LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

Donoghue's second work for theatre was commissioned by Glasshouse Productions and the Arts Council of Ireland.
A memory play in which a vaudeville star on the night of her final comeback relives her two marriages (one to a man, one to a woman), Ladies and Gentlemen is closely based on the life of the late nineteenth-century male impersonator Annie Hindle. This play with songs, set mostly in the dressing rooms of busy vaudeville theatres all over North America, was inspired by a real same-sex wedding that took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1886. It resurrects a ragtag troupe of emigrants - most notably, male impersonator Annie Hindle, 'a man's widow and a woman's widower', as the tabloids called her. With a light touch, Ladies and Gentleman explores the ways we perform our roles, both on and off stage.
It appears in Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays (Oberon Books, 2015).