Annons
VICE: So tell us about Yitzhak, and why does he stay with Hedwig?"As a brown person in America—well, and everywhere—you feel your brownness and your blackness even when other people don't realize they're being offensive or hurtful." —Rebecca Namoi Jones
Jones: Yitzhak is a guy who has big dreams, and loves beautiful things. He wants to love and be loved, to be cared for. Unfortunately, he's been through a lot in life, in his own country and in order to flee that country. He has made really difficult choices in order to survive, and those choices involve him suppressing his own desires, his own beauty, and those finer things that he has inside him.
Annons
Hedwig has had this major moment of self-reconciliation. He's shed his many layers of skin, and is allowing herself to free herself. In that, she realizes that she needs to free Yitzhak as well. She gives Yitzhak the right to wear wigs again, and to be his true self, the way that she is allowing herself to be his/her truest self.Do you think they stay together?
No. I don't think so. I think that they part, but they part in a way that is full of love.How do you get into character?
I apply a healthy dose of make-up to create humungous eyebrows, a mustache, and a beard. The make-up helps quite a bit. Once I see myself in the mirror, my face immediately goes into a different form.
Annons
Absolutely. A lot of the verbally abusive stuff that Hedwig slings at Yitzhak has become, for lack of a better word—or perhaps it's the best word to use—darker. It feels close to home in this sad but appropriate way.Especially the version of the show John Cameron Mitchell was doing. Already, when Lena Hall was doing the role, there was a whole section where he would say "you're like a self-hating helper monkey." And, you know, the word monkey has been used toward black people in racially-charged, abusive ways for years. There was also one point I was chewing some gum and John's Hedwig would take the gum out of my mouth and chew it himself, and say "Mmm, watermelon." It's stuff that wasn't even on purpose, but when it came out, because I'm black, it had this extra dark layer to it.With Darren [Criss, who is currently playing Hedwig], it's less dark but it's still there. As a brown person in America—well, and everywhere—you feel your brownness and your blackness even when other people don't realize they're being offensive or hurtful. It's something you feel all the time. It's lending itself to this role.Were you familiar with the show before? How do you think its reception is different this time around?
I never got to see the show at Jane Street, but I was in love with the movie and I watched it many, many times. So doing this has been pretty exciting. It's interesting now to have Darren Criss be a part of the show, because he brings this audience who loved him on Glee. So I'm seeing all these eyes-wide-open people at the stage door, which is great.But it's just really cool that they found a way to make this dark, witty, biting piece of theater about a transgender person with a botched sex change a big hit on Broadway. It's making an impact on young people and people in general who have never seen it before, which says a lot about the show as a piece about self-acceptance, redemption, addiction, abuse, and how we can come to terms with our complicated identities and embrace the freak within us!Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.