A Transgendered Cafeteria Triumph

"Don't you know me? I'm the new Berlin Wall, baby! Try and tear me down!" a flamboyant German transsexual named Hedwig snarls as the guitarist beside her begins to play a raucous riff. Soon, the rest of her band, the Angry Inch, joins in, while Hedwig sings and struts around the stage. She is wearing a cape spray-painted with the words "Yankee Go Home With Me." Sometimes she suggestively gyrates against her backup-singer-slash-husband, a person of indeterminate gender named Itzhak.

Lower level Macintosh may never be the same.

Welcome to the Columbia Queer Alliance's production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a rock musical disguised as a performance by the eponymous band. The "angry inch" in the title of the show and the band's name refers to what's left of Hedwig's manhood after failed gender-reassignment surgery. As she sings: "My sex change operation got botched/My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch/Now all I've got is a Barbie doll crotch/I've got an angry inch."

Through monologues and songs, Hedwig narrates the story of her life-her journey from life as a boy in Communist East Berlin to a trailer-trash housewife in Kansas to "this punk rock star of stage and screen" performing in the decidedly unglamorous basement of the Barnard student center, a fact that does not go unmentioned in the show.

"One very important part about Hedwig-and this is noted in the beginning of the script-is that the show should always take place in the space that you're in" explains Hedwig's director, Sammi Schwab, BC '09. "We're not pretending to be anywhere else."

Getting a chance to put on the show in Lower Mac was a happy accident.

"We originally got the space because we couldn't find another space, but then we realized that it was the ideal space for this show-Hedwig is the 'internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you,'" Schwab says, quoting a line from the show. "So it's perfect that she's performing in a student cafeteria."

Schwab also notes that it might have been difficult to fit the large audience she is expecting to attend in another performance space. "We're supposed to pay security guards, because there are so many people coming to the event," Schwab says.

Many of these audience members may not be students at either Barnard or Columbia. That's because Hedwig's cast and band mostly consists of people who are unaffiliated with either college-the band includes Barnard alum Pascale Jean-Louis, but Andrew Sotomayor, who plays Hedwig, is a visiting student from Syracuse. Itzhak is played by Polish singer/songwriter Ilonah, who "worked with Andrew at Lord & Taylor. That's how they met. It's such a ridiculous, eclectic group of people," Schwab explains.

Sotomayor, a musical theater major, has been planning this production "for years," Schwab says. He understudied the role of Hedwig his sophomore year at Syracuse, and it's been a dream of his to put this show on and play the character.

In addition to fulfilling Sotomayor's personal vision, Hedwig has a greater purpose. During the show, audience members will have an opportunity to donate money to two charities, Pathways to Housing, which provides housing for needy New Yorkers, and City Harvest, an organization that takes leftover food from restaurants and gives it to the hungry.

"We wanted to make note of the fact that we're doing this in New York City, so that's why we chose charities that suit New York," explains Schwab.

According to Schwab, Manhattan is the perfect place to put on a production of Hedwig-and doing the show at Barnard is even better: "Being a liberal arts college for women in New York City, we're famous for dealing with issues of gender ambiguity and sexual violence-two main themes of the play. And so there are those superficial reasons, but even more so, at Barnard, you really learn to hone your independence. That's what going to Barnard is all about, learning to be a strong, beautiful, Barnard woman-exactly like Hedwig!"