Don’t hate him because he’s beautiful, this “twilight man.” During the Depression, work was wherever you found it, and if a colored “sissy-boy” fleeing his rural home for the Big Windy City wound up a cross-dressing cabaret entertainer—well, didn’t he send money home to his family, fabricating a story about a job at a flower-shop? When his sister, pregnant and husbandless, came to him for help—did he not take her in, despite her revulsion for his mode of employment? And if he later renounced his past—was it not to offer his niece a place in “respectable” society?
But one cannot suppress so large a part of one’s life forever, as the opening song in Being Beautiful informs us. On this New Year’s Eve in 1970, spurred by his niece’s thesis research, Afton Cousins (aka Miss Atrina) will come to terms with sister Bernice, who would prefer to bury those memories altogether. Together they revisit scenes from the past, Afton recalling the companions who welcomed him to their transsexual demimonde.
These include the mentorly Miss Lonette, hostess of the fashionable Limbo Club (“If you can’t tell who’s real and who’s not, you’re probably in the right place.”), along with the sour Ellen and the wistful Leslie—né LeRoy Emerson, Riley Ellis and Aeshock Levinson—who together comprised his first “family.” There was also Winston Page, Lonette’s financial manager (“God don’t love ugly, but beauty don’t last” she admonishes), who would become Afton’s lover and protector. And the vindictive closet-case who would destroy them.
This Chicago Theatre Company premiere features deft direction by Delia Jolly Gray, a fearless cast led by Raufel Muhammad, Gordon McClure, Langstan Martin Smith and Bailey Boudreau as the charming and courageous queens, several infectious songs by McKinley Johnson and Stephanie Newsom, and costumes by Christine E. Pascual that make you want to become a female impersonator just so you could wear clothes like these.
Being Beautiful tells a story too frequently lost in the annals of gay history—a story unfortunately too big for the limited space and budget of its current production. One can envision a more streamlined score, richly detailed set decoration and enough room for McClure’s dance numbers to really cut loose. Bailiwick, About Face—could this show be moved north for a stint later?