Mon 8 Jul 2013 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Robert Gilbert A Christchurch director and playwright needs a helping hand to get a play exploring the lives of transgender New Zealanders off the ground. Robert Gilbert spent the summer interviewing trans Kiwis for his project. “There are very few theatre plays that look at transgender issues which is curious when themes around cross-dressing, androgyny and transgender have been around for thousands of years, and were explored in the earliest of written theatre literature, for example The Bacchae by Euripides,” he says. With the working title Trans Tasmin, the play is almost at the stage where it can be workshopped and further developed however to do this, Gilbert must raise $6000 by 11 August. You can donate here “Boosted is an all-or-nothing fundraising model; the project needs to raise 100 per cent of the money to get funded or it doesn’t happen,” he says. Gilbert became interested in the topic when a friend underwent gender change. He observed that society and even the law were largely ignorant of the real issues facing transgender people and their families. “I wanted to look at the way society sees Transgenders, how they see themselves - both before and after. We still seem to see men becoming women as slightly comedic, a la Mrs Brown,” he says. “We are still freaked out. You’d think in 2013 we could just treat people as people.” Trans Tasmin which will look at discrimination in New Zealand society, misunderstandings and fears about the transgender community, will be presented in a theatrically challenging context by including aspects of Euripides' The Baachae within the text. One of characters is Tasmin Mahika, a Māori transgender woman of Ngai Tahu descent. She is completely comfortable with herself as a woman and says it is others who struggle with her gender identity, once they find out. “It’s my intention to write a play where the issues of gender role, and transgender [people] in contemporary society are seen against a backdrop of an ancient Greek Tragedy. The scenes will be linked by the character Simon Greenwood, who is a first year university student studying The Bacchae. He is able to view his own contemporary challenges of having a transgender girlfriend against the gender-role themes in The Bacchae,” says Gilbert. The playwright hopes that audiences will come away with a greater understanding of the transgender community, and perhaps have more tolerance and compassion for New Zealanders who are different to them. “Trans Tasmin is not going to hit people over the head with the issues, it allows real people to tell their stories in a way that many who know little about the transgender world, can understand and even empathise with.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Monday, 8th July 2013 - 1:20pm