Review: "UNSEX'd" Asks If Shakespeare's Boy Players Are More than Just Pretty Faces

UNSEX'd

Written by Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes

Directed by Josh Bradley

Presented by JB Theatricals at UNDER St. Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

August 10-17, 2025

The playful use of bardcore covers of contemporary songs in scene transitions encapsulates both the era-bending sense of humor in Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes's Renaissance-set UNSEX'd and the continuities in the issues that the play raises between the early modern period and our own. In commercial theater in Shakespearean England, public self-exhibition onstage was frowned upon for women, so female roles were played by boys or young men, and UNSEX'd, with psychological acuity and enough bawdy humor to make the Bard proud, irresistibly draws us into the friendship and rivalry between two such specialists in female characters in Shakespeare's own company. In its run at UNDER St. Marks, UNSEX'd is making its U.S. premiere as part of the FRIGID New York's 5th annual Little Shakespeare Festival (July 31-August 17), themed “Not Your English Teacher’s Shakespeare” and curated by artist and educator Conor Mullen, who also appears in the improvised As You Will at the festival.

Much of UNSEX'd takes places in the tiring room, with its settee and drawers, its pieces of costume and props, and it is here that, after a brief induction drawing from Macbeth, we first meet stage actor Wilburn Hussey (Johnny Vorsteg), reading his latest reviews (a fun anachronistic touch complemented later by stories from a Shakespearean celebrity tabloid media). Hussey has been extremely successful as Shakespeare's leading lady but is no longer as youthful as he once was, leading to reviewers using phrases like "faded beauty" and prompting him to pray, in verse and in a riff on Lady Macbeth, to the spirits. Humphrey Hughes (Sam Given), in contrast, who works delivering bread, is a nice, hardworking boy who prays to a more socially acceptable entity. He is also very pretty. It is this last trait that prompts Hussey to convince this significantly younger man, who turns out to be a fan of the theater and of Hussey's work, to train under him to play female roles. As Humphrey's career trajectory begins to mirror Wilburn's own meteoric rise, and as Humphrey increasingly embraces and enjoys an adulation that is inseparable from his physical attractiveness, Wilburn's relationship with him threatens to sour and Humphrey threatens to mirror Wilburn in less desirable ways as well.

The title UNSEX'd, alluding as it does to Lady Macbeth's request to the spirits to remove the expected characteristics of her sex, points to the foregrounding of gender performativity and play inherent in early modern stage performance. As Hussey trains Hughes, we see female-ness broken neatly down into a set number of gestures and attitudes, but we also hear the argument that a man-as-a-woman has a specific way of being, and of being attractive, that a man or woman lacks. UNSEX'd also echoes Macbeth in that Hussey and Hughes end up competing for a figurative crown–two people who would ideally be supporting one another dragged into conflict owing to beauty standards, an issue that of course extends beyond the stage and the acting profession. Related to though not coterminous with these standards is the sexual availability attributed to actors such as Wilburn and Humphrey, a type of currency but also an expectation–from acting mentors (Wilburn promises Humphrey at the outset that he will not expect sex like other trainers do), playwrights (including Shakespeare, here solidly pansexual and spoken to but never seen), and even audience members. Noteworthy as well are some clever jokes around Humphrey's influence on Macbeth and an inspired twist in the play's coda that any Shakespeare or theater fan will appreciate. Vorsteg and Given excel at both the verbal and physical comedy of the production (a scene involving scrotal powdering comes to mind), which they seamlessly blend with the darker edges and internal struggles of their characters' journeys, including Hughes's decreasing innocence and Hussey's increasing desperation. In an additional layer of expression, Given deftly employs Humphrey's loss–with the occasional significant relapse–of his working class London accent as a marker within his character arc. Humphrey's accent represents one kind of transformation and boundary crossing in a play replete with both, including how UNSEX'd marvelously and riotously imbricates early modern and contemporary queerness.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards