In these nimble and supple instructions for a girlish and transgender theatre of love, stage directions reach out, reciprocal in their care, decoration, and attention, like a stage crafted, taken apart, and made in-the-act of being woven together again, rather than directed: torn from a former position and placed mise-en-scène as such. The truth is in the bruises of attraction and remedial fellow feelings too. Dysphoria—from the Greek dusphoria, from dusphoros, meaning hard to bear—is a felt and perceptible thing; and if we imagine more theatrical scenes of transgender girlhood out of and into love, we might find sensual resourcefulness and new postures and directions for living more interior and exterior life. This is all tragic and gorgeous to me: that in heartbreak and after a fall, the most ethical and therapeutic thing for trans girls to do is become better attuned to the staging of our love stories and enshrine them in girlish and relational art and decoration. A young Adorno in a cute one-piece bathing suit fangirling over Schubert’s heartbroken music for four (or more) hands: “The right response is tears.” [1]
[1] Theodor Adorno, “Schubert (1928).” 19th-Century Music 29.1 (2005): 3-14.
I
Lights up on a bare stage enveloped in a heart-shaped frame. Five trans girls over the age of 40 enter holding hands and flirting under bright light. They perform a cotton-candy-coated kiss, sometimes called the cotton candy kiss, by putting a piece of cotton candy in each other’s mouths and French kissing. Blackout.
II
Duke Ellington & John Coltrane’s “In a Sentimental Mood” is on full blast. Lights up on a blizzard in a world much like our own, and—standing before us—hundreds of trans girls catching snowflakes on their tongues. Hundreds of trans girls are not being beaten. Short-circuit and sparks: lights do not dim.
III
Lights up on New York in 1994. Hearts drawn in pink chalk by effeminate boys and little girls cover the sidewalks of the Lower East Side. From backstage, a trans girl poet tells stories about amorous trans girl activities. In the meantime, the sun shines while a rain cloud hovers overhead. The trans girl poet prays for a sunshower, for something beautiful to erase trans girls in love from the historical record this time. Blackout.
IV
Lights up on a bare stage. Enter a whirlwind of trans girls—black, white, and in color between the ages of 5 and 15—from different directions talking and dancing like girls with girls. They gather and twirl in a glorious and anarchic manner. A riot ensues from the sound of girl talk and hold music. Blackout.
V
Single spotlight center stage: a rabbit hole. Alice returns from Wonderland in her pajamas and writes a love letter to Artaud. She is age 10, 22, 44, 65 or all at the same time. Alice reads the letter aloud until enough is enough. In this girlish and transgender theatre of cruelty, Alice breathes, affective and athletic with her sex mistaken. She gives the letter a kiss. This is a lesson in how trans girls kiss their lovers goodnight. Blackout.