Gender benders Brown’s Beauty is more than skin deep BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Compleat Female Stage Beauty By Jeffrey Hatcher. Directed by Connie Crawford. With Steven Levenson, Brian Faas, Rachel Golub, Annabel Topham, Andre Thompson, Emily Fox, Lizzie Vieh, Jessica Kerry, Grainne Belluomo, Lucy DeVito, Matt Biagini, Oliver Day, and Nicholas Clifford. At Brown University Theatre through March 20.

We all know that in Elizabethan times only men and boys were permitted to play female roles. That prohibition ended abruptly in 1661 with the Restoration, and playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, fascinated with the picture of so many suddenly displaced female impersonators, wrote the fascinating Compleat Female Stage Beauty. Brown University Theatre and Sock & Buskin is mounting an engaging, full-throttle production.

Brown takes compleat advantage of the glitzy and campy opportunities, starting with the more than 75 lavish period costumes, designed by Phillip Contic, on the two dozen actors. Nightclub drag queen conventions are not neglected, with brief lip-synch singing during some scene changes and full-company disco writhings, under a glitter ball, framing the play. A string trio and synthesizer harpsichord provide music — 17th-century-esque with a thumping backbeat.

The playwright has focused on actor Ned Kynaston (Andre Thompson), intrigued by Samuel Pepys’s descriptions of his cross-dressed performances. In one entry, the diarist described him as "clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house." The Brown production would have captured the character better with an androgynous actor in the role, but Thompson does provide the requisite emotional energy.

Speaking of energy, the Restoration of Charles II (Brian Faas) to the throne apparently perked up old Londontown. After the dour interregnum of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan prigs, the contrast must have been, well, dramatic. All the more apt that the king, just six months returned, would decree that only women could portray women. Gender identity, like royal identity, was back in place again.

Kynaston is recorded as having eventually adapted to the edict, playing male roles to popular effect. (Pepys wrote that he "likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house.") But the play leaves the actor at the brink of that changeover, merely suggesting the possibility.

More interesting is the psycho-sexual turmoil beforehand. This Kynaston is gay, a lover of the Duke of Buckingham (Nicholas Clifford), who tells the actor that when he makes love to him he does so as if to Cleopatra or Desdemona or the other roles he plays. The king declares, "I make no distinction between the part and its player, and neither, I think, does anyone else." Indeed. When Kynaston makes a shaky command attempt to play Othello before the court, he does so badly and receives no sympathy. He feels intensely female, so that is what he offers on stage. Audiences should appreciate this, he insists. "A woman playing a woman — what’s the trickery in that?" he asks.

The theater seamstress, Maria (Lizzie Vieh), is in love with him, but when he later attempts to make love back, in appreciation rather than attraction, the kindness stops at his conducting a little seminar on sexual logistics. Before he gets his act together, Kynaston is reduced to singing bawdy songs in a music hall and lifting his skirt to flash his wares to the incredulous.

Poor Kynaston is beset on every side. The proprietor of the theater where he works, and the Othello to his Desdemona, is Thomas Betterton (Steven Levenson), a tuppence-pincher and fair weather colleague. Kynaston has made an enemy of the fop Sir Charles Sedley (Oliver Daly), who is provided outlandish pink and aqua duds by Contic. Another foe is Margaret Hughes (Emily Fox), an aspiring actress who has mimicked Kynaston’s Desdemona performance gesture by gesture and whom he eventually finds himself coaching in the role.

The king himself, whom Faas gives charm with an in-charge edge, provides comic relief, asking that the production of Othello be jollied up a bit. We are bemused by both his boyish frivolousness and his mistress, Nell Gwyn. Lucy DeVito provides her a cockney accent and a confident brashness that fits Nell’s whore-who-got-lucky gaiety like harlequin tights.

The production, directed by Connie Crawford, is entertainingly instructional about theater expectations and experiences of the time. The convention was to stylize portrayals for emotional emphasis (think John Lithgow "acting!" on SNL), and we get samples of overwrought audience responses to Desdemona’s death scene. (The playwright has Kynaston coach Hughes in a naturalistic, rather than declamatory, style that wouldn’t be seen until actor David Garrick set new standards nearly a century later. But we can chalk that up to theatrical license.)

Compleat Female Stage Beauty was first staged in 2000, and a film titled Stage Beauty came out three years later, with Billy Crudup as Kynaston. The Brown production, stressing the psychological layers as it does, goes to the heart of the matter.