The Spot’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Cognitive Frames, Staged Thirdspace, and the Impossibility of Erasure
Freddie Harris Ramsby, Montclair University
There’s a moment towards the conclusion of The Spot’s August 2024 production of the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Ketchum, Idaho) when the title character, Hedwig, played by Kevin Wade, is bathed in yellow light. This light is not the yellow of buttercups or golf shirts, but the sickly hue of caution signs and hazard tape, a visual signal screeching “do not cross.”[1]
A few months before our show opened, Idaho had passed legislation, specifically House Bill 421 (hereafter HB 421), defining sex and gender as synonymous and dualistic (Alaspa, 2024).[2] These legislative attempts to erase non-binary identities inflected our production, seeping into our staging, choreography, and lighting. As lawmakers’ binary rhetoric continued to capture our attention that summer, I was compelled, as dramaturg, to probe, theoretically, the law’s preoccupation with the language of liminal bodies—Hedwig’s major focus. Shrieking boundaries, then, seemed particularly resonant.
Our staging of Hedwig in this political landscape channeled Lakoff's (2004) frame theory (Don't Think of an Elephant!). Additionally, as we moved Lakoff's cognitive insights into physical space, I imagined Hedwig occupying what Soja (1996) terms thirdspace. Consequently, we transformed our 70-seat venue into a small and gritty New York City club and built two thrust stages jutting out from a central stage. Our staging became a spatial metaphor for HB 421. Audience members sat around sequined tables between stages in our thirdspace, which served as the emergent zone where Hedwig nightly, yet not always safely, enacted the nuances of non-binary experience that house bills can't legislate.
In what follows, I trace how our production mobilized Lakoff’s and Soja’s theoretical frames and enact what Hedwig taught us that summer: the impossibility of legislative attempts to erase the language of non-binary bodies, even when that legislation demands essentialized definitions of sex. Our staging of Hedwig, then, responded to Rhodes and Alexander's (2015) call in Techne for acts of “de-and un-and re-composition" that complicate “dominant narratives of sexuality, gender, and identity” ("Composing while queer"). Accordingly, Hedwig was performed nightly against the legislative “set” of HB 421 as an embodied multi-modal act of de-and un-and re-composition. The story of Hedwig's languaged complexity demonstrated a visceral enactment of theory and rhetorical retort that audiences felt.
A Little Hedwig Context
Hedwig's journey is aptly summarized by H. Colangelo (2020). Hedwig—left with an “angry inch” after a botched sex change operation—exists materially between sexed categories.[3] Aristophanes’ dualist allegory (DeBrabander, 2017) sculpts her liminal identity, which Hedwig powerfully articulates in “The Origin of Love” (Atlantic Records, 2014). In this myth, two-sexed beings are sliced in two by Zeus, and tragically left to wander the world searching for their other halves. As a result of the sex change, binary constraints define Hedwig’s search for self-actualization and recognition. When the show concludes, Hedwig accepts, what creator John Cameron Mitchell terms her, “a gender of one” (Folliard, 2019), where her liminal identity transforms from a source of tragedy to radical self-acceptance.
Don’t Think Beyond Sexed Categories: Lakoff’s Cognitive Framing
Lakoff illustrates how cognitive frames operate by prompting us to “not think of an elephant” and noting that we immediately do (2014, p.3). Once a linguistic concept activates a mental frame, we cannot avoid processing it within that framework, even if the premise is unfounded. Tax relief, for instance, evokes the frame that tax is an affliction–a frame that can’t be unthought (2014, p.4). Similarly, while reading through HB 421's political undoing of what I’ve observed as already adopted discourse around sexual liminality, I pondered the bill’s framing, and I found that, at times unintentionally, the bill reiterates the linguistic transcendence of binary sex categories.
First, the bill repeatedly defines sex as immutable, biologically determined, and observable at or before birth. From a Lakoffian perspective, the bill tries to constrain an understanding of sex by eliminating alternative interpretations, and position the definition of sex as the only rational or scientific view. Indeed, the bill references “increasing confusion [emphasis added] about sex as biological truth” (Idaho House Bill 421, 2024). Thus, the bill’s framing suggests that anyone who disagrees with its language is misled. Yet, that same sentence continues: “There is increasing confusion about the definition of sex as a biological truth and its relationship to concepts and terms, including but not limited to gender, gender identity, gender role, gender expression, and experienced gender [emphasis added]” (Idaho House Bill 421, 2024). Despite the bill’s efforts to enforce sexual binaries by appealing to a frame of uncertainty, it nevertheless reiterates a vocabulary of gender diversity, further drawing attention to precisely what the majority of Idaho politicians seek to erase.[4] In this instance, the bill’s language appears at odds with itself. And certainly, the Idaho ACLU picked up on its inconsistencies, terming it “vague” and “medically inaccurate and oversimplified” (2024). It’s a small instance of a backfiring mental frame, but it was enough to inspire my dramaturgy. This language created a rhetorical space that, while attempting to enforce binary codes, gave the language of liminality visibility. We tried to do the same in our staging of Hedwig.
