Women & Femmes, or Females
by Nelle Tankus & The Ensemble
directed by Grace Carmack & Eden Aztlán
January 31st – February 17th | Theatre Off Jackson
This play is a wreck! The director got in a car crash, the lighting designer was fired, and the cast and crew have been barricaded in the theater by the playwright as she tries to find an “authentic moment”. For their own reasons, the three femme leads start making their own play – it’s different, and better than the play they’re in now. Do they even need the playwright? The only course of action: mutiny. Partially generated by the actors and scored to experimental electronic music, Women & Femmes, or Females is a transfeminist play about overidentifying with one’s trauma, performing goodness, and agency.
Women & Femmes, or Females is based on Tankus’s experience with transmisogyny and the writings of Kai Cheng Thom, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Torrey Peters, with special nods to experimental electronic artists SOPHIE, Dreamcrusher, and Pharmakon. This show (hard to call it a play) is committed to queer trans life. It is curious about queer trans folks being targets for the insecurities of people who love them. The hurt that was caused to these particular queers, and what choice they have (or don’t) in not repeating it. It is interested in mess, failure, discomfort. In the search to be good, do these trans folks lose themselves? Have any of them ever been “good”? Partially generated by the actors, it is also an exercise in decentering the playwright as the architect, vying instead for a collaborative process of generating new material together based on the actors own experiences.
