- OTHER MEDIA
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- She could wield a sword as easily as sing an aria
- San Francisco Chronicle April 7, 2009 (Robert Hurwitt)
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- Sometimes truth can be more inspiring than fiction. And biography can
be more theatrical than drama.
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- Lee Kiszonas' "An Affair of Honor," the centerpiece of this
year's Exit Theatre DivaFest, tells the story of the late 17th century
French opera star Julie d'Aubigny (called La Maupin) as a cross-dressing,
sword-fighting young lesbian early in her storied career. Though the fragmented
play is often beguiling - with clever comic episodes and good opportunities
for sweet warbling and flashing swordplay - it seems constricted by contemporary
sentiment compared with d'Aubigny's life.
- "Affair," which premiered Saturday at the Exit, focuses on
an episode when d'Aubigny was beginning her singing career in Marseilles.
A charmingly androgynous Brittany Kilcoyne McGregor plays Julie as a brash
young swashbuckler in male disguise, fencing for money until she falls
in with a gay couple.
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- Brian Trybom's slyly effeminate aristocrat Philippe bonds with Julie
and sponsors her operatic debut. The parasitic Georges (a monochromatic
Michael Vega) wants to destroy her. He gets his chance when Julia Heitner's
adventuresome local lass falls in love with Julie's male persona in some
sexually charged fencing lessons.
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- As seen at Friday's preview, Kathryn Wood's stagings still seemed rocky,
coping with an uneven cast and Kiszonas' jumpy, truncated scenes. McGregor
anchors the action fairly well, though (with Trybom's help), even in some
nice contralto solos (Maya Gorodetsky provides deft piano accompaniment
under Don Seaver's musical direction).
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- Kiszonas ends her "Affair" on the gay-positive note of Julie
and Philippe bonding over being stuck in the wrong bodies for their gender
orientations. This isn't as sentimental a distortion of d'Aubigny's life
as Théophile Gautier's novel "Mademoiselle Maupin," but
it doesn't do her justice.
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- Though d'Aubigny dressed in men's clothes, she did so openly as a woman
and made her name as a woman in the opera. Her tumultuous love life encompassed
many men as well as women, and her fencing prowess was extraordinary.
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- In one celebrated story, she defeated three men in a sword fight, then
became lovers with one of them. In other versions of the tale Kiszonas
tells, when her lover was sent to a convent, d'Aubigny rescued her - placing
the corpse of a dead nun in her bed and setting it on fire to cover their
tracks - and they continued their affair.
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- By turning this material into an often entertaining gender-identity
cliche, Kiszonas misses a golden opportunity to explore the bewildering
diversity of love.
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