Thursday: Three professional actors perform The Kid’s play via videoconference, with a director overseeing and a sound engineer managing the recording; the play will be released in the form of a podcast. Afterward, the two of us discuss it.
Me: Tell me about your play.
The Kid: I’m in an after-school writing program called Writopia, and they hold an annual event called the Writopia Worldwide Plays Festival. Anyone in Writopia can enter; if your play is selected, it gets performed by actual actors.
Me: What’s the play about?
The Kid: I don’t really want to talk about it.
Me: OK. Your play includes a trans character. You yourself don’t identify as trans. What was it like writing about a character from a community you’re not a part of?
The Kid: If you’re not a part of the community, it’s 10 billion times more important to represent things accurately. You have to be really careful. You have to do a lot of research. In a perfect world — I don’t know that many trans people, but I would have talked to some. For this, I read books and articles and tried to represent that perspective accurately.
I’m worried that after all my research I’ll write something wrong or outdated or offensive. I tried really hard not to say offensive things, or something that’s not true for that community. I can’t speak for millions of people, obviously, and what I wrote won’t be true for every single person. But I tried to reflect the experiences of a lot of people so it would resonate, and not to make up stuff that would perpetuate stereotypes.
I’m not saying that my identity is the trans character; I’m just writing a play that includes that character. If every character was yourself, that would be weird.
Me: It turns out that the actor playing that character is trans.
The Kid: It was cool that they found a trans actor. They’re often not represented; a lot don’t get recognition. A cis man playing a trans woman can be especially problematic, since it gives the impression that trans women are cis men in costume, or men dressed up like women. That’s literally one of the things the trans community has been fighting for decades: to be thought of as women if they’re trans women, or men if they’re trans men. They’re not the other gender dressed in a costume.
The actor said in one of the rehearsals that she wouldn’t have agreed to do the play if she thought the community was represented inaccurately. And she said it’s a story that’s not often told, especially in terms of young trans people, and the differences between gender and sexuality that the play explores. It felt like my hard work paid off.
And then, when we performed it, she actually teared up while reading the first take. So that counts as a win.
Me: What was it like to see it performed?
The Kid: I couldn’t believe it. We did three takes. On the first take, I had to mute myself because I was actually squealing. I’ve never had anything like this performed before. It was crazy that something I had written resonated with people enough that it was chosen, and then to see it actually performed by these incredibly amazing actors. They did such a good job; they got everything I was trying to say. I wouldn’t have expected anyone to cry, and more than one person did.
And then we had an actual director. I thought a director’s job was to sit around — they don’t have to write or act. I thought it would be easy. I thought the first take was incredible; if someone had asked me, my instructions would have been, “I have no notes, that was great, I loved it.” But the director had five notes for the three actors. And everything he said — I recognized the moments he pointed out, and I thought, Oh, yeah, he’s right. But I never could have given words to it. And then the second take was so much better. And then he gave more notes, and then the third take was even better. I could never have done what he did. He improved the readings so much.
Me: This performance was meant to be put on stage, but that got canceled in CoronaWorld. How was that for you?
The Kid: It was great watching this audio play; I loved it. But I still missed seeing it as an actual play. In CoronaWorld you can’t do most of the things that make the Worldwide Plays Festival so incredible. If not for CoronaWorld, they would have built an actual set and used actual props based on my play; it all would have been brought to life. And we all know these aren’t normal times; you can’t make anything seem normal. I know they couldn’t defy social distancing. But we’re missing a lot of the fun.
So part of me wanted them to do it later. Not that this wasn’t incredible, but I’ll never get to see that play. Of course I understand: we don’t know when there’s going to be a later, or if there’s going to be a later at all.
Me: Do you plan to write more plays?
The Kid: I don’t know. I usually don’t write plays except for this festival or in a playwriting class. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, but I consider myself more of a fiction writer than a playwright. Except my Writopia teacher said it’s the best thing he’s seen me write. Maybe I’m better at this. Maybe I should rebrand myself.
(New York state numbers on Thursday: 304,372 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 1.6 percent; 306 dead, to a total of 18,321, up 1.8 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,083, to a total of 57,150, up 3.8 percent.)
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