Charlotte.com – Julie York Coppens – Theater Writer
Ripley’s glam-rock idol, like the transvestite he played earlier, both search for understanding
Most actors worry about typecasting: Who wants to spend the rest of his career playing lonely East Germans of ambiguous gender?
Scott Ripley is unconcerned. The star of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” opening next week at Actor’s Theatre, sees more differences than similarities between that show’s glam-rock idol and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the elderly transvestite he portrayed last season in “I Am My Own Wife.”
For one thing, Hedwig has undergone transgender surgery — so, although the procedure wasn’t completely successful, he, or rather she, isn’t a transvestite in the strict sense. Nor is she East German anymore, having married an American GI and emigrated to the United States shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.