After two years in lockdown, BenDeLaCreme is back on stage — and ready to be committed. Benjamin Putnam, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” season 6 contestant and “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 3” contestant known as BenDeLaCreme, joined Boston Public Radio Tuesday ahead of her one-night Boston stop on her “BenDeLaCreme is…READY TO BE COMMITTED” tour.
Her show features a mix of original music, dance, burlesque and puppetry, with BenDeLaCreme playing 15 characters in the performance. While the show originally premiered in New York City in 2019 with a run in Provincetown that summer, BenDeLaCreme's planned spring 2020 tour was canceled due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
“It’s a narrative show, and it’s actually inspired by my relationship with my real life-partner,” BenDeLaCreme said. “It’s a show in which DeLa is looking for love and looking in all the wrong places — it’s sort of a narrative camp cabaret.”
The past two years in lockdown inspired BenDeLaCreme to alter the show, emphasizing themes of connection and intimacy amid a time of loneliness.
“The show is all about loneliness, and looking for connection. And, surprisingly enough, that seems to be something that's resonating especially hard with people right now,” BenDeLaCreme said. “So there's been some rewriting that really sort of digs into how we have really changed the sort of immediacy — the stakes are much higher of wanting that connection, and how traumatizing it can be to be by yourself.
“At its heart, it's a show that's about our struggles with being alone, and how difficult those things can be, and the way that some of those things force us to look at our own mortality,” she continued.
In the past few years, drag has burst into mainstream culture — partially due to the popularity of reality TV competitions like “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” and “The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula.” And as drag is increasingly brought into the mainstream, BenDeLaCreme has noticed a more limiting attitude in what drag should look like.
“I do miss the sort of nitty-gritty drag that sort of only could thrive in the shadows. When I first saw some of the most incredible performances that I’ve seen, it was actually here in Boston,” BenDeLaCreme said. “Varla Jean Merman at Machine Nightclub — or Machine Hall, as she called it, at the time — was just such a huge inspiration. We just talked about Ryan Landry and the [Gold Dust] Orphans. I saw them do ‘The Bad Seed.’ And you know, all of that really expanded my mind as to what drag really could be.”
“It was interesting, because ‘Drag Race,’ of course, is now sort of the pinnacle of the art form that I’ve been in love with since years before it was invented,” she continued. “And so really, if you want to sort of get to the peak of this industry of this art, it’s something you need to participate in.”
But that isn’t to say that drag reality shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” are completely reflective of the drag community. In a move controversial with viewers, BenDeLaCreme chose to eliminate herself from her season of “All Stars” rather than send another competing queen home — a protest of the show’s reliance on drama.
“[‘Drag Race’ is] also reality TV, and they’ve created a lot of manufactured drama for the theoretical benefit of the viewers at home. You were asked to — if you do well on the show — eliminate your fellow contestants and send them home, and I just kept on winning week after week,” BenDeLaCreme said. “Imagine how mortified I was. The downside to that was that I kept having to eliminate the queens that I was there with.”
“There was this moment on the runway, when I realized I proved myself by winning most of the challenges, and I had nothing left to prove,” BenDeLaCreme said. “And so it was sort of a realization that I had done well enough in the competition to say, ‘hey, I can win this thing. I can do well at this thing. But I do not agree to the terms.’ And that's a pretty rare opportunity.”