Performing Lakoff
Two examples from the show suggest how HB 421 and Lakoff's framing theory shaped our Hedwig: First, while our two thrust stages represented sexual dualism, so did our choreography. The opening number offers an example when Hedwig, born a “slip of a girly boy” from East Berlin (Mitchell & Trask p.3), sings “Tear Me Down” (Atlantic Records, 2014d). In the song, Yitzak, Hedwig’s partner/lover (played in our production by Yanna Lantz), explains how, like the Berlin Wall, Hedwig embodies divisive binaries – "Between East and West, Slavery and Freedom, Man and Woman, Top and Bottom" (Mitchell & Trask p.2). During the song, Wade repeatedly navigated the two thrust stages positioned to represent these oppositions. But to embody Yitzak’s particular exposition, and give the audience something special to drive the point home, Wade crawled suggestively along the stage left thrust, flipped onto his back – sometimes with exaggerated difficulty to infer the challenges of performing within such categories – and shimmied his legs flat up against the wall. As Yitzak described the wall (“Reviled, Graffitied spit upon”), his legs parted like a clock as indicated in the following clip:
Jumping to his feet, Wade gestured further to Hedwig’s oppositional nature: pointing to the east and west, gesturing slavery and freedom, naughtily enacting “man, woman, top and bottom.” In all, in this song and others, we focused Wades’ movements to enact a choreography of hyperbolic opposition, of division and duality.
At a turning point in the show, the song "Angry Inch" (Atlantic Records, 2014a) reveals that a botched sex-change operation renders Hedwig outside legislative definitions of sex. Towards the conclusion, Hedwig confronts profound rejection when Tommy Gnosis—her young mentee and, according to her understanding of the Aristophanic myth, her potential other half—abandons her. Upon feeling her "angry inch," Tommy asks "What is that?"—a moment of dehumanizing categorical reduction (Mitchell & Trask, 2000, p. 66).
This brings me to my second example of how the show performed HB 421’s insistent dualism and the Lakoffian intervention I outline above. At this pivotal moment, our lighting and staging amplified Tommy's rejection of Hedwig’s lived complexity—echoing the essentializing logics of the bill—and then drew renewed attention to her embodied experience and the pain of such erasure–echoing the vocabulary of “increasing confusion.” After the confusion, however, Hedwig experiences an epiphany of self actualization.
To illustrate: “Exquisite Corpse” (Atlantic Records, 2014b), a furious punk rant and the song Hedwig performs after the rejection, found Wade and Lantz occupying the separate thrust stages. Here, our staging illuminated the loneliness and isolation each felt when categorical constraints attempt to negate lived existence. We chose this separation to spatially enact Hedwig's realization that she exceeds binary sex, even though her body remains subject to others' binary categorizations. Correspondingly, Lantz performed a tormented Yitzak on the opposite thrust, spatially isolated and bearing the weight of Hedwig's projected trauma. Wade and Lantz neither engaged with each other nor acknowledged the audience or band. They sang, trapped in a dualistic purgatory, bodies writhing in mental anguish. It was precisely in these moments of emotional collapse that the show’s lighting designer, Mollner, deployed that sickly hazard-tape yellow lighting:
We wanted the yellow caution lighting to harshly illuminate dualist boundaries, and warn of the painful consequences of living within them. Yet, Wade and Lantz’ most anguished bodies, very loud and very present in this yellow light, insisted on the impossibility of their negation, indexing expressions of gender in HB 421. And, in fact, the show ends with Hedwig’s radical acceptance of her liminality, in a celebratory anthem for “all the strange rock and rollers” who, with their gender identities, roles, expressions, and experiences, are “doing all right” (“Midnight Radio” Atlantic Records, 2014e).
