Radclyffe

I finally made it to my friend Kestryl Cael Lowrey’s show! I missed hir earlier 348, but I’m glad I made it to Radclyffe. It was playing at the Theatre Workshop on

36^th St.

as part of the Fresh Fruits Autumn Festival. “Fresh Fruits” is actually a pun, because it’s a festival of plays by queer artists.

Kestryl and I went to Lewis and Clark together, and ze was a year ahead of me in the theater department. Kestryl is transgender, and seems to have always been interested in queer theater. Back college, ze used the masculine pronouns for hirself, but now it seems like ze’s using “ze” and “hir.” This is my little disclaimer to say that I’m not totally familiar with these words, so let me know if I get one of them wrong.

So Radclyffe. Radclyffe Hall was an “invert,” or butch writer in the earlier 20^th Century. Kestryl’s one-person show is a meditation on Radclyffe’s life and its lessons for queer culture today. The show, as it stands, is definitely geared towards a queer audience. However, it seems to me to be a first draft of something bigger, and, if I may, more important. Radclyffe’s life goal, as presented by Kestryl, was to communicate lesbian life as it is unashamedly to the mainstream. She had to compromise this goal because of the times she lived in: she felt, according to Kestryl, that the only way to do this was to make the lesbian protagonist miserable. Hence the title of her book, The Well of Loneliness. Kestryl is pushing for Radclyffe’s original concept, in which the protagonist is happy, leads a fulfilling life, and nobody has a problem with it.

Radclyffe the play is the first draft of that. But the burden, it seems to me, isn’t on the queer community. It’s on the mainstream. After all, for all their political activism, Kestryl and hir compatriots can’t force anybody to accept them. It has to come from us. In a later draft of this play, I’d like to see it done for an audience of more than ten, in which more than 10% is part of the mainstream. And that we’re there because we want to be there, not because it makes us feel like a bigger person. That’s a terrible reason. The good reasons are things like: it’s a fun thing to do, to support your friends, because you’re curious about who, exactly, Radclyffe Hall is. You know, all the reasons I went. So I guess the burden on the mainstream is to be more like me.