Twelfth Night, or Gender Bending

Toe tries on Viola's wig

Jason and I spent most of our summer and fall this year rehearsing for and performing in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It was our first venture back at the Coaster Theatre in eight years (the last show we did there, I was pregnant with Toe) and we had the opportunity to work with our favorite director, MLT.

I played Viola, the young woman who is separated from her twin brother at sea during a storm. She lands on foreign ground and masquerades as a man to work for the local duke until she can figure out what to do next. She is sent (as a man) to woo a local countess on the duke's behalf. The countess, of course, falls in love with Viola (dressed as a man). Hijinks involving mistaken identities ensue. Meanwhile, Viola's brother arrives in the area and adds to the confusion. I love the role. I have loved the play since I was five and was given a book called "Tales from Shakespeare." At forty, I thought I had missed my opportunity to play Viola. When I auditioned, I was hoping for Maria, the countess's maid, if anything.

Bless, MLT, she cast me as Viola anyway. My counterparts (including my "twin") were all ten years younger. They have been doing show after show at the Coaster during my hiatus and I felt old and rusty. Now that the show is over, I made the mistake of watching part of the video. I had gotten to the stage in acting (before my hiatus) where I would do a performance and then watch the video and there would be no surprises. I knew what my performance would look like. I was startled after this one to experience, once again, that shock of, "Good grief! That's not what I thought I was doing! That doesn't look right at all! It FELT right; why doesn't it LOOK right?"

I don't think my performance was bad, it was just not as good as I had hoped. The calibre of the actors and the performance was really high. And while we were doing it, even though I felt rusty and was working really hard, I had a wonderful time.

Viola and her twin Sebastian. We got the same haircut and color.  Bless this actor, he curled his hair every performance.

I did a lot of research to try to achieve a physical presence that would pass as masculine. I scoured YouTube for videos on "how to pass" as male. I got a binder (an undershirt that binds down any female "bits"). As I rehearsed and tried various stances, walks, gestures, I came to realize how freeing it felt pretending to be a male. I took up more space, made bigger gestures, I didn't worry if I was being too loud or flirting too much (I figured the countess had to have something to work with). I felt powerful and free.

 I began to wonder why Viola would give all of that up at the end of the play. She becomes incredibly silent in the last act once her gender is revealed.  It took me a few weeks to realize that I was viewing this from a  modern forty year old woman's perspective. Maybe Viola was afforded great freedom as a man, but she was in love and ultimately, hers was a love story. I began to think about my twenty year old self, how madly in love I was and how desperate I was to spend time with my love (who lived half the country away). And for me, that change in perspective allowed me to divide the experience into B's journey (playing a role, trying to master the masculine physicality) and Viola's journey (acting as a man as a means to an end, falling in love in the process).  I was able to enjoy both processes simultaneously.

How the performance turned out, in this instance, is in the eye of the audience. It FELT right to me. I enjoyed working with the cast (including the love of my life- the same man I mooned over when I was twenty) and arrived to the theater each performance night with an absolute sense of BLISS.