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In space, no one can hear you slay.
But Portland drag artists paid tribute to the heavenly bodies anyway in Space: The Drag Show, a bimonthly drag revue by producers and performers Max & Mars. Space began as guerrilla theater in 2022, when Max Little and mononymous Mars set up a background on an Irving Park soccer goal. Their orbital trajectory shifted to the Clinton Street Theater, where Space will conclude its run on Saturday, Aug. 10, with a reverse-order tour of the Milky Way. When Little and Mars first started booking Space in 2022, they had their performers on the calendar all the way out to now. The producers say their future-forward thinking came as a shock to prospective cast members.
“That’s one of their favorite stories to tell about this show, ‘LOL, two years ago Max & Mars were like, ‘What are you doing in two years?’ when most drag performers don’t know what they’re doing this weekend,” Little says. “I feel like that’s going down in the lore of the local drag scene.”
Space is what would happen if Stephen Hawking teamed up with the glitteriest tarot girlies he could find to celebrate the universe’s majesty. Little brings the show’s astrological knowledge, inspired by his own Saturn return, while Mars is the production’s Carl Sagan. She repeats Space’s tagline with a slight vocal fry: “The magic of astrology, the science of astronomy, and the alchemy of drag.”
Space is equal parts magic, knowledge and community as drag artists show off their wildly unique take on the cosmos. Performers could lean into mythological interpretations of the planets, or use fabric innovatively to represent a planet’s terrain—the sun, the asteroid belt and Earth’s moon were added to fill out the solar calendar’s 12 shows. They might even just find a star-themed song and lean into the lyrics, like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” or Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Pop culture spawned a few unexpectedly astral moments since Space began—the billionaire space race, the solar eclipse’s path of totality crossing the United States again, and the solar storm that shone the northern lights over Portland, to name a few—but Little and Mars’ performers had no shortage of inspiration among them.
Little and Mars highlight standout moments from Space’s two-year run: Loretta Lordchild’s lunar costume, which used bed sheets and trash bags to build a tardigrade body; Xavier Knight’s stellar take on Saturn, which was their second-ever drag performance; and Aqua Flora, who won a Space performance slot as the winner of the Most drag pageant. Flora—a member of the ballroom House of Flora, and the Eugene-based House of Blunt drag family—performed on their own merit in the asteroid belt show, but dazzled as a rock god vision of Jupiter, shredding on a custom lighting-bolt guitar to Earth, Wind & Fire in a self-illuminating cloud wig.
“We’ve really tried not to just book a small range of alt, eastside drag folks, but really reaching across different parts of the drag scene, which is so diverse and has all these little pockets that are all doing different things,” Little says. “We’ve tried to weave together the local solar system, if you will.”
SEE IT: Space: The Drag Show at Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., 971–808-3331, cstpdx.com. 6 pm Saturday, Aug. 10. $11–$33, all ages. Respiratory face masks required.