Our Research Project and Concept for the Show

Peter Cockett and Melinda Gough

 “The battle for trans rights is being fought on the battlegrounds of history,” Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans

This show forms part of Engendering the Stage, our ongoing collaborative international research project on the performance of gender in early modern Europe. Although portrayals of early modern characters by trans and non-binary actors may seem like a radical innovation of our times, playing with gender was an exciting feature of theatre practice across Europe. Engendering the Stage explores gender variance and queer resonance in plays originally written for the commercial stages of early seventeenth-century Spain, England, France, and Italy. In these investigations, we look to the past to imagine new horizons for gender equity today and into the future-- on professional and university stages and beyond.

Engaging with classical texts in today’s classrooms and theatres brings challenges, however, since these plays carry harmful representations and ideas about class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and more. Acknowledging this harm presents an ongoing challenge for our research: how can we ethically engage with these plays and histories today? This year the Fall Major was scheduled to produce a classical play, but should we even do so?

Kit Heyam’s recent book Before We Were Trans has helped us and our student collaborators to wrestle more deeply with this challenge. By applying a trans lens to the study of history, Heyam reveals rich and diverse evidence of trans and queer lives across the globe, from antiquity to the present – evidence that is often excluded or marginalized in traditional historical accounts.

Heyam’s work helped motivate us to produce Castro’s The Force of Habit. This play from the Spanish Golden Age is an example of classical theatre. It is simultaneously rich in evidence of queer and trans history. At the Stratford workshop, trans actor and director Emma Frankland said: “The past is not the past; it is not even past.” The gender oppressions present in the play are still very much present in our society. The flipside of Frankland’s brilliant observation is that the very gender diversity which is finding new platforms and voices today has always been part of our world. Gender non-conformity and gender multiplicity outside of a colonial, patriarchal binary frame have been suppressed and erased, in Europe and on these lands, sometimes through egregious laws but other times simply because straight, cis-gendered historians have chosen to ignore the evidence or have misrepresented it to serve their own world views.

The Force of Habit, then, provides yet more textual evidence that trans and queer possibilities were being explored in early modern Europe. At the same time, it is a work of theatre – and hence of imagination. Inviting us to imagine otherwise, this production playfully explores what happens when the seemingly fixed boundaries of binary gender (and sexuality) in early modern Europe – and in our present day -- turn out to be not so fixed.

And yet The Force of Habit is not immune from harmful ideas and assumptions involving gender as it connects with violence, honour, and lineage (rank and race). In working with this seventeenth-century text, we have wrestled with how best to harness its celebration of trans and queer possibilities while not reproducing its harms. All too often, trans and queer narratives are represented in ways that further erase trans and queer people. This happens with modern productions of classical plays, as noted in Sawyer Kemp’s essay on holistic dramaturgy. “Nothing about us without us,” a phrase coined by disability activists, has therefore become a touchstone for our work. Researching with, and not just about, trans and queer persons, is key to reducing such erasure and minimizing harm. This principle has been embraced by our graduate student collaborators, whose posters on Queer Space, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Transcestors (Trans-Ancestors) appear in the lobby outside the theatre – with layout and design by Hamilton’s queer owned and run marketing and design firm Unicorn Rebellion.

The principle of “nothing about us without us” has also been important for casting. Explicitly welcoming auditionees of all genders, including trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer persons, the show has embraced a production process designed to ensure that actors of all genders would have opportunities to shape the show’s development -- including rewritings of the script undertaken, collaboratively, in response to issues arising in rehearsal. In approaching the show in this way, we have been inspired not only by disability activists and by Kit Heyam’s research but also by Nora Williams’s notion of “liquid dramaturgy.” Urging us to see early modern playtexts as fluid and changeable rather than fixed, Williams encourages theatre artists and researchers of classical theatre today to embrace holistic, structural changes – changes meant to ensure that casting and other production choices do not end up inadvertently “propping up the same oppressive structures” they seek to dismantle.

The premise for our show is that the play that comes down to us from seventeenth-century Spain is already queer, and that McMaster’s production merely brings into sharper focus that queerness by applying a trans lens to reveal historical evidence perfectly apparent in the original text.  At the same time, our revised script creates a new comical unfolding of the action – one that makes visible and helps to further dismantle the gender binary the parents are so keen to impose. The creators of the show have enjoyed imagining audience members at the original production in 1609 who would have been longing for the ending we provide in our production, and who would have understood all the queer and trans coding the playwright and company inserted in the story.

The Adaptation

This production is a full adaptation of the play, not simply a staging that invites a specific interpretation of the text. That means we not only cut lines out (something that happens in many productions), we also re-arranged the lines, assigned them to different characters, and wrote new text to create an ending for this comedy that made us happy.

The original Force of Habit follows the traditional pattern for comedies from early modern Europe. The play begins with a point of conflict in the social order. The main action involves a subversion of that social order, and the ending restores social order and aligns the play with the dominant morality of the times. There is a lot to like about the “middles” of many early modern comedies, and a lot to hate about the endings.

