Ms Blakk for President: The Drag Queen Who Crashed the 1992 Race

Terence Alan Smith ran for president in 1992 on the slogan "Lick Bush in '92!" He ran in drag, as Joan Jett Blakk, and this month New York gets the play about it. Ms Blakk for President, by Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney, is now showing at the Vineyard theatre in New York City until 29 November.

The campaign was not serious in the electoral sense. It was serious in every other one. Blakk's platform: fire everyone in the White House, paint it pink, reroute the military budget to education and healthcare, then return the land to Indigenous people "and let them take it from there". The campaign did not advance. Blakk did make it onto the floor of the Democratic national convention by entering Madison Square Garden as Smith and changing into drag in the bathroom. The country saw its first Black drag queen presidential candidate.

How did a footnote become a play?

The project began as an accident of scheduling. In 2019, Landau was set to direct another McCraney play at Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre company; casting fell through. Landau had directed McCraney once before, in 2004, and was, in her words, "dead-set on having Tarell act in something". With a tight deadline to fill the slot, she was "literally flipping through a book on Chicago LGBTQ+ history and came across one tiny paragraph about Joan Jett Blakk. I stood up from my desk and pointed at the book, saying out loud: 'That's it.'"

McCraney, best known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonlight, needed little persuading. Finding Smith took longer. He had moved to San Francisco, campaigned for mayor there, and become an underground arts fixture. When the pair located him, he had been unhoused, moving between friends' apartments. Landau flew out for his blessing, and the two "holed up in a hotel room for some days" for an extensive interview.

"The main thing was how shocked he was that we had found him, and that we were interested in telling his story," Landau recalls. "He felt he had been lost and forgotten." Smith could not accept that someone remembered his campaign until the Chicago opening, where he sat in the audience.

What did Smith's drag actually mean?

McCraney knew drag, but Smith "opened up a whole other channel of drag-as-activism that I didn't know about, not to the extent of the lineage of genderfuck that Terence was engaging in" (genderfuck: drag that deliberately scrambles gender signals rather than passing as one gender). Smith showed "no pushback" against drag's mainstreaming, McCraney says, and cheered on "some of the older queens who were on RuPaul's Drag Race". But Smith noted his own approach "hadn't exploded and become the commercialized version".

"Terence was never going for realness," McCraney says. "He was going for something where he would be in a dress and didn't tuck, or hide the fact the wigs didn't fit. He was saying: 'Sometimes I put on a dress and this other part of me comes forward.'"

Blakk herself framed the campaign as art. In a video for Queer Nation, the activist organization on whose ticket she ran, she beams that presidential campaigns are "performance art … nothing but orchestrated, rehearsed musical numbers, so we can just blend the two". Landau puts it more sharply: "He wasn't saying he was inventing this new thing of: 'Pay attention to me and I'll make a point.' He was exposing something he felt was true of all politicians."

What's changed since Chicago?

The New York version is substantially restructured. The Chicago premiere opened with the campaign launch; now, Landau says, "that scene happens about halfway in, so there's an entire half of a play that was not included before, including how and when she chose the name Joan Jett Blakk."

"It feels more like an origin story for a hero," McCraney says. "We watch the birth of this person who has this amazing ability to charm the shit out of people. We wanted to make sure that we all leave knowing there's a little bit of that in all of us."

McCraney played the role in Chicago. Wayne Brady was set to debut it in New York until a vocal polyp intervened. Tony nominee Ato Blankson-Wood now steps into the high heels. "Learning that this was based on someone's life has helped me be in service of something," he says. "It takes a lot of ego out to know Terence Smith did an incredible thing and my job is to help more people know about it."

Blankson-Wood performed in the inaugural Yale School of Drag during graduate school and calls drag "like this armor you can step into and feel powerful and soft at the same time". His main motive, though, was working with McCraney, whose writing he names "a guiding light": "There's a consistency of queerness – of Black queerness, specifically – that makes me feel like I belong."

Whether audiences leave with McCraney's hoped-for "little bit of that" in themselves, they have until 29 November to find out.