New play investigates the ‘significance’ of gender

Does gender matter?

In show business, where lines are purposefully blurred in the name of art, the performer’s sexual identity may not be important, but in certain situations it will sure get the audience talking.

This was a salient point in the attention surrounding Amanda Lear, longtime fashion model and artist muse turned disco singer.

Lear, whose singing style was more of a Marlene Dietrich-type spoken monotone, had a briefly successful music career, mostly in Europe, in the late 1970s and beyond.

She was never a superstar, but collected a career’s worth of attention through her statuesque (she’s 5-foot-10), androgynous look and husky voice. Was she trans? Was she a drag queen?

Lear played along, artfully dodging the question in interviews, and recording songs like “If I Was a Boy” and “I’m a Mistery.”

The latter title provides the title to a new play from St. Petersburg journalist Margo Hammond. I Am a Mistery debuts tonight at the Dali Museum (Lear was a Dali disciple and close friend in the ‘60s and ‘70s) and will continue Saturday and Sunday at The Studio@620.

Hammond, the books editor at the St. Petersburg Times from 1990 to 2006 (before it was called Tampa Bay Times), began the play nearly a decade ago, at the urging of Dali Museum Curator of Education Peter Tush.

In its earliest incarnation, as it was being workshopped, I Am a Mistery was a musical. With acrobats.

“And as I kept working on it, I realized I didn’t really want to do a play about Amanda Lear,” Hammond explains. “I wanted to do a play about us, about society’s obsession with Amanda Lear’s gender. Because every time I would see an interview in French, in Italian, in English, somebody would ask her ‘Are you a man?’ ‘Did you start out life as a man or a woman?’

“She was constantly teasing the audience about this question. And that really intrigued me. I thought my gosh, is it important to know whether the answer is yes or no?

“I started to realize, it’s not important at all, and that she sort of built her career on this ambiguity, and tweaking society. And I loved that idea.”

Four actors appear in I Am a Mistery. Eugenie Bondurant, Mary Rachel Quinn and Jim Sorenson each appear as Lear – there’s some severe line-blurring going on – along with numerous other characters including Dali, David Bowie (with whom Lear was romantically involved) and transgender model/actress April Ashley.

Michael Gregory also appears in a variety of guises.

Bob Devin Jones is the director. Says Hammond: “I fell into the trap of: Well, if there’s a male panelist, then he should be male. And Bob said ‘Why? The whole point of your play is that gender doesn’t matter.’ So he’s doing a lot of mixing up with genders.”

Hammond always had it in her mind to try playwriting – pre-journalism, she’d taken classes in New York – and to this day has lots of friends involved in theater around the country. More recently, she studied with Bill Leavengood in St. Petersburg.

As Station 12, Bondurant and Quinn teach acting through the city’ Green Light Cinema.

Quinn currently has a recuring role on the Netflix series Outer Banks, while Bondurant has an extensive film and TV resume including The Hunger Games and The Conjuring.

Like Amanda Lear, Bondurant is tall, striking and has an androgynous look (and like Lear, she’s a European runway model).

“She’s said that she experiences this play on a personal level,” Hammond says. “Just like Amanda Lear, she is oftentimes approached by people who will say ‘What are you?’”

Tonight’s performance at the Dali Museum is sold out. Tickets for the weekend shows at The Studio@620 are available at this link.