Pierrot Lunaire(2014)
Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenbergās Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriendās father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce āserves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,ā is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenbergās melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like āA cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!ā