Boys, boas and a big issue: writer Philip Himberg on his new play Paper Dolls

The Tricycle’s latest production, about a real-life group of Filipino carers-cum-drag troupe, is a dark story dressed in sequins says writer Philip Himberg
Writer Philip Himberg with the five key cast members of Paper Dolls Pic:Daniel Hambury
Daniel Hambury
27 February 2013

My chat with American writer Philip Himberg about his new play is attended by a strap-on sex toy that stands mutely sentinel on the table between us. This prop is not, however, the most surprising thing about Paper Dolls, which tells the largely true story of a group of Filipino drag queens working as carers for elderly orthodox Jews in Tel Aviv.

Himberg, 59, is a gay, Jewish New Yorker (though drag is, he says, “not my thing”) who married his Muslim Indian accountant husband two years ago, and who since 1997 has run the theatre programme for Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. As if to complete the circle of improbability, the play is premiering in Kilburn, where it is directed by Indhu Rubasingham in her debut season in charge of the Tricycle Theatre. “It’s been,” Himberg concedes, “rather an amazing route.”

The journey began when he saw Israeli director Tomer Heymann’s documentary Paper Dolls, itself drawn from a five-part TV series, at the Los Angeles film festival in 2006. The film depicts a bizarre but fragile symbiotic culture. Infirm Hasidim, who cannot be touched by women, find themselves nurtured by camp and in some cases hormonally altered young men — economic migrants who are working to support families back home and who, on their evenings off, put on paper frocks and lip-synch to American, British and Israeli pop in gay clubs. Unable to qualify as citizens, the Paper Dolls are entirely dependent on their employers’ goodwill.

“I sat there and immediately thought this felt like a play,” recalls Himberg. “It was so theatrical in many ways: the stories, the themes, the characters. I responded to the story about immigration, about crossing borders, both literal and metaphorical, which has been a hot button issue in the States. Also the clashing of cultures — the idea of Asians, Filipinos, living in Israel felt so unlikely. And the generational thing, that these younger Asian men were caring in a very beautiful way for these older men who had been, frankly, abandoned by their families.”

Many in the audience, he suggests, will know what it feels like to entrust a father or mother to others’ care while remaining indifferent to the inner life of the immigrant providing it (or delivering a pizza, or emptying the office bins). Of course, as well as weighty themes the story also has songs and FABULOUS costumes.

Himberg secured the rights to adapt the film and visited Heymann in Tel Aviv. “I saw where the Paper Dolls lived, the Bnei Brak — which is the Hasidic enclave — and all the gay clubs,” he says. “I met his [Heymann’s] mother.” He also needed to meet the drag queens featured in the film, “to honour that these were real lives, not fabricated lives”. Four of the Paper Dolls now live in London as British citizens: one is a qualified nurse working closely with a surgeon performing skin grafts, while another is married to a (male) German doctor. Himberg says all of them describe themselves as gay and “identify as women” rather than transgendered or transsexual: in any case they probably remain too poor for sex-change surgery. They also remain vulnerable outsiders. A fifth Doll was shipped back to Manila, a sixth murdered in Dubai.

Initially, Himberg saw the play as an original musical he would produce and others would write, before realising that the pop songs the Dolls chose were integral to the play’s discussion of identity. He also eventually acknowledged he was “obsessed” and should write the script himself, which was a big leap from his last project as writer, a one-woman show for Broadway star Maureen McGovern.

Fortunately, the Sundance Theatre Programme, which was part of Robert Redford’s vision for his Institute long before the more famous film festival of the same name came along, exists to give artists space to experiment without commercial or even aesthetic pressures. As artistic director of the programme, Himberg was able to award himself a three-week writer’s fellowship in 2010. It sounds idyllic: a studio in Utah with a gorgeous view and three meals a day.

It was also through Sundance, where Rubasingham spent time on a residency, that the two hooked up. On the advice of a mutual friend and colleague, playwright Lynn Nottage (Ruined), Himberg invited Rubasingham to work with a group of Tanzanian artists on Sundance projects in Africa and New York. The two became friends and she asked him to send her the script if and when he completed it. “She told me later she was terrified in case she hated it,” says Himberg. By the time he delivered, Rubasingham was in line to take over the Tricycle and offered him a slot. Where better to stage this play, he says, than a venue with an international reputation, in a cosmopolitan city where homosexuality and immigration are high on the political agenda, far away from the devastating gaze of the New York critics?

During the seven-year gestation, drastic changes were made to the story to turn documentary into drama. Tomer Heymann, an affable, questioning presence throughout the film, becomes the more divisive and questionable character Yossi on stage. The relationship between the Filipino brothers Chiqui and Giorgio has become more antagonistic (it’s Giorgio, the troublemaker, who disruptively deploys the aforementioned sex aid in a dance routine).

The central relationship between the elderly Eastern European Jew Chaim, losing his voice and his life to throat cancer, and his comely carer Sally (Salvatore) is preserved but Himberg has invented the character of Chaim’s daughter Adina, to point up the way definitions of gender and family can get blurred. Most of the original Paper Dolls are coming to see the show, and Himberg is a little nervous. Not least because, he whispers, the actors are “much better” performers than the real Dolls and will sing live rather than lip-synch.

For Himberg, the process of creating the play constitutes a new twist in an already interesting life. Raised in Connecticut and educated at Oberlin College, he started out as a director at Playwright’s Horizons in New York and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in the Seventies before retraining in Chinese medicine. For 11 years he practised acupuncture in Santa Monica and “as an out, gay therapist” was much in demand from Aids sufferers who then had no access to palliative drugs. “It burnt me out,” he says. Soon after he sold his practice he heard Redford was looking for someone to run the theatre side of Sundance.

For the future, Himberg envisages a steady flow of scripts between the Tricycle and Sundance. He also believes his experiences in the rehearsal room in Kilburn will benefit his day job when he goes back to it. “When I talk to a writer, now, I am somebody who knows what it is to hold a pen,” he says.

Paper Dolls is at the Tricycle Theatre February 28-April 13 (020 7328 1000; tricycle.co.uk)

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