The process began in the Spring class THTRLM 3PR3 Text-Based Devising: Research and Development. Students were introduced to two plays and critical writing about the gender politics of the period. (Audience members will find some of these sources in the Want to Know More and Works Cited pages on this website.)

Once introduced to the play and its social context, students were invited to imagine how they would want the stories to end if they were to write the story themselves. From their offers, we developed a draft structure for the new script that allowed us to begin work on writing and designing and was open-ended enough to allow for changes following casting. We agreed at this point that the final version of the show would be determined by the actors cast in the roles, who would be invited to bring their own lived experiences of gender to their roles.

Since our premise is that the past is not necessarily more conservative than the present, and that this play is full of evidence of queer and trans histories, we retained as much of the original text as we could while still telling the story we wanted to tell. As you watch the show, you may feel you know when the production moves into new writing, but don’t be too sure. You might be surprised to discover many of those moments were in the original text.

The one obvious and apparent intervention is the creation of our singing and dancing gender-fluid chorus, who provide critical commentary on the action of the old play and help move the action to the ending we all desired.

Director’s Acknowledgments

Peter Cockett

The process began with an edition of the play published online by the Diversifying the Classics project at UCLA led by Barbara Fuchs. The play was translated collaboratively by the following members of the UCLA Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance: Paul Cella, Nitzaira Delgado-García, Barbara Fuchs, Mar Gómez Glez, Laura Muñoz, Juan Jesús Payán, Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Kathryn Renton, Veronica Wilson. This text and the introduction by Laura Muñoz and Payton Phillips Quintanilla provided an excellent staring point for our process.

The class of THTRFLM 3PR3 all played a key role in the initial inspiration for the production

April Bird and Thomas Zackary researched possibilities for set design, combining classical Spanish architecture and a drag club, and created draft set models that were inspiration of the set design featured in the production.

Sarah Ransom and Polina Zlochevskaia researched period costumes, drag culture, and contemporary non-binary fashions and drafted designs that

The actors Dalia Dudalski, Kindrey Krol, Chris Liu, Saad bin Saud, and Zaina Zafar explored the performance of gender and the possibilities of camp and drag, and devised an opening for the show that remains in place today.

Zhao DongFang and JingJing Liu researched Spanish music from the period of the play and the classics of drag club culture, and explored ways that the two might be combined.

Stacey de Berner, Sydney Skeete, Elizabeth Winstanley, and Jeff Yu, bravely begin the writing process, adapting scenes from the play, and providing new writing that remains in the script today.

Over the summer, while writing the full draft of the play, I was fortunate to enjoy editing and dramaturgical support of my collaborator and colleague Melinda Gough.

Casting the play was a defining moment in the production development. Each of the cast members have made valuable contributions to the concept of the show, bringing their personal perspectives to the performance of their characters. Evelyn Speakman (Félix) generously took charge of writing a new ending to her character’s journey in the play.

The amazing Chorus, Kiara Barrow, Joan Palparan, Isabelle Duchene, Avery Hart, and Sienna Kim made the drafts of their dialogues very much their own, bringing so much life and critical heart to the production.

Zhao DongFang worked throughout the summer to compose music for the show, grappling with ways to capture the combination of past and present, drama and comedy, while embarking on a learning curve to surpass all learning curves.

In September the draft play and design research from the Spring, was handed over to a new team of students drawn from THTRFLM 3S06 Major Production Workshop. They are all recognized in this program, but I want to acknowledge their work here and express my gratitude for their contributions to a process that has been inspiring, caring, and relatively smooth.

A special mention is warranted for Assistant Director, Saad bin Saud, who has been central to the production from the outset, showing great leadership and commitment to the play, its ideas, and the design concept. He wrote the songs, sometimes in collaboration with the director, and sometimes alone. He directed the chorus, collaboratively creating musical arrangements and choreography.

Great thanks also to the graduate student dramaturgy team from English/Cultural Studies 780, for their brilliant research and writing for the lobby displays and website. They have deepened our understanding of the contemporary and historical contexts for our production, helped amplify queer and trans voices from the past and present, and provided avenues for connection with local queer and trans organizations and resources.

I would like to also acknowledge the inspiring role played by things I have read and seen while working on the production: Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans, bell hooks’ All About Love, and Syrus Marcus Ware’s Radical Love public art installation. Also inspired by my conversations with children Jonathan, Ellla, Tish, Sophie and Charlie, and grateful for them putting up with my extended absence every Fall.

Final special thanks must go to Kelly Wolf, who, as instructional assistant, has provided support, practical and emotional, at every step of the way, and to Patrick Brennan, Pamela Blackwood Marques and James Kendal for their production expertise.

So many minds and hearts combined to make this show possible. We hope you enjoy the results!