The criminalization of sex work has been talked about more openly in the last few years. From the immediate damages of SESTA-FOSTA to the double standards of Instagram and Facebook’s community guidelines, it seems that people are finally realizing that if the machine comes for sex workers it will come for civilians next.
Play Your Part wanted to honor these and other issues and found a way to do it not through a new piece but through the modernization of a play from 1926: Mae West’s Sex.
Mae West is a cultural icon for her shameless sexuality but what many people don’t know is that she wrote multiple plays in her lifetime. Plays which many of her contemporaries thought went too far.
According to director Isabella Price “It is a fucking crime that no one is producing Mae West. Her work is still super relevant. It slaps.”
With a text that discusses the humanity of sex workers from the perspective of sex workers, Price and her team then related it to the struggles of now. Not just of sex workers to exist without censorship, but specifically black women.
“I’m reading about how Mae West released Sex and got arrested and all these reviews saying this is the decline of society and femininity...and then I’m going back to twitter and people are like ‘How dare Megan Thee Stallion talk about her pussy on the internet’. We’re having the same conversations 100 years apart.”
But the bigger challenge with bringing Sex into the modern age was not in just updating the setting. The true challenge was producing it online rather than onstage.
With a cast that sprawls across the country, the team was working in multiple time zones, having a chunk of time in the middle of the day that was not too early or too late for anyone. When I asked Price what this was like she simply said ““Hard. Very very hard.”
But worth it in the end. The team was able to pre-record some of the characters and scenes to avoid staging the entire show ‘live’. The production is a blend of filmmaking and theatre; both of which Price has experience with.
“When this project came it was such a good mix of theatre and film because we had to film so much of this production. Because we’re doing this on [webcasting] we didn’t want to rely on every actor being live streamed. It’s just too much of a...so many things can go wrong when you have 15 people live streaming at one time.”
Price is not the only one to have found joy in this medium. Amr Nabeel, who plays Agnes, also saw it as an opportunity to grow as a creator.
““It’s given me a chance to hone my skills as we move into a more digital age. It requires so much use of the actor’s imagination to give a sense of the world.”
It wasn’t just acting that the performers worried about. Due to the remote performances, each actor had to work on their own lighting, sets, costumes...all the things that actors normally don’t have to think about.
““I think as actors we can fall into a guise that you’re just there to say your lines and then walk off. And I think it’s important especially in the world we’re getting into is: what else do you want to say? When I’m getting ready and doing Agnes’ makeup...what shade do I want? What does this shade tell about this moment? Something so simple as a shade of lipstick really exercises you as an actor to make strong choices.”
Getting into Agnes’ skin was something Nabeel thought a lot about. Agnes, as written in 1926, was a female character played by a female performer. Nabeel, who is a man and who has not had experience in the sex industry, went on a journey to find the humanity in Agnes.
“I didn’t want to make her a caricature...Agnes is someone you could see in your living room.”
This is where having sex workers at the table (whether in 1926 or now) is important. Nabeel did not have his own personal experiences but Price did. Experiences she decided to share with the cast.
“This story is about the stigma of sex work. That forced me into a position where I had to tell people I know this because I have engaged in it. I went back and forth, should I tell them, how will that affect the way they view me? It’s always a thing about who are you going to tell. As the director...are they going to be able to respect me? But there was no way I was going to be able to talk about sex work without using first person.”
Play Your Part also had a community stakeholder in The Oldest Profession a history podcast which looks at famous sex workers through the centuries and which is produced by a sex worker.
This first hand experience is vital to ensuring that productions about sex work. In our pop cultural landscape, sex workers often fall into two categories: tragic victim or empowered girlboss. It is easy to see the job itself as the source of drama but Price had no interest in telling that sorry tale.
““This story is about the stigma of sex work...Margie loves sex and sex work. What she’s trying to find is someone who accepts her exactly as she is. Someone who sees her and sees the sex work and still loves her.”
The performative aspects of sex work do get to shine though, as this production features multiple burlesque acts choreographed by Sailor St. Claire.
Sailor has performed burlesque for over a decade now and her biography pays homage to her academic roots. The Showgirl Scholar (St. Claire earned her PhD in 2016) gave the cast a crash course in burlesque performance. While the production originally planned to include seven pieces, that number was reduced to two solos for Nabeel’s Agnes and for the lead character of Margie (played by Amariss Harris). Aside from nudity, these pieces do not look alike, being vehicles to tell each character’s story.
“Every conversation I had with someone went in a slightly different direction based on what the piece was going to be.”
Harris’ number, which St. Claire describes as “this is her at work” took inspiration from Mae West, as well as other classic bumpers and grinders. Nabeel’s piece, a burlesque rendition of Agnes’ death, is more akin to a musical where characters break into song. It is a private, highly emotional moment.
