It hasn’t always been blindingly obvious that Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a riff on Plato’s “Symposium.” But the Greek fable it offers about the origin of love is at the heart of this hard-rock musical by John Cameron Mitchell (book) and Stephen Trask (music and lyrics) about “a mere slip of a girly boy from Communist East Germany” who became “the internationally ignored songstress barely standing before you.”
But let’s get back to Plato. Per Alcibiades, one of the speakers at the symposium in question, Earth was once a paradise populated by two-gender creatures. But these perfectly completed beings amassed too much power, so Zeus split them all in half with lightning bolts. Rent asunder, humans became doomed to spend their lives in search of their missing halves. For Hedwig, that search means a botched surgery to become a woman (leaving the “angry inch” of the title), a quickie marriage to an American GI, and then abandonment by the same in a Kansas trailer park.
Straddling genders and countries, Hedwig is micro and macro, a character and a symbol. Theo Ubique’s production shows both the individual looking for love in a strange new world and a fledgling country unsure of its place in that strange new world. Either way, this Hedwig closes over your head like water, the music flooding your neurotransmitters. It’s an affirmation that cannot be denied and that will (per the lyrics) hit you hard and fill you up. v
Through 7/28: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 7 PM, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre, 721 Howard St., Evanston, 773-347-1109, theo-u.com, $39-$54, $34-$44 students and seniors, dinner $25 extra.
