Butterfly: Road to One Act Festival Part 4

So it's over now.

I'm not sure how to feel about everything.

We came away with first runner up - which basically means if either of the two plays they chose to go on decides they don't want to or can't make it to regionals, THEN we get to go. So...pretty much we aren't going to regionals. We did come away with best original script, and I am really happy for Trish, our writer, she deserved it, especially since during the judges critique they were very harsh on the writing - obviously that was just to mask their true feelings about the merit of this piece. We also won an award for technical excellence. No acting awards.

That's hard for me.

I have never been so anxiety-ridden as I was that weekend - not abnormal anxiety - normal person anxiety. I felt like we really had a shot at winning. I didn't know exactly what to expect from the event or who would be there or how it would all go or if I would succeed in making all of my costume changes in time. I worried about the audience response, especially since much of the weekend was taken up with comedies. Not that there's anything wrong with comedy, it's just that ours is not a comedy, and if the audience is expecting one, we might not get as great a response...

Here I am talking like it didn't already happen.

I admit that overall it was a GREAT weekend. I learned SO much from the wonderful women I spent the time with.

I was sad about the judges.

I really felt like David made them uncomfortable. As he should have. But especially from the male judge I felt a lot of negative energy.

I also felt like they gave a lot of just plain mean comments to all of the plays - not just ours - things that couldn't help really in the future, just made you feel like you sucked.

On the ride home I just didn't know what to say, how to talk about what I was feeling. I was glad we did so well but it was almost worse that we got first runner up. It made us know how close we were.

The judges deliberated for three hours while all the casts and crews and whatnot sat in a restaurant waiting and waiting - long after the coffee had dried up, still we sat. It was agonizing. After all that waiting - nothing.

I knew as soon as they announced the acting awards and none of us were mentioned that there was no way we'd won.

That damned acting awards is tearing me up. I admit it. This is the first time in my entire theatre career that I felt like I could honestly say I was good. I have never worked this hard on a role. I have been told I was good in the past. I have felt good ABOUT my performance, but I have never felt so validated as an actor as in this particular piece.

It's not just that.

This piece is important. I wanted it to go on just because this was the kind of piece that people need to see. Something that teaches. Something that makes the audience question everything on the way home from the theatre. That's what theatre is about, after all. If a play doesn't leave you questioning, it hasn't done it's job. Even comedy should be able to pull this off if they're worth their salt.

I guess it's just a let down.

I don't regret a second of the time spent. It has been the best theatrical experience I have ever had, and that's saying a lot, since I've been doing theatre since the toddler years, quite literally.

The weekend was simply incredible - the festival itself aside.

We stayed at our producer's house (okay, it's her boyfriend, Steve's house...but whatever). It was SUCH a beautiful house. We ate amazing food. I learned lots about vegan cooking. We went for a 2 mile run Saturday morning. We watched the video of the production from June 2009 and saw how much we'd grown. We got lost all over the area about a billion times. We listened to music from Quebec. We did yoga. We read books. We discussed politics and religion and feminism and gay rights and abortion and art and being an artist and a mother and just about everything else you could possibly discuss. I felt like for a brief little weekend I was sort of living my fantasy of living in a community of artists - the weekend has fed my creativity into the week. I feel like doing everything. I feel more myself than I have felt...well...ever.

I'm excited about my art. I'm excited about who I am and who the people around me are and who my family is. I missed them like crazy while I was gone. I missed my own bed and my own house and the feeling of my husband's skin against mine and the feeling of my daughter climbing up into my lap to have If You Give a Moose a Muffinn read one more time and the smiling eyes and kisses on the cheek provided by my five year old son.

Everything about the weekend honestly made me feel ALIVE. I am sad about us not winning. It's hard for me to believe it's over, to be honest. I am sad that I didn't get an acting nod to feed my ego. But I am so thankful for that weekend or rejuvenation and deeper understanding of who I am. Of what it means to be a woman. I feel like I've really been missing out all these years.

Oh - before I wrap up completely, I wanted to note that I've added Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues to "my favorites" widget - it's in the sidebar there to your right. If you don't know the piece, I recommend you read it with an open mind. The piece is to be produced on Valentine's Day. V-day. Until the violence stops - the Vagina Monologues are about stopping violence against women. About power for women. About owning your womanhood. If you haven't read the piece, go over to the widget and click and order it and give it a try. It's quickly become a theatrical feminist classic.