“We wanted to offer Agnes, through a sense of fantasy, an opportunity to see herself as she wanted to be rather instead of how her life went.”
Nabeel said the process of working on the piece was crucial to his embodiment of the character.
“It was a growing moment. It stripped my character down (literally) to the core and allowed me to access a vulnerability and achieve a certain strength.”
Strength is a word that came up a lot in these interviews. Price especially spoke about the resilience of black sex workers, not just today but through history.
“Black sex workers are so integral in our society whether we want to admit this or not. They are influencing hair, fashion, music, style...It felt like no one was acknowledging that stuff. Let’s make something that is a nod to the culture.”
Indeed, any legislation that comes out against sex workers will hit sex workers of color harder. Harder still if those sex workers are also trans (one of the main reasons Agnes has been adapted to be trans in this production). These demographics are not often at the forefront of, well, anything. Except the revolution. In that, black sex workers are leading the charge and making the world better little by little even though they are often not given due respect even within activist circles.
“Taking Mae’s work and the reinterpretation has been so simple so easy. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to put more focus on my own culture, my own history as a black woman...while paying homage to Mae who is truly a hero of mine.”
By focusing on ‘this world I live in’ and the women who Price calls ‘the progeny of Mae West’ the modern setting reflects who we need to listen to. In 1926, Mae West was, according to St. Claire, “writing about people she knew and people she worked with and that was not anything that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice wanted to see in the theatre”.
Today white sex workers have more of a voice than ever and often need to be told to sit down and let others speak. Mae West speaking out in 1926 was revolutionary, but that torch has passed; if black women and femmes are doing the work they should be given acknowledgment.
Price wants to honor them. Not just as activists and firebrands, but as full people deserving of respect and admiration. People who are not only their job but vibrant individuals.
“This production is a love letter to black sex workers. A love letter to all the black working women that I have known. The black working femmes that have made it so much simpler for me and really broken down barriers. This is a love letter to all those women and femmes.”
Sex will open on December 4, 2020 at 6pm PST, and perform through December 19. Ticket holders will receive a link to a private website where the show will broadcast live for each performance. Tickets are a suggested donation and available at playyourpartseattle.org starting November 20. Sex contains explicit language and deals with mature themes such as sexual assault, suicide, sex work, extortion, and crime. It may not be suitable for some audience members, and is not recommended for audiences under the age of 16.
Play Your Part wanted to honor these and other issues and found a way to do it not through a new piece but through the modernization of a play from 1926: Mae West’s Sex.
Mae West is a cultural icon for her shameless sexuality but what many people don’t know is that she wrote multiple plays in her lifetime. Plays which many of her contemporaries thought went too far.
According to director Isabella Price “It is a fucking crime that no one is producing Mae West. Her work is still super relevant. It slaps.”
With a text that discusses the humanity of sex workers from the perspective of sex workers, Price and her team then related it to the struggles of now. Not just of sex workers to exist without censorship, but specifically black women.
“I’m reading about how Mae West released Sex and got arrested and all these reviews saying this is the decline of society and femininity...and then I’m going back to twitter and people are like ‘How dare Megan Thee Stallion talk about her pussy on the internet’. We’re having the same conversations 100 years apart.”
But the bigger challenge with bringing Sex into the modern age was not in just updating the setting. The true challenge was producing it online rather than onstage.
With a cast that sprawls across the country, the team was working in multiple time zones, having a chunk of time in the middle of the day that was not too early or too late for anyone. When I asked Price what this was like she simply said ““Hard. Very very hard.”
But worth it in the end. The team was able to pre-record some of the characters and scenes to avoid staging the entire show ‘live’. The production is a blend of filmmaking and theatre; both of which Price has experience with.
“When this project came it was such a good mix of theatre and film because we had to film so much of this production. Because we’re doing this on [webcasting] we didn’t want to rely on every actor being live streamed. It’s just too much of a...so many things can go wrong when you have 15 people live streaming at one time.”
Price is not the only one to have found joy in this medium. Amr Nabeel, who plays Agnes, also saw it as an opportunity to grow as a creator.
““It’s given me a chance to hone my skills as we move into a more digital age. It requires so much use of the actor’s imagination to give a sense of the world.”
It wasn’t just acting that the performers worried about. Due to the remote performances, each actor had to work on their own lighting, sets, costumes...all the things that actors normally don’t have to think about.
““I think as actors we can fall into a guise that you’re just there to say your lines and then walk off. And I think it’s important especially in the world we’re getting into is: what else do you want to say? When I’m getting ready and doing Agnes’ makeup...what shade do I want? What does this shade tell about this moment? Something so simple as a shade of lipstick really exercises you as an actor to make strong choices.”
