The thing about a time warp is that it can happen anywhere. With a few familiar songs and perhaps a trick of the light, a college theater in the Northeast Kingdom can transform into the setting for one of the most celebrated productions of the 1970s sexual revolution: “The Rocky Horror Show.”
At Northern Vermont University-Lyndon, the musical “cult classic” will soon be performed onstage, opening Thursday, April 20, and running through Sunday, April 23.
“I’ve loved the show since I first saw it when I was 14,” said Alex Hume, a member of the Twilight Players, NVU’s theater club. “It was really an influential moment for me in finding my identity as a young, lost, queer middle schooler.”
Hume will play the role of Frank-N-Furter in the show.
“The Rocky Horror Show,” written by Richard O’Brien, first debuted in 1973, combining the camp of sci-fi B movies with a serious message about LGBTQ+ liberation. At the time of its release, the show sparked controversy for its bold representation of queer and transgender identities, and just as quickly solidified its place in queer culture. In 1975, it was adapted into the film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
As NVU theater professor and director Michael Kane puts it, the show is “like Frankenstein’s lab meets gay pride parade. … It was one of the first mainstream shows to explore a world that wasn’t just a binary world.”
Kane, who grew up in East Burke, joined NVU-Lyndon as a theater professor in 2021. After the first year of the pandemic, he said, NVU students were eager to get involved in theater.
“It was as if there was a forest fire, and all these new shoots were rising up,” Kane said.
Kane said students were drawn to “The Rocky Horror Show” this year because of its message and relevance to their lives.
“There’s a part of a song (in the show) where the refrain goes, ‘Don’t dream it, be it,’ and that is so powerful,” he said. “Sure, (the show is) silly and frivolous … but underneath all that, it’s a show about being who you want to be.”
Chance Rowe, a second-year student at the college who plays Dr. Everett Scott in the show, said they think Rocky Horror has been controversial because it portrays “the freedom of owning a body” and “being sexual and in tune with yourself.”
“Unfortunately, today,” Hume said, those things still feel “like an act of rebellion.”
Rowe encountered “The Rocky Horror Show” in 2016 in a YouTube recording of the production, falling in love with the show’s actors, set and soundtrack.
“I really resonate with the song ‘Sweet Transvestite,’” they said, since it encourages “being proud of who you are and of your own identity. … I know who I am and am happy to be here, and that’s the message I get from that song.”
While expressing admiration for the songs, Rowe and other cast members noted that “Rocky Horror” does use some outdated language — words such as “transvestite” and “transsexual,” for example, which Rowe said are “very much not how we should describe anyone nowadays.”
The show’s language proved somewhat divisive among LGBTQ+ students on campus, according to cast members, and some people opposed the production, in part, because of the outdated and potentially offensive language it employs.
Yet, cast members said, the show provides an opportunity to witness such language within a historical context, and, for those who identify as transgender themselves, even reclaim it.
As the NVU-Lyndon students gear up for the performance, many say they are eager to carry on the show’s subversive legacy, particularly in the context of recent anti-queer violence. This year, a record breaking number of anti-LGBTQ+ — and specifically anti-transgender — bills have been introduced or passed in state legislatures across the United States, accompanied by increasingly hateful rhetoric and heightened violence.
“It’s always been political, showing queer identities in the media,” Hume said, “especially now that in many states around our country, what (LGBTQ+ people) are doing and the things we’re saying is looked at as criminal behavior.”
Politically, Vermont has “protected the rights of these students and allowed them to celebrate their identities and sexuality,” Kane said in a press release. “In other states, college students would have a lot of problems performing this show.”
For Hume, the rural setting of the college’s campus draws assumptions about a lack of tolerance for LGBTQ+ people just as quickly as it subverts them.
“Up here in Vermont, there’s far more goats than there are people,” Hume said, “Compared to the rest of the country, you often think we’re ‘Oh, they must be very conservative, very harsh personality people’, (but) these are very open, friendly people. … I feel like this is the perfect landscape to put on the show.”
Even so, Hume continued, “we do have to think about (safety). Of course we’re putting on the show, but what elements of ourselves do we need to protect while doing this?”
“We’re just here to love people and be ourselves,” Rowe said, “I feel like this show better helps other people to understand that and not see queer people as villainous.”
As opening night approaches, cast members express hope that their production of “Rocky Horror” will resonate with viewers, no matter who they are.
Brett Violett, a junior playing the role of Riff Raff, said one of the moments he connects with most happens as the narrator is closing out the final scene: “The narrator comes on and (says), ‘And crawling on the planet’s face, some insects called the human race. Lost in time, and lost in space. And meaning.’”
“Maybe it comes off as a little silly from a show like this,” Violett said, “but the words themselves (are) quite profound in discussing, you know, who we are as people, what our meeting is and how we live.”
For Kane, that line stands out as well, inviting the audience and cast members to zoom out and remember how small human beings are, how large oblivion is, and how it can be liberating “not take ourselves too seriously” during the brief and wondrous time that a person is alive.
“The show is like an anthem to be who you want to be, and I think that, in itself, is political now,” Kane said.
Additional information can be found on the Twilight Players’ Facebook event page.
