Neil Patrick Harris in 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch'

Just look around you: No fewer than eight high-profile shows on Broadway and two off-Broadway are flaunting attention-getting, gender-bending performances.

We saw this trend escalating last year with Nathan Lane’s touching portrayal of a vaudevillian in The Nance, Billy Porter’s charismatic, cross-dressing dancer in Kinky Boots, and Bertie Carvel’s cartoonish Mrs. Trunchbull, the headmistress from hell, in Matilda.

Gender takes center stage

But now, in the current season, gender-bending (or cross-dressing, or role reversal, or female impersonation, however you want to describe it) is more than a daring provocation. It’s a dominant center stage feature. Moreover, what was once a historical tradition (men playing women’s roles in Shakespeare’s time) and later entertainment (men dressed in women’s clothes in vaudeville) has now taken on interesting political, social, and psychological dimensions.

The season opened with an all-male, dazzling double bill of Twelfth Night and Richard III on Broadway. Mark Rylance’s stellar company thrilled us with the virtuosity and clarity of their rendering of Shakespeare. At the same time, Lincoln Center’s Macbeth frightened us with its fearsome male trio of the “Weird sisters” (John Glover, who played one of those horrific hermaphrodites, described himself as a “witch with tits”).

Meanwhile, downtown, two off-Broadway productions of Brecht — The Good Person of Szechwan at the Public Theater and A Man’s a Man at Classic Stage Company — featured flamboyant male narrators (Taylor Mac and Justin Vivian Bond respectively) performing in what has traditionally been called “drag” (a term which should by now be obsolete). Another revue-style production — the delectable new musical called A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder — features a masterly performance by Jefferson Mays who plays all eight victims of a mass murderer, one of whom, Lady Hyacinth, rivals Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in her farcical flamboyance. You won’t find a more wild and wonderful performance anywhere on Broadway this season than Mr. Mays’s multi-gendered tour de force.

Alan Cumming’s androgynous Master of Ceremonies in the rousing revival of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret at the Roundabout provides equal entertainment, and at the same time, a sobering political metaphor. In sharp contrast to Joel Grey’s original gaminlike portrayal, Alan Cumming’s insidious interpretation suggests a provocative parallel between sexuality and politics. At the seedy Kit Kat Klub in 1930s Berlin where people are invited to “leave their troubles behind,” Cumming’s cunning emcee interacts freely and indiscriminately with “ze boys and ze girls,” with Nazis and Americans, with innocents and criminals — all in the name of surviving and avoiding reality. His refusal to take sides foreshadows the tragic consequence that so many like him ultimately faced.

For me, the epiphany of the season is one that turns the tables on gender-bending. The arresting all-female Julius Caesar at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (a London Donmar Warehouse import) took us by surprise, subverted our expectations, and left us with much food for thought. Set in a women’s prison, this provocative production provided a new appreciation of Shakespeare’s all-too-familiar tragedy about the perils of politics. Director Phyllida Lloyd’s bold choices of context (incarceration) and casting (women in men’s roles) offered a double insight into “the power of the powerless,” as Václav Havel once called it.

What's new

In contrast, two Broadway openings last month attempt to offer a more psychological view of gender-bending. In the revival of the 1998 downtown, counterculture rock musical, Neil Patrick Harris’s heavy-duty Hedwig tells the traumatic story of her life, her sex change (she was once a he), and her lost love, while assaulting us with a dozen deafening songs backed up by her bad-boy band members (one of whom is a girl). Over 90 numbing minutes, Hedwig slithers through a slew of outrageous costume and wig changes, while gyrating in five-inch high heels on the roof of a wrecked car.

The problem is that this aggressive production is pitched at such a high decibel and assaults you with such a force that you feel your own pain rather than empathize with Hedwig’s. In the end, it degenerates into a stunt show — a showcase for Mr. Harris’s prodigious talents rather than a compelling, compassionate character study.

Similarly, Harvey Fierstein’s Casa Valentina at the Manhattan Theatre Club attempts to get inside the heads of closet cross-dressers, to understand their inner conflicts. Based on a true story of a Catskill hotel in the 1960s that welcomed heterosexual men who liked to dress as women, a group of guests gather for a weekend, where they are safe to practice their secret ritual openly and reach out to one another for understanding. The outcome of their collective search for identity is, in contrast to what you’d expect from Fierstein, author of the flamboyant Torch Song Trilogy, sadly ambiguous and inconclusive.

Whether providing insight or sheer entertainment, gender-bending is now a part of our mainstream culture. And that’s a good sign. It’s a celebration of individuality and a hopeful indication that one’s personal choice of sexual identity is finally beginning to be accepted. Meanwhile, let’s work on our terminology. “Gender-bending” is a new term that has crept into our lexicon and may suffice for the present. But we can do better. How about “freedom of self-expression”?

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to Pete Pryor’s annual holiday panto at People’s Light and Theatre Company. I wouldn’t miss Mark Lazar’s cross-dressing act for the world. It’s harmless, it’s hilarious — and it’s a tradition.