Your Gender Politics Cannot End at the Wings: Seeing Richard III at Seattle Shakes

Sarah Harlett as Richard III and Suzanne Bouchard as Buckingham. Photo by HMMM Productions

Last night I went to see Richard III at Seattle Shakes, produced in partnership with upstart crow collective. Last year I saw Part 1 of Bring Down the House, which enthralled me, as it did most of Seattle. At the time, my concerns over representation on creative teams was nascent and not fully formed. So forgive me for not having written about this before.

From upstart crow's website:

upstart crow collective was co-founded by Betsy Schwartz, Kate Wisniewski and Rosa Joshi in 2006. We are dedicated to producing classical works with all-female casts for contemporary audiences. Focused on telling story and living characters honestly on stage, our work is text centered and visually imaginative.

What an amazing, admirable mission. Really inspiring for me (user of she/her and they/them pronouns) to read and then absorb their work. Shakespeare has always felt too elite, too wordy, too distant for me. Even when I've designed for Shakespeare, the dated gender politics frustrate me, especially when I'm responsible for clothing the female-identified characters -- often in modern dress -- to fit in with the tropes of womanhood: virgin, mother, whore. So to get the opportunity to take in the power and politics of the histories told by some of the most formidable performers in the area who would not otherwise get to play these lords and princes and kings: awe.

And then I look the production team page.

And my heart sinks.

First, let me be clear that I admire and respect every single designer who worked on this production and really loved their choices and designs. This is not commentary on what was represented on stage by their artistic vision. I also recognized that the same creative team worked on Richard III also designed for Bring Down the House. And that there is great comfort in not having to re-establish visual language and vocabulary when taking on adaptive work that is risky (yes, all female-presenting performers doing Shakespeare will probably always be risky even if you've proven it's amazing).

However... why is the design team still a representation of our male-dominated theatre field? Set designer, lighting designer, co-sound designer.... all  male-presenting if not -identifying designers. Costumes, props, and co-sound designer are holding down the other part of the identity pool, but that's pretty normal for our industry. Check out this HowlRound report from 2015 if you'd like statistics to back this up.

Yes, this frustration about the utter lack of representation at the creative table comes from a selfish place. Let's just get that out there. I see my male-counterparts get asked time and again to do scenic designs and I look at my resume--MFA, Award-winning Designs, GENERAL AWESOMENESS--and ask why not me? And then I get the call to design costumes for that same show and I'm like, cool, my chromosomes dictate where my skill lies.

But this goes beyond me. And gender. While it's easy to be frustrated that theatre, as a field, is lead by cis-het white dudes when you're definitely not checking many boxes in that identity, it's even more angering that, in the name of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) as well as novelty and marketing buzz, theatres are mounting these amazing productions that examine how stories can change, grow, and deepen when the bodies presenting them (aka performers) are as diverse as the population in 2018.

And that is really important.

However, the people who are creating the world of these gender-swapped, racially diverse stories ALSO have to be a part of the under-represented groups. The voices around the table making decisions about architectural angles, ephemeral lighting, and subconscious-gripping sound cannot continue to be (cis-het, white) men if we're truly going to end white supremacy and patriarchal control of our art form.

I look at the production team of Richard III, and my first frustration comes from the male-domination in those creative roles. And then I look on stage and see the choice of director Rosa Joshi to pit the transcendent Porsche Shaw as Richmond, savior of England, against the gripping, equally-talented Sarah Harlett as Richard III, twisted monarch, and I cannot help but see (and feel) the politics of 2018: a Black leader (dressed in white, shout out to the costume designer) standing above the slain White leader (still dressed in black), declaring victory and peace for England.

The conversation expands, knowing full well that the racial and cultural identities represented on that list of creatives are dominated with whiteness.

The set design, along with lighting and sound, create the container of the production. It sets the tone, the visual language, and the boundaries of the world that the story exists in. When producers and producing companies do not consider who is making those decisions -- sure, to be molded by a director who often does sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, but damn that's a lot of burden for one artist to bear -- they are continuing to bound the story by cis-het white male privilege and thinking (and art). It's hidden to the audience, the donors, the media. But not to the performers and the members of the creative community. We see this inequity, we can feel the oppression of decisions that impact our identities (in June 2018, American Theatre Magazine published an article that discussed how the white-gaze plays out in lighting design -- where designers have to light all skin tones).

