Plays: 'Cross-Dressing' conflates roles, identities

Posters for Cross-Dressing in the Depression made me wish I'd been more ambitious in selecting my history senior essay. After I saw the show at the Yale Cabaret, directed by the company, I wished I were more ambitious in my poetry writing. Playwright Erin Cressida Wilson spun together a lyrical work from ashes of the overtold Oedipal myth. Just as the blight plagued Thebes until the identity of Laius's slayer was revealed, the true nature of main character Wilder's world exposes itself amidst the barren Great Depression.

As the show opens, orange lights fade in and out, revealing several still-life arrangements of the characters. Denver, Colorado during the Great Depression has a tropical lethargy about it. An adult Wilder (David Koppel, DRA '98) recalls naps with his mother (Heather Robinson, DRA '99) and her freckles. He remembers listening to his mother peel the freckles from her skin and put them on him. In the bed positioned at the center of the stage, his mother sponges her bare back.

When we meet Wilder's father and namesake, the atmosphere of the Depression becomes apparent. The father (also David Koppel) and mother demonstrate tremendous resourcefulness just in putting food on the table. As young Wilder (Josh Grubb Robinson, DRA '98) discovers, "This is corn flakes in the shape of...in the color of...a roast."

When Wilder's father is jailed and his mother gets a job as a maid, he is sent to live in an attic. It is in this attic that Wilder finds himself having carnal thoughts in order to keep warm. For through the holes in his wall he sees Melora , a pale young thing and an allegory for sex. Heather Robinson's portrayal of Melora reveals her talent much more than her scenes as the mother ever do. Wilder alternately watches Melora entertain gentlemen, and listens to their bed squeak as he reads the Bible in his room.

Josh Grubb Robinson glows with the tremendous naivete and wonder of a boy just entering puberty gradually coming to terms with thesignificance of its changes. He speaks in a stream of euphemisms without perceiving them as such, but rather as nonsensical adult- speak. With Melora, "the carrot wetter," comes Wilder's realization that people use their bodies to make their living. With that knowledge, in turn, Wilder trips backwards to memories of his mother and her similarities to Melora.

This necessitates a confrontation with his mother, when Wilder begs her to allow him to prostitute himself and "look pretty." And though it seems that the play's title will fulfill itself, it does not do so literally. The play instead uses the cross-dressing of actors who play multiple characters, and the way a life echoes and repeats itself. I had little trouble with the conflated identities of grown Wilder and his father, both played by Koppel, or Heather Robinson's transition from mother to Melora. Set Designer Tad Feekes uses a bed as the axis of the stage, making all of the character resonances true, since sex and reproduction are
universal.

For those of you who've never been to the Yale Cabaret, as I had not, it is a cross between a packed lecture hall and an English pub. Crowded but piping with camaraderie, the space challenges actors to make themselves heard and keep themselves interesting enough that we strain our necks to see them. The company demands a lot of the audience's field of vision by providing viewers with two foci--the narrator Old Wilder, off to the side of the stage, and the action around the bed. From the wings, Koppel's easy voice lilts us into acceptance of his presence as we watch the other characters. The agility with which he transforms into Wilder's father or an anonymous John is not at all jarring, given the small stage and cast.

Ms. Wilson's words become baffling at times because of their density and token poetics, but the production makes sense of them. Like the script, the music and lights move gradually, conveying an era in which the constant is hardship. This cooperation between lighting (Alexander Bagnall, DRA '00) and sound (Shane Rettig, DRA '99) unifies a show with much potential to scatter across different times and multiple characters played by the same actress or actor.

The three cast members performs up to the caliber of Ms Wilson's script, adding moments of poignancy--or moments of comedy as sophisticated as the line "My chest hair just fell on you." Enough said.

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