Following its success last year, the Fool’s Brunch drag show returned Thursday, March 28. All the cast and crew are Trinity students, and this semester’s production will have eight performers.

Fool’s Brunch is a drag variety show in which each act depends on the performer. Many of the acts are dance numbers with singing or lip-syncing along to songs. The appeal of drag performance is for someone to express a queer identity, explore certain aesthetics on stage, build confidence, or just to play a fun character in front of an audience.

Even though all of the acts are specific to the performer, they all inherently play with the subverting gender roles and gender presentation. Alongside this, drag performance can build confidence and allow someone to express themselves to an extent they may not be able to in everyday life.

Directed by Jay Burdine*, junior art major, this second iteration of Fool’s Brunch boasts a bigger budget, a larger crew, and more performers. This is a big difference from last semester’s performance, which only had four performers, including Burdine himself.

When Fool’s Brunch premiered for the first time last fall, it was performed in the Cafe Theatre, and the performers made do with a simple set. Most of the four performers had some experience with drag performance, and they held a collective drag show.

In contrast, the drag performers currently rehearsing for Fool’s Brunch’s opening are mostly newcomers who have never done drag before. They, alongside experienced performers and returners from last semester, have put lots of effort into their drag personae and performances.

Parker Snellgrove, junior English major, described his drag persona The Whore of Babylon, and discussed the deeper deconstructive meaning of his performance.

“My character is sort of a multi-layered one where his baseline persona is a clown and it’s very sort of 1920s, almost like French New Wave film-inspired with some other elements like the 1950s, musicals, things like that. But this character of the clown is also an actress in and of themselves,” Snellgrove said. “The nature of my performance specifically is meant to be almost really referential to those film aesthetics in understanding that I am someone acting as a character who is also acting. So, it’s meant to be overblown and campy in certain ways of really embodying that this is a performance.”

Dalex Zenteno is a sophomore art and communication double major. They are the stage manager for Fool’s Brunch, and they perform in a duet act with their friend, Sarah Reese, a sophomore with an undeclared major. Zenteno talked about their expectations for the show and for their performance.

“I think that it’s going to be funny no matter what,” Zenteno said. “In my opinion, my goals are to be sexy, make the audience laugh, be goofy, and just have a good time performing and playing as this different character who’s very different from who I am.”

Fool’s Brunch performed Thursday, March 28 in the Cafe Theater at 6:00pm.

*Jay Burdine is an illustrator for the Trinitonian.