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Review — Sommerfugl by Bixby Elliot
Sep. 23rd, 2015 11:35 pmSommerfugl is a dramatization of the story of Lile Elbe, described as the first trans person to undergo gender reassignment surgery, in 1930.
1930 was a very different and much more binary place than today's world. If you were male you were a man and you wore man clothes and did man things, with very attenuated possibilities for overlap with the experience of being a woman. It was a time without much option of playing the role without having the expected morphology. Echoing my observation of the middle-school book Gracefully Grayson, which I reviewed on September 8, I'd say that Sommerfugl's setting similarly permits author Bixby Elliot to express the idea of a male-bodied person being a woman in simple concise terms: Einar (later Lili) discovers he likes to wear a dress and when a man flirts with him while so adorned, he finds himself responding to it, hence he's a woman. The complexities and nuances that would be more likely brought up as alternative interpretations by skeptically hostile people in today's world were not considerations in 1930, and there are advantages to that straightforward simplicity.
Wayne Alan Wilcox is convincingly pretty and demure without needing girl-clothes and a girl-hairdo to complete the impression. His gestures, facial expressions, his reactions and the way he moves, particularly when dancing, all illustrate for us that this male-bodied person is a quite believable fit from the outside as a womanly person.
Bixby Elliot appears to have chosen to have his characters speak with a post-Victorian sentence structure, something which I do believe does accurately reflect the speaking style of the 1930s. Wayne Alan Wilcox's delivery of those oft-ornate lines was sometimes stilted and woodenly precise, making the moments when we was speaking become the occasion where he sounds affected and not natural. That's unfortunate, since as the lead character he speaks a lot in this play.
Aubyn Philabaum portrays Einar/Lili's wife Grete. Philabaum is emotionally compelling when on the tearful edge of distressed cheerfulness, right on the verge of a loss of decorum and control. The same prissy Victorian dialog rolls more fluidly and elegantly from her tongue. It is Grete who, needing an artist's model, first gets a reluctant Einar into a gown and tells him what a lovely woman he makes, and she's a gleeful co-conspirator when Einar is becoming Lili for the duration of a party and it's all in good fun. She's believable in the realistic scene where the transition is ceasing to be an entertainment and where Einar, and not Lili, is the pretense, and she finds herself frightened and uncertain about how to behave towards this stranger: "I don't know who you are any more, and if I don't know who you are I don't know who I am!"
Many transitioning people find themselves in that very situation, where initially supportive friends and family members suddenly find that the overall gestalt of visual cues and shapes and adornments now causes their mind to gender that person as the destination gender and it all becomes inescapably who that person now is and not just something that that person is "doing".
Bernardo Cubria plays multiple additional love interests (Claude, who comes on to Lili, and Rudolfo who charms Grete) as well as giving us Dr. Steuben. Cubria brings a robustly masculine Latin passion to the play, which turns out to be what both Lili and Grete wanted — he's the one to sweep a girl off her feet. The similar roles in a minimalist play lacking complicated costumes caused me some difficulty with differentiating the two romantic characters, a situation that can be hard to avoid when there are more roles than actors.
Michelle David portrays Anna, the model whose lateness prompted Grete to put Einar in a dress, and also plays his sister Kira and, thirdly, the hospital nurse. She turns in a solid delivery of these multiple supporting roles. As Kira, she gives us another person who loves Einar and who is having difficulties relinquishing his identity and allowing Lili to exist and be accepted.
I was drawn into this story because of its situation: here was a person who had no opportunity to look around, take notice of transgender people, read about their experiences, and then decide "I must be one of them". The sense of identity that the main character chose was not previously in existence. Einar not only had to invent Lili, but also had to synthesize the entire phenomenon of being transgender with no role models, no name for it, no prior example of how such a thing could be done. Those of you who read my blog will recognize that I find myself in that same situation as a male girl-woman who, unlike more conventional (transitioning) transgender activists, is OK with my physiological maleness and with being perceived (accurately) as a physiological male, and wherein I'm all about trying to create head-space in people's minds for the idea that there are male girls and female boys as well as the more conventional & more typical female girls and male boys, and that we should be accepted as we are, with no pressure to change behavior, presentation, or morphology.
In the story arc of Sommerfugl, that journey of synthesis is a multi-person process, with Grete getting Einar into women's garments, Einar and Anna the model enjoying taking him out in public for the fun of it, Einar becoming increasing convinced that he is more himself when Lili and uncomfortably less so when he reverts to being Einar and has to wear boy drag again, and Dr Steuben taking things to the next level by providing the unknown and unprecedented possibility of the surgical solution.
Sommerfugal by Bixby Elliot. From Sept 24 through Oct 10, 7:30 PM at Fourth Street Theatre in Manhattan. Presented by InViolet Theatre, Directed by Stephen Brackett.
