AMERICAN THEATRE | What Is a Non-Binary Play?

Years in the past, I had a scholar, a superb and inventive trans girl, who frequently wore full stacks of skinny metallic bangles on her forearms. It was a wise alternative. In addition to being additional proof of her standing as a vogue icon, she additionally had a surefire method of commanding my consideration every time her hand shot as much as reply a query. The clink of the bangles indicated the urgency of her thought. I by no means need to appear intrusive to my college students, so I don’t typically ask them about what they’re carrying, however to me these bangles appeared to be an announcement. Their sound hitting her desk, or on her raised arm, proclaimed, “I’m here.”

As a non-binary particular person, I discover myself attempting to do the identical factor. I see my pals and colleagues within the trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming communities doing this too. The loud proclamations outline the fluid borders of our havens, and make these areas secure for quiet. And so we take a look at ourselves. We take a look at one another. We discover love and acceptance, usually small in scale at first. And then, once we deem the world worthy of our genius, we put the bangles on.

Here I’m going to do an incomplete job of an analogous form of noise-making on behalf of non-binary performs. I’ll take an finally minuscule fraction of performs wrought by non-binary writers and amplify them to create an admittedly porous “definition” of the “non-binary play.” There can be many holes on this amorphous theatrical survey, and I hope different non-binary creators will fill them, both with their very own work or criticism. However, the impossibility of completion is not any excuse to draw back from the urgency of beginning.

And beginning is pressing. In my very own work and within the work of different non-binary playwrights, I see formal shifts, pushbacks, additions, and questions declared via tales which can be usually dismissed by the cis-heteronormative institution as too distant from the prescriptions of Aristotelian theatre to qualify as dramatic narrative. They aren’t, in fact, and the insistence that they’re solely serves one other oppressive binary: the play/not play divide that has been used to exclude many feminine, Black, Indigenous, POC, queer, and neurodiverse artists, and all intersections thereof and past. There is a protracted custom of this, however that doesn’t imply it should proceed. If you could look to Aristotle, learn his personal “On Interpretation,” wherein he notes that language exists “by convention.” We create the conventions; in the event that they not serve us, we will alter them. Language, and the artwork created with it, serves the individuals, not the opposite method round.

The predominant people I’d prefer to be served in naming the conference of the non-binary play are rising non-binary playwrights. Ideally, they’ll use their phrases to construct out the range of this ever-changing class of theatre. Second, I hope this work of defining reaches audiences, theatres, and critics who’re maybe searching for to embrace work by non-binary artists however stay not sure of the vocabulary with which to take action. This vocabulary issues. In the graphic novel Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe writes of eir bother with the gender binary: “The knowledge of a third option slept like a seed under the soil. This seed put out many leaves, but I didn’t have the language to identify the plant.”

We non-binary people incessantly discover ourselves naming and renaming “the plant,” however there may be additionally typically a necessity to call the soil, the roots, the oxygen produced by the leaves, the chlorophyll, and different elements which can be associated to, however will not be, the plant itself. In different phrases: Naming myself non-binary was one step. After that got here the necessity to rename my artwork in relation to my non-binary self. This, the truth is, is the place the concept for this text started.

In 2020, my play Turning Krasniqi received a Parity Commission from Parity Productions. As a outcome, it acquired dramaturgy from the corporate’s inventive management. This was invaluable. It remodeled my story of a Kentucky highschool scholar who adapts a centuries-old Albanian ritual to turn out to be burrnesha—a gender wherein somebody assigned feminine at beginning takes on extra masculine social roles—into a decent, effectively structured piece of theatre. In this course of, questions arose about tonal shifts inside the piece. These have been moments I acknowledged as unconventional however deeply true. In my expertise as a non-binary artist with Albanian and Greek ancestry, I continually felt the whiplash of reaching again towards deeply emotional, cultural gender rituals, solely to be propelled into present-day laughter across the popular culture worlds I really like dearly. I needed my play to protect that speedy oscillation, as a result of, for these of us who query items of our identification, this doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Processing gender incessantly occurs at intersections the place we’re additionally serving another half or components of our selves. As such, gender breakthroughs can occur in outfitters, or faculty loos, or in parks as one LARPs their armor-clad self towards extra victories than one. The cathartic absurdity of that is vital to my journey, and my work.

