Mirror, mirror, on the wall: Who’s the saddest queen of all? E. Dale Smith’s Divine/Intervention finds John Waters muse and trash icon Divine (Bobby Goodrich) on the eve of her death in 1988, facing off in a hotel looking glass with the man behind her glam-grotesque makeup and flab-fabulous outfits: Harris Glenn Milstead (the touching Ryan Walter), a shy, heavyset gay man who has long vanished behind his alter ego’s outré bravado but now longs to be taken seriously as a male character actor. Conceived and directed by Braden Chapman (who has his own drag life as Mimi Imfurst), the play asks whether either side of this Jekyll/Hyde combo can survive without the other, and smudges the dividing line between them. The writing itself gets smudgy sometimes, too—there are many flashbacks, not all clearly limned—and Divine would surely sneer at the therapeutic nature of some of the exchanges. But the behind-the-makeup approach is admirably sincere: The show is less interested in reproducing Divine comedy than in chasing Divine revelation.—Adam Feldman
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