Christine Jorgensen Reveals

Real life is rarely as compelling as theater, but when real life drama and the theatre collude, mesmerizing pieces like Christine Jorgensen Reveals are born. The play is the brain child of actor Bradford Louryk, who discovered a 1952 LP of the only recorded interview with America’s first male-to-female transsexual. After listening to the interview, Louryk realized that he needed to share this story. Instead of adapting the interview for the stage, he presents it as is, but with a twist—he lip-synchs to the recording.

The immediate effect is dissonant. Actually, the first few minutes after Louryk enters as Jorgensen are disorienting, on both a historical and theatrical level. He walked on dressed in an elegant, 1950s, skirt suit of crisp, green, satin. His jacket’s three quarter length sleeves revealed pale, soft arms. He wears a Marilyn Monroe blond wig and sports perfect, heart-shaped, red lips. Transsexuals are still rare enough even today that the dissonance is almost historic. Although this was technically only cross dressing, as an audience, we gave the same silent, appraising glances that Jorgensen’s contemporaries undoubtedly gave, asking what is feminine and what is masculine here? Where is the man underneath that chiffon, make-up, nail polish?

Louryk’s lips and fingernails were painted an indelible 1950s red. Throughout the show, I was fascinated by his thin hands which carefully punctuated the recording, giving it added depth and meaning. At first, I found the gestures disconcerting, like the lip-synching it feels like a half effort.But after a few minutes, I forget that he was mouthing the words and the gestures no longer felt restrained. It was in the hand gestures that Louryk’s interpretative skill as an actor comes through. Occasionally, he had clues to work off of—the microphone picked up the sound of nails tapping against a wooden chair arm, a finger nail scraped across satin. Those noises belie the steady measure of the voice or accent a slight hint of impatience. Other times the gestures seem purely extrapolated, but often they felt right.

If only, the interviewer could have been as subtle and as skilled as Louryk. In a bit of stage craft that doesn’t quite make sense, the interviewer is the performer Rob Grace who speaks from a reproduction 1950s television that shares the spare stage with Louryk. Grace has been filmed lip-synching the questions that the interviewer Julius Russell asked. He mugged and grimaced and furrowed his brows. He judged and queried, prodded and poked. He asked all the questions we want answers to, but somehow I ended up wishing he were polite enough not to. I found the whole thing disconcerting. So, I went looking for the recording and I found it and listened (you can too). Without the overwrought facial emoting, the questions sound sympathetic. What seems lascivious in the mouth of Grace, “If you should see a girl, an exceedingly beautiful, curvaceous girl, a beautiful, seductive woman—say of the Marilyn Monroe variety—do you ever wish you could go back and be a man” seems actually quite a serious inquiry. Particularly when one discovers that the Julius Russell in questions was not a white, one-time-frat-boy cum broadcaster as presented in this play. As Jorgenson’s autobiography reveals, the real Russell—an African American comedian—was chosen because he would be a sympathetic, non-judgmental questioner.

Despite Grace’s questionable direction (the set is a recording studio—why director Josh Hecht didn’t decide to build a glass wall at one end and pretend Russell was behind it, miked in the control room is beyond me), the audience was rapt, hanging on every syllable and hand gesture. Jorgensen is thoughtful and smart. She’s both decades ahead of her moment and indelibly part of it. Listening to her talk about the construction of gender and the expression of sexuality was to listen to a enlightened contemporary. Listening to her talk about the medical diagnosis of her “condition” was to pity the era’s doctors and psychiatrists for not knowing any better.

It’s an incredible thought-provoking night at the theater. If New Yorkers know any better, they’ll go down to the Lion Theater to experience it for themselves.

Photos courtesy of http://www.theatrerow.org/thelion.htm and http://www.theatermania.com/