February 2016 I produced and directed the play Pronoun as my Theatre Senior Thesis Project. At Butler University, every Theatre Major is given the option of producing a piece of Theatre during their senior year. I wanted to do something that spoke from a personal place, and what better than a theatre piece about trans lives?
When I started university in 2012, one of the classes we had to take was “The Idea of Theatre”, an intro to major theatrical movements and themes throughout western history. At the end of the course, we had to produce a manifesto of what we wanted to accomplish with our work in theatre. I wrote that I wanted to make theatre that would touch people’s hearts and minds and open them to see the world in new ways, to create a new or different appreciation of imagination and the beauty of the human experience. At the time this meant shoving people into a tiny box marked “Good”, because I knew 100% what was right and everyone else was a gross Satan worshiper who needed to be saved. (Now I’m the gross Satan worshiper.)
As I posted about here and here, when I came out as a Trans woman(and later Non-Binary) I began to see the great and wonderful weirdness that is the world, full of friends and fiends and so many inside outs and inbetweens. Naturally I began wanting to explore ways of creating theatre that allowed for the participation of the best and wackiest the world has to offer.
Part of the answer came from a class I took in the 2015 spring semester where I studied The Living Theatre. The Living Theatre, as opposed to The Dying Theatre, is an avant-garde theatre group that uses theatre as a venue for social change. Their style of theatre, which involves defying traditional aspects of theatrical convention, uses absurd situations to create various levels of discomfort in the audience. Their work became the inspiration for the project I put together for my devised theatre class. We had the assignment to come up with a five minute solo piece, I chose to create one that would tell the story of humanity. I used stillness, silence, and audio from MLK and Hitler speeches to contrast our capacity for good with our capacity for evil. Rather than tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end the idea was to tell a story that draws from our collective beginnings and endings to show what our possibilities are in a way that would leave the audience feeling something more than sense of “rightness” for not being a literal Nazi.
Elements designed to make the audience a participant in the piece can be used in conjunction with traditional “embody-the-character” acting, and together show people what we can do to change the world. This blurring of boundaries of realism and absurd action represents the blurring of boundaries in our real lives. My own life experience is a blurring of boundaries as I live as a non-binary communist queer in a BDSM relationship with my genderqueer wife- so while my daily life challenges conventions that tell us what makes an acceptable lifestyle, it is also important to challenge the conventions of “good, acceptable, mainstream” theatre with “odd, avant-garde, absurd” theatre. Because if we are too comfortable with our theatre, what can it really be telling us other than everything is fine? (It’s not fine, nothing is fine – the world is literally on fire, but its OK because Cats is back on Broadway…)
I learned more about working with these ideas from Fringe Benefits’s book Staging Social Justice which contains essays from a variety of people involved in Theatre for Social Justice Workshops. Their writings describe the methods and impact of their highly democratic form of theatrical creation, which often started with a specific social injustice that a particular community wished to target, and developed from there a community focused critique of the problem while also providing a solution.
All of this was done through a democratic process – as opposed to the top-down process of much mainstream western theatre today. While the FB workshops included facilitators and other people filling specific roles, the entire process was based in the participants choosing what went into the play. Directing was done in a traditional style, though not without continuous and uncensored input from everyone involved in the production. This was done to ensure that no one person’s vision dictated the piece, letting it truly be “community theatre”
I personally attempted to create this type of experience with my production of Pronoun, but having very little experience, I could have a done a better job. One of the major differences between what I attempted and what has been done by Fringe Benefits or the Latin@ American Theatre of the Oppressed is organization. I was one person attempting to take actors with varying levels of experience and essentially give them complete freedom to discover what the play needed to be, whereas Fringe Benefits and Theatre of the Oppressed used structured activities to create in the actors the confidence needed to shape the play on their own terms – being new to the process, I completely failed to do so.
While there were moments of brilliance from the cast, times where I was blown away by what they brought to the table – I trusted too much on those moments being able to bleed out into the rest of the play and didn’t do much of anything to help the actors cultivate these moments, which often left the actors with less experience grasping for straws, relying on what they could get from the more experienced actors on their own time. This led to a show that could have had more of an impact, and deserved a more competent director than I was at the time.
At the same time it was the first production at Butler University (a Liberal Arts school in Indiana) directed by a trans person, starring a racially and gender diverse cast, about a transman and his friends and family. This was part of my attempt to make sure the people the play was about were the ones involved, so that rather than simply being a story about a trans person, it became a story told by trans people to challenge the normative stories of our day. For some in the audience this was extremely uncomfortable – for others, trans and queer people living in conservative Indiana, it was a beautiful sight and for me a validation of the idea that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
In the end, what I want to see is a theatre that doesn’t coddle its viewers, that doesn’t simply tell an entertaining story about an important social issue while presenting a vague solution. I want to see theatre that engages the local community in tackling the issues that affect their daily lives, that galvanizes the audience regarding their inaction, that gets people out of their seats and onto the streets working to create a better world. And while in my opinion Pronoun at Butler never reached its full potential it did tell a necessary story about love and trans lives, and in that way it was successful. I hope to take the lessons I learned from what did and did not work and go forward to continue making art that will transform the world.