No Drag

When the lights come up on And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens — which is playing at the Yale Cabaret now through Saturday night— something transformative is already taking place.

It’s not just the elaborate set, arranged to reflect queer New Orleans circa 1957.

The specter of Tennessee Williams is everywhere: reclining on the chaise, where he’s dressed in a nothing but a red silk kimono; mixing a cocktail at a well-stocked bar; straight-backed and skinny at a typewriter, a set of flexing, manicured fingers striking the keytop as a ribbon whirs away inside. 

I think the strange/the crazed/the queer/will have their holiday this year, Williams writes out, letting the verse bounce and echo in his head. I think for just a little while/there will be pity for the wild. 

Back in 2016 New Haven, an audience is wide-eyed at the words, watching as they fly from the main character’s drawling lips to a ​“straight” sailor’s unwilling ears, settling back on the page when they see they are not welcome. There is something exquisite and unsettling about the whole exchange, as if 60-plus years of queer history are being smushed together, and can’t find quite the right fit.

Which feels, surprisingly, like a good thing. In a massive win for first-year director and cab debut Rory Pelsue, Williams’ little-known work takes on a sort of fabulous posterity, walking the tightrope between mid-century gay New Orleans and 21st century America, where it seems impossible that the same systems of sexual oppression, violence and want are still taking place. 

In Williams’ world, it is the late 1950s, and New Orleans’ French Quarter is pulsating with a vibrant and not-so-clandestine culture of drag, wildly popular in the city from the 1930s onward. Our main character, Candy, is a queen to rule all queens — or so she would have us believe — who has built up a small fortune through her work as an interior decorator. As she rattles off her successes — three properties in the area, one in old slave quarters, where she may or may not be displacing black people — audience members get a glimpse into the relationship she’s pursuing with Karl, a cash-strapped, ostensibly hetero sailor who rebuffs her advances. Anguish-racked and desperate for companionship after her husband has left her, Candy begs Karl to stay, bending to his will in a way she sees as exercising hers. When he ultimately does, exchanging some seriously abusive sex for money, it feels tragic and joyous and inevitable. 

That part, in and of itself, isn’t actually as weird as it may seem to current viewers. As George Chauncey explains in Gay New York, the first half of the 20th century saw straight, working-class men paying gay men and queens for sex, as long as they were permitted to maintain the macho or masculine role. Instead, it’s Karl’s sense of propriety and sexual violence, so out of place in Candy’s world of affect and ornament, that rattles viewers, proving too much for them — and for Candy herself — by the end of the night.

But Pelsue and an extraordinary Candy (first-year Yale Drama student Patrick Madden) don’t stop there. Tying a stunning, pristine set and perfectly contained script to current events, Pelsue captures in Williams’ words, now over half a century old, what it means to grapple with gender, cultural appropriation, and otherness. At moments, we feel deeply for Candy, her desperation for Karl’s companionship — and willingness to submit to abuse — at once destructive and intimately familiar. At others, we critique her as she uses her profession to justify, consciously or not, a particular taste for japonisme that rivals the MFA Boston’s big cultural gaffe last year. Meanwhile, the script operates with a subtext rich in current and cross-generational references from ignorance-fueled proclamations on trans- and cis- gender use of public spaces to The Danish Girl, the straightest queer movie to come out of 2015. 

There is one truth that still stands tall at the end of the night, as audience members start to make sense of the others. This country, as Candy herself says near the beginning of the show, would be absolutely barbaric without queens. And without immigrants. And without black lives mattering. And without others, so many others, reveling however carefully in their otherness. It would be a crying shame if we ever forgot that.