Losing the Trans Tropes and Reaching for Love

A Guide to Writing Your Own Play

By Warren D Riley

This essay is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship

No one wants to be another woman in the theater. This idea is what I gauged as a subliminal truth under the niceties of the acting teachers of my early youth. Actresses were talked about like they were a dime a dozen, with the boy students’ half-hearted performances often met with an outpouring of love and support. I think every girl who grows up in theater comes to terms with this idea at some point in their early tenure. However, I eventually had to realize that this pessimistic outlook stemmed not only from possible shards of truth but from personal jealousy. Not only were the boys around me praised for the same amount of work the girls were contributing, but they got to do what I had always secretly wanted. They got to live out their childhood as boys.

There appears to be a new anxiety sprouting in our country, one that foretells a rise in a sort of magical piece of media, designed to radicalize the pre-pubescent and turn them transgender. The sad fact of this myth is that there are too few stories about trans people to make this fear true, and even fewer with a wide enough access to enter my 11- year-old self’s sphere. Sorry to all who hoped otherwise, but I realized I was trans – independent of ‘grooming,’ the media of the left, or, truthfully, any outward pressure. With this being said, after the anxiety of coming out wore off, it eventually came time to stare down my first love: theater. And when I did, I had to come to terms with the fact that I did not see myself in its reflection.

Though I’ve settled into my life here at the UCLA English department, few of my peers know that I started my educational career at a theater conservatory. After graduating from an arts high school, I felt that the trajectory of my life as an actor was carved into stone. However, this trajectory seemed to halt after I left my conservatory in my freshman year. A good BFA primes you for the industry you hope to enter. I felt, as a freshman, that the industry was not yet ready for people like me. I knew I wanted to act, but I did not know many theater actors who made careers after being out as trans men.

I don’t mean to imply that there are no trans stories in theater, or that there are no trans men in theater. I am not the first of my kind, and will hopefully not be the last. However, the few representations I could find in my early education were marked by some sort of personal compromise. Perhaps the actor found success before coming out, gaining momentum under a more acceptable identity. Or, the actor stayed playing roles meant for their assigned gender. Or, one would embrace medical transition only to reconcile that they would not be seen as the material of a leading man. Trans men are short; testosterone will not change this fact, and the height requirement to play Fiyero on Broadway is 5’11” or above.

With these anxieties in mind, I found myself in UCLA’s English department with a mission. If I could be a good writer, not just a good trans writer, but a writer strong enough to stand out amongst the louder voices, I could perhaps trick audiences into watching trans people on stage. Now, as a senior, I can report back and say to all those interested: my mission was successful. I wrote a play, Urgent Care, that was chosen for a production by a student theater organization here on campus. While I won’t get into the minutia of the story, perhaps to better compel others to read it/see it, I can say that my intentions for this play were clear from the get-go, and the process brought me three rules of representation:

Rule 1) I may not write a coming-out story:

Realizing you are trans is a personal and individual process. It is, at its most simple, a conversation with the self: who am I? Theater, in its best form, is not a conversation with the self. Perhaps poetry is, but not theater. Theater is a conversation between multiple people. It is the conflict of identities; it is not the story of a single identity. I find that most coming-out stories are overtold, with contrived conversations to make an inward process fit into an outward artistic form.

Rule 2) I will not educate:

Theater asks questions; it does not bring answers. While there is, of course, value in education, I challenged myself to make a trans character whose identity is never outwardly questioned, never explained to the audience. When a character is forced to serve an educational function, they are, in some way, stripped of humanity. Our job in creating trans stories is to bring more humanity, not less.

Rule 3) I will show that I am among you:

I am a trans guy, but I am also a son, a student, a cousin, a lover, a brother, a patient, a pedestrian, a driver, a singer, a writer, a worrier, and so on. My trans stories will not serve to point out the differences between someone like me and the rest of the world. My stories will use transness to speak to something larger. I don’t really care to ask what it means to be a trans man alone; that question is for my diary and for my therapist. I do, however, ask what it means to be a man, what it means to be alone, or what it means to show up for the people we love. Even if a person hates trans folks and wishes to see a mass exodus of our community from this country, a play that fulfills Rule 3 will ask the same questions that keep that very transphobe up at night.

Though I had plenty of time to think over my goals, plenty of time to write the script, plenty of time to see it be produced at UCLA, I forgot to dedicate a dash of mental space for the most important part of the process, the entire point of writing my own play in the first place: how will I perform the dang thing? Urgent Care is not only the first time a play of mine has been produced, but it is the first time I’ve led a show. There are times when I feel that the current me, the one scrambling to learn my own lines with a full-time course load, curses the hubris of my previous self. How will I possibly take on a role made up entirely of my own words? Will I be able to separate my thoughts as a writer from my performance? To be completely transparent, dear reader, I’m not quite sure at this time. What I can be sure of is this:

After each table read, or at the end of each rehearsal, the feeling that radiates off the text I spent a year crafting is love. When I turn off my writer-brain and engage in the rehearsal process solely as an actor, I find a guiding sense of love beyond the art of theater, beyond the discourse of identity, but a love that can only be found in a broader community. While I can rhapsodize about the art of playwriting, or the art of representation, I now find that my truest goal in writing trans stories for the stage is simple: I wrote Urgent Care to bring the love of a broader community to a trans character. I think we deserve to feel this love.