Getting into Agnes’ skin was something Nabeel thought a lot about. Agnes, as written in 1926, was a female character played by a female performer. Nabeel, who is a man and who has not had experience in the sex industry, went on a journey to find the humanity in Agnes.
“I didn’t want to make her a caricature...Agnes is someone you could see in your living room.”
This is where having sex workers at the table (whether in 1926 or now) is important. Nabeel did not have his own personal experiences but Price did. Experiences she decided to share with the cast.
“This story is about the stigma of sex work. That forced me into a position where I had to tell people I know this because I have engaged in it. I went back and forth, should I tell them, how will that affect the way they view me? It’s always a thing about who are you going to tell. As the director...are they going to be able to respect me? But there was no way I was going to be able to talk about sex work without using first person.”
Play Your Part also had a community stakeholder in The Oldest Profession a history podcast which looks at famous sex workers through the centuries and which is produced by a sex worker.
This first hand experience is vital to ensuring that productions about sex work. In our pop cultural landscape, sex workers often fall into two categories: tragic victim or empowered girlboss. It is easy to see the job itself as the source of drama but Price had no interest in telling that sorry tale.
““This story is about the stigma of sex work...Margie loves sex and sex work. What she’s trying to find is someone who accepts her exactly as she is. Someone who sees her and sees the sex work and still loves her.”
The performative aspects of sex work do get to shine though, as this production features multiple burlesque acts choreographed by Sailor St. Claire.
Sailor has performed burlesque for over a decade now and her biography pays homage to her academic roots. The Showgirl Scholar (St. Claire earned her PhD in 2016) gave the cast a crash course in burlesque performance. While the production originally planned to include seven pieces, that number was reduced to two solos for Nabeel’s Agnes and for the lead character of Margie (played by Amariss Harris). Aside from nudity, these pieces do not look alike, being vehicles to tell each character’s story.
“Every conversation I had with someone went in a slightly different direction based on what the piece was going to be.”
Harris’ number, which St. Claire describes as “this is her at work” took inspiration from Mae West, as well as other classic bumpers and grinders. Nabeel’s piece, a burlesque rendition of Agnes’ death, is more akin to a musical where characters break into song. It is a private, highly emotional moment.
“We wanted to offer Agnes, through a sense of fantasy, an opportunity to see herself as she wanted to be rather instead of how her life went.”
Nabeel said the process of working on the piece was crucial to his embodiment of the character.
“It was a growing moment. It stripped my character down (literally) to the core and allowed me to access a vulnerability and achieve a certain strength.”
Strength is a word that came up a lot in these interviews. Price especially spoke about the resilience of black sex workers, not just today but through history.
“Black sex workers are so integral in our society whether we want to admit this or not. They are influencing hair, fashion, music, style...It felt like no one was acknowledging that stuff. Let’s make something that is a nod to the culture.”
Indeed, any legislation that comes out against sex workers will hit sex workers of color harder. Harder still if those sex workers are also trans (one of the main reasons Agnes has been adapted to be trans in this production). These demographics are not often at the forefront of, well, anything. Except the revolution. In that, black sex workers are leading the charge and making the world better little by little even though they are often not given due respect even within activist circles.
“Taking Mae’s work and the reinterpretation has been so simple so easy. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to put more focus on my own culture, my own history as a black woman...while paying homage to Mae who is truly a hero of mine.”
By focusing on ‘this world I live in’ and the women who Price calls ‘the progeny of Mae West’ the modern setting reflects who we need to listen to. In 1926, Mae West was, according to St. Claire, “writing about people she knew and people she worked with and that was not anything that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice wanted to see in the theatre”.
Today white sex workers have more of a voice than ever and often need to be told to sit down and let others speak. Mae West speaking out in 1926 was revolutionary, but that torch has passed; if black women and femmes are doing the work they should be given acknowledgment.
Price wants to honor them. Not just as activists and firebrands, but as full people deserving of respect and admiration. People who are not only their job but vibrant individuals.
“This production is a love letter to black sex workers. A love letter to all the black working women that I have known. The black working femmes that have made it so much simpler for me and really broken down barriers. This is a love letter to all those women and femmes.”
Sex will open on December 4, 2020 at 6pm PST, and perform through December 19. Ticket holders will receive a link to a private website where the show will broadcast live for each performance. Tickets are a suggested donation and available at playyourpartseattle.org starting November 20. Sex contains explicit language and deals with mature themes such as sexual assault, suicide, sex work, extortion, and crime. It may not be suitable for some audience members, and is not recommended for audiences under the age of 16.
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