XY(T)

Description
* (one star) I feel cheated, for reals. I went into Kestryl Cael Lowrey's one-person play under the naive notion that I would actually learn something about the unjustly underrepresented transgender community. Instead I was forced to sit through 45 minutes of Lowrey, a self-proclaimed “gender revolutionary,” dashing about the stage and dashing off disconnected anecdotes that seemed less interested in informing the audience how he came to identify as “transgender butch” than in simply trying to “shock” us. And I was rooting for Lowrey, too: I laughed uncomfortably through the simulated strap-on sex; I tried to identify with the hidden complexities of the awkward, Lifetime-worthy moment of testosterone bingeing; I even responded during the unwanted audience participation. I stuck with XY(T) in the hope that Lowrey would let the forced performance go for a bit and just be honest about the questions and confirmations that discovering your true gender brings. No dice. The transgender-performance community deserves better representation than this. I could have spent that 45 minutes more educationally by watching an episode of The L Word.—Fareed Mostoufi, Freelance Writer