Transgender performer LAZLO PEARLMAN brings his vaudeville show on gender and language to the District’s Palace of Wonders. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
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ZACK ROSEN
Friday, March 28, 2008
Lazlo Pearlman, the London-based transgender performer who is starring in the burlesque night “Madame Pierre’s Other Tongue” at H Street’s The Palace of Wonders on Saturday, March 29, picked the unusual theme for his show after learning of a linguistic surprise.
“I do a lot of work with gender, but I’m not interested in banging it on the head and saying ‘gender is good, gender is bad, what is gender.’” Pearlman says. “I realized that, in French, all nouns are gendered and ‘cock’ is female and ‘vagina’ is male. When I found that out it got my head spinning about the possibilities of playing with that, playing with language … it seemed rife with comic possibilities.”
Pearlman is an American, female-to-male performer who moved to London four years ago for a graduate program in physical theater and stayed after he married an English woman. Prior to transitioning, the majority of Pearlman’s theater experience was in “campy queer theater,” as a woman who played a number of male roles. After transitioning, he took some time off the stage to figure out what performance style best served his aims.
“I didn’t know what to play anymore — I couldn’t do drag queens, it didn’t make sense,” Pearlman says. “I only directed for six years trying to figure out what to do on stage, I was trying to figure out how to play gender and blur gender. In people’s eye’s I’m so male, but I’m not a man and I’m not a drag queen. I’m trying to figure it out and find something different.”
THE SHOW TAKES THE form of a cabaret where each performance riffs on some aspect of language. Lazlo doesn’t appear until the second half, while the first segment features other performers, including Greta Groinshplitta, a German character with a bawdy take on “Hotel California,” tribal belly dancer Mavi and Leroi the Girl Boi, who claims to have the fastest-twirling tassels in the world of burlesque and whose “lemon number” is better seen than described.
“It will be a lot of ‘what is what’ and ‘who is who’ and reintroduce what gender possibilities are out there, especially for folks that aren’t aware of what gender performance opportunities are out there,” says the show’s producer Kendra Kuliga, who will also perform under her drag persona of Ken Vegas. “I asked the performers to take the theme of Lazlo’s show and do something based on language, whether that’s body language or a poem about language. I’m biased, but I think it’s going to be a once in a lifetime experience.”
Pearlman’s contribution to the show will be to act as a teacher, offering the audience an intro “immersion course” to language. He will sing songs, in various languages, without translating foreign ones. The offerings will range from Edith Piaf and Elvis Presley numbers to faster paced songs from the likes of Def Leppard and Blur, with performances in between.
Though Pearlman has had trouble in the past communicating his transgender identity to his audience, he’s hit upon one surefire trick that might make an appearance at Saturday’s show.
“The simplest way for me [to let the audience know] is to be naked,” he says. “That’s why stripping and fetish performance have come into my life in the last couple years. Until I’m naked they assume I’m a man, a gay man, and that’s only half true and not telling the whole story — the default is to take off my clothes.”
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