I recently watched a 2014 interview with Bebe Neuwirth from the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, and I was struck by a comment that Neuwirth made about why she doesn’t explain how the songs in her act emotionally resonate with her when she introduces them to an audience. She said,

I prefer not to say what I’m singing about because it dissipates the focus, and mostly I like the audience to have their experience of it. If they know what I’m thinking they’ll be thinking about that as opposed to letting the song happen to them. When I sing “Surabaya Johnny,” I say, “I believe this is about the most extreme heartbreak a person has ever had.” I don’t talk about my own heartbreaks; I want the audience to see what that means for them.

Watch the full context of her remark below.

Part of why this moment stood out to me is its connection to what I was learning in my theatre seminar that week about audience and spectatorship. The way Neuwirth displaces herself as a site of meaning reflects the idea that, in the words of Alice Rayner, “performance is not a solipsistic event of self-expression.” The meaning of a performance is not fixed in the intention of a performer; rather, a multiplicity of meanings rise out of a performance that vary according to the different experiences and memories each spectator carries with them. In live performance there is a dialogic relationship between performer and audience wherein the audience listens for the “memory, desire, and hope” that well up in the performer and echo back their own, disparate impressions. Because of Neuwirth’s approach to performance, any lingering preoccupation with Bebe-Neuwirth-as-star falls by the wayside as the song and the story it tells take center stage. Spectators can fully immerse themselves in the narrative because they are unencumbered by the knowledge of an already-established import for its performer. In this way, Neuwirth democratizes the experience because no interpretation is enshrined or elevated above any other.

I have had the pleasure of seeing Neuwirth’s “Stories with Piano” twice—once at a fundraiser in Baltimore, and again a few months later at 54 Below. My favorite part of the show is a sequence of songs that are originally performed by men. It begins with “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd, seamlessly transitions into “Real Live Girl” from Little Me, and ends with two Tom Waits songs, “Invitation to the Blues” and “Martha.” I love Neuwirth’s performance of these songs, and my experience of them was further enriched by the way Neuwirth introduced them. When she brought these songs to her music director, Scott Cady, she wrestled with how to approach these songs that are traditionally sung by heterosexual men to heterosexual women. Neuwirth decided to sing the songs as written without changing the pronouns because, in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, “love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love.” (It strikes me as I write this the way this refrain resembles Gertrude Stein’s famed sentence “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” which she wrote to return the word to its original definition, since it had been abstracted from it after decades of poetry. Love is already an abstract concept, but perhaps we need to repeat this phrase to underline its constancy and universality.)

Neuwirth’s decision to keep the original pronouns in these songs intact may seem like an insignificant choice, but it was—and remains—important to me because it brought me back to being fifteen- and sixteen-years-old as I tried to use music to make sense of my sexuality. I coped with feelings that I struggled to understand and accept by creating lengthy playlists of songs performed by female singers who used female pronouns to refer to their lovers. The actual content of the song was secondary—for whatever reason, I needed those parameters in place so I could slip into the singer’s point of view and work out my own feelings for women by identifying with hers. Looking back as an adult who is more secure in my sexual orientation, I’m embarrassed by some of the songs I listened to just to be less alone with my feelings. I don’t mind doing the work of translating a song to my own experience now, but it brought me immense joy to hear Neuwirth intentionally perform these songs in a way that allowed me to “hear” lesbian desire in the lyrics.

The audience is a multiple subject, however, and as I explained earlier in this post, each audience member will invariably take away a different meaning from the same performance. The second time I heard this sequence of songs at 54 Below, I was reminded of this reality when a man at a nearby table laughed multiple times during the beginning of “Real Live Girl” (read the lyrics here). The only explanation for his reaction I could think of at the time was that he found it comical to hear the lyrics of this song come from the mouth of a woman. His reaction took me out of the performance and reminded me that while “love is love,” not all love is treated with the same respect.

I was probably too quick to judge this man, who could have been laughing for any number of harmless reasons and, besides, I think that I am also drawn to Neuwirth’s rendition for a similar reason: the uncanny contradictions that arise when the song is performed by a woman. There is something absurd about the shameless expression of lesbian desire and the labeling of it as “American.” When Little Me opened on Broadway in 1962, the Lavender Scare, an initiative to purge gay people from government service that began in the late 1940s, was still ongoing. In the musical, “Real Live Girl” is performed by U. S. soldiers in a time when men who engaged in homosexual conduct were dishonorably charged from the military. Likewise, soon after the Women’s Army Corps was formed in the 1940s, the screening process for recruits was modified to exclude lesbians from service. While openly gay people are allowed to serve in the military now, it’s hasn’t yet been a full decade since Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed. In short, it is only very recently that homosexuality has been thought not to be incompatible with American-ness.

This tension between homosexuality and American identity was not on my mind either time I heard Neuwirth sing this song, but these details occurred to me as I tried to figure out how that man could have experienced the same song so differently from me. I think these facts support what I intuitively felt when I heard the song—Neuwirth’s rendition of “Real Live Girl” is delightfully subversive because it encourages a reading of lesbian desire as healthy, compatible with American ideals, and most importantly, joyful. What’s wonderful about Neuwirth’s performance and the spare context she provides for the songs she chose is that my interpretation can co-exist with the multitude of other meanings imagined by the other audience members in the room that night. One man’s laughter cannot diminish the truth I found in the song.

To read the article by Alice Rayner I quoted at the beginning of this post, “The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and the Ethics of Listening,” visit this link, which is currently open access.