“Blood, Sweat and Queers” is inspired by the true story of a Czech sprinter who broke world records at the 1934 Women’s World Games in London, and gained world-wide fame when the female athlete whom the Czechs knew as Zdena Koubková became Zdeněk Koubek and began living as a man.
Czech playwright Tomáš Dianiška’s riff on Koubek’s life, initially entitled “Transky, body, vteřiny,” is being presented as one of the twelve productions from Eastern Europe in this year’s (largely free) Rehearsal for Truth theater festival.
Koubek’s story is certainly worth telling, given its eye-opening relevance nearly a century later on another continent — the attacks on gender nonconformists, the rise of fascism. Director Edward Einhorn, who translated the text into English along with Katarina Vizina, makes the most of a minimalist production in an auditorium of the Bohemian National Hall, relying on Ramona Ponce’s costumes and Chris Carcione’s videos to set the scene, and on a fluid seven-member cast taking on multiple roles, with a stand-out performance in the role of Zdena/Zdenek by Hennessy Winkler, a Broadway veteran (Sweeney Todd) who is himself a trans man. But the script raises more questions than it answers.
Bullied as a child, Zdena takes refuge in running; Winkler delivers a lovely monologue on its joys. Zdena turns out to have a natural talent for track and field, to the delight of the citizens of Czechoslovakia. It’s at a theater, the play seems to suggest, that Zdeněk discovers his true nature. One of the performers in the amateur company is too drunk to go on, so Zdena, who has been helping out and knows the part, is persuaded to take his place, portraying a male character with a false mustache. He looks at himself in the mirror, and clearly likes what he sees. But the play also indicates that it’s not just Zdena’s desire to be a male. It’s a biological fact. Having been birthed at home, Zdena was never examined thoroughly by a physician until he collapses from exhaustion, presumably from the stress of all the training and all the attention. “Zdena, you’re a man,” the doctor tells the athlete. “You were born with a penis, but…, your genitals have a partially female appearance.” The surgery Zdeněk undergoes is to correct the condition.
Such details in Dianiška’s play seem at variance with the best-known account of Koubek’s life, told last year by Michael Waters, both in a non-fiction book The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and an article in the New Yorker entitled A Forgotten Athlete, A Nazi Official, and the Origins of Sex Testing at the Olympics.In it, Waters writes: “Contemporary sources that mention Koubek often refer to him as intersex, but that term assumes a degree of knowledge that we don’t have.”
The play also has Zdena harassing a Jew — reluctantly egged on to do so by a woman to whom he feels what he thinks at the time is a lesbian attraction – but, after his transition, dating a woman who is wearing the yellow star of David on her coat (They are in a country under Nazi occupation.) Koubek in fact married a gentile woman; that, and having gotten a driver’s license that identified him as a male, might have saved his life, Waters writes: “As the Nazis sent queer and trans people to death camps, Koubek managed to pass—on the surface, he was the picture of white, gentile heterosexuality. It was best, perhaps, if no one thought too much about, or even remembered, the full story.”
A playwright is not required to keep to the facts, but in the case of Koubek, some of Dianiška’s imagined details strike me as less interesting than the real ones. In the play, after Zdenik announces his transition, the public turns against him, he loses his job as a coach, and is forced to make money by performing in a freak show, running on a tread mill as a ringmaster barks out “Come on. And see Zdena naked. See her vagina.” Waters reports that Koubek actually performed on Broadway in a cabaret show called “Folies d’Amour” and later with Josephine Baker in the Folies-Bergere in Paris.
Blood, Sweat and Queers
Part of the Part of Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival at the Bohemian National Hall through June 15
Written by Tomáš Dianiška.
Translated from Czech by Edward Einhorn and Katarina Vizina.
Directed by Edward Einhorn
Fight director: JaneAnne Halter, Costume design: Ramona Ponce
Video design: Chris Carcione
Sound design: Becca Silver
Cast: Craig Anderson(Coach and others), Herschel Blatt (Kuba and others), Ethan Fox (Bed’a and others), Jean Marie Stodolski (Eliška and others),Alyssa Simon(Lída), Katarina Vizina(Mother and others), and Hennessy Winkler (Zdeněk)
