Brandon Teena’s turbulent life and tragic death have inspired a whole slew of creative endeavors, including several books, a documentary, a film (the recently released Boys Don’t Cry) and now a surprising and haunting play, running at the Little Room Downstairs Theater. What sets Leigh Silverman’s Brandon Teena apart from the whirl of writing that has come before it is the unusual perspective from which the play is told. Teena is not an attempt to document the youth’s life, though we do get a basic skeleton of his story. Instead, Silverman attempts to get inside Teena’s head. She gives this boy, who became little more than a cardboard character in all the media coverage, a voice so that we can imagine what it’s like to be trapped inside a body that feels utterly wrong.
Born Teena Brandon, this 21-year-old female lived life as a boy, convincing everyone from school principals to girlfriends that he was who he said he was. “Because I say I am, I am a boy,” he repeats over and over. “I’m not a girl. I’m not sexually uncertain. I’m not a lesbian. I’m Brandon.” But the world did not see it his way. Branded a liar by the court system at 21, he was sent to jail for fraud in 1993. It is fitting that Silverman should begin the drama there. The place becomes a metaphor for the world in which Teena lived and died, imprisoned by coded gender roles that offered no space for people like him.
Richard Laub’s impressionistic set is spread across a bone-gray stage, barren save for the single prop used throughout: a wooden, straight-backed chair. The lighting suggests the bars of a cell and the darkness of the world outside. Teena waits in jail for his hearing, for an increasingly protracted and painful stretch of time, suggested through a series of silent vignettes that are extraordinarily effective. They establish from the start that this story is about a human being caught inside a system of language and symbols that is so rigid, so absurd and so frighteningly Kafkaesque that it will eventually destroy him simply because he dares to confront it.
When he can wait no longer, Teena screams out, “I’m not supposed to be here. Get me out. Get me out. Get me out.” What follows is a somewhat fictionalized account of the tribulations that led him to this moment, told in a series of mesmerizing monologues by Natalie Maisel as Teena.
In and out of trouble throughout his teen years, Teena learned how to lie as a means of survival. He makes up a family of brothers whom he can emulate. “My brothers and me,” he says full of swagger and tough-guy charm. Later we discover that the only real people at Teena’s home are a confused and bitter mother, a downtrodden sister and an abusive stepfather. Teena declares to this monstrous man, “You can’t do those things to a boy.”
His only salvation comes in the form of an uncle who teaches him how to shoplift waffles and sausage from the Kmart. He loves his uncle because he knows how to steal and because “he has hands that are thick and dirty and cut up.” Besides his uncle, Teena learns “everything about being a man from TV.” Miami Vice is his role model, constructing for him a vision of manhood that ties chivalry and charm to danger and violence. And danger does indeed seem to be imminent.
Laub’s direction throughout these monologues creates a world that is dramatic, stark and bleak. The timing here is impeccable. Neither rushed nor meandering, the hour-long single act builds a long, slow crush of tension. The various failings of our world begin to add up to something tragic. The principal abuses him because he’s a “special boy.” His mother refuses to accept him because he won’t be a girl. He runs off, ending up in Falls City, Nebraska, bagