I can’t believe it was already a week ago that Claire and I returned to my favorite Wicked Little Town to see Darren Criss perform as the titular role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This run on Broadway has been of particular importance to me- not least because it has given me the opportunity to meet Darren not once, but twice, and to have an extremely memorable interaction with him at that.

More importantly, if there is anything more important than that (debatable), I was introduced to this musical for the first time. I’m generally a more traditional theater person. I was raised in the barricade and the woods with the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim. So when I heard the announcement that one half of my favorite fictional couple would be portraying this groundbreaking role that I had only ever heard of in passing, I knew two things: 1. I had to see it and 2. I had to figure out what this musical was actually about.

As a traditionalist, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Hedwig had never really been at the top of my list. But as I prepared to venture into her world, I was surprised at the philosophical depth of John Cameron Mitchell’s creation. Long story short, Hedwig and the Angry Inch has quickly become not only one of my favorite musicals of all time, but also one of my favorite works of art. Allow me to explain why.

Hedwig is introduced as a paradox of sorts. Both man and woman, and yet, neither. Much like the Berlin Wall, an inch of jagged flesh separates Hedwig from fully seizing either of the identities that she possesses. She stands between two modes of existence, performing the exterior of a woman but not quite knowing her internal identity—are some parts of her still more Hansel than Hedwig? And if that is the case, where does Hansel end and Hedwig begin?

Instead of confronting these issues of identity, Hedwig is aggressive and angry. She is desperately trying to force two pieces that don’t quite fit together into a whole persona, and she is struggling with all of the forces that contributed to her fate: from her parents, to Luther and Tommy Speck, to her own personal decisions. Her identity is an exquisite corpse, sewn together with bits and pieces of the expectations from the various people she has loved and lost.

What draws me to Hedwig most magnetically is the way that her search for identity ties to the underlying theme of the Origin of Love. In the exposition of her tragedy (or triumph, as I’m learning to recognize), Hedwig recounts an ancient Greek myth that all humans were born with two heads, two sets of legs and two sets of arms. Fearing our power, the Gods separated us down the middle, dooming us to be so distracted with searching for our other halves that we would never think of defying them.

Hedwig is enthralled by this myth, assuming that she has found her other half in the prodigal Tommy Gnosis—that he indeed was the person that she had been looking for and that, perhaps, when the Gods had split them, he had received all of the “worthy” and attractive qualities.

As she stands, in her full wig and makeup, dressed to the nines in her costume, we see Hedwig at what is her most put together and yet, her most vulnerable. She has been shamed by Tommy Gnosis’ success at her expense, unable to move on from his overwhelming betrayal.

We hear more and more of Hedwig’s story, of her botched sex change to leave East Berlin, at Luther’s absence and her first encounters with Tommy Speck, and she begins to deconstruct the façade right before our very eyes. The wigs are shed, the costumes come off—and at the penultimate number of the performance, we see Hedwig has become Tommy Gnosis.

At first glance, it appears that Hedwig was correct about Tommy—that he was in fact her other half, the piece that she had been looking for to unlock her true identity. In fact, it seems that Tommy has appeared because Hedwig has become whole. However, despite these appearances, what I’ve learned from Hedwig is that regardless of first glance—we must always look again.

True, the disappearance of the façade appears to indicate that visually, Hedwig and Tommy are each other’s missing halves. But there is a much greater, more poignant theme at play if we listen closely to the lyrics of the Wicked Little Town Reprise and Midnight Radio.

As Tommy Gnosis rises into the crowd to mirror Hedwig’s first encounter with him, he sings “You think that luck has led you there. But maybe there’s nothing up in the sky but air…And there’s no mystical design, no cosmic lover pre-assigned. There’s nothing you can find that cannot be found.”

Hedwig as Tommy, and Tommy as Hedwig, rejects the notion of the missing half. We are not in pursuit of another person to become whole: because we have been whole all along. The transformation of Hedwig into Tommy is not a transformation at all. Rather, it is an indication that all those pieces that Hedwig thought had been missing were actually inside of her all along.

This point is re-iterated in Midnight Radio: Know in your soul, like your blood knows the way from your heart to your brain—know that you’re whole.

Hedwig had it wrong. The Technicolor myth that she had been fed in her childhood taught her to seek outside of herself to feel complete; that she could not be enough on her own. She then changes to become all the things she felt she was not: to become somehow better and more worthy because exterior forces could not love her from the front.

If there is one key takeaway from this musical it is: when it comes to an either/or, why not be both. Why not be it all. Be everything that you desire, and don’t believe that you need someone to give you permission to be those things.

We are not searching for our other halves: we are searching for the strength inside of ourselves to be everything that we could desire to be. And it begins with knowing that you on your own lack nothing. You are sun and moon and earth, and you don’t need anybody to make you those things.

Then, when we do find those people with whom we will share our lives, it is far less about sticking ourselves back together and wholly about walking together, side by side. The goal, then, has never been about completing, but always about complementing.

Complementing one another; saying “you are who you are and I will amplify you so that you become the most you that you have ever been:” That, then, is the true origin of love.