Sunday I went with some friends to see the Trinity Rep‘s production of His Girl Friday, a stage adaptation based off “The Front Page,” the original newspaper comedy became the 1940 movie His Girl Friday starring Carey Grant and Rosalind Russell.  This play has a lot going for it, and if you’re in Providence or the neighborhood, check it out!   There’s one particular (subtle) aspect of the production I didn’t know until I was talking with my friend Rachel, who was the production’s dramaturge: both the film and stage version of His Girl Friday are the result of a character gender-bend.

The movie His Girl Friday revolves around the sexual tension between Walter Burns (Carey Grant), an “honest scoundrel” newspaper man, and Hildegard Johnson (Russell), who was once his best reporter and wife – and who’s now his ex-best reporter and his ex-wife.  In the original play “The Front Page,” Hildy was a man – a crack reporter who ditched the newspaper game to build a family, leaving Burns in the lurch just as the greatest story of the decade is about to break.  When the movie was made, Hildy was re-imagined as a woman, a Lois-Lane type spitfire reporter.  The old (male) character’s ambivalence about the newspaper business, and his desire for stability and growth, were left intact with the gender change.  In The Front Page, male!Hildy apparently had a sort of weak-tea female fiancee, who, in the film, becomes the milquestoast Bruce Baldwin, a mild-mannered insurance salesman and all-around sap.

I love this sort of thing.  It’s easy, when creating characters, to impose gender stereotypes on them unconsciously when you assign them a gender.  Creating characters of one gender and switching them to another (or having them cross-dress effectively, as in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night) can highlight those unconscious biases – and provide an opportunity to flip, deflect, and transform them.  When done well, with compassion and imagination, you don’t end up with men masquerading as women or vice versa – you end up with characters who are a comment on our common humanity, and our common desires for fulfillment, growth, romance, adventure, adversity.