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	Grade: B+ | Genre: Drama Summary: If you are looking for a shrewd period piece that flips everything you know about gender and forces you to take a new perspective, this is the film you've been waiting for.

Starring: Billy Crudup, Claire Danes and Rupert Everett
Director: Richard Eyre

Stage Beauty is a deft Shakespearean gender bender that proves incredibly fresh and unique. The film is set in 1660 England during a time when the crown had decreed that all women's theatrical parts would be played by men. We find out that this stems from a fanatic cleric who thought that allowing women to act on the stage would be to resign them to a life of prostitution and debauchery. Strangely, he didn't seem to have a problem with the fact that men would have to become transvestites to fill the vacuum he created. Kynston (Crudup) is the celebrity of her time, declared as the most beautiful woman on the stage as Othello's Desmonda. She has aristocratic groupies overtaken with blinding curiosity to know if Kynston still has his manhood firmly attached. Kynston has studied for countless years to play a woman. Through their passage, he has slowly worked out all of the masculine kinks that make him a man until he is a woman. He has sexual rendezvous with a fellow actor who is more enamored with the aura that surrounds his performance as Desmonda than with Kynston.

Claire Danes plays his faithful dresser and fervent admirer, Maria. Maria longs for the chance to act on the stage and aches over her love of Kynston. Little does everyone know that change lingers in the air. King Charles II (Everett), based on the very persuasive coaxing of his mistress, has reversed his father's decree and declared that not only would women be allowed to play their gender appropriate roles but also it would be illegal for men to now play these parts. Maria inadvertently triggered this change by originally going against the king's order and acting as Desmonda in a small production illegally. Now that the restriction has been lifted, Maria vaults to fame having the dubious distinction of being the first actress to perform on the stage and Kynston loathes her for it.

Kynston is at first indignant, refusing to give up his role. Eventually he enters a tailspin when he is dumped by his company and unable to cope with this new reality. Like a broken record, he repeats that there is no art in a woman playing a woman and thus why he refuses to play men's roles. Yet what he doesn't realize is that his training and his person are so effeminate that there is no reach in his playing a woman because that is what he is. Maria encounters her own struggles as her novelty eventually wears off and her audiences dwindle, siphoned off to see more talented actresses. She also encounters a taste of the whore that the cleric had railed against as she is forcefully persuaded to expose her breast for a painting so people will actually believe she is a woman. It seems they had Playboy even in Shakespeare's time.

The most compelling part of this film was the look at sex and the roles that we play. Where is that line between homosexual and heterosexual and does it mean anything anyway? Society engenders us from our first moments to fit an arbitrary mold and in Kynston's case that mold just happened to be a woman. How is he expected to suddenly become a man if that is all he's ever known? What if this goes against his nature? Should he act the appropriate part to satisfy societies need to categorize him? Stage Beauty makes you ask these probing questions to search out what you feel about gender and its affect on our lives.

Really the only thing this movie is missing is that more casual appeal that Shakespeare in Love had. Although this is a fascinating film, it is one you have to be in the mood to watch. With that said, if you are looking for a shrewd period piece that flips everything you know about gender and forces you to take a new perspective, this is the film you've been waiting for.

Purchase or rent Stage Beauty now.

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