In the past few years numerous memes have floated around the Internet designed to prick the hypersensitive egos of men who spend their lives thinking of women as sexual objects or pieces of property. One of the most common memes takes a standard conversation in which one man compliments another on the way he's dressed. The compliments start to escalate until the recipient feels vulnerable, perhaps even violated. The meme ends by asking "How would you feel if you were treated like that every day?"
With (primarily female) victims of sexual predation feeling sufficiently empowered to name and shame the men who assaulted them, the #MeToo phenomenon surging across social media has forced the public to acknowledge that some of their heroes have been leading villainous lifestyles. In the case of people like Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, and Matt Lauer, their lechery was an open secret. Recent revelations about such celebrities as Kevin Spacey, James Levine, Roy Moore, and Charlie Rose had a creepiness that made them especially newsworthy.
When popular idols are toppled from their pedestals, some people are quick to challenge the veracity of a victim's accusations. And yet, even with their newfound knowledge, few people would be willing to walk a mile in the shoes of men and women who have been sexually harassed, raped, and suffered from years of self-doubt and self-blame. Would these people be able to survive the emotional anguish and psychological pain of having their lives shattered because a predator targeted them as a potential conquest? I sincerely doubt it.
Thankfully, there are moments when men who routinely discount women's experiences get a hint of what it's like to live inside a female body. If you haven't had a chance to read Dan Pearce's article entitled A Letter to Men: The Lesson of the Saggy Burrito in My Pants, I heartily recommend it. While I've always enjoyed watching The Try Guys, two of their recent Buzzfeed videos deserve extra credit for giving men a taste of specifically gender-related types of pain.
Playing with gender roles really works some people's nerves. In the early days of the LGBT rights movement, conservative gays would frequently bemoan the presence of drag queens and leather men in LGBT Pride parades, preferring that only 'respectable' gays be given visibility. What they failed to acknowledge was that it was the drag queens who pushed back against the police during the 1966 raid on Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco and the 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Their courage was the torch that ignited much of today's LGBT movement for equal rights.
- While gender reassignment surgery had been performed by German doctors in the 1920s (the first heavily publicized case involved Christine Jorgensen's operations in 1951 and 1952), spoofing gender roles has long been a theatrical tradition and a staple of the drag community.
- The success of RuPaul's Drag Race has had a major cultural impact on Millennials and future generations of fashion-conscious youngsters.
- During the 16th century, young men and boys traditionally performed women's roles on London's stages.
- The roots of England's beloved pantomime shows or "Pantos" (which often feature cross-dressing) can be traced back to Italy's 16th-century commedia dell'arte and the 17th-century music halls and masques which became cherished European traditions.
- The 18th century tradition of castrating young boys who grew up to become men with powerful soprano voices (see Anne Rice's 1982 novel Cry To Heaven) is receiving new attention thanks to Mark Rylance's recent Broadway success in Farinelli and the King.
Two recent San Francisco events focused on the cultural confusion that can erupt from overturning traditional gender roles. One involved a screen-to-stage adaptation of John Madden's beloved 1998 film that earned seven Academy Awards. The other was a 1924 silent film directed by John G. Blystone that had been beautifully restored by the Museum of Modern Art with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Each mined comedic gold from a reversal of gender norms.
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For its end-of-year holiday show, Marin Theatre Company presented the Bay Area premiere of Shakespeare in Love. Set in London in 1593, Lee Hall's lively stage adaptation of the original screenplay crafted by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard requires 13 highly-skilled actors to portray 36 characters as Will Shakespeare struggles to finish a play commissioned by Richard Burbage with the only requirement being that it includes a dog. While Shakespeare in Love features appearances by such historical figures as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Burbage, Ned Alleyn, Philip Henslowe, Edmund Tilney, and John Webster, other characters are convenient figments of the scriptwriters' imagination.“The crime of obscenity came in many forms in Protestant 16th-century England. It was a catch-all for a host of things that the city fathers felt undermined the power structure that kept everyone in their place in society. They were especially disgusted by cross-dressing, whether it was a nearly penniless actor cross-dressed (in terms of class) pretending to be a king, or the attractive prepubescent boys who began their acting apprenticeships performing female roles onstage (not to mention the thousand characters that dress as someone else), theatre’s insistent deception about the fundamental nature of reality was its main offense. Impersonating a king, whose body and reign were literally held to be sacred, was obscene -- and so was impersonating a member of the other sex against the law of nature and of God. The only way it could have been any worse is if there had been actual women up there. Why? An issue of control, mostly.”
