What a World! What a World!
312 W 36th St., Manhattan, NYC
July 9-August 2, 2026
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| Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
Film studies brought us the concept of the heterosexual male gaze as the default mode of looking in media, implicit in how the camera mediates between the image and audience, and the new play
What a World! What a World!, uses an old movie to anchor its thinking about the gaze, both in (the) film and in the world.
What a World! What a World!, by Eric Marlin, explores being seen, self-presentation, the inscription and interpretation of texts and bodies and bodies as texts, all in relation to queerness and camp. Making its world premiere at The Tank after previous workshopping at Ars Nova ANT Fest in 2019 and the Prelude Festival in 2023,
What a World! What a World! stages a smart, surprising sixty-five minutes of slippery boundaries and contested perspective.
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| Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
The film around which the play revolves,
The Pearl of My Oyster, presented as a forgotten 1943 melodrama, concerns a socialite named Charlotte who says that she is willing to give up everything to be with the fisherman, Keith, with whom she is in love. Two performers, unnamed and identified in the program only as Not Keith (
Queen-Tiye Akamefula) and Not Charlotte (
Annie Hoeg), are working, sometimes contentiously, on a drag performance of the film (Keith would be played by a drag king and Charlotte by a drag queen–although Not Keith at a later point proposes deconstructing even this presentation of the constructedness of gender). Also falling under the umbrella of Not Keith and Not Charlotte is a queer couple, one of whom (Not Keith) is attached to
Pearl and its "romance" despite its problematic gender politics, who watch the film together (and have some contentious moments of their own). Akamefula and Hoeg play all three (or more) sets of characters, and they and the play move fluidly among them without overtly signaling such movement (there are no changes in their costuming or appearance until late in the play, for instance), which destabilizes distinctions in the same way that drag itself does. Drag emphasizes the performative nature of sex and gender by presenting them in exaggerated form, and the artificiality that comes with such exaggeration links it to camp, a historically queer mode that, as theorized by Susan Sontag, involves pleasure in self-aware artifice.
What a World! What a World! extends these disruptive frameworks to sexual relationships as well, as in an early conversation in which Not Keith–after repeating "look at me"
–asserts that Not Charlotte is beautiful, but Not Charlotte responds that beauty is "easy" and "inane," indicating a desire not to be seen and to be loved for being "hideous" instead, firing off a funny list of imagined grotesque traits.
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| Annie Hoeg and Queen-Tiye Akamefula. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
Artifice, as seen in camp and, perhaps more obviously, drag, transforms, and
What a World! What a World! emphasizes the theme of transformation throughout. The pearl in the film's title is an irritant transformed over time, both in its physical nature and in its desirability (by humans, anyway). The stage space begins and for a long time remains completely bare, except for a covering of carpet tiles in various shades of gray, but it eventually does undergo some changes–which underscores its own artificiality, as do the multiple actor-operated parts of
Skye Mahaffie's inventive lighting design and the absence of objects alluded to in the dialogue: Not Charlotte's dress or Not Keith's Altoids, for example. Imagined props are typical theatrical artifice, but here they resonate beyond the space of the theater to also evoke the performativity of everyday life.
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| Annie Hoeg and Queen-Tiye Akamefula. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
By the end of the play, Not Charlotte is still unsure if the moment of transformation that Not Keith has promised that
The Pearl of My Oyster contains has occurred, leaving it an open question whether this moment has not yet arrived, will not arrive, arrived without notice, or is imperceptibly ongoing. Can art provide transformation? Is the answer about who is looking and how? With their differing perceptions, the Not Keiths and Not Charlottes disagree over a number of things, from the importance of surface–particularly the body as (interpretable) surface–to whether the film represents "a battle of the sexes" or "a fraying of the binary" (of course, frayed binaries tend towards both/and not either/or), to whether the term for those Golden Age film accents is Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic. This last point of argument kicks off a series of hilarious imitations, and Akamefula and Hoeg are equally good in a segment that finds them lip synching lines from the film. The pair deliver Marlin's often heightened language with compelling artistry and humor, sometimes complementing it with stylized synchronized movement, while director Khanin does not shy away from some effective extended pauses and periods of quiet as a counterbalance.
What a World! What a World! reminds us that romance is as much a construction as sex and gender, but you may find yourself falling for it anyway.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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