Julie Crawford of Columbia University on Galatea by MJ Kaufman

MJ Kaufman’s Galatea or Whatever You Be, a genderqueer translation of an already pretty queer Elizabethan play by John Lyly, is set in an unnamed village terrorized by the god Neptune – the “one with the big pitchfork-like thing” – who demands the sacrifice of the villagers’ most beautiful virgin every five years in order to save the village from destruction. (“I AM THE OCEAN,” Neptune crows, “I SWALLOW EVERYTHING”). In order to save their daughters Galatea and Phyllida from death, the villagers Melebeus and Titerys crossdress them as boys and send them off into the woods. There, the “girlboys” attract the unwanted attention of Diana’s nymphs, who, while normally devoted to “lesbian separatist solidarity,” are temporarily heterosexualized by Cupid’s arrows, and fall madly in love with one another. (As one of Kaufman’s stage directions tells us, you’ll find “a queer club” if you “go far enough into the woods”). In Lyly’s play, cross dressing produces a kind of inevitable homosexuality based in Renaissance ideas about likeness being at the center of positive ideas about union. As Phyllida tells herself early in Lyly’s play, “Art thou no sooner in the habit of a boy but thou must be enamored of a boy?” And while they lose no time in rather suggestively “making much of one another,” they are nonetheless disturbed by their “dissembling” in “short coats” – a view Kaufman relates to contemporary transphobia (let’s not fall into trap of thinking that “Trans people practiced deceit”) – and generally concur that, despite their love for one another, they are “practicing impossibilities.” In Kaufman’s version, Galatea and Phyllida’s attraction to one another is based in their shared views on and experience of non-normative sexuality and gender (“being in-between gender’s a real safety gamble”); social justice critique (“non-consensual virgin sacrifices”); and frank sexual desire that fully embraces gender nonconformity. “I don’t know what you are,” each says to the other, “But I want whatever you are.” Lyly’s play concludes, famously, with the promise of a sex change that will allow the girls to marry one another. (They won’t learn who will be transformed into a man until the wedding). Yet while their fathers, who have been flirting pretty heavily themselves, adjust to Venus’s plan for their daughters in Kaufman’s version (“Even in this magical queer landscape,” Diana points out, the families of transpeople take time to get on board with their transition), Galatea and Phyllida have other plans, and it doesn’t include one of them becoming what Venus calls a “REAL man.” In the newly kinder and gentler village culture, now freed, thanks to the work of Diana and Venus, from Neptune’s demands, when everyone else arrives at the village church, Phyllida and Galatea “stand at the edge of the woods,” the place, since Vergil’s Eclogues, of queer desire. While Lyly’s play never stages the transition and thus marriage that Venus promises, Kaufman’s version concludes by questioning what a happy ending might be altogether – not, as most theater critics claim is true of all comedies, marriage, but something much better.