Earlier this year, a friend took me to my first-ever opera (Richard Strauss’ Elektra at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden) and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. When another friend suggested a trans-centric performance of a Philip Glass theatric composition at the Neuköllner Oper, my curiosity was piqued enough to take the chance. I’m glad I did.
[Sarah Bodle and Mara Snip on stage. (Press photo.)]
There’s a review in the taz that covers the details pretty well and I won’t repeat that here. What I don’t think they covered is how the performance comes across to a trans viewer. Director Paige Eakin Young and co-director/lead performer Mara Snip took this science-fiction work about alien or supernatural abduction and deftly reinterpreted it through a trans lens. As far as I can tell, the original text from David Henry Hwang already explicitly delt with themes of personal confusion around one’s own inexplicable experiences and the societal disbelief and refusal of acknowledgement that accompany it. As the lead performer says more than once, “It is better to forget, it is pointless to remember. No one will believe you.” While the authors drew on popular accounts of UFO encounters, they also connected it to spiritual and drug-induced experiences as well as psychosis. In all of these situations, the subject becomes even more isolated as they realize that others will not take them seriously.
All of this will be instantly familiar to any trans person. I literally thought I was a space alien as I child; I didn’t know how else to make sense of how I felt. While I’m grateful not to have lost any relationships as a result of coming out, I still worry about how extended family members or friends I haven’t seen in years will react to my changes. I still get anxious that some fresh hell will be unleashed upon me every time I go to a new healthcare professional, or visit a government office, or cross a border. I live with it better than I did a few years ago when I last wrote at length about being trans in public, but everything I wrote there is still accurate, and the politics of both my home country and my country of residence leave me in a constant low-grade panic about my safety.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the years is that it’s easier if I don’t talk about being trans with cis people I’m not especially close to. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that they don’t understand what I’m talking about, and it tends to make them uncomfortable. The conversation is a dead end. They can’t offer me much wisdom, nor can they respond with their own similar experiences. I mean, they probably could, but they’re too scared that any comparison might offend me. (It wouldn’t!) Of course, I’m talking here about the generally sympathetic people that I would even want to share anything about myself with, not the people that actively want me repressed, outcast, or dead!
So when Snip tells me about her childhood experiences of expressing nascent femininity and learning quickly that that would elicit swift, harsh judgment, I know that feeling. When she describes looking in a window and seeing her girlhood reflected, I’ve done the same. When her mom sent her a picture taken by her grandfather of her as a child in a gown and hair extensions, I remembered a picture a friend in college took and developed of me in my first skirt with my hair finally grown out. When Snip recounted wondering how a lover would react to her trans body, I can relate. When she stopped mid-sentence to ask if someone in the crowd said something, I know that anxiety. When she expressed disbelief that anyone would ever take her seriously as a performer, let alone as a human, well, I’ve been there too.
Snip invested a lot of herself in this performance, and it paid off. I can presumably say the same of Paige. If you’re looking for a dramatic representation of what trans life is like, it’s hard to imagine doing better than this. And on top of that, you get an excellent, otherworldly musical performance featuring some sort of wind synth instrument in additional to Roland keyboard synths and a variety of other woodwinds. Snip was excellent in the role, and I would be remiss not to mention Sarah Bodle’s sublime performance as some blend of alien, spirit, and sexual liberator. I really wonder what the cis people in the crowd thought; I worry that they got an entirely different, confusing, less emotionally moving performance. But maybe for once, this wasn't for them.
Score: A
Thanks to Mirah!
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