Pierrot Lunaire
Pierrot Lunaire
53% Match20140h 51m

Music · Drama

Overview

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

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One Night Only
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Funny Boy
Quintessence
The Invitation
Breakfast with Scot
eXXXorcisms
Deceitful Appearances
Because of a Boy
T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s
Forbidden Zone
The Lost Boys
The Damned Don't Cry
#LookAtMe
Summertime
Forest Echoes
Tuī Ná
Pria
The Phone Call