A Caged Bird Sings the Blues About a Life of Not Fitting In
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: July 15, 2010
http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/theater/reviews/15night.html"A Night at the Tombs," a solo show by the transgender performer Bianca Leigh about the time she spent a night in the Manhattan Detention Complex, sounds as if it ought to be spunky or scandalous. But — not uncommon in transgender theater — it turns out to be largely tease, because nothing much happened during that night of incarceration.
Miss Leigh uses the occasion of her arrest — she was accused of prostitution, she says — to reflect on her life, including the predictable feelings of not fitting in as a child and the eventual escape to New York from New Jersey. She was, she relates, determined to be a Shakespearean actress. "There was just one thing in my way: my penis," she says, adding, deadpan, "ironically, an asset in Shakespeare's day."
