Michael LaRocco

Man in Polyester Suit is a photograph by American artist and provocateur Robert Mapplethorpe. The photograph is a black and white sepia...

Martha, the self-loathing heroine of Edward Albee’s searing 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the embodiment of the gay icon...

Realistic and codified performance in theater is based primarily on the premise that performance can be approximated into neatly aligned categories. Much like human behavior and the modalities of culture, performance is not always a lesson in either/or, but rather a lesson in disunity. Nowhere do we see disunity more realized than in the world of drag performance where the audience enters into a nether world where realism and codified performance unite as strange bedfellows.