If we are going to turn a corner as an artistic pursuit, our equity and inclusion politics cannot stop at the wings. We need to infuse our creative teams -- and our admin teams -- with the voices of everyone who resides in our universe in 2018, but specifically with the ones that we haven't been hearing or listening to.

I want to be hired. But more importantly, I want to see the world through intersectional eyes.

My Hair. My Gender. My Identity: Part Three

"How about we stop here and let you live with this length for a bit." The hairdresser who I'd asked to cut off 8"+ of hair in January was nervous. Hairdressers are always nervous cutting my hair, but I think he particularly felt pressure because he is also a friend who had read my blog posts.

Suddenly I had come face-to-face with a reaction to my writing and my journey. And the reaction tested my resolve to make this change. To discard my femininity calling card.

I didn't push further for the hair cut I wanted.

Because I was scared, too.

In part, I was scared because cutting that much curl would inevitably take some time to see what would actually happen with the hair shaft. But also because his concern about such a drastic change, someone who knew what I had thought about and written, and who was having a direct conversation with me about gender identity made me question everything I had resolved.

Which meant that if I had sat down to write Part 3 then, I would have wallowed in my self-doubt rather than continuing to move forward.

Since beginning this writing project, all I could hear in my head was my mother asking "What's the point? Why are you dragging the skeletons out of the closet?" Though she died six years ago, her influence is still great.

And then I was cute again. My Shirley Temple curls, resting at my ears, healthy and very springy, had returned.

I resigned myself and put this thought experiment on hold.

Until this week.

On Thursday, I watched Hannah Gadsby's beautiful, heartbreaking, oh-so-personal piece "Nanette" now available on Netflix. I encourage anyone reading this to watch it, no matter what you think about comedy, the #MeToo movement, or me. Really.

What struck me and had me balling was when Hannah (and yes, I'm going to use her familiar name for many reasons, not least of which is that I feel personally connected to her and I don't want to distance myself by using her last name -- though I recognize the issue with this since most females and female-identifying people are often spoken about like this as part of the misogyny of our world) relays her realization of years of internalizing the message that she was "the wrong kind of woman." And that, even in her later years, that she is the wrong kind of lesbian. And I... can't really put into words how much that broke me open.

In Part Two of this blog series I said my hair is my claim to femininity.

But you know what? I like my hair. I like that it is distinct and different and that people are jealous of it. What I don't like is being called cute. Which I can't do much about apart from aim to not look cute... which then gets rid of this part of me.

--

In 2018, we've caught up with my small liberal arts college peers in being able to discuss and proclaim gender as a social construct. As someone who works in the business of choosing costumes to tell stories and hint at identities on stage, I have long been tapped into ways that we perform and don gender on any given day. But until this year I hadn't really sat down to scrutinize how my trauma and upbringing had been molding my identity and making me deeply uncomfortable in my own skin.

About a year ago I started to adopt the pronouns they/them. I still use she/her, as much out of habit as out of my wish to. In the last few months I've answered surveys that allow me to identify outside of the binary as gender-non-conforming or gender-queer.

And in the past two months I've thought a lot about gender and how I want to not be "gender-non-conforming" or "gender-queer" because gender shouldn't be a binary thing that I have to be nonconformist about or queer (verb usage there). Why has this been floating to the top again for me? Because I'm pregnant. With a baby that, according to tests, has XX chromosomes. And now, being pregnant means that I am relegated to a world of dresses and leggings and tunics (aka feminine clothing) and an acute awareness of my own breasts (which I've always seen as a necessary evil of one day giving birth and have otherwise fantasized having removed in, what is now considered part of a gender reassignment journey). I also want my child to know that their chromosomes do not equate any type of being, while simultaneously wanting to be able to say, when people ask, that I'm having a girl because I'm really excited about that. I'm excited that I get to have a mini me and show her a world that isn't the one I grew up in. Where she can wear pink and blue, dresses and jeans, she can build houses for her barbies, make mud pies and bake real pies. I want her to be a girl with no strings attached in her mind about what that means; which I know is unrealistic given society today. And also that this little one might want to use other pronouns and labels than haven't even been dreamed up at this point.

Which will be awesome. And I'm up for the task of letting this little one know that their curls (which they'll probably have, let's be real) are just curls and theirs to describe, define, change, grow, and anything in between.

And I'm here to publicly say and lay claim to an identity that is more encompassing of me and my journey: I'm gender-queer because I queer gender, both in my personal day-to-day life as well as in how I want to raise my child and how I enact my art.