I don’t know the way widespread this tonal mixing is in non-binary performs, however I’ve learn sufficient of them to know I’m not alone. Currently, I’m modifying a set of non-binary performs for Next Stage Press. While there are collections of performs by trans writers, that is the primary I’ve seen that focuses on non-binary people particularly. That distinction might demand an evidence. A group of labor by trans authors ought to goal to incorporate trans males, trans ladies, and non-binary people who think about themselves to be underneath the trans umbrella (not all do). In making a ebook of non-binary work, it might be disrespectful of me to incorporate trans males and trans ladies who don’t additionally use the time period “non-binary” for themselves (as some, specifically some in my assortment, do). This is as a result of trans males are males, and trans ladies are ladies, and nobody has a proper to impose upon them terminology that separates them from their validity in both of these genders. For non-binary people, there may be usually the belief of trans-ness. Since that’s typically the case, I needed my assortment to be inclusive of these writers. However, I additionally needed the ebook to be respectful of non-binary individuals who don’t additionally outline themselves as trans. For that motive, I take advantage of phrases like, “trans and/or non-binary writers,” to permit for that range. If genders are packing containers, then we’re all cats. When cats put themselves in packing containers, they are often as content material as Garfield subsequent to a contemporary pan of sizzling lasagna. Put a cat in a field, although, and you’ll in a short time study the true that means of claws and tooth, and rightly so.

It’s vital to me to respect the field of “non-binary” as its personal place—linked to others, positive, but in addition absolutely shaped by itself. More usually than not, I’ll see the will for non-binary people to be coupled with one other gender or gender class: “Women and Non-Binary People,” “Trans and Non-Binary People.” No one ought to deny that these intersections exist, however being non-binary just isn’t a de facto rider to a different gender. It is impartial, and may take up house as such. One advantage of that is that, when work is studied as solely the work of non-binary individuals, sure traits or similarities might emerge that would illuminate shared pursuits and/or points for mentioned group. I’ve actually observed this within the assortment of non-binary performs I’m modifying, even permitting for the distinctiveness of every piece. For occasion, Ok. Woodzick’s quick play Pageant and Pyres mixes the glitz and glam of ’80s and ’90s teen magnificence pageants with the brutal execution of Joan of Arc. This oscillation of tone and time creates the friction that tears aside the binaries of the play, exposing its very coronary heart.

Dismantling binaries is tough. It takes lots of pressure. In non-binary performs the place gender is a central theme, the viewers might really feel the bluntness of this vitality in order that the work can present each the likelihood and the problem of eradicating the slash (“is/is not,” “past/present,” and many others.) that establishes binaries. What some might expertise as a tonal shift, then, is a really actual manifestation of some non-binary experiences.

Playwright M. Sloth Levine makes use of one thing comparable of their work. In Levine’s Four Moments of the Year, we hear 4 monologues spoken by trans individuals. They occur in numerous seasons, in numerous settings, in numerous tones, and so they drop references to every little thing from historic Greece to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Here, the tonal shifts strike me as having the identical function as Woodzick’s, although the usage of references that stay in each antiquity and popular culture stands out as distinct. In Levine’s work, I get the sense that the inclusion of allusions outdated and new dismantles that individual temporal binary, whereas claiming each as trans by way of the mouth of a trans character.

We incessantly find out about each historical past and fashionable popular culture as being implicitly cisgender. Antiquity is queer, no query about it, however lecturers dedicated to that reality have, in my expertise, been overpowered by these dedicated to a extra cis- and hetero-washed previous. In some ways, modernity has the identical downside. There’s queerness, nevertheless it usually takes fan and slash fiction to push it up above subtext. For occasion, whereas some Trekkies insist upon Captain Kirk’s heterosexuality, loads of the earliest Star Trek slash fiction extrapolated a homosexual relationship with Spock. While some shrug off such plots as byproducts of a junk medium, queer communities inside fandom gravitate towards such writing as a result of it lets us see a model of ourselves explicitly in a textual content that hasn’t made house (the ultimate frontier). When people like Levine, and different playwrights who do that extra extensively, incorporate each queer histories and popular culture into their work, and that work finds a mainstream residence, it validates the queerness we’ve been elevating from these locations all alongside. And since non-binary individuals usually search via previous, current, and future for locations the place we exist—and there are numerous—non-binary performs have the potential to highlight these specific types of queerness in areas of tradition which can be already within the properties of individuals far outdoors our neighborhood.

