Today's NYT has a long feature about John Travolta's choice to play Edna in the new remake of Hairspray. It's interesting for a copule of reasons. First of all, it makes the claim that the casting of a man to play Edna has nothing to do with drag, or even to do with a man playing a man trying to pass as a woman (Mrs. Doubtfire-style) but everything to do with the physical appearance of the Edna character:

Edna is something much rarer: a female character whose DNA, as the stage director Jack O’Brien put it, requires that she be played by a male — the cosmic opposite of Peter Pan.

In fact, Travolta explicitly states that his interest in playing Edna is akin to his interest in playing Bill Clinton in Primary Colors -- that is -- in "becoming" the character so convincingly that he "disappears" into the role.

“Playing a woman attracted me,” Mr. Travolta said. “Playing a drag queen did not. The vaudeville idea of a man in a dress is a joke that works better onstage than it does on film, and I didn’t want any winking or camping. I didn’t want it to be ‘John Travolta plays Edna.’ That’s not interesting. It had to be something I could go all the way with, disappear in, like I did in the Bill Clinton role in ‘Primary Colors’ or in ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ ”

In other words, Travolta is playing Edna as a straight woman, and his goal for the length of the film is to be perceived as that straight woman, not as a man playing a straight woman, and not as a drag queen.

Second, it argues that Travolta-the-man is not at all homophobic, regardless what his faith would tell him about homosexuality.

Whatever Scientology teaches, he never raised the subject on the set. (“Is there such a thing as a Reform Scientologist?” Mr. Shankman asked.) And whatever the contours of his personal life, they didn’t keep him from embracing his inner — and outer — Edna. As Mr. Waters said, “He’s in a dress singing a love song to his husband, so what’s anyone complaining about?”

This raises a question that I thnk would be interesting to discuss in a forum here, or somewhere, given how often it comes up in how many different contexts. Namely: How should we understand the connection between the tenets of a person's religion, and that person's individual orientation toward the world?

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth