The word “travesty,” etymologically, is about what people wear. In the 1600s, it meant to dress in disguise, or more specifically, to cross-dress. Only in the 19th century did the word take on its now primary meaning: “a debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation.”
Drag and performance artist Sasha Velour’s work often takes on layers of historical meaning, and in her new show, “Travesty,” at Woolly Mammoth Theatre through April 19, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner and star of the HBO reality show “We’re Here” takes her audience through the history of a fictional drag theater called the Travesty.
Velour’s Travesty is loosely based on the New York theater named for famed vaudevillian drag actor Julian Eltinge. Opened in 1912, it was a Broadway theater and then a burlesque venue, and it has since been repurposed as an AMC movie theater. But Velour’s Travesty is also a composite of many such places around the world: It’s a “fantasy place,” Velour says, “that had been a site of hundreds of years of drag performance, kind of collecting all the different stories that I learned about, but bringing them together under this one rubric.”
The Travesty, as seen through the show’s vignettes, is a place of liberation, resistance and ruin. It’s haunted, too; the ghost is a stand-in for all of the performers who passed through the space.
In telling a ghost story, Velour says, “the information has been lost, but the spirit is still there. That is kind of the queer experience, where our history is in every corner, even in the arts, in theater specifically. … But then that lineage has been a little obscured. Torn down, if you will, transformed into something else.”
Queer performance places may not last forever, but a queer home is not just a building. “Instead of spaces, it’s like the humans of the queer scene carry on these legacies,” Velour says. “The metaphysical space of a drag costume or a drag body is the place. A drag makeup is what lasts.”
To that point, Velour says that her costumes for the show — her travesty — are “the home that I take with me. My drag, my costumes, literally create a sense of belonging for me.”
The week of her show’s press opening, Velour took The Washington Post on a tour of her dressing room to explain the significance of her favorite looks.
The Ghost
The ghost, who appears several times throughout the show, wears a white chiffon dress dyed in copper, designed by Andrés Caballero. The costume, Velour says, is “playing with ideas of age and rust” but is still “glamorous and covered with crystals and rhinestones. The idea is that this character is from a forest. So we kind of went in a minty green direction.”
The White Pannier
This look, for which Velour appears as herself, involves a “full royal pannier,” she says. The piping on the white dress echoes the proscenium of the Travesty theater, and the dress itself doubles as a surface for Velour’s video projections, a signature of her work. The dress looks bulky but is actually quite lightweight: “I really like to go off and swing it around,” Velour says. The costume was designed by Gloria Swansong.
Alexandra
The costume for the character Alexandra — named after the song by Allie X that plays during this vignette, about longing and emotional catharsis — was inspired by Harlequin clowns. “There’s storytelling done through the costumes,” Velour says, particularly through Alexandra’s hat. The dress was hand-painted by designer and drag artist Jazzmint Dash. Alexander is Velour’s given name, so the character has a particular significance to her, she says.
The Witch
Another character, Velour says, is a “queer witch who is being put on trial by the Inquisitors.” The witch wears a bright orange ball gown, also designed by Swansong, that has been burned at the edges and painted with gold. “She does get burned, but she turns the fire around and burns down part of the town instead, and we name that as one of the origin points of the theater,” Velour says.
Velour
“This one’s just me at the very end,” Velour says of a flesh-toned “Bob Mackie for Mitzi Gaynor”-esque glittering gown designed by Diego Montoya. “After becoming everyone else,” Velour says, “I just need to bare it all as myself.”
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