San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ continues to do harm
When Tennessee passed Senate Bill 3, the country’s first anti-drag law, in March, legislators kept wording vague. According to the law, any show that has “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest or similar entertainers” cannot be performed anywhere where it might be seen by “a person who is not an adult.”
In theory, the law could apply to the musical adaptation of “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which tours to Nashville and Memphis before next year’s BroadwaySF run — though last month a federal judge temporarily blocked its implementation. As in the 1993 film set in San Francisco and starring Robin Williams, the musical follows a cisgender man who disguises himself as a woman so he can nanny his children, whose custody he has been denied. That would seem to be the very definition of impersonating a woman. (The film cannot imagine a man being a nanny or knowing how to perform household tasks.)
But Tennessee Performing Arts Center (where I attended student matinees as a suburban Nashville grade-schooler) isn’t worried. “We do not expect this to impact the Broadway programming that we look forward to sharing with our patrons,” Jennifer Turner, TPAC president and CEO, said in a statement to
The Chronicle.
The center is probably correct in its interpretation of the law. “Mrs. Doubtfire” is, of course, not the target of Senate Bill 3 or of any of the anti-drag legislation that, according to an April report from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, has been proposed in at least 14 states.
The true goal of the legislation, said Maxe Crandall, a playwright and the associate director of the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University, is to create a wedge issue.
“It’s underway to feed and mobilize a base and to refocus the culture war on the existence of trans people, now that it won the Dobbs decision,” he said, citing a theory many have advanced about the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.
In fact, for many, “Mrs. Doubtfire,” with its onslaught of “man-in-a-dress” gags, helps make possible and justify oppressive laws such as Senate Bill 3.
“It’s a very easy line to go from laughing at someone to legislating against them to condoning violence against them and attacking them,” said Christian Lewis, a queer and trans nonbinary freelance theater critic and professor at Baruch College, a branch of the City University of New York.
Lewis, who uses genderneutral pronouns, pointed to repeated gags in the musical poking fun at the character Daniel Hillard’s quick-change into Mrs. Doubtfire.
“We’re supposed to laugh at a man wearing a bra and having hip pads on and seeing this plus-size nude bodysuit,” they went on, “when that’s what
some people do their whole lives, doing drag professionally or as trans people that need clothing to affirm their genders. It’s just so not a joke, and yet this musical makes it into a joke.”
Oakland drag artist LavaleWilliam Davis, who performs as Coco Buttah and also uses gender-neutral pronouns, recalled thinking, “Why?” when they first learned about the film’s musical adaptation.
In the movie, a bathroom scene unveils Mrs. Doubtfire’s true identity to two kids, with the awful line, “He’s a sheshe.” “It’s linking genitalia to personal identity,” said Davis. “Today, it reflects what’s going on with trans people and bathroom legislation.”
“There’s literally no such thing as a man in a dress — except in comedy,” noted Crandall. The very phrase makes him cringe. The film and musical’s propagation of that narrative implies that trans women are just men playing dress-up.
Still, many “Mrs. Doubtfire” audiences might laugh along with the show’s jokes without being conscious of transphobia.
“Where you fall on the issue of men in dresses as transphobic or not I think depends on your recognition of who’s making the joke and who’s the butt of the joke,” said Ryan Donovan, an assistant professor of theater studies at Duke University and the author of “Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity.”
Crandall doesn’t see “Mrs. Doubtfire” as the most egregious example of transphobia on the stage or screen but more as part of a broader culture of normalizing traditional gender roles.
“Mrs. Doubtfire” isn’t the only “man-in-a-dress” musical to play on Broadway stages recently. A musical of “Tootsie” premiered in 2018, later touring to Broadway San Jose. “Some Like It Hot” leads the pack in 2023 Tony Award nominations, which were announced Tuesday, May 2.
Of the filmed “Doubtfire,” Donovan pointed out, “The fact that Harvey Fierstein played the gay brother to Mrs. Doubtfire felt important at the time. That’s where the country was in terms of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ representation.” The movie even depicts Daniel’s children as being aware of and not scandalized by “Uncle Frank and Aunt Jack.”
“These musicals, however clumsy they have been, should probably be read as attempts at inclusion,” Donovan said. “They may open audiences’ eyes to new possibilities, including the people who are maybe not as progressive as
some would like.”
Still, the musical makes one update that might have struck even 1993 audiences as retrograde — the number in which Daniel first becomes Mrs. Doubtfire.
“We have a parade of beautiful female ensemble members as, like, Donna Summer,” Lewis said. “And then we have male ensemble members in purposefully really ugly drag as, like, Margaret Thatcher. This number really solidifies that there are some women that are beautiful and we’re meant to love, and there are some women that are ugly and we’re supposed to criticize.”
To Lewis, the song both underlines unrealistic expectations for cisgender women’s beauty and plays into the troubling notion that the point of being trans is to pass.
Anti-drag laws, along with the gender-norming stories that help justify them, are already having an effect. Davis said that at the last drag story hour they did, the San Lorenzo Library had increased security, just in case. At gay clubs now, they went on, “you go there wanting to have a good time, to be with community. But there’s always still, at least for me, in the back of my mind: ‘Where are the exits in case there’s an emergency?’ ”
For Lewis, the irony is that Mrs. Doubtfire does exactly what conservatives accuse drag artists and trans people of doing.
“People on the news are saying that trans people, drag queens are men in dresses who are preying on children. ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ is a musical where a man literally does that,” they said.
In the film, dressing counter to gendered expectations is a deception, a means to get ahead, just as conservatives portray it in their supposed concern about women’s sports.
Said Lewis, “It’s playing into the exact conservative talking point that is such a myth and a harmful lie about drag performers and trans people.”