"Hedwig and the Angry Inch" And Me

DISCLAIMER: if you don’t know what this is, I'll introduce you. Here. But WARNING: may be shocking to some viewers. In a good way or bad, but just so you know, it’s rated R “for sexual content and language.” It's in the same vein as Rocky Horror Picture Show, but a little more emotional. Not for the faint of heart, but you can come watch the movie at my house if you want because I love it.

It’s been about three weeks now since I saw the show live on Broadway for the second time and I still can’t stop thinking about it. What an incredible experience! I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to the people behind the show, though they will probably never read this, for giving me such an incredible gift. I won’t pretend to know everything about what went into writing and performing Hedwig. In fact, I very much am trying to figure out how one would go about creating such a fantastic show (for personal reasons). But it meant a lot to me, and I will never be able to thank the people behind it enough.

I want to talk for a bit about what makes this show so special. And I’m going to try to be honest about it. I never thought that I could relate so much to a person like Hedwig. It wasn’t her Rock ‘N’ Roll persona, her East German heritage, or even her history with prostitution that was so foreign to me. It was the fact that she’s transgender. With her drag makeup and rhinestone studded denim, she inhabits a skin so different from mine. Growing up cis-gendered, I always felt some discord in my feelings towards gender-queer persons. I wanted to love them, but I just couldn’t understand them. And I’m a person that just has to understand things. I couldn’t get why anyone would act in ways that I don’t. I mean, come on Hedwig, what’s with the act. Why all the drama, the abrasiveness, the narcissism? I admit, I’m a judger. But seeing Hedwig’s story and feeling my pain over again with her so strongly, I finally found my love for people who display their story differently from me. And now, instead of finding it slightly annoying, I find it absolutely incredible that members of the human family can feel such similar feelings and yet deal with them and display them so differently. Not only did I get to know Hedwig on that stage, I got to be inspired by her.

Sitting in that room with all those people, I felt Hedwig’s pain. Not because I felt sympathetic to the character, but because I felt that I was the character. I was Hedwig, I was Yitzhak. I could sing those songs with just as much passion, although probably not as beautifully. I wasn’t just sitting and watching, I was living and reliving. This in itself was an incredible gift.

One of the most powerful moments for me was the song “Long Grift.” This was my favorite song the first time I watched the show, because the lyrics come from a place of such pain. But what I wasn’t expecting going into my second time was to have an experience during the short song. I got to watch in awe as Yitzhak (Rebecca Naomi Jones) began, nervous and unsure. Soon, she found her place in the song as the victim, living the words as the pain showed in her eyes. And then, something amazing happened. That pain was transformed into joy as she was finally able to tell her story, and to own her feelings. And I thought this is me. I had a revelation. These are feelings that I forgot that I feel—wounds I had hoped would heal if I just put them away and became someone else. I still feel them. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t find joy. What an incredible discovery! I understood this even as I was feeling those feelings I had hated so much. As Hedwig sang “Exquisite Corpse,” my other favorite song, I was falling and spinning with her. So lost in the cacophony of those feelings. Trying to feel them out and let them take me over as I hadn’t in such a long time. I won’t lie, I sobbed. Half of me was suspended in my seat, but the other half was reliving all of the feelings I had ever felt in rapid succession as the drums beat out the racing rhythm of my heart and the blinking lights followed the path of the tears down my face. And then the music stopped. I was lost. Thankfully, the moments that followed next were slow and quiet. And then finally, Hedwig sang “Midnight Radio.” Somehow, I mostly overlooked this song the first time I saw the show. Maybe I was distracted by Darren’s bare body. In fact, that’s probably it (how embarrassing). In my memory of that first time, it bled into the curtain call and was the signal for me to shake off the feelings and get ready for the real world. But now, I am sure that I will never have another favorite moment. I hadn’t noticed the first time how beautiful and hopeful the song is. I mean, really, I should have, but I needed that intense pain right before to even register how important this moment was. Because for such a tragic story, what I took away was hope. Hope for me, and hope for the whole world—that one day everyone might understand, and that we could hold on to each other.



*EDIT
I made a mistake and I want to take this moment to both own up to it and try to remedy it. We live in a culture of sexual objectification. As someone who advocates against this culture, I feel the need to address something in the original post. This is not to invalidate the post, but to build upon it (because I could talk about my experience with Hedwig forever). So here it is:
The only time I mentioned Darren specifically here was to talk about his body. Not only is this even more embarrassing for me, it is also unfair to him. I was trying to keep the post short and to connect to other people through self-effacing humor; but anyway, I would rather have a long post and be a better human than lose such a perfect opportunity to point out how we are unfair to people in every-day ways.
So, here is a more perfect account of my experience during Darren’s performance—and I’ll still try to keep it short. Darren is extremely talented; it’s not inappropriate to talk about his body, because he uses it masterfully in the show as an acting tool. I just want to focus on the artful way he uses it rather than my attraction to it. The show is about being sexy, in a big way; but that’s not all it’s about. It’s about exploring yourself and so much more that I can’t even articulate. Darren gave so much to the role, and I felt like he was giving that gift to each and every audience member.
The first time I saw the show, I was absolutely drawn to Darren’s body in Midnight Radio. Yes because he’s dreamy and I’m a sucker, but also because he was doing something incredible with it, and it was transfixing. He was showing us who he thought he was. Who Hedwig was. It was like witnessing the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly; yes it was really that transcendent. Maybe because the whole show seems in a way like a butterfly transitioning back into a caterpillar. As Hedwig takes off her drag, piece by piece, it’s like she’s losing parts of herself. She is transitioning to something else, but it’s something that doesn’t fit into a box the way a wig does. More than that, she is finding herself in the pieces, exploring where they fit into her, smashed together with her idea of herself, and the emotions that are always changing within her. And this is where Darren takes us in the end of the show. Exploring his body, disconnecting and reconnecting, deciding whether he can walk without heels, choosing whether he wants to share his bare heart with us or hide it, not forcing his body into a way of behaving, but letting his body speak to him, and to us. And then finally honoring Hedwig and all she stands for in Midnight Radio. The most powerful line of the entire show my second time watching it was Darren’s quiet and deliberate delivery at the end of the bridge in Midnight Radio. “Here’s to Patti, and Tina… And me.” So here’s to Hedwig, and Darren: Thank you.