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| Megan Trout as Viola de Lesseps in a scene from Shakespeare in Love (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“A certain level of anxiety about possible promiscuity and illegitimate children is understandable in a political economy that revolves around inherited titles and wealth. However, in Shakespeare’s England, that anxiety resulted in the virtual imprisonment of women from the lower middle class on up. Through a range of social controls including weekly church sermons, gossip, the marriage market, and laws punishing infidelity in women far more harshly than in men, a woman’s ‘virtue’ was enshrined as not only the highest attainment to which she could spend every waking moment striving but, frankly, the only thing of any value about her whatsoever. Elizabethan society was obsessed with policing its women -- especially the upper class and the nouveaux riches who, like Viola’s father, aspired to that class. Viola was not risking being grounded for a week, say, or put on probation at school. She is risking her entire life and any hope of future happiness in order to participate as a colleague and equal in this art form. Shakespeare in Love is, above all, a love letter to the theatre, and its power to transform the stuff of ordinary life into timeless and transcendent magic.”
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| Megan Trout (Viola de Lesseps) and Adam Magill (Shakespeare) in a scene from Shakespeare in Love (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Directed with zeal by Jasson Minadakis, this production benefited immensely from a tightly-knit ensemble comprised of some of the Bay area's leading actors (many of whom played musical instruments during the performance). With Ben Euphrat handling musical matters as the leader of an onstage band, Mark Anderson Phillips (Fennyman), Liam Vincent (Ralph), and Kenny Toll (portraying Kit Marlowe and Ned Alleyn) joined Stacy Ross (who appeared as Queen Elizabeth, a nurse, Mistress Quickly, and a woman named Molly). Other actors deftly jumping in and out of multiple roles included L. Peter Callender (Burbage, Adam, and a boatman), Lance Gardner (Valentine, Robin, Kate, and Lambert), Thomas Gorrebeeck (Wessex, Tybalt, and Peter), and Brian Herndon (Tilney, Wabash, and Nol).
Adam Magill (Will Shakespeare) and Megan Trout (Viola de Lesseps) have become familiar faces to Bay area audiences who have had the pleasure of watching them develop over the years while savoring their versatility. And yet, MTC's production was often stolen by Sango Tajima who, when not playing the violin, portrayed Webster with the kind of hilariously crazed energy that made Bobby Lee such a powerful comedic force on MADtv.
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| Adam Magill (Shakespeare) and Sango Tajima (Webster) in a scene from Shakespeare in Love (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
MTC's production featured a sturdy unit set designed by Kat Conley, period costumes by Katherine Nowacki, lighting by Kurt Landisman, and sound design by Sara Huddleston. Key contributions to the production's success include the fight direction by Dave Maier and choreography by Liz Tenuto as well as Jessica Berman's work as a dialect coach and Jennifer Reason's music direction.