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Index of all Blog Posts
1930 was a very different and much more binary place than today's world. If you were male you were a man and you wore man clothes and did man things, with very attenuated possibilities for overlap with the experience of being a woman. It was a time without much option of playing the role without having the expected morphology. Echoing my observation of the middle-school book Gracefully Grayson, which I reviewed on September 8, I'd say that Sommerfugl's setting similarly permits author Bixby Elliot to express the idea of a male-bodied person being a woman in simple concise terms: Einar (later Lili) discovers he likes to wear a dress and when a man flirts with him while so adorned, he finds himself responding to it, hence he's a woman. The complexities and nuances that would be more likely brought up as alternative interpretations by skeptically hostile people in today's world were not considerations in 1930, and there are advantages to that straightforward simplicity.
Wayne Alan Wilcox is convincingly pretty and demure without needing girl-clothes and a girl-hairdo to complete the impression. His gestures, facial expressions, his reactions and the way he moves, particularly when dancing, all illustrate for us that this male-bodied person is a quite believable fit from the outside as a womanly person.
Bixby Elliot appears to have chosen to have his characters speak with a post-Victorian sentence structure, something which I do believe does accurately reflect the speaking style of the 1930s. Wayne Alan Wilcox's delivery of those oft-ornate lines was sometimes stilted and woodenly precise, making the moments when we was speaking become the occasion where he sounds affected and not natural. That's unfortunate, since as the lead character he speaks a lot in this play.
Aubyn Philabaum portrays Einar/Lili's wife Grete. Philabaum is emotionally compelling when on the tearful edge of distressed cheerfulness, right on the verge of a loss of decorum and control. The same prissy Victorian dialog rolls more fluidly and elegantly from her tongue. It is Grete who, needing an artist's model, first gets a reluctant Einar into a gown and tells him what a lovely woman he makes, and she's a gleeful co-conspirator when Einar is becoming Lili for the duration of a party and it's all in good fun. She's believable in the realistic scene where the transition is ceasing to be an entertainment and where Einar, and not Lili, is the pretense, and she finds herself frightened and uncertain about how to behave towards this stranger: "I don't know who you are any more, and if I don't know who you are I don't know who I am!"
Many transitioning people find themselves in that very situation, where initially supportive friends and family members suddenly find that the overall gestalt of visual cues and shapes and adornments now causes their mind to gender that person as the destination gender and it all becomes inescapably who that person now is and not just something that that person is "doing".
Bernardo Cubria plays multiple additional love interests (Claude, who comes on to Lili, and Rudolfo who charms Grete) as well as giving us Dr. Steuben. Cubria brings a robustly masculine Latin passion to the play, which turns out to be what both Lili and Grete wanted — he's the one to sweep a girl off her feet. The similar roles in a minimalist play lacking complicated costumes caused me some difficulty with differentiating the two romantic characters, a situation that can be hard to avoid when there are more roles than actors.
Michelle David portrays Anna, the model whose lateness prompted Grete to put Einar in a dress, and also plays his sister Kira and, thirdly, the hospital nurse. She turns in a solid delivery of these multiple supporting roles. As Kira, she gives us another person who loves Einar and who is having difficulties relinquishing his identity and allowing Lili to exist and be accepted.
I was drawn into this story because of its situation: here was a person who had no opportunity to look around, take notice of transgender people, read about their experiences, and then decide "I must be one of them". The sense of identity that the main character chose was not previously in existence. Einar not only had to invent Lili, but also had to synthesize the entire phenomenon of being transgender with no role models, no name for it, no prior example of how such a thing could be done. Those of you who read my blog will recognize that I find myself in that same situation as a male girl-woman who, unlike more conventional (transitioning) transgender activists, is OK with my physiological maleness and with being perceived (accurately) as a physiological male, and wherein I'm all about trying to create head-space in people's minds for the idea that there are male girls and female boys as well as the more conventional & more typical female girls and male boys, and that we should be accepted as we are, with no pressure to change behavior, presentation, or morphology.
In the story arc of Sommerfugl, that journey of synthesis is a multi-person process, with Grete getting Einar into women's garments, Einar and Anna the model enjoying taking him out in public for the fun of it, Einar becoming increasing convinced that he is more himself when Lili and uncomfortably less so when he reverts to being Einar and has to wear boy drag again, and Dr Steuben taking things to the next level by providing the unknown and unprecedented possibility of the surgical solution.
Sommerfugal by Bixby Elliot. From Sept 24 through Oct 10, 7:30 PM at Fourth Street Theatre in Manhattan. Presented by InViolet Theatre, Directed by Stephen Brackett.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
