Now her theatrical focus turns inwards. Take the way each cold shoulder and micro-aggression from friends and family aggregate into an impenetrable wall of isolation for trans woman Harry. Dialogue is lived in. Harry and Jo have divorced. Their romantic past is consigned to memory and they amicably go their separate ways. From there the narrative bifurcates into interweaving strands.
Freewheeling Jo embraces her singledom with tacky tattoos, exotic holidays, and eventually a new lover. Harry struggles to continue transitioning, leaping through bureaucratic hoops, and struggling to integrate into a hostile world that will not recognise her. But just as you think you can grasp it, Bush pulls the narrative rug from under us with a genre-bending twist. Otherland playfully melts into a swirling magical realist standoff between gothic and sci-fi.
Harry is reimagined as a humanoid sea creature trapped in a net and writhing in a pool of water. Meanwhile Jo, now reluctantly pregnant as a surrogate mother for her lover who cannot give birth, is imagined as a monotone android, with wires sprawling from her body.
Neon lights, icy and blue, flicker and whir around her, sapping the last morsels of her freewheeling humanity. Both Harry and Jo strive for humanity beyond the confines of their corporeality, the same sides of the coin but stratified across genres.
An all-female chorus break out in sporadic outbursts of song and dance, scenes breathlessly waltz into each other, even with the spine cracking tonal shifts. Enter Your Email to Unlock This Article Plus, get the best of BroadwayWorld delivered to your inbox, and unlimited access to our editorial content across the globe. Photo credit: Marc Brenner. Click Here to Buy Tickets. More Hot Shows Discounts.
