UNSEX’d
Written by Jay Whitehead & Daniel Judes; Directed by Josh Bradley
UNDER St. Marks | 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009
Aug 2 at 6pm, Aug 3 at 3:30pm, Aug 7 at 6pm, Aug 10 at 6pm & Aug 17
From the raucous and rebellious minds of Daniel Judes and Jay Whitehead comes UNSEX’d—a gleefully irreverent, gorgeously crafted, and intellectually nimble play that struts into the limelight not merely as a clever footnote to Shakespearean lore, but as a bold and blazingly contemporary reclamation of the Bard’s legacy. Making its U.S. premiere at FRIGID New York’s delightfully subversive Little Shakespeare Festival, UNSEX’d is at once a heady theatrical treatise and a saucy backstage comedy, an Elizabethan fever dream in drag, doused in glamour and nasty ambition.
The writing is nothing short of luscious. It drips with wit, pulsates with reference (high and low), and dances nimbly between homage and parody. Shakespeare purists will delight in its myriad allusions; contemporary audiences will revel in its irreverence. It is both a love letter to the Bard and a pointed critique of the culture that has followed in his wake. Set in a kaleidoscopically anachronistic version of Shakespeare’s England—where Elizabethan doublets share space with modern gloss and glam—it spins the tale of two male actors vying to originate the role of Lady Macbeth. You know to expect a gloriously vulgar, emotionally frank, and intellectually satisfying melodrama drenched in themes of aging, madness, identity, and the treacherous slipperiness of gender.
Directed with a devilish sense of timing and texture by Josh Bradley, we are sonically ushered into this world by cheeky instrumental covers of modern pop anthems—Renaissance-styled versions of contemporary hits that simultaneously amuse and disarm; think something like the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This” orchestrated for theorbo and fortepiano or Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” for flutes and recorders—and the audience is alerted that we are entering a liminal realm. This is not your English teacher’s Shakespeare (the festival’s theme, as it happens), but rather an exhilarating mash-up of early modern and postmodern sensibilities, where TikTok-worthy twirls meet the verse of iambic pentameter, and where the same old questions of gender, power, and performance haunt us like Banquo’s ghost. For those steeped in the lore of the boards, the very mention of Macbeth within a theatre is to flirt with chaos itself—and UNSEX’d does not merely flirt; it seduces, subverts, and plunges headlong into that chaotic magic. What emerges is a fiercely intelligent exploration of gender, ambition, rivalry, and performance itself.
The setting: the tiring room of Shakespeare’s own company. The actors’ stakes: youth, beauty, glory, and the increasingly perilous currency of desire. Theirs is a theatrical tapestry that threads Elizabethan excess through the eye of 21st-century pop culture, revealing how little our appetites—and our narcissisms—have changed. The performative artifice of Elizabethan stagecraft becomes an astute mirror to our present-day obsessions: with fame, with image, with reality that’s anything but.
Enter Wilburn Hussey, portrayed with jaw-clenching grandeur and razor-edged vulnerability by Johnny Vorsteg, is a seasoned virtuoso of the feminine masquerade—a veteran of Shakespeare’s "boy players" whose bloom is fading and whose envy festers just beneath a thick patina of rouge and bravado. In fact, he was once the bard’s shimmering muse with a legacy steeped in the voluminous skirts of Shakespeare’s heroines. We meet him lounging in a haze of nostalgia and barely concealed anxiety, flipping through his reviews like auguries of doom, now clinging to his fading spotlight as time and younger, hungrier talent encroach. With the bravado of Lady Macbeth and the fragility of Lear on the heath, Hussey conjures the spirits—metaphorical and perhaps literal—that will disrupt his world.
Into this charged space arrives Humphrey Hughes (Sam Given), a cherubic bread boy with a strong work ethic, a pure heart, and, most importantly, the sort of beauty that threatens to upset the entire precarious hierarchy of the stage: fresh-faced, pliable, and radiantly dangerous. What begins as a charming mentorship quickly devolves into a cataclysm of jealousy, possession, and spectral interference. It is no accident, of course, that Wilburn's first impulse is to mold Humphrey in his own image—a Pygmalion tale turned inside out and laced with both yearning and dread. This mentorship quickly becomes a hall of mirrors that ripens into a volatile dance of seduction, ambition, and betrayal.
The resulting alchemy? A delicious metamorphosis wherein Wilburn slides from tragic ingénue to grotesque crone, while the sweetly docile Humphrey sharpens into something far more sinister—an evolution echoing Lady Macbeth herself. Their pas de deux is as volatile as it is electric, reminiscent not only of Shakespeare’s own duelling souls but of classic celebrity dyads: think Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz in the classic episode “Lucy and Ethel buy the same dress,” that iconic coupling of inseparable best frenemies performing Cole Porter’s “Friendship”—both desperate to outshine and consume the other (and dismantle the other’s dress) as the cameras roll on. Theirs is a chemistry of combustible beauty—lust, loathing, admiration, and despair intertwined.
