TORNADO MAGNET: A SALUTE TO TRAILER COURT WOMEN
One Yellow Rabbit
Written by and starring Darrin Hagen
Directed by Chris Craddock
Runs April 1 to 12
Big Secret Theatre (CPA)
Interviewing Darrin Hagen is like camping it up with the best of divas – and drag queens are just so damn quotable.
Hagen, whose Tornado Magnet opens at One Yellow Rabbit on April 1, describes the one-tranny show about mobile home life as anything but a drag performance.
"Well, there is some camp there, I suppose," says Hagen. "After all, I am a six-foot-four guy in a dress."
Tornado Magnet is one of the most recent productions by Edmonton’s Guys In Disguise, the Fringe-hit troupe behind Edmonton River Queen: Not a Love Story, Piledriver and, of course, the Tranny Trilogy (Tranny Get Your Gun, L’il Orphan Tranny and Tranne of Green Gables). For the most part, Guys in Disguise has been a showcase for Hagen’s own interest in blending drag with a theatrical storyline.
"I was a drag queen for 10 years first, but comedy has always been my thing," says Hagen. "Don’t get me wrong – impersonation is an art form in itself, I just don’t have the face for it."
As Guys in Disguise hits Seattle this fall with Piledriver (about queer wrestlers on a cross-country bus tour), Hagen is thrilled to take the company out of the Edmonton Fringe circuit and on the road. The host of two television programs (Hagen is the first drag queen to host a national series with the Life Channel’s Who’s On Top), years of experimental drag are now coming to fruition.
"Every time I get a kick at the can in a real theatre, it makes me proud to have that legitimacy as a queen and as an artist," he says. "I love it when young people from small-town Alberta come up to me and tell me I’ve actually helped them in some way."
Tornado Magnet was co-created and directed by Ron Jenkins of Workshop West, and later directed by Chris Craddock, who co-wrote the Tranny trilogy. While Craddock is in the credits, Hagen credits both artists for their support.
"The show does push itself now, but you need that other person to push you, as well," he says. "As I relaxed in these roles, I have really been able to learn. I don’t have formal theatre training – I’ve only been to drag school."
Hagen did, however, grow up in a mobile home – or, as he calls it, a "manufactured home" – in Rocky Mountain House. Using his own mother as a catalyst for his character, Tornado Magnet became the story of Dotty Parsons, Supermom, Queen of the Doublewide, who knows everything about anything trailer-esque.
"Dotty’s been described as Lily Tomlin meets John Cleese, and I add Carol Burnett. But then Dotty’s pretty realistic," Hagen says. "She looks at the trailer court through her daily necessities, and she pulls things out of her kitchen to show how trailer court life is."
Camp aside (Dotty is head of the Family Relocation Inspection Committee, combats "mobile homophobia" and awaits her trailer-court honey), Hagen takes Tornado Magnet quite seriously. He hopes to bring the show to the Tornado Alley of the American Midwest in his further efforts to dispel the white-trash stereotypes behind trailer life. Though the show is not his biography, he’s proud of his upbringing and not afraid to work it.
"I call it a kitchen-sink, multi-media presentation," he says. "It’s low-tech, has a slide show and sort of explores different chapters of trailer court life – like how you can tell something about a person by the coffee they drink or the colour of their furniture. It’s about fitting in."
Guys in Disguise is even inspiring other drag queens to take on theatrical form, and with a growing interest in drag from mainstream audiences, there appears to be a market for the genre.
"Politically, I’m not going to preach to the converted," Hagen says of queer audiences, "and it’s always amazing when I step onstage and a wider majority of people show their appreciation for drag work."
Roller-set or not, this diva’s at the top of her game. |
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