Playing with Gender: Drag and Gender Performance in Tuna

by Rachel Ropella In our production of A Tuna Christmas, actors Nathaniel P. Claridad and Tom Ford are each playing 11 characters—22 total! The rowdy cast of characters of Tuna, Texas, that they're portraying include men such as Sheriff Givens and Petey Fisk, as well as women like Aunt Pearl and Vera Carp. Tom Ford, one half of our dynamic duo, commented in his PlayNotes interview that “I've always thought it’s fun how I get to explore my feminine side, to explore my masculine side….I get to live in all these different heads and attempt to be truthful to all of them.” Playing with gender performance in theater has been around for centuries, leading to valuable commentary on gender and the development of art forms such as drag.

In places like Elizabethan England, it was illegal for women to act on stage professionally until 1661, as acting was seen as an unseemly profession. Cross-gender casting was the norm in Shakespeare’s time, with male actors playing such characters as Viola in Twelfth Night, who dresses as a man during the play. Within these plays, cross-gender casting and costuming was seen as integral commentary to the work. In her essay Come, Sir Boy: Subverting Masculinity Through Cross-Gender Performance, author Rachel Chung notes, “The gender of the actors functions not only in the external process of the show, but also as a device within the play, interacting with the text and…the audience is asked to zoom in on particular elements of the text that call gender and performativity into question”.

When thinking about gender performance, one might also think of entertainment outside of theater, such as performances by drag queens or kings. A drag artist is a performer who uses costumes and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate gender signifiers as they sing, lip-sync, and dance. The first self-proclaimed “queen of drag” was American LGBT activist, William Dorsey Swann. Swann, who had been born into slavery, started hosting drag balls in during the 1880s and was critical to the development of queer culture. Today, because of influential documentaries like Paris Is Burning and shows like RuPaul's Drag Race, drag balls and shows have become popular and more mainstream.

In the world of A Tuna william dorsey swann. Christmas, you might wonder: is this play an example of drag or just cross-gender casting? It’s an interesting question, as this play could be considered both! When Joe Sears and Jaston Williams toured the country with the Tuna plays, they often referred to it as drag when talking about their overexaggerated performances of women like Vera Carp. “It’s still amazing to me that two men dressed mostly in drag could have such an effect on audiences,” said Sears to TexasMonthly. However, this play can also be an example of cross-gender casting since there have been performances in which one or both of the actors have been played by women. Rhonda Kulhanek spoke of her empowering experience playing a variety of complex characters and identities in Women in Theatre’s production of Greater Tuna: “All of these people I’ve met….These people are very real to me; some in a frightening way.”

Whether it’s in the world of Tuna or a Shakespeare play, playing with gender performance in the theater and drag today is still extremely popular and is no longer binary. With all-female Shakespeare productions, nonbinary performers like Iris Menas performing on Broadway, and RuPaul's Drag Race including trans performers like Gottmik, artists continue to explore how they can express their identity as well as comment on the wider world around them. Be it serious commentary, hilarious satire, or empowering entertainment, both drag and gender performance has been and continues to be a part of Tuna and the greater theatrical world.