Great art changes and expands each time you experience it – but that’s not always a comforting feeling. Walking into the Belasco Theatre in New York this past Saturday night to see writer-director-actor John Cameron Mitchell make his triumphant return to the stage in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 17 years after he originated the role off-Broadway, I didn’t know what my reaction would be. Here was a show I, and thousands of other LGBTQ people and other outsider folks, hold near and dear. I wondered whether Hedwig would still feel as urgent and exciting as the first time I saw it. Swept up in the crowd’s enthusiasm and joy, I found one obvious answer – Mitchell and the show are sensational. But the deeper truth I found was that Hedwig’s story – co-created by Stephen Trask, who wrote the music and lyrics – has become more resonant and relevant to queer and trans audiences than ever, yet in a darker way than in previous incarnations.

Like the majority of fans, my first encounter with Hedwig came via Mitchell’s 2001 film adaptation. I was going through a hard time when I first stepped into the cinema on the film’s opening weekend. I had come out of the closet 10 months previously and had been desperately trying to figure out who I was and where I fitted in. Was I a gender-bending club kid? A Chelsea twink? An art fag? I’d also experienced a crushing rejection from my gay best friend, a feminine guy who wore makeup and women’s blouses, but told me that I was “too gay” to hang out with him.



An image from Mark Tusk’s New York show called It’s Pronounced HedVIG. Photograph: Mark Tusk/http://flaneurphoto.tumblr.com

This pain and confusion swirled around me as I took in the story of Hedwig, an East German boy forced into a botched sex change, who, now living as a woman, emigrates to America, where the love of her life rejects her sexually and steals all her music. Filled with rage, Hedwig pulls the wig down from the shelf and goes on the warpath, following her superstar ex’s tour bus around the country, performing her pain and heartbreak in a series of truly incredible songs in tacky buffet palaces. In Hedwig’s story, I found a message of resilience and self-expression. Keep going, the film screamed at me. Let your freak flag fly, no matter how much shit people throw at you.

This experience was shared by millions of queer and trans kids around the world, for whom the movie and stage show became a kind of modern Rocky Horror Picture Show – a positive statement of queer and gender-fluid expression, and a meeting place where queer and trans kids could come, dress up in drag, let their hair down, find friends and lovers. After Saturday’s performance, Mitchell described testimonies from queer and trans people over the years who described the show’s impact on their lives. “For example,” he said, “I just met a mom at the show yesterday who said her daughter was suicidal and the show helped her move past that period, which is pretty moving.”

Site of transformation: Hedwig’s wig. Photograph: Mark Tusk/http://flaneurphoto.tumblr.com

Two months after my first viewing, I went to see Hedwig again, days after the Twin Towers fell. This time I ignored the film’s message of resilience and persistence. Instead, I mourned the loss of the grungier New York depicted in the film, uncertain of what the future held for the city, which had allowed Mitchell, an out Broadway actor, to travel downtown to the famed Squeezebox party and workshop his character before turning her into a cult phenomenon.

Fourteen years later, Mitchell tore up the stage at the Belasco as if no time had passed, but I saw a whole new side of Hedwig. In this production, violence was everywhere – from the physical (sexual abuse, mutilation) to the emotional (neglect, rejection, betrayal). Violence also runs through the music in songs like Tear Me Down, Angry Inch, The Origin of Love and Exquisite Corpse.

The violence is at its most extreme is in the relationship between Hedwig and her husband Yitzhak, a former drag queen (played by Tony winner Lena Hall) who Hedwig forbids to perform in drag for fear Yitzhak may eclipse her own talent. They spit in each other’s faces, torment and try to upstage each other, before Hedwig tries to heal the damage she’s inflicted on him. Mitchell confirmed that one of his main goals with this production was to to emphasise the dark side of this relationship: “I wanted it to be believable that we’re in a relationship,” he explained. “A fucked-up one, a kind of Petra von Kant one, but a real one, a sexual one and an abusive one.”

This new Hedwig is a profound exploration of violence – how we endure it, how we cope with it, and how abused people can perpetuate the cycle. For queer and trans people, even today, this message is incredibly resonant, especially as both groups move into the mainstream. All one has to do is to recall last year’s vitriolic RuPaul-inspired debate between drag queens and the trans community over the usage of words like “tranny” to realise our continued capacity for inflicting trauma upon each other in abundance.

Hedwig as portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris, John Cameron Mitchell’s predecessor before the originator of the role took over. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP

“I don’t think that it’s reductive to use Hedwig as a kind of trauma treatment,” Mitchell says. “I like making art that’s useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it, it’s a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context you can make sense of it before and after it happens. I always think that in some way art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It’s like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it. I love that people come back to Hedwig and tell me, ‘I went that time and it brought so many things and I saw it in a different way.’”

When Hedwig hands her wig to Yitzhak, in that final moment of contrition and apology during Midnight Radio she – and Mitchell – encourages us to try not to transfer the pain and abuse we experienced on to others, but to find ways to enable more forms of self-expression, to listen to each other and to consider our words and our actions.

