Nassim, as performed by LaWhore Vagistan: A Drag Queen’s Compulsory Vulnerability
An experimental play blurs boundaries between playwright, actress, and audience.
Photo Courtesy of David Monteith-Hodge
The experimental play Nassim is bursting with surprises for both audience and performer. Each night, a different performer takes the stage without reading the script beforehand. Projected onto a large screen, mysterious disembodied hands manually flip pieces of paper that reveal the script line by line. This experimental approach generates a current of excitement, anxiety, and curiosity as the play unfolds in unforeseen and potentially unstable ways. What if the performer messes up? However, it is the imperfections, the audience participation, and the feeling that anything can happen that lend Nassim an electric, ephemeral feel.
The night of October 12 blessed the audience with performer LaWhore Vagistan (@lawhorevagistan on Instagram), everyone’s favorite overdressed, over-opinionated South Asian drag aunty. It was strange to see a drag queen dethroned from her usual performance context in the straightjackets of script and theater stage. While theater is often a more formal context that draws older and whiter audiences (which emerges from the art form’s specific class and racial history), drag is usually more informal, irreverent, and glamorous. Audience members and fellow drag queens often cheer their support at the top of their lungs during shows. LaWhore Vagistan’s presence brought this energy to the Huntington Calderwood. Her witty addendums to the script, fearlessness in forging ahead into unknown territory, and sharp comedic timing invited the audience to engage loudly and often. The audience at times yelled suggestions on interpreting the script when the performer faltered. Many of the unwritten rules of theater—no audience talking, no clapping before the end, no suggestions to the performers—fell to the wayside. In this way, theater became more accessible and exciting as boundaries between audience and performer blurred.
Nassim is often lighthearted. The playwright asked LaWhore Vagistan to share her favorite curse word (cumbucket) and forced her to eat a cherry tomato every time she mispronounced a Farsi word. And yet Nassim was the first time I saw a drag queen cry. LaWhore Vagistan, choking up at the prepared words of the playwright, said that she wished she could show the playwright her family. LaWhore Vagistan, who could not prepare for the play’s emotional vagaries, was thinking of her own, real family. This was not acting crying, but instead an affective portal into the performer’s inner world, revealing something intimate about her relationship with her family. Seeing a drag queen unexpectedly cry onstage, against drag’s typical performance of fierceness and impenetrable confidence, created an enticing allure of playwright-performer-audience intimacy and a shared witnessing of authentic vulnerability. This moment bolstered the play’s theme of the transformative nature of human connection, but the surprise script took away the performer’s agency to choose what she shows to the world. In seeking to strip away the barriers of performance by constantly catching the actor off guard, Nassim muddles the issue of consent in the relationship between playwright and performer.
Nassim is structured as a progressively more intimate dialogue between performer and playwright. However, the actual context is that of a theater performance, with anonymous audience members voyeuristically watching a relationship develop on stage. LaWhore Vagistan cried before people whom she perhaps did not want to cry before. At another point, the playwright asks LaWhore Vagistan to show him a picture from her camera reel. LaWhore Vagistan hesitated for a few seconds, but of course assented, bound to the expectation (and perhaps contract) that she execute the script in good faith. Her picture was projected on the screen for the audience to consume.
A good sport and captivating performer, LaWhore Vagistan bravely held her head up high after the slight embarrassments and chidings that the playwright goodnaturedly poked at her. At times she stood quietly and lonelily onstage, the remnant of tears smudging her eyeliner, under the temporary control of a playwright who 90 minutes ago had been a stranger but who had asked for her intimacy, vulnerability, and personhood. Performing emotion in the role of an actress was not enough for playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. Experimental theater is often meant to cross boundaries. However, Nassim has a lot to learn from drag, which is often provocative and overturns artistic norms while still striving to create an environment of mutual respect and consent.