"As an ensemble of queer people, an exploration of imperialism felt particularly pertinent," says Samwell Rose (they/them), the project's facilitator and director. "Empires thrive on oppressing queer people and gender groups. I think queerness and imperialism are, by definition, at odds, which makes it really fun to explore the issue from a queer lens."
The play is being produced independently at Buntport Theater from Friday, August 25, to September 3 by Rose in association with the new theater group, the Agenda Theater. After working on Stonewall at Benchmark Theatre as associate director earlier this year, Rose wanted to continue making local theater about queer issues devised by queer people. The Agenda Theater formed a board, which held its first meeting to discuss the LGBTQ+-focused production company on July 24.
"The team working on Willy/Nicky is all involved in creating the new company, plus a few others," says Danté J. Finley, who plays Rasputin. "I'm currently leading it, but it's really a collaborative effort. This is a new journey for all of us. We're calling it the Agenda Theater, as in the gay agenda, but the 'gay' is silent."
"I love Denver. I'm from Colorado, but Denver theater is woefully behind the rest of the country in terms of both form and content," Rose says. "I'm hoping that by producing this play, we can also demonstrate that devising and experimental theater are not scary. We want to see more of this type of work in Denver, and Willy/Nicky will demonstrate to others that we are capable of producing it. Hopefully, people will see this as an invitation to participate in devised theater," or script writing through a collaborative effort.
Willy/Nicky is based on the correspondence between Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, and Czar Nicholas II, the last Russian emperor, during the first months of World War I. The third cousins exchanged flowery, tender language in these telegrams and letters about war mobilization efforts, which seemed fundamentally incongruous with the high-stakes situation.
The play also dives into the psychology of Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, Czar Nicholas II's wife. Like her grandmother, Queen Victoria, she was a carrier of the gene for hemophilia, which she passed on to her son and heir to the Russian throne, Alexei Nikolaevich. After Alexei's birth, she became obsessed with keeping him alive while keeping his hemophilia a secret from the public. She was also infamously obsessed with Rasputin and convinced that he was the only one who could save her son.
"Also, there were tons of public cartoons depicting her having sex with Rasputin, because the public thought they were definitely having sex, especially after her letter to him was leaked to the press," Rose says. "[There is] nothing the public loves more than demonizing a woman for being either a saint or a whore.
"Also, there were tons of public cartoons depicting her having sex with Rasputin, because the public thought they were definitely having sex, especially after her letter to him was leaked to the press," Rose says. "[There is] nothing the public loves more than demonizing a woman for being either a saint or a whore.
"I had a really good history teacher in high school who focused a lot on this time period," Rose continues. "I was always fascinated by the telegrams between Kaiser and Nicholas. It was strange that...they would sign off messages 'With love' that were literally about building up armies for global conflict and conquest. And it just felt like the right time to explore that relationship and queer World War I. I felt that way partly after the success of Stonewall, which most of this team was a part of, but also just the last couple years being in the Denver theater community. I really felt like the people here would be the right people to explore this idea."
The anti-imperialist drag play is devised and performed by local queer talent, including Andrew Catterall as Kaiser Wilhelm, Paola Miranda as Czarina Alexandra, Frankie Lee as Czar Nicholas II, Alicia Millerson (on Fridays) and Louie the Second (on weekends) as The Escort, Danté J. Finley as Rasputin, cade beck as the production stage manager and lighting designer, and Katelyn Kendrick as disability consultant. They promise that this will be a war story like no other, as it conveys its narrative through a combination of memes and actual quotations from historical events. The play is also being co-produced by IDEA Stages, which will provide funds for an ASL interpreter for the performance on Friday, September 1.
"Samwell wasn't aware of this when they cast me as Wilhelm, but I studied German and this era in college," says Catterall. "So I was already coming in with a little bit of knowledge about these events, but after I was cast, I started doing some more research on my own to get a sense of who this person was. When we started, we had all kinds of ideas of how it was going to be really grounded in history, and I think as things have gone on, history has receded into the rearview mirror a little bit. That's not to say that Willy/Nicky is not informed by history, but we're putting our own spin on it."
Rose was astounded by the amount of historical LGBTQ+ information they were able to find about the play's subjects during the research process. "One of the other things we discovered was how much queer history we have not been taught," Rose says. "For instance, the Eulenburg affair is this big gay moment in history that nobody talks about but we feature in the play."
Historians who do recognize the event's significance refer to it as "the greatest homosexual scandal ever, and it may have even accidentally started World War I," Catterall says. "It was rumored that Kaiser might have been bisexual himself, but he had this close friend, Philip Frederick Alexander, who was a homosexual and pacifist in the German government. He was outed by more militaristic elements of the government, and basically, at the same time that Philip was outed and thrown out of government, the German ruling class started to turn very militaristic."
After the incident, the country decided to bolster its military and implement a combative foreign policy, which ultimately resulted in World War I. "Step aside, Archduke Ferdinand," Rose jokes. "You're just a distraction from the real cause of the war...homophobia."
During the first week of rehearsals in mid-July, the teams discussed vocabulary that would aid in devising the play, while also planning how they would create the piece as a group. "We broke down what devising means for this group, what Viewpoints [a postmodern theatrical technique used to explore time and space] are, and talked about how best to tell this story," Miranda says. "And then from there, we learned about the history, and then we started working with prompts to create scenes."
These prompts contained details from the cast’s brainstorming sessions about core historical moments and themes that they wanted a scene to include. Together they read the prompt out loud, and then Rose would leave the room to let the cast discuss ideas. The entire play is built from such work sessions, which were then pieced together into a cohesive collection of scenes that explore a love triangle between Wilhelm, Nicholas and Alexandra in the midst of a global war.
Most important, during these initial sessions, “not once do we do things the same way," Miranda adds. "The point is to experiment and create something crazy. ... We incorporated a level of sex into almost every scene, and I think that brings us back to one of the central themes we were interested in posing in this show: What are they distracting us from? People frequently believe they are watching one thing when in fact they are watching something completely different. Willy/Nicky addresses some very deep historical moments, and the question is whether the audience will take them in or be distracted by the sex."
"Our devised work is grounded in historical aspects, but we've taken such a contemporary approach to how we're conveying the storyline," Lee says. "So what I love is that audiences will probably get, like, ounces of this historical story that really is huge and important. We're approaching these historical figures in a way that audiences can relate to them."
"Something I really hope people take away from Willy/Nicky is that there are so many queer stories out there and all kinds of queer ways of telling stories," Finley says. "Our stories are not just tragedies. I think it's about time the world wakes up and realizes that there is ferocity in the queer community, especially among the queer theater community. We're coming for you, and not gracefully. It's time for change."
Willy/Nicky, 7 p.m., August 25-September 3, Buntport Theater, 717 Lipan Street, Denver. Sliding-scale tickets are $1-30. Find more information at eventbrite.com/e/willynicky-tickets-690615448397.
