By Maura JudkisTHE WASHINGTON POST
A year ago this month in Murfreesboro, Tenn., the drag queen Sasha Velour shook the hands of a pair of anti-drag activists, as TV cameras recorded.
Velour was dressed in head-to-toe silver, looking like an Art Deco skyscraper, with red lips, contoured cheeks and catlike eyeliner. The activists — a bearded father and his teenage daughter — called her “sir.” They said that “God created man with a penis” and “woman with a vagina.” They referenced the Bible and referred to “the LGBTQ religion” as a “cult.” They told her: “Something’s wrong with you.”
Velour invoked the separation of church and state. She talked about the “variety in terms of chromosomal gender.” She added: “There’s nothing immoral about loving someone.”
Velour parried ignorant comments with a firm politeness, like a lawyer disarming a hostile witness. She never lost her composure. “To us,” she gently told the activists, “this sounds like hatred.”
This encounter takes place in the third episode of the new season of HBO’s “We’re Here,” a reality series in w
hich drag queens visit small-town America and face stereotypical resistance from locals (the full season is now streaming on Max).
She was a long way from New York, where her art is revered, and from La Jolla, where she’s starring in a new stage show with Broadway ambitions at La Jolla Playhouse. “Velour: A Drag Spectacular” opens tonight in the Playhouse’s Potiker Theatre.
To some drag fans, Velour may not have seemed like the most obvious queen to send to the front lines of the culture wars. The winner of Season 9 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” in 2017, Velour is known for her highe hbrow, cerebral interpretation of drag, and for her reveals — drag lingo for little surprises built into a performance. Hers is the kind of drag that feels like true performance art, not like an appetizer for a boozy brunch.
The protests she encountered while filming the show felt “like drag, in its own way,” she would say later. “They dress up, they put on their red hats,” and put on “demented, wrong drag, where it’s like you’re performing something, and there’s no acknowledgment that it’s a performance. And it’s really designed to make people feel unsafe and weak and small” — unlike real drag, which, at its best, makes the crowd (and the performer) feel joyful and empowered.
So Velour stood strong and tall, towering in heels over the pair of activists.“I’m grateful that this young woman and her father want to speak with us,” Velour said to the TV cameras, “but it doesn’t feel like they really want to have a conversation. They’re not going to hear us.”
Crossing the divide
In one America, drag is practically illegal. In another, it’s never been more mainstream. Some drag artists get picketed and threatened with arrest, while others get Super Bowl commercials and Emmy Awards. The emotional and geographic distance between the two is growing depressingly distant.
Velour, 36, has become a traveler between these disparate lands. Having reached an echelon of drag fame below only RuPaul, Velour could have stayed ensconced in New York, leaving only to play sold-out crowds on her national and European tours. She’s doing those things, too, but she’s also fighting with conservatives for her freedom of expression, and for the rights of queer people in small towns.
In April, Velour sat for an inteview in her art-filled Brooklyn home with her Italian greyhound, Vanya, lounging nearby. Her partner, Johnny, was upstairs with COVID. This return to reality TV is a move that Velour joked about dreading in the intro to her 2023 memoir and drag history book, “The Big Reveal.”
Will such a move make a difference? Could a performance amid people who hate her art change their hearts and minds about it? She demurred.“If anything,” Velour says, “I think our ability to be visible on TV is a reflection of the work activists do on the ground to shift culture and to change up institutions, and to illuminate for powerful people where their blind spots are.”
A few days prior to the interview, at a rehearsal space in New York’s Times Square, a group of powerful people (i.e., potential investors) was prepared to open their wallets for “Velour: A Drag Spectacular,” a drag history that also explores how she went from Alexander Hedges Steinberg — the theatrical, vampire-obsessed queer child of academics in Urbana, Ill. — to Sasha Velour, drag superstar.
The play is based on Velour’s book, which traces drag from ancient shamanistic ritual to Elizabethan theater and Chinese opera.Director Moisés Kaufman — who considers Velour “one of the best performers of her generation” — introduced the presentation, standing before a makeshift white curtain that looked like bedsheets. “Everything you see has been made with spit and glue,” Kaufman told attendees. “If somethingcrashes, that’s drag.”
But Velour’s drag is not ad hoc or ramshackle. It is precise, considered, sharpened to a knife’s edge. She emerged through those bedsheet-curtains and stretched a spike-heeled foot to the sky. She wore a showgirl headdress and was surrounded by a video projection of four versions of Sasha Velour — making her, in effect, her own backup dancers.
Then she competed with these avatars for the spotlight in increasingly comic and then aggressive ways. They spilled virtual marbles and tripped her, trying to sabotage her act. She pushed them back behind the curtain. They closed in on her. She let out, to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” a lip-synced scream.
“Our art literally gets criminalized,” she says during another number. “Our voices, often discredited. But not tonight.”The birth of Sasha
Every good drag show has a reveal, and every reveal contains a greater truth. So it’s tempting to view the offstage version of Sasha Velour as the real Sasha Velour — sans makeup, wearing a black turtleneck and angular glasses, looking like she’s about to teach a college course on neo-expressionism.
With drag queens, everyone will “focus on unmasking the person and seeing, you know, who they really are,” Velour said, at her home. “There’s something kind of faulty about that.” Many people, she says, find out who they really are through drag, through fantasy.
