A few years back, when I was still in the middle of the MFA Playwriting program at Catholic University, I had an idea for a play dealing with the fluidity of gender—a small cast show centered around a lead who, over the course of his/her life, changes gender several times. No idea for a plot. Just the overall “what if?” I went so far as to borrow Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw from classmate and director Matt Ripa, but got little farther than some vague notes (that Matt would go on to eventually direct the upcoming Fringe show is probably not a coincidence).
The idea languished. As part of my MFA, I ended up reading Oedipus Rex again. Somewhere in the process of reading/researching that play, it came to my attention that the blind seer of that drama has a rich life outside of the play. Tiresias appears in a number of plays and, according to myth, spent the middle part of his life as a woman thanks to a curse placed on him by the goddess Hera.
The idea of a person who not only has the perspective of seeing the past and the future, but experiences his/her life as both genders, intrigued me. It was around this time that Washington College, where I was an undergraduate, offered to commission a new play from me for a staged reading helping kick off their new, shiny arts center.
That’s when I started We Tiresias.
When people ask me what it’s about, I’ve been saying, “It’s about the
life of Tiresias, the blind seer from Oedipus.” Which is an awful
elevator speech. It makes it sound like a biopic, which does a
disservice to the play and to all biographies ever, since only a few of
the “real” facts of the character’s life are incorporated into the play.I use the broad strokes of Tiresias to deconstruct the whole idea of tragedy, and question whether the terrible events of the past are destined to rule our future, or only do so if we let them. And by telling the story from the perspective of Tiresias as adolescent man, woman, and old man, I get to have all the fun of gender fluidity I was looking for in the first place.
There’s also magic, murder, bandits, eyes being plucked out, a castration or three, and enough rough and tumble sex that we had to incorporate it into fight call.
Really, I should say, “It’s a story about magic and love and tragedy and sex and bandits told from the point of view of a boy who becomes a woman who becomes the old, blind man destined to give Oedipus the worst news of his life.”
I gotta go memorize that.
