“Meet my better half.”
How often have you heard spouses of all genders introduce one another that way?
But do you recall that the notion of a loving couple as one body dates back to Plato’s “Symposium” (about 400 B.C.)? And let’s not forget Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s “Man and wife is one flesh” 2,000 years later. The trope is, of course, also mentioned in many religions’ marriage ceremonies.
Plato envisions each human as two males bound back-to-back (Children of the Sun), two females likewise bound (Children of the Earth) or one male bound back-to-back with a female (Children of the Moon). Zany Zeus eventually zaps these round entities into halves, starting each of us on a quest to find his, her (or their) missing half to complete him/her/them.
That’s “The Origin of Love,” according to the song in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” now in a ribald but well-rounded production by ROŪGE Theatre at the also-unconventional restaurant/bar venue of 37th and Zen in Norfolk.
Why is this 1998 hit rock musical by John Cameron Mitchell (book) and Stephen Trask (music and lyrics) so perfect for Hampton Roads’ newest theater company, led by Patrick Mullins? It also stars Steven Pacek; the director and star recently gave us “Rathskeller — A Musical Elixir” at Zeiders American Dream Theatre. For one thing, it’s Pride Month and this is a proudly gay play; and, for another, it’s the mission of ROŪGE to make theatre “universally accessible” and to “break down perceived barriers of class, culture, and content,” according to the playbill. Mullins also shares in his notes: “Musicals made me queer. Sort of.”
He gives special credit to “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which involves a thoughtful, even erudite, story about an East German teenager named Hansel (Pacek) who is willing to undergo a transition operation to escape East Germany by marrying an American GI. This is when the Berlin Wall divided East from West. The operation is botched, however, leaving Hansel with an “angry inch” of flesh where his genitals used to be.
She takes on her mother’s name, Hedwig, and leaves with her husband, Luther (a dark figure because of his pederasty). Luther leaves Hedwig high, dry and forced to turn tricks in a Midwest trailer park. Hedwig eventually marries again; actor Leila Stephanie, adroitly plays almost all the important people in Hedwig’s life: mother Hedwig, husband 1, Luther, and husband 2, Yitzhak, who likes to dress up as a woman. But Hedwig churlishly forbids him from doing it lest, perhaps, he might compete with her.
Hedwig has been turned against men in general by a young man she initiated into sex while Hedwig was babysitting him. (Again, we have troubling suggestions of underage sex). He is Tommy (whom she also initiates into rock music and renames Tommy Gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge). We’re told Hedwig and Gnosis enjoyed a brief time of artistic and sexual bliss, but that Gnosis stole Hedwig’s songs and abandoned her. There’s an amusingly adapted plot point in which Gnosis is said to be playing a concert at the nearby Chartway Arena on Hampton Boulevard. Hedwig keeps opening an exterior door of 37th and Zen hoping that Gnosis will mention her in his amplified remarks to his fans. He never does. However, at evening’s end, Gnosis does pop into our musical for an appearance (played by — surprise—a buff and wigless Pacek, stripped down to his underwear). Mullins notes in the playbill that the roles of Gnosis and Hedwig were played by separate actors in Mitchell’s 2001 film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” But Mullins prefers the stage version where one actor plays “the naïve Gnosis and the hardened Hedwig —the man, the woman, the gay, the straight and the entire spectrum of everything that lies between …”
Mullins also guides us to his belief that the musical’s theme of division is ultimately resolved. Hedwig later says, “There ain’t much of a difference/Between a bridge and a wall.” Mullins also believes that we (not Zeus) have “divided ourselves.” It is therefore unlikely that another person can ever complete us. That, we must learn to do for ourselves.
The other creatives on and offstage at 37th and Zen help us along. There’s an onstage band. For the lurid “Sugar Daddy,” no pole in the restaurant is left unembraced and microphones are suggestively placed between legs. The poignant “This Wicked Little Town” is delivered by Pacek with the despair only an accomplished actor/singer can provide.
However, nothing matches the show’s showpiece— the Platonic “Origin of Love.” Mullins’ version has Hedwig reading from a children’s storybook. The audience can see the childish renderings of the Children of the Sun, Earth and Moon getting split because a cameraman is there to film the “reading” and other parts of the show projecting them up on wall screens.
Recall the lyric, “They had two faces peering/ Out of one giant head/So they could watch all around them/As they talked, while they read…” Mitchell and Trask’s show invites such innovation and Mullins accepts. Literalizing becomes a master trope of the show combining erudition and raunchiness in a way others rarely master.
There are allusions to philosophers wedged into contemporary pop song lyrics. Classics scholars have taken this show seriously, writing articles about the types of Platonic love being illustrated (Holly Sypniewski’s “The Pursuit of Eros in Plato’s Symposium and Hedwig and the Angry Inch”). Sypniewski quotes another scholar (H. Christian Blood) discussing “super-queering Plato” (!). How do you combine allusions to Gnostic Gospels and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” with lines such as “My sex change operation got botched … Now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch”?
Answer: You get director Mullins to do it, starring Pacek, with outrageous wigs by Ryan Ward. As one of the show’s songs says, “You, Kant, always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you Nietzsche.”
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu
If you go
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays through June 9
Where: 37th & Zen, 1083 S. 37th St., Norfolk
Tickets: Start at $25
Details: rougeva.org
