The Self and Its Splinters in Sasha Velour’s ‘Smoke and Mirrors’
DragCon LA 2019 has come and gone, and with it goes the most recent run of Sasha Velour’s Smoke and Mirrors. While I did not see this particular run of the show, I did have the chance to see it in New York back in March, and it’s been on my mind ever since.
At the top of the show, Sasha makes it clear that she is not in the business of subterfuge, as captured in the proclamation that above all things, she is absolutely not a “man dressed as a woman.” This line got a laugh from the audience, (maybe you didn’t know this, but Sasha is funny) but it is not at all a joke. Sasha really isn’t a man dressed as a woman: for one thing, she is a nonbinary person who accepts they/them pronouns when out of drag, and for another, her drag never has been — and never will be — about illusions. A fantastic piece of irony for a show called Smoke and Mirrors.
Where exactly are the smoke and mirrors that are being referred to? We’ll start with the smoke, which may be easier to see. There is, of course the animated Evil Queen-esque green smoke that frequently blows across the screen at the back of the stage and forms the show’s title cards, but there is also a metaphorical smoke. Sasha Velour is famous, and her fame, as is the case with all famous people, precedes her. With that circumstance comes a dissonance produced by the conflict between a person’s public profile and their actual flesh-and-blood self. The smoke of fame is obfuscatory: it hides the humanity of a person. I’m not going to shock anyone when I say that you can draw a direct correlation between the amount of fame attached to a person and the amount of unsubstantiated talk that gets thrown at them. When someone is famous, it is very easy to trick yourself into believing that you see them as a real person when you don’t, and from there you can easily project your own thoughts of who this person is onto them — and by the way, this usually says more about you than about them.
As for the mirrors, there are, of course, no reflective surfaces on the Smoke and Mirrors stage (honestly anything capable of reflecting light would likely be a liability on such a tech and projection-heavy show), but there is a lot of mirroring. With the help of modern technology, Sasha multiplies herself, allowing the show to be performed by both the real Sasha and her many on-screen clones. As she explains in the show, human nature is far too complex and nuanced to be capable of neat, meiotic division. The traits that cause conflict within ourselves do not produce a good side and a bad side, or a sick side and a healthy side: when you hold them up next to each other, they are, like a reflection, identical.
This conclusion, that the self is incapable of tidy division, is one that she reaches at the end of a speech about the difficulty of living with anxiety and depression. She speaks of feeling as if there are two Sashas, the healthy one, who is capable of producing shows like this, and the sick one, who needs constant care. This is something most people with mental illness can relate to, but it is not accurate. It is after this speech that the multiplied Sashas we’ve seen prior take on a new significance. She is not, as one might have assumed, splitting herself up, but rather assembling the various parts of herself and collaborating with them. Nowhere is this more clear than in the show’s finale, in which every single iteration of Sasha that has appeared in the show takes a final stroll across the stage (or screen, if you prefer). Some are empty-handed, some carry props or drag set pieces, some push brooms, and as they go, it becomes clear that Sasha has become a theater troupe unto herself. In our own ways, we are all our own theater troupes, or artists’ colonies, or writers’ collectives, or orchestras, or whatever the case may be. Every day, we all wake up and every bit of ourselves comes along.
Another thread that runs through the show is that the nature of change is circular, not linear. The opening number, performed to “Cellophane” by Sia, is one that has long held a place in Sasha’s repertoire. She performs the number in a broad white gown onto which a close-up video of her own face is projected, but this face is not the one on Sasha’s actual head, or at least, it isn’t anymore. The video is an older one, filmed when the Sasha Velour that we know looked very different (many of us will remember the graphic brow that appeared on television back in 2017). In a post-show Q&A session, she explained that an attempt was made to update the number, but when it didn’t work out, it was decided that the number would be performed with its original staging. What this choice has done is its shown that while brows may change, the faces we’ve had and the people we’ve been over the courses of our lives will forever remain a part of us, like a ring around a stump.
This theme of circular change is visited again in “Fame,” which may be the most tech-reliant performance in the show. Now would be a good time to note that the technical precision in this show is truly breathtaking. I can’t imagine the patience it must have taken to get every single movement just right to prevent any mistimed cues, out-of-place props, or stumbled lines, so it is ironic that Sasha has chosen the most tightly produced number as the one in which she acts out every performer’s worst nightmare: live fuck-ups. In this number, the prerecorded Sasha clones nail every single cue (in fairness, they have the advantage of retakes), but the live Sasha falters, trips, misses a cue, and in her panic, literally rewinds the performance. Those of us who remember faulty VHS tapes know that if you fiddle with those playback buttons too much, you might damage the tape, which is exactly what happens. But the glitch we see is not TV static, but rather YouTube videos of older Sasha numbers, including “Fame,” (which once appeared at Bizarre Bushwick featuring a very different wig), and home videos of a preschool-aged Sasha performing puppet shows. Sasha’s been performing for a long time, and with that kind of career longevity comes very high expectations, but perfection is simply not sustainable. Human beings are going to fuck up, and when they do, we can usually forgive. Rarely, however, do we forgive ourselves. The irony in the number is of course that this is a staged fuck-up which Sasha executes perfectly, but the sentiment is the same.
While watching the show, I couldn’t help but think of another queer one-woman-show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Both Smoke and Mirrors and Hedwig explore the fractured self: in Hedwig, a person coerced into botched unwanted gender reassignment surgery tells her life story and waxes (but mostly wanes) poetic on the struggle of looking for her other half. The ending of Hedwig is ambiguous, but the implication is that there is no such thing as an other half except the one that exists within you, i.e., you are your own other half, i.e. if you can’t love yourself… well, you know. The same can be said for Smoke and Mirrors, but with smaller fractions: multiple selves rather than two halves of a whole. There is not going to be a point in anyone’s life where we learn this lesson and keep it. After all, change is circular. When the going gets tough, we are bound to forget this truth: that it is only when we can bring together all the parts of ourselves that feel estranged and acknowledge them as being a whole that we will be able to hear and tell our stories.
The critical response to Smoke and Mirrors has been incredible, and for good reason. Dates for a North American/European tour are currently being scheduled, and I would encourage you to see it when it comes to you. The show will move you regardless of who you are, but its messages are especially crucial for anyone needing to be reminded of their own artistry.
Featured image courtesy of AJ Jordan Photography.