To answer my mom's question of why all of this: It's because being open holds me accountable to not allowing my trauma and discomfort to win. It also allows me to reach others who may see themselves in my story. Because for too long women have been told to shut up and sit down. And by not doing that, I'm queering gender.

Thank you.

My Hair. My Gender. My Identity. Part Two

2000 - Seattle Aquarium Touch Tanks

“I told them to look for the girl with the curly, blonde ponytail. You’re hard to miss.” My supervisor sent me down to the floor to meet with a tour group. My hair was my defining feature. My calling card. Easily picked out of a crowd, my halo of frizzy, blonde hair, even only 5’6” above the ground, was distinct. Commented on. Marveled at. And even ridiculed.

My father’s genes are responsible for the texture of my hair, but his hair, like his sisters’, is coarse and mostly short. I didn’t understand the texture of my hair very well until high school (and then really didn’t truly master it until my late twenties). Taking a second period, high school swimming class meant that my hair had to air dry while I sat through Algebra and lunch. No longer fussing with it or sleeping on it, the natural curls that I inherited from my Irish family emerged. My hair went from frizzy and nappy (yes, a particularly venomous middle school acquaintance used this to describe the blonde bird’s nest atop my head) to curly and frizzy.

And so began my life as a host to blonde curls.

In high school Latin class, someone tried to convince me to play Eros (aka Cupid) in their class project.

I would regularly get stopped in parking lots and asked who did my hair. Even extended members of my family told me how much people paid to get hair like mine.

And then hairdressers would marvel that my hair wasn’t fried to kingdom come from products when they sat me in their chair.

Those same hairdressers would blow my hair out for me after the appointment because I had no patience to do that on my own. I’d live for a few days in an alternate reality of straight blonde hair, able to run my fingers through it, and completely unrecognizable to people at times. Without my curls, who even was I?

2012 - Straight Hair

Blonde curls. Heart-shaped face. Female. Cute.

My first boyfriend, and later my fiancé, was into my cuteness. I’ll admit that I was easily mold-able in this six-year-long relationship. Eager to please and to keep the primarily long-distance relationship alive, I asked his opinion about everything, including my hair. He met me when my hair was curling to somewhere between my shoulders and chin. As my hair length fluctuated and I toyed with the idea of growing things out, he always voted for a bob that made me look “cute.”

It was easy enough to oblige; remember, I didn’t get a handle on the texture of my hair until my late-twenties and, until then, really hated how brittle and frizzy my hair got as it grew out. I would often fantasize about that bob with an undercut I tried to get when I was ten. What if I just shaved off the kinkiest, most offensive curls at the nape of my neck? Maybe then I’d have beautiful, flowing locks like the movie stars that were embracing a tousled, loose-curl look in the early 2000’s.

I have never done that. Instead I fell deeper and deeper into the cult of my blonde, curly hair. A love-hate relationship that most people with natural curls will understand. My calling card. Unique and different. Hair that made me conspicuous (and clogged my bathtub drain).

When that ill-fated relationship above finally ended, I was as cliche as the movies, declaring I would shed my cuteness and the baggage of my first love! Time for a drastic change! No, I did not shave my hair off, though I did offer to. (Shortly after this relationship ended, my father’s other daughter was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I offered to shave my hair in solidarity with her chemo treatment that would result in hair loss. She did not take me up on it. I was mostly relieved.)

Instead, it took me over 3 years to be drastically changed. I grew my hair out long past my shoulders. I graduated with my MFA. I moved to California with a new beau to follow my post-graduate school dreams of being a resident scenic designer at a theatre company. And I started over.

Though my hair can never reach my waist, like my mother’s when I was little, because it’s too brittle and prone to tangling (and I’m not patient enough to coax it to that length, really), I had turned in my cute card to become what I was told was Woman.

And yet, I was still the woman in a male-dominated field, with soft, curly hair.

My identity has always been at odds with society. And itself.

I was told by one side of my family that women were to be docile, dress-wearing, long-haired housewives. The other encouraged me to follow my dreams to become the first person in my family to graduate from a four-year college. When my dreams took me into building and painting for theatre where t-shirts and jeans were the primary uniform, I was labeled a lesbian by my family and peers. Never mind that I, like so many teenagers, was too painfully self-conscious to consider dating (let alone being the survivor of sexual abuse).

The only thing that has remained constant: my blonde, curly hair. My calling card. My claim to femininity.

2003 - Grinnell College

   My claim to femininity.

   My claim to femininity.

   Why do I need something to claim that part of myself?

   ?