Butterfly: Road to One Act Festival, Part 2

Tomorrow is our tech rehearsal for Butterfly. I'm not very nervous because I don't have to do much. We're running a cue to cue, so I don't have to worry about my crazy costume changes. I do want to make sure I scope out the backstage area, however, so I know exactly where I'll put everything. I have five different costumes in our twenty-four minute piece and several props, so I need to make sure nothing gets lost and I have a system in place so I won't be too stressed out.

This week has been incredibly stressful for me. On top of Butterfly rehearsals twice this week I've had something else on every other night and it's been well...just a bad idea.

I ended up having to medicate for my anxiety disorder yesterday, and truth be told I should have done it again today, but I don't like medicating for anything, let alone something that I know I could control if I just let myself relax and take some time to de-stress.

Michael did give me some time off today and I got some things off my plate on the home front and got some things in order for the play I'll be directing this spring (W;t by Margaret Edson). Unfortunately, I tried to take a bubble bath and the water ended up balancing out all wrong so instead of a relaxing warm bath I got an intense and uncomfortable cold bath that lasted all of five minutes before I stopped caring that I'd wasted gallons of water and just toweled off.

I was ten minutes late to rehearsal.

I abhor lateness. To be early is to be on time. To be on time is to be late. To be late is not an option. This is the credo I learned from my high school musical director, and so I continue said credo to this day in my own life (which probably adds a lot to my stress...)

But, in spite of my abhorring, late I was.

Luckily, everyone else in the cast + our fearless director had just figured out how to get into the building and get everything in order, so no one was very upset with me, and we chatted a few minutes and then went straight into a run.

I decided that I would forget my costumes tonight, my dresser wouldn't be there anyway, so the last scene wasn't doable, and I really wanted to focus on my character.

I don't have a lot of time to prepare between scenes, even though each of my appearances occurs after a temporal span of years, so I like to work character when I can so that everything just snaps into place for me for each section as the piece rolls along. It's hard to explain in any way other than that.

Though I'm still working physicality to be as perfect as possible, I've also decided that if we win this festival thing and make it to regionals, I may seriously consider trying to pass as a man myself for a day. I'd like to try it somewhere no one knows me and just try it out. I worry because my bone structure is very feminine, especially in my arms and my face, but I feel like this would help me more than anything else with my character. I'm thinking maybe I'll go up to the city with some friends who won't be completely freaked out by the exercise, and just go and see things and eat out and go shopping and things like that, just to see what it's like to try to pass and live as a man.

I talked with Michael about it and he said that he could deal with it. He wasn't so keen on it when I said I might like to go clubbing as a guy. That might be a little more disturbing. The only reason I considered it was because in my second appearance in the show as my character (in somewhat reality, not counting my appearance in the butterfly field as feminine Emily) I imagine that he is headed out to a club with some friends. I, personally, think I would hate clubbing. I have this anxiety disorder thing going on and I hate crowds and people close to me and tight spaces - but I'm pretty sure David likes clubbing. Mostly because at the club no one is staring at him, no one is wondering about him, he's just accepted as himself with no questions asked. I think he has a group of friends he met at school (college, I think) who are supporting him through this whole transition thing and they act as sort of his "wing-men" - they treat him as a man, so other accept him as a man. I imagine he has both guy friends and girl friends helping him out with the whole thing, acting as his support network because his mother is so out of it. That's just my imagining. David has been on my mind a lot lately, as I suppose he should be.

Butterfly: Chapter One

It is difficult for me to post about this show. It's one of those experiences where, while you wish you had a photograph of it, you're almost glad you didn't take any, because it somehow cheapens the memory.

When I was in Ireland on my cross-cultural study, our guide, Brendan, encouraged us to stop taking pictures and simply live in the moment, rather than the future. The things I remember as having the most impact from the trip, are the things I chose to simply treasure mentally, rather than snapping photographs and journaling.

In spite of this, I feel I owe my readers an understanding of the experience I've been having for the past few months as David, the transgendered man and title role in Butterfly, by Trish Cole.

I haven't said much about the experience since I "snagged the part" at the beginning of the process. I wasn't sure how to handle any of it. The fact that my androgynous look helped me immensely in casting. The recognition as a boy simply on the streets, and now on the stage - what did that mean for me as a woman. What did that mean for me period? What exactly, was I embracing by agreeing to be a part of this project?

