Open Lecture: “The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film”

Abstract:

In 2008, Broadway actor Harvey Fierstein expressed his dismay about backstage working conditions. “There is magic in the theater,” he told a reporter, “but it’s not in the dressing room.” A common assessment of dressing rooms, Fierstein’s observation attests to the ways architects and designers have historically paid more attention to the public-facing parts of the theater than the spaces behind the scenes. Yet dressing rooms have captured the American imagination for over a century, as the subject of journalistic reporting, such as the one that features Fierstein’s interview, and most common, as a recurring space in American film. In “The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American film,” I explore the dressing room as a space that produces both narrative and metaphorical potential for its inhabitants. In countless films, spanning multiple genres and modes of production, the dressing room is where we encounter performers whose identities challenge social norms. These wives and mothers, single girls, maids, and leading men expose the limitations of social mobility and contest notions about who can succeed in American life and on what terms. Such characters appear again and again, from the 1890s to the present day, testifying to the continued salience of their fictional dilemmas in our actual lives. While real dressing rooms might not be magical places, American film has repeatedly fixated on the space as a staging ground for personal transformation.