Thanks, in large part, to Tom Stoppard's extensive knowledge of Shakespeare and his times, this production of Shakespeare in Love proves that a stage adaptation of a beloved film does not need the Queen of England to step over a mud puddle in order to win an audience's love. Here's the trailer:
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While Shakespeare in Love depicts a woman's desperate desire for the freedom to be whatever she wants to be, The Last Man on Earth shows what can happen when women rule the world. Recently screened during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's "A Day of Silents" program at the Castro Theatre, this gender-bending 1924 farce begins innocently enough with eight-year-old Elmer Smith (Buck Black) being unnecessarily nasty to six-year-old Hattie (Jean Johnston) because he doesn't know how to tell a girl that he likes her. Flash forward to 1950, when the United States has a female President and the adult Elmer (Earle Foxe) is living a primitive life in the woods. How can this be? An epidemic of "masculinitis" has succeeded in killing off nearly all the men on the planet. |
| Earle Foxe is the unlikely star of 1924's The Last Man on Earth |
After a female aviator named Gertie the Gangster (Grace Cunard) discovers Elmer, her find causes havoc as the goofy, dimwitted hermit becomes the grand prize of the land, sought after by every woman (including those who would fight to be on top).
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| Elmer Smith (Earle Foxe) gets a medical checkup from Dr. Prodwell (Clarissa Selwynne) in a scene from 1924's The Last Man on Earth |
With an eye toward making a hefty profit off something more valuable than gold, Gertie sells Elmer to the Federal government for a whopping $10 million. The female politicians running the nation wisely choose to let Elmer's fate be decided by a boxing match between two leading contenders (to be held on the floor of the United States Senate).
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In his program essay, Kyle Westphal writes:
“Adapted from a short story by John D. Swain that appeared in the November 1923 issue of Munsey’s Magazine, The Last Man on Earth reads like a science-fiction goof taken a step too far, with the narrative often set aside to ruminate on the surprising dividends and unexpected consequences of a society without men. The outlandish setup (a planet without men, victims of the deadly “masculinitis” epidemic) remains more than enough. Among the effects of masculinitis: the real estate market evaporates and the surviving women have their choice of the poshest mansions. Prohibition remains on the books out of inertia, though alcohol abuse has plummeted in the absence of men. Church attendance crumbles despite a new class of ‘frenzied female evangelists’ for ‘a manless religion was doomed to atrophy.’ Football ceases to be played and literature loses its luster.”
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| Earle Foxe is the unlikely star of 1924's The Last Man on Earth |
“Both the short story and the film solve the problem of matriarchal and narrative stasis by introducing a hitherto forgotten man into the equation, a biological game-changer discovered in a remote forest by a clique of hard-edged femme gangsters. In this credulity-straining moment we are reminded that this female-only planet was thoroughly the product of the limited imaginations of a roster of studio men. As Farran Smith Nehme observed in Film Comment, ‘If a woman were to create a cinematic world where a mysterious epidemic had killed all but one man on earth, you better believe the leftover would be Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Gilbert Roland ... the list goes on, but in any event, it sure wouldn’t be the 1924 film’s Earle Foxe.' A tree-dwelling, emaciated Rip van Winkle blissfully ignorant of the new status quo, Foxe cannot help but present the least compelling justification for his sorry gender.”
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| Photo by: Allen Sawyer |
With live musical accompaniment by Philip Carli, the sense of humor driving The Last Man on Earth is captured by the above intertitle. Joining in the fun were Gladys Tennyson as the aforementioned Frisco Kate, Clarissa Selwynne as the appropriately named Dr. Prodwell, and Derelys Perdue as the adult version of Elmer's childhood crush, Hattie.
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| The powerful women on display in 1924's The Last Man on Earth |
“Why contemplate what women would do for pleasure in a manless world when the sight of a woman president or a woman street sweeper would be enough to generate a nervous chortle from an audience still coming to the terms with the new social order in the wake of the 19th Amendment? asks Westphal. "‘With love, fighting, sex jealousy, double-living, bootlegging, bohemianism, villains, missing heirs, faithless lovers and guardians removed, what was the poor novelist to do?’ wondered Swain. Even years later, with universal suffrage an established part of the fabric of American life, the idea of a gynocracy proved too fantastic to resist, with Fox remaking the story in 1933 as a pre-Code musical entitled It’s Great to Be Alive.”
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