The Colby Echo

Issue date: 9/16/09 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Nick Iodice

In her new one-woman show, Colby's own Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan recounts her experience as the awkward teenage James Boylan. She shows us the young boy practicing his presentation on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon while wearing a bra stuffed with gym socks. Though he didn't know it then, he was on his way to becoming the woman who now speaks comfortably on stage about her life as a trans-woman. Boylan's performance contained anecdotes from her life, interspersed with original songs she sang while accompanying herself on piano and auto-harp.

Boylan begins her tale by recounting the story of a porcupine crawling into her car engine as she drove from Virginia to the Pacific Ocean to scatter her uncle's ashes. Her car fails in Kentucky when the porcupine unleashes his quills in the engine (the porcupine escapes safely for those of you who are concerned about his well-being).
Boylan is forced to spend the night at the Drawbridge Inn while her car gets fixed, and there she meets a ventriloquist and his dummy. Her night in Kentucky is a boomerang between the stories she tells us about her life as a trans-person. Her stories include her embarrassment as James at an America's bicentennial assembly at school, her conversation (still as James) with her dying father, coming back as a woman for the reunion at her "theoretically all-male" private school, her night in the haunted house of her boyhood with her wife, sons and dog, and finally her moment of temptation and revelation in Kentucky. The play is effectively lighted by John D. Ervin, who uses lights not only to create a spotlight to illuminate the sole figure of Boylan as she reads the words of her tremendous story, but to enhance her storytelling. The strobe effect flashes against her confusion and embarrassment. Conversely, the lights illuminate the television with a soft glow (the hearth of the modern age) as she recounts the "super stickiness" of her family, the lighting adding to the feeling of peace she felt and we the audience share with her.

Professor Boylan creates a memorable cast of characters, changing her voice, mannerisms and posture to craft her teenage self, her father, her perpetually stoned high school friend, the spunky girl she crushed on as a schoolboy and the ventriloquist Lloyd and his puppet with the grating greeting. She brilliantly weaves moments of deep pathos into a humorous account of her life, and her delivery is spot on. She explores her confusion with her identity, makes peace with the ghosts of her past and extols the enduring and transformative power of love, speaking beautifully about her wife Dee-Dee, her love for whom she can only express through wordless music. Finally, Boylan plays songs on her auto-harp reminiscent of all-American folk ballads, if folk ballads were entitled "Drag Queens from Outer Space," and her piano pieces range from bluesy to neo-Romantic. Her songs are sometimes campy, sometimes sublime but always steeped in sincerity, filling in at the void of meaning when words alone fail.

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