SpeakEasy reframes coming-out story in ‘Pink Unicorn’

Trisha Lee has faith, conservative convictions and a genderqueer child in a small Texas town. The sole character in the SpeakEasy Stage Company’s virtual presentation of Elise Forier Edie’s “The Pink Unicorn,” Trisha wrestles with her minister, her neighbors and her own beliefs in a work concerned with the deep, dense shades of grays the real world trades in.

A lot of art, from theater to film to TV, presents coming-out stories two ways: the character who comes out is ostracized or accepted. “The Pink Unicorn,” which is available March 5-18, rejects those simple story lines.

“I encountered this play when (I had) two very close friends tell me their children had come to them to tell them that they are nonbinary,” director M. Bevin O’Gara said. “These two women had very, very different reactions. But they both felt like there was one way to handle this and that they needed to get it right.”

“The beauty of this play is that it invites people to make mistakes,” O’Gara continued. “It explores the idea of imperfect trying. I feel like imperfect trying is important because it gets us to a step and that leads to another step and another.”

Played by Stacy Fischer, Trisha is a model of imperfection. A working-class widow, she doesn’t always get things right with her teenager Jo and spouts some pretty ugly opinions, says O’Gara. She also loves her child even as she struggles to meet Jo where they need to be met.

“I think mistakes are valid because they are how we learn to be better,” O’Gara said. “The beauty of stumbling and failing, stumbling and falling, is it is what makes us human. And I think this play is really, really human. It’s really truthful, it’s really honest and it’s about a part of this experience that we don’t really see or talk about because it’s not black and white.”

O’Gara had a long history with Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company before spending three years as the producing artistic director at the Kitchen Theatre Company in Ithaca, N.Y. Now back in Boston, this is the director’s return as a guest director for SpeakEasy. Like many in theater, she notes the awkward nature of translating her art via Zoom.

“I wasn’t interested in making a film,” she said. “I really feel like this is a performance. … It’s one actor sitting down and telling you a story from top to tail, filmed in one take as if it was a theatrical production. Once I started to think about it as performance rather than Zoom theater, that really cracked something open for me.”

One advantage of the virtual format: adding a post-show panel discussion exploring the themes of the play. This is the kind of thing that might be part of one performance at a traditional production, but can now be included with every virtual showing.

“This will feature voices from the trans and nonbinary community not just discussing the play but discussing their own journeys,” O’Gara said. “One of the challenges of the play is that you hear from the mother but you don’t have the perspective of this genderqueer child. So when I started speaking to SpeakEasy about this, I made it clear that it was important to have those voices in the performance and we do that in the panel discussion.”

---

For tickets and more details on “The Pink Unicorn,” go to speakeasystage.com.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3bP90D1