2Bmag online

Related Posts

• 2B picks the gayest gigs at this year’s Fringe Festival
• Vogue Manifesto: Trajal Harrell’s (M)IMOSA at the FTA
• Centaur goes Southern Gothic with Haunted Hillbilly

Secrets. That is what FBI founding director J Edgar Hoover was good at: keeping them, manipulating them, and uncovering them. As most people know, Hoover was an instrumental part of making the modern police state that is the U.S. of A., where he headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the rise of fascism in the 1930s, to the thick of the Vietnam War and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 70s. Davis Kovacs’s original play How to Become Jayee promises to explore the themes of a nation’s entire history through the story of a man who was obsessed with hiding his transvestitism, his homosexuality, and his mixed race heritage.

“We want the audience to think about the weight of secrets people hide behind, that we all have this little person inside of us who is trying to keep their deepest secrets,” says director Jacqueline van de Geer. Van de Geer has had a busy year, starring in her one-woman Diana Vreeland homage DV this winter, and choreographing the lovely horses of Village Scene’s Equus this spring. For Van de Geer, the play’s central thesis is how Hoover’s obsession with keeping his divergent identities secret causes him to further suppress the sexualities and identities of the FBI’s targets, which included fascists, communists, and civil rights leaders. Hoover was known for using blackmail, illegal surveillance, phone-tapping, and any means necessary to snuff out people he saw as enemies of the state.

“On the surface and in his public life Hoover was very anti-gay— this was to throw people off the scent of his private life— he was also anti-black as his aggressive pursuit of Martin Luther King Jr. proves,” says Kovacs, whose research led him to discover that J Edgar Hoover was believed to have part African-American heritage, something which was a source of extreme shame for any upwardly mobile person until well into the 70s (and even today). How to Become Jayee explores this “Civil War writ large in one single man,” and yet, in keeping with the spirit of the Fringe, there’s also a lot of camp, and it’s being billed as a comedy(!).

Added to all this is the contemporary quirk that apparently Clint Eastwood is slated to make a feature film about Hoover with Leonardo di Caprio in the lead role. “WWII (pre- and post-), communism, homosexuality, the atom bomb, the Cold War, and contemporary Hollywood,” come together in an idea-cloud about J Edgar the public power-monger and private gay cross-dresser, says Zak Amzallag, who plays both Jayee and Leonardo.  Amzallag, a newcomer to the stage who will soon leave Montréal to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, is worried that the play will confuse people, but has worked on “finding character anchors so that you can easily bring the audience with you.”

Zak Amzallag

One big challenge of playing Jayee/Leo is that the character spends 85% of the play in a dress, but Amzallag has to deliver lines alternately as Hoover, Hoover in “drag”, Leo, and Leo-playing-Hoover-in-drag. If that weren’t confusing enough, there’s also some meta-theatre going on, with Leo’s girlfriend, Bar, also playing a secret agent, and a character who is the casting director for the film… about J Edgar Hoover. Can you say Almodóvar, or The United States of Tara?

The programme invites us to “journey over to the set of a Hollywood blockbuster with 20^th-century America’s most flamboyant cop, a supermodel starlet and, of course, the ubiquitous equestrian mediatrix.” What could be weirder, Fringier, or more necessary in our current state of celebrity-saturated culture under a nascent Conservative police state than How to Become Jayee? All we can say is, consider our expectations for this year’s Fringe raised. Not 2B missed!

How to Become Jayee

Written by Davis Kovacs

Directed by Jacqueline van de Geer

Starring Zack Amzallag, Caroline Gautier and Jennifer May Walker

Venue 8, Club D’Espagnol,  4388 St Laurent

JUNE 10 FRI/ 20:00*, JUNE 11 SAT/ 14:15*, JUNE 13 MON/ 21:45*, JUNE 15 WED/ 23:45*, JUNE 18 SAT/ 22:15*, JUNE 19 SUN/ 16:45*

www.plaTeautheaTre.com

More info: www.montrealfringe.ca/en