The work of finding transness in time and house is the work of many non-binary performs. It seems in Ashley Lauren Rogers’s The Last Ring, wherein transness performs a key function in a narrative about skilled wrestling. Here the affect of each gender and wrestling are proven onstage, expertly linking the trials of 1 to the opposite. Meanwhile C. Julian Jiménez’s performs Julio Ain’t Goin’ Down Like That and Bruise & Thorn lay a trans declare to their setting, New York City, and characters’ personal trans and non-binary our bodies. In Julio, Jiménez’s character Elegance sums up this possession effectively by saying:

I stay in fact. You have been born into your reality. How good for you. I earned my reality via trials and tribulations, via the backhands of my stepfathers and the chokeholds of my mom’s fingers pressed firmly to the Adam’s apple that my mom would eternally remind me that I’ve…

Taken past the context of the play, these phrases reverberate into many non-binary performs and plenty of non-binary lives. Many of us don’t have the expertise of being “born into” our reality. In maybe the perfect of circumstances, the potential for being non-binary was realized about quickly after, and the particular person was capable of lay declare to the identification rapidly. In my case, it might be many years after my beginning earlier than I even realized the language of being non-binary, and after that my reality needed to survive the questions of pals and family members, the anger of these closest to me, and the harassment of neighbors. It wasn’t an expertise as violent as Elegance’s, nevertheless it was one which harm. Even so, Jiménez paints the suitable portrait of the expertise: not one which facilities trauma, however one which celebrates our reality’s energy to emerge from the perfect and the worst. Being non-binary just isn’t essentially a narrative of trauma, however, when trauma does occur, non-binary performs are uniquely located to point out what occurs once we make it via.

Above all, I’d urge theatres that need to produce non-binary and trans work to acknowledge the potential subtlety of our tales. A non-binary play is not only one the place a non-binary particular person comes out. It can merely be one the place a non-binary character turns into a part of one thing they love that has historically not explicitly made room for them. A theatre skilled as soon as requested me if I needed to contribute a play to their to-be-published exploration of “the non-binary or trans experience.” I responded with a politely worded query about their use of the singular in “the non-binary or trans experience,” mentioning that for me, shopping for my first costume, pondering what sort of creature McDonaldland’s Grimace is, responding to transphobia, and enjoying with my Power Rangers motion figures are all non-binary experiences, as I’m non-binary, and I’ve skilled them. My response went unanswered.

Indeed the perfect factor about trans and non-binary experiences, as conveyed in trans and non-binary performs, is that they’re by definition not one factor. They are a plethora of joys, pains, ownerships, references, anxieties, comforts, languages, types, and extra—all continually evolving due to new range added. As non-binary playwrights intersect their work with the opposite components of their identities—race, class, faith, neurodiversity, incapacity, tradition—their audiences get to see the alternative ways our gender exists on this planet. This lets us keep away from the pitfall of portrayals of non-binary individuals in media, which usually skews white, skinny, able-bodied, and neurotypical. The advantage of that isn’t simply giving audiences a extra trustworthy image of non-binary communities, but in addition the truth that such performs can act as an invite to any non-binary one that might have felt they don’t “look the part” that claims, “Yes, you belong here.”

This is why I’ve not began any sentence right here with, “A non-binary play is…” Whatever I’d say after the ellipsis would exclude a fellow non-binary playwright, and would void the best present non-binary performs can provide audiences: a way that house exists to be claimed by those that have none, quite than assigned by or to those that have lots. As I talked in regards to the notion of the non-binary play with Ashley Lauren Rogers, they talked about a number of components that may come up incessantly: “a play written or helmed by a non-binary artist…,” or that has “binary expectations (of gender or in general) as the focus of its criticism.” Or, they mentioned, “It could be as simple as including well-rounded non-binary characters.”

Rogers then added that the act of definition itself usually entails making a binary itself round what one thing is and isn’t, including, “If we’re truly looking to break binary thinking, we have to break binaries when looking at what a non-binary play is as well.”

Non-binary playwright and actor Dani Martineck agreed, however put it otherwise. “Non-binary plays are as varied as non-binary playwrights, non-binary performers, and non-binary storytellers of all kinds,” they mentioned.

This could also be irritating for some searching for the effectivity of a single reply, however I want this kind of fluidity. It facilities the humanity current in non-binary performs, and begs us to concentrate the various vary of labor that would presumably match underneath its umbrella. That range is human range.

When a non-binary play is produced, it’s however one bangle on the arm of theatre. We want many. We want so many who when the hand is raised, the sound is immediately recognizable and its message can’t be ignored. We’re right here. We’re right here. We’re right here.

Jonathan Alexandratos (they/them/theirs) is a non-binary playwright based mostly in New York City whose award-winning work has been internationally produced. Find them on Instagram @toy_circus, Twitter @jalexan or on the internet at https://jacentral.neocities.org.

Related