in a most engaging spirit of humor and irony. As Bornstein reminds us, gender is both the battle ground and the playground. At play, then, Bornstein performs several outrageously funny monologues, including a corker as 8th-grade English teacher Mr. Blunt, who explicates gender and pronouns thus: "'I' has no gender, and 'you' has no gender. 'He' and 'she' do, which is fortunate, because 'we' has no gender either, does 'we'?"
Another bit, a Marx Brothers sketch with Groucho and Harpo as two surgeons (Drs. Razor and Weener) who refuse to perform Herman's sex change because she is a lesbian, is also a scream.
Earlier, I ventured the opinion that good theatre is subversive. If you look "subversive" up in the dictionary, you'll find a definition that goes something like this: "having a tendency to undermine or overthrow an established system, as by persons working secretly from within." The editors might well have been thinking of Kate Bornstein when they wrote those words—and, if they weren't, they should have been. These days, when closets of various conformities can scarcely be built fast enough, everyone ought to take a little Bornstein-style subversion on her (and his) plate.