What's in an identity? 'Gender Play' asks probing questions, with suggested answers from Shakespeare

What might hem in an actor and put barriers not only on getting roles, but also on interpreting them with some expression of the actor's identity as part of the performance?

Will Wilhelm, a Chicago actor being presented here by Indianapolis Shakespeare Company  through April 27, co-devised "Gender Play, or What You Will" to answer the question with a focus on  nonbinary assertion.  In more provocative terms, Wilhelm calls themself a "gender traitor." How is such an identity congruent with tendencies evident in the Shakespearean canon toward fluidity in sex/gender matters?

"Gender Play" turns such a potentially academic investigation into a lavish party atmosphere

Will Wilhelm is not willy-nilly.

in the Phoenix Theatre's black-box space. The Frank and Katrina Basile Theatre allows for vaporizing the "fourth wall," as Wilhelm gleefully pointed out in Friday night's performance. The actor's struggle to make a theater career while not ticking the female or male box on their c.v. is front and center in their presentation, so why not make a costume party out of it? For intermission, there will just be a collective dance rave. Prompts given to a few patrons allow for Wilhelm's guided participation. And everyone has to take a tarot card going in, so we can all pretend to be "fortune's fool" (in Romeo's phrase). 

What does an actor's uniqueness do to an interpretation? It may have to be cast aside at the audition, or the actor is simply not cast in the production. Who you really are sets the boundaries and direction of your career, Wilhelm impresses upon the audience, drawing on personal experience.

Even though an audience is exposed to actors' particular looks and voices for the entire stage experience, is each mime supposed to just sink into the character and its interaction with other characters, offering nothing of their offstage selves?

The hint of inauthenticity in this aspect of theater may be responsible for some anti-theater attitudes, like that of  20th-century American man of letters John Updike, who once told an interviewer: "I've never much enjoyed going to plays. The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook."

If the "unreality" of their craft occasionally bothers the minds of actors, imagine how much that is underlined if an actor feels they cannot bring their real self to what they say and do onstage. Rehearsed and molded to produce a unified effect,  the cast pretends to be persons rendered through words on the page and subject to a director's guidance. We looking on are obliged to just suspend our disbelief. 

The setting of "Gender Play" entrances the mind and eyes. 

In reorienting the purpose and impact of theater, Wilhelm and co-creator Erin Murray enlist the audience in a seance bringing back Shakespeare through flashes of his works awash in the atmosphere of a revealing party game. At the outset, you are encouraged to don masks, headgear and costumes from your choice of a dazzling variety, and you take your seat from a variety of choices.

Wilhelm sketches out the default position of the Elizabethan stage: all roles were performed by men and boys. On top of that, within the plays there are numerous cases of mistaken identity, often deliberately adopted to fool others. The subtitle "What you will" is also the punning subtitle of "Twelfth Night," which itself involves foolery that used to be attached to Epiphany celebrations (the twelfth day of Christmas). 

Some characters declare a different identity from how they present to others (Lady Macbeth), some object to the marginalization declared for them (Edmund in "King Lear"). Major characters kick against the pricks of their assigned identity, including Kate in "The Taming of the Shrew" and Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice." Wilhelm skillfully presents one such cameo portrait after another. I was particularly fond of the actor's Juliet, whose love for Romeo is transformative from the get-go as she rejects the patriarchy that demands another role for her. Wilhelm's impersonation makes clear Juliet won't be fortune's fool, unlike her new lover, who initially presents the stereotype of a besotted swain on the rebound from a previous relationship.

I'm not sure that this show's strong hints of an intimate relationship between the playwright and one of his patrons, the Earl of Southampton, are explained in the sonnets. But the sources I'm familiar with leave open the possibility of something closer than a literary transactional link. That possibility serves "Gender Play" well. 

Wilhelm and Murray seem justified in encouraging speculation about the open-ended nature of Shakespeare's feeling for how human beings connect to each other on the deepest level. It's all fun along the way of figuring each other out as we figure out ourselves, whether we be gender traitors or gender loyalists.

[Photos by Zach Rosing]