My first reading of the script, as I've mentioned before, was disappointing. I focused mainly on my sections of the script: the parts where David appeared before or after his transition. In that reading I was afraid I had signed on to something that may not be worth my time, considering our financial situation and the fact that I already feel rushed all of the time and that I don't spend enough time with my family as a whole - this gig wasn't exactly paying. I stuck it out, however, and showed up at the read-through, after which my entire outlook changed.

The power of the script, when read aloud, was somewhat life-changing for me.

I try to pretend I am relatively worldly as far as my understanding of things. That I have had so many experiences and have this urbanized open mind. The fact is, to my knowledge, I've never met anyone who is transgendered. While I have several gay friends, mostly men, I had always found the trans-sexual world something entirely different. It's not just a preference. It's something of an accusation. That "God made a mistake." That was before Butterfly.

As a Christian the entire thing rocked my faith. Made it stronger, really, or at least more aware, but I cannot express how much I struggled with the subject matter.

I researched for this role in a twenty seven minute production more than I had ever researched for any other part. I was fascinated and horrified and bewildered and confused.

As a young girl in elementary school, I struggled with some gender issues myself.

I wanted to be a boy.

It seems they were kinder to one another. It seemed they got to do more thing, what they wanted - play better games, wear more comfortable clothing. During this time I wrote the name "Josh" on my papers, knowing this was the name I would have been given had I been born male.

Since that time I have come to embrace my femaleness, but it has taken quite some time to get over it. To fully appreciate what it means to be a woman. I feared that this role might take me back into that ten year old girl's mind who just wanted to be accepted, and being male seemed the only way that could work.

I know now, looking back, that everyone else was going through puberty - at least most of the girls in my class, and I was simply a very late developer. It gained me mostly ridicule, though now I'm told I still look twenty, and I'll be very happy about this when I'm sixty-five.

Through this journey I learned so much about the trans-sexual community. I was able to walk in their shoes, so to speak. It opened my eyes.

I used to be one of those people who made jokes about "she-men" and about women who cut their hair like mine. I used to think I knew what I was talking about. I was so wise.

To be trans-gendered is not the same as being confused. It is not the same as being homosexual. It is its own animal entirely.

I watched several videos on YouTube where trans people gave themselves injections and gave instructions to one another with helpful hints on "passing" as their "true gender". I sat in restaurants, in church, and at meetings observing the differences in mannerisms between men and women and never realized when I came off as masculine or not. I never realized how many cues we take from society.

Near the end of the run I talked with Trish (the writer and co-director) about how I was noticing these things and I related the story about the boy in the pediatrician's office who called me "ugly" and how that had hurt me, and how his mother didn't correct him. Trish said that it was society's way of putting me back in my place. Telling me I was breaking one of the unspoken rules that people work diligently and constantly at enforcing regarding the paradigm of social norms. It was difficult to accept that I had been a part of it and most likely still was to some degree.

All of it seemed to relate nicely back to the star I had chosen at the beginning of the year, the fruit of the spirit on a cardboard star I was to relate to for the remainder of the year. Our church does this ritualistically every January. Mine was kindness, and that's another blog all by itself.

There is much more to say, but the baby is crying and I have to end this now. I hope to add to my Butterfly entries at least three more chapters before I'm through.

snagged the part

So I am officially playing Emily/David in the original play, Butterfly, by Trish Cole. It's an intense drama about a woman who kills her trans-gendered daughter after she makes the complete transition to a man, David. The woman reflects on these things from her jail cell. She's out of her mind a bit, she has determined that she killed David, not Emily. That her daughter, who she calls "the butterfly", was killed by David and she was avenging her little girl by killing this man. It will certainly leave the audience questioning just about everything on their way out of the theatre. Whatever you think about the trans community, would you kill your child? How would you react to a daughter or son who went through this change? It's very intriguing, and though it is morally interesting for me personally to play such a role, I think it will be really good for me and the community to be a part of this piece. All things are for a purpose, and all things work together for good for those who are in Christ Jesus. I think that I was meant to be there, at that audition. I was meant to shave my head, to have these experiences, to meet people, to be cut from Sweeney Todd, all for this particular opportunity. I am honored to be a part of such a beautifully written piece, and interested in the sort of response it will receive from the community. Should be an adventure.