Hedwig in [Third] Space: Negotiating Possibilities
Sanchez (2022) writes of queer spaces that "take into account the ways in which individuals, groups, and bodies have not been able to fit into what has previously been pre-determined as 'comfortable' spaces.” like a theater ("Queering Space" p. 160). With Sanchez in mind, Soja's concept of thirdspace illuminates how Hedwig's nightly performances generated multiple possibilities beyond the established categories of binary sex,[5] thus reiterating rhetorics of gender and visibility. Applying Sanchez’s observations to Soja’s thirdspace reminds us, however, that those enactments aren’t always safe, as one afternoon’s performance demonstrated.
Soja invokes the term “thirdspace” in his 1996 Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places[6]. Thirdspace transcends the binary logic that frames so much of our thinking about the world. Instead, he conjures thirdspace as a place of “radical openness,” that is “directly lived” and, like live performance, is never the same (p. 67). Thirdspace enables multiple ways of thinking about the same thing, underscoring the inherent flux of lived spatiality (p. 9).
While performing within a dualist worldview, Hedwig also conjures this indeterminate space and its inherent potentiality early on in the show - her body inhabits it. Her body cannot be determined by absolute coordinates, but through interactions with others: “the geography of human contact, the triangulation of a pair of eyes on my face, the latitude and longitude of a hand on my body. These are the only clues to my place in the world” (Mitchell & Trask, 2000, p. 4) Hedwig inhabits thirdspace in terms of how social-spatial relations produce embodied experience. The space determines her movement in the world.
Performing Soja
In our tiny theater, we tried to evoke this logic of human/geographic potential. We reimagined our thirdspace simply: Once the show opened, audience members sat around small tables between the thrust stages and Wade interacted with them nightly.[7] With this set up, Wade’s Hedwig both encompassed and inhabited what Soja describes: "I urge you to begin reading Thirdspace with an open mind . . . set aside the demands to make an either/or choice and contemplate instead the possibility of a both/and also logic" (p. 5). Instead of furthering “either/or” dualisms, our thirdspace staging invited the audience to situate themselves inside the binary thrust stages, but at the same time transcend it through direct experience with Wade. This was mostly a shared positive experience.
Our thirdspace revealed its vulnerability, however, when, during a Sunday matinée, a drunk heckler demonstrated how spaces of potentiality, in a State where sexuality is legislated via binary definitions, can become contested territory. While Soja idealizes thirdspace as “a space of extraordinary openness, a place of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives.” sometimes the dualistic either/or closes on potential like a vice.
The man sat at one of the thirdspace tables, house left. Normally, Wade would venture out into this area during the song “Sugar Daddy” (Atlantic Records, 2014c). On this afternoon, however, the production crew felt a palpable tension - the man’s comments signalled danger. I was in the booth along with our stage manager. We muttered back and forth, concerned about Wade’s safety. Fortunately, our musical director, also playing a member of Hedwig’s band, latched on to this tension. At an opportune moment, she signaled to Wade to not enter our thirdspace. He didn’t. And the potential for openness that the space usually invited was lost. During that show, sexual dualism, as reiterated in the language of HB 421, rendered it unsafe. The yellow caution light that drenched Hedwig’s liminality now served its literal purpose.
The Power of Witnessing
Theory, such as Lakoff’s and Soja’s, is truly effective when it is witnessed. When it is felt. Theater offers us that, especially theater that puts its audience in the center of the action. To this end, our production enacted the impossibility of erasing a body like Hedwig’s through legislative rhetorics. Indeed, when legislation and inebriated audience members impose binary definitions, or signal that anything beyond them is “other,” they can’t erase non-binary bodies; rather, they create a heightened awareness of them, forcing a collective witnessing of non-binary reality. We tried to make this witnessing explicit.
Similarly, in the space between thrust stages, audience interactions with Wade’s Hedwig, whether he ventured out into them or not, powerfully demonstrated that thirdspace is not merely theoretical, but deeply consequential in terms of how liminal bodies negotiate or relish it. The theater provides powerful demonstrations of this every night, differently. This is its multi-modal power.
References
Anti-LGBTQ+ definitions of "sex" and "gender": House Bill 421 Fact Sheet. (2024). ACLU Idaho. https://www.acluidaho.org/anti-lgbtq-definitions-of-sex-and-gender-house-bill-421-2024-fact-sheet/.
Alaspa, K. (2024, April 2). Idaho Legislature passes bills to limit gender expression, ban compelled pronoun use. Idaho Capital Sun. https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/04/02/idaho-legislature-passes-bills-to-limit-gender-expression-ban-compelled-pronoun-use/.
