The Brooklyn Rail: Take a second and try to make a list of all the nonbinary characters in musical theater.
It won’t take long to realize there isn’t much of a list. While there have been a few nonbinary performers on Broadway and several roles have been played by actors whose gender does not match their characters’, there’s only been one character I know of explicitly written as nonbinary: Pythio in Head Over Heels.
4 comments:
I think that it is so essential and important to have a wide variety of people and experiences portrayed on Broadway and in media in general. And I think anytime there is an opportunity to cast someone in a role that is an underrepresented person they should. I think that specifically, trans actors should play trans characters and nonbinary actors should play nonbinary characters. It is sad that Jagged Little Pill not only cast a cis woman to play their nonbinary character but changed the character's gender identity entirely. They lost a real opportunity to have a good representation of a nonbinary character. To make matters worse they cast a nonbinary actor as the character's understudy even when they changed the character to get a cis woman. I hope that Jagged Little Pill reverses this change and embraces the real opportunity they have to make positive change in theater for nonbinary people and actors.
This production, and this casting and re-writing coverup, makes me really sad and angry. I saw Jagged Little Pill on Broadway with some friends back in January 2020. The original Alanis Morissette album was a CD my mom played in the car all the time as a kid and I grew up loving. Plus seeing Jo, an androgynous lesbian with a killer song in the middle of the performance, in addition to other queer characters and a playbill with pronouns included with every bio, I came out of the theatre having really enjoyed myself. I didn't even know that Jo had originally been a nonbinary character until the Tony Nominations came out and I saw a couple queer news outlet cover this cover-up. It has genuinely made me dislike the show. There were gender queer people in the cast and even as the understudy and they continued to cast the character with a cis-woman and the to avoid that problematic choice erased the identity. If the creative and producing team wanted to have Lauren Patten play a titular role in the show, they should have written one that fits her, instead of erasing representation for an identity seldom recognized respectfully or without transphobia.
reading this article made me very sad about the absolute lack of care and respect towards a huge community of people who are gender nonconforming, and those who may be questioning their gender identity. It is an absolute shame and frankly ridiculous that the team who created such a powerful non-binary role in "Jagged Little Pill" would flat out deny the gender identity of their own character as soon as it hit broadway. I feel as though they were doing it in order to have a successful run but the damage that that erasure will do is irreparable. This is a musical that could have stretched leaps and bounds above anything done on broadway ever before, but not anymore. Even going so far as to cast a non-binary understudy for the role and then to completely deny that part of them can be nothing short of hurtful. It is truly sad and I hope that future productions of this show bring back the wonderful and essential representation seen in the original creation of Jo.
One thing I’ve always noticed about theater is just how gendered it is. I don’t know if this observation would occur to a cis person, but it is truly an art form that is in a lot of ways grounded in traditional gender roles. The reason that there are barely any trans actors is because the industry is structured in a way for them not to succeed, and they have it ingrained into them that they will never make it. An observation I always think about is the demographics of the actors vs. the demographics of the techies. The backstage always has way more POC and way more LGBTQ+ individuals. There is a reason that it is like this, the difference in demographic is no coincidence—and this difference is applicable to literally any theater program out there, from a high school theater to CMU to Broadway. Not to mention, trans actors are usually boxed into the limited trans roles there are. Have you ever seen a trans actor play a cis role? If you come up with an exception, it’s likely only one. This article is just another example within thousands of incidents of transphobia in the industry, this occurrence is just a lot more direct and less subtle than most. Disappointed but never surprised.
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