Velour began to find that through her grandmother Dina, a Ukrainian immigrant to San Francisco and failed actress, who encouraged a young Velour to dress up in dramatic costumes and perform skits.
Velour’s father taught Russian history, and her mother edited a scholarly journal. They were supportive of their child’s sexuality and drag ambitions, and Velour’s book praises their “seriously good parenting.”
Their academic rigor can be seen throughout her book, which delves into unheralded gender-non-conforming performers in history, including Barbette (a 1920s drag aerialist), Coccinelle (a French actress who, in 1958, underwent gender-affirming surgery), and Washington’s own William Dorsey Swann (a former enslaved person known as the “queen of drag”).
Reality TV stardom
Shooting episodes of “We’re Here” brought Velour back to her teenage years, living in a small town, being the only gay person she knew. She was used to online trolls, in 2023, but to hear hateful words directly, to her face, was new for her.
The perception of Velour has always been that of a highbrow academic. She studied literature at Vassar. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to study public art and urban identity in Moscow. She is fluent in Russian. She has a master’s degree in cartooning and designed a cover of the New Yorker with an illustration of her own face.
The Sasha Velour in “We’re Here” reveals that she makes a great drag mother, as mentors are called within a community where many performers are rejected by their own families. She is behind some of the show’s moments of tenderness, such as accompanying a newly transitioning woman on a trip to buy her first wig.
But the producers, aware of her stiletto-sharp mind, also deployed her to interact with bigots.
The season’s final scene takes place in an Oklahoma church not far from the town where Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager, died in February after intense bullying (their death was ruled a suicide by the state medical examiner). Velour’s performance in the church culminates in what might be her greatest reveal yet. It’s not a prop surprise, like a flurry of rose petals, or the inversion of a famous song. The reveal is meant to make an entire community — an entire country, really — confront itself.
Will anyone hear the message? Will it change anything?
“I don’t think entertainment is enough,” Velour says, at her dining room table in Brooklyn. But “I think the emotional impact on the audience can be really profound.” Profound enough to save a life, she adds. So the answer, actually, is yes.
The big reveal
In Judaism, Velour’s religion, one who saves a single life has saved the whole world, according to the Talmud. And Velour, according to her own book — and aligned with the philosophy of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin — supposes that a single life is only truly perceptible when it’s over.“The biggest reveal,” she writes, “is death.”
“I’ve always been compelled by the idea that our afterlife is how our story gets told and how we’re remembered and that we give people an afterlife by remembering them and telling their story,” Velour said in the interview from her home.
Later, at a drag show in the Manhattan nightclub Le Poisson Rouge, she expanded on her philosophy.
“My only spiritual belief, really, is that by dressing up in drag, we connect with the generations that came before us,” she said from the stage, dressed in a shimmery caftan.
We “put on drag sometimes as protest, sometimes as community, sometimes as a little hustle. Always as art.”
La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘Velour’
For more than 20 years, Moisés Kaufman has fruitfully collaborated with La Jolla Playhouse on theatrical workshops and new plays that in many cases have moved on to successful runs on Broadway, off Broadway and the West End in London, and some picked up Tony and Obie awards.
Kaufman directed the La Jolla Playhouse productions of “I Am My Own Wife,” “33 Variations,” “The Laramie Project,” “Here There are Blueberries,” “The Tallest Tree in the Forest” and “The Nightingale.” Some of these shows he also co-wrote and co-produced through his New York-based Tectonic Theater Project, for which he is the founding artistic director.
This month, Kaufman is back at La Jolla Playhouse with his latest project, “Velour: A Drag Spectacular,” a “queer fantasia” starring famed drag queen Sasha Velour, who’s best known for winning season 9 of the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” TV series. Kaufman co-wrote the piece with Velour and Tectonic is co-producing the show in the Playhouse’s Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre.
Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley said he’s excited to have Kaufman back in town.
“’Velour: A Drag Spectacular’ marks the continuation of our rich, decades-long relationship with one of the luminaries of American theater, Moisés Kaufman, and his company, Tectonic Theater Project,” Ashley said in a statement. “Moisés’ partnership with Sasha Velour — one of the most entertaining, visionary talents in the drag art form — promises a unique and jaw-dropping performance.”
The play was inspired by Velour’s origin story as a small-town, genderfluid child turned drag superstar. It will be staged in multimedia fashion with projection mapping, video animation, lip-sync performances and narrative storytelling.
The story mixes Velour’s coming-of-age story with a celebration of the history of drag and queer expression.
Ticket sales have been so brisk that the Playhouse extended the production by a week before it opened. It opens tonight and runs through Sept. 15.The play’s cast features two local actors: San Diego drag queen Amber St. James and queer theater artist Shaun Tuazon, who serves as the show’s understudy.
Also featured in the cast are Ezra Reaves, a non-binary actor and comedian, and Moscato Sky, a Latinx, trans-femme non-binary dancer and choreographer.
U-T arts editor Pam Kragen contributed to this report.
‘Velour: A Drag Spectacular’
When: Opens tonight and runs through Sept. 15; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: Potiker Theatre, La Jolla Playhosue, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UCSD, La Jolla
Tickets: $30-$63
Phone: (858) 550-1010
Online: lajollaplayhouse.org
U-T arts editor Pam Kragen contributed to this report.
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