Atlantic Records. (2014a). Neil Patrick Harris - The Origin of Love (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) [Official Audio] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZtyFQQPnEs.
Atlantic Records. (2014b). Neil Patrick Harris - Angry Inch (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) [Official Audio] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5QYeOJI3lk.
Atlantic Records. (2014c). Neil Patrick Harris - Exquisite Corpse (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) [Official Audio] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O5tmYgA3NM.
Atlantic Records. (2014c). Neil Patrick Harris - Sugar Daddy (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) [Official Audio] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5_kUOi4KDw.
Atlantic Records. (2014e). Neil Patrick Harris - Tear Me Down (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) [Official Audio] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eey6q81-bFw.
Atlantic Records. (2014f). Neil Patrick Harris - Midnight Radio (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) [Official Audio] [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxqGzVHcfmk&list=RDrxqGzVHcfmk&start_radio=1.
Barnett, S. (2012). Psychogeographies of writing: Representing space. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 16(3). https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.3/topoi/barnett/representing.html.
Bossick, K. (2024, August 14). Hedwig and the angry inch celebrates outsiders. Eye on Sun Valley. https://eyeonsunvalley.com/Story_Reader/11972/Hedwig-and-the-Angry-Inch-Celebrates-Outsiders/.
Colangelo, H. (2021, December 13). Hedwig and the angry inch: Trans icon or problematic disaster? Medium. https://harmonycolangelo.medium.com/hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-trans-icon-or-problematic-disaster-a22d6a8cc017.
DeBrabander, F. (2017, February 14). What Plato can teach you about finding a soulmate. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/what-plato-can-teach-you-about-finding-a-soulmate-72715.
Edbauer, J. (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940509391320.
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Hedwig Robinson. (n.d.). LGBTQIA+ characters Wiki. https://lgbtqia-characters.fandom.com/wiki/Hedwig_Robinson.
James, A. (2025, July 8). ‘We are all non-binary’, says Hedwig and the angry inch creator John Cameron Mitchell. The Pink News. https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/08/we-are-all-non-binary-says-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-creator/.
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[1] An image shows Hedwig, a rock performer, wearing a short blond wig, eyes circled in kelly green eyeshadow, standing on a dark stage, bathed in a sickly yellow light, and bordered by purple. She grips a microphone with intensity, her body language indexing desperation, as she points directly at the audience. The image is from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and showcases Hedwig’s angry and passionate stage presence during the penultimate song. Photo credit: Tessa Sheehan Photography.
[2] For a summary of how sex difference science is taken up by law and policymakers, see Sudai et al., "Law, Policy, Biology, and Sex," pp. 802-804.
[3] While numerous critical commentaries have addressed Hedwig's gender identity, it is fluid, oscillating between masculine and feminine presentations throughout the play. I defer to Cameron Mitchell’s language in the script, referring to Hedwig as “her” when he does. Mitchell reportedly uses he/him pronouns, while preferring “androgynous” to refer to his own gender (James).
[4] The bill passed with a 54-14 vote in the House and a 26-8 vote in the Senate.
[5] The spatial turn in rhetorical studies has emerged as a vital theoretical lens over recent decades (see Edbauer, 2005; McAlister, 2016, 2019; Mountford, 2001; Reynolds, 2004). Barnett (2012), however, draws rhetoric’s attention to Soja’s concept of ‘thirdspace.”
[6] The term “thirdspace” is also attributed to Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture first published in 1994. I use Soja here because of his discussion of the term and spatiality, which suggests the qualities of space, and interactions of individuals in it.
[7] An image shows a moment in a rehearsal of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It depicts two parallel thrust stages extending from a central stage, with Hedwig on the stage right thrust, and Yitzak on the stage left thrust. Hedwig, dressed in a white fringed jean jacket and skirt, sings dramatically into a microphone, her left arm outstretched towards Yitzak. Yitzak, wearing a combat jacket, tie, black jeans and fingerless gloves, with a microphone in his right hand, stretches his opposite hand toward the audience. The central stage hosts the band upstage, arranged with a keyboard and bass player on stage left, and a drummer and guitarist on stage right. An empty space between the thrusts reveals the seating area, where audience members were positioned at tables during the performance, creating what we termed our “thirdspace,” which blended performance and audience in an immersive theatrical experience. Photo credit: Tessa Sheehan Photography.