As Humphrey ascends (meteoric and radiant), Wilburn descends—his art curdling into envy, his affection into bitter regret. And then there is the crown—both literal and metaphorical. Hussey and Hughes do not merely compete for roles; they vie for a kind of sovereignty: over their art, their bodies, their legacies. Yet the genius of UNSEX’d lies not just in its dramaturgical intelligence, but in its ribald glee. This is a play as much about scrotal powdering and backstage gossip as it is about identity and legacy. It is a stroke of dramaturgical brilliance: by embracing the magical, UNSEX’d claims its lineage as a true inheritor of Shakespeare’s dark poetry, even as it lampoons it with drag sensibility and modern savvy.
UNSEX’d is that rare theatrical beast: laugh-out-loud funny, cerebrally astute, emotionally resonant, and gloriously, unabashedly queer. It is a love letter to the theatre as a site of transformation and betrayal, a haunted house of ego and performance, a looking-glass that shows not who we are, but who we are willing to pretend to be in the eyes of others. What elevates this work beyond mere pastiche is its profound psychological acuity and a deeply contemporary interrogation of queerness, identity, and theatrical performance itself.
Indeed, UNSEX’d glories in its contradictions. It is by turns crass and cerebral, high-concept and lowbrow, exquisitely crafted and joyfully unhinged. The dialogue is a thing of wonder: barbed and unrelentingly clever, it marries the florid bombast of Elizabethan rhetoric with the acid-tongued repartee of drag culture. The verbal gymnastics performed by both actors—tongue-twisters, Shakespearean pastiche, and mile-a-minute zingers—are nothing short of Olympian.
And yet, for all its dazzling wordplay, the production is never afraid to descend gleefully into the gutter. No double entendre is left unplumbed, no metaphor for anal sex left unexhausted. From repeated jabs at the size of the Bard’s “little Willy” to the frankly gratuitous display of glistening actor buttocks, UNSEX’d relishes its own vulgarity with the glee of a child in the costume trunk. At its thematic core, however, this is not merely smut for smut’s sake. The play astutely—and surprisingly tenderly—interrogates questions of beauty, age, queerness, and theatrical lineage.
Given's transformation from wide-eyed admirer to self-possessed actor is as chilling as it is exhilarating; once firmly in place as the “leading lady,” Given’s entire carriage becomes almost otherworldly. Given’s use of vocal modulation—the gradual loss of Humphrey’s working-class London accent—provides a deliciously subtle arc of transformation, mirroring his shift from wide-eyed ingénue to steely manipulator. It is an astonishingly nuanced performance, marked by both control and vulnerability. His is a physical life that calls to mind the exquisite John Epperson as Lypsinka, an homage to the stylish self-possessed celluloid villainesses of a bygone era.
Vorsteg’s descent into desperation, meanwhile, is shaded with such pathos and theatrical brio that we can’t help but be seduced even as he spirals. Vorsteg gives a masterclass in controlled mania: a performance that teeters gorgeously on the brink of madness, vanity, vulnerability, and grandeur. Vorsteg dazzles with his ability to command sympathy even at his most grotesque; his Wilburn is a diva undone, a Prospero whose magic is slipping from his fingers. In particular, he captures with harrowing precision the specific kind of middle-aged queer desperation rarely explored with such clarity: the terror not just of being replaced, but of being forgotten.
The title UNSEX’d, of course, harks back to Lady Macbeth’s invocation—her plea to the spirits to strip her of her femininity in the name of ambition—and the play takes this invocation literally, theatrically, and metaphysically. What does it mean to perform gender? To inhabit the feminine not by birth but by artistry? Through Wilburn’s masterclass in how to play a woman—complete with codified gestures, posture coaching, and the occasional slap—the play dissects the very bones of theatrical femininity. Yet it also posits something more provocative: that the femininity of the boy actor is not merely mimicry, but a kind of third gender, a seductive hybrid, a creature made for the stage, and desired precisely because of that liminality.
Visually, the production thrives in the cramped, prop-laden intimacy of UNDER St. Marks. The cluttered tiring room becomes a character in itself: a haunted, hallowed space where identities are tried on and discarded like so many wigs. The production is a playful anachronistic pastiche: period elements mashed up with a gleeful disregard for accuracy. Set, lighting, and sound combine to underscore the play’s central conceit: that time, like gender, is performative, unstable, and open to gleeful manipulation. The production's aesthetic is a sensory delight, thanks to the assured hands of its design team. Anthony Paul-Cavaretta, Ava Weintzweig, and director Josh Bradley have concocted a visual and sonic palette that joyfully refuses the confines of period realism. Time, like gender, is fluid here: brocade and neon, Elizabethan ruffs and theatrical sequins collide to thrilling effect. It’s a world that feels simultaneously ancient and modern, as though the past were being remembered through a glittering drag mirror. Time collapses and the veil between past and present, real and illusion, mortal and ghost, is tantalizingly thin.
UNSEX’d is not just a play; it is a celebration of performance itself. Of what it means to don a costume, to seduce an audience, to outlive one’s own reflection in the gaze of others. It is Shakespeare as he might have written if he’d been born in our time: genderfluid, fame-hungry, and gloriously unbothered by decorum. It is, in a word, spellbinding. If the theatre gods are just (and surely they are), UNSEX’d will continue to cast its glamor over audiences here in New York, from coast to coast—and far, far beyond.
UNSEX’d played its last performance on August 17.
UNSEX’d was part of FRIGID NY’s annual Little Shakespeare Festival.
for FRIGID programming and info visit www.frigid.nyc
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on August 25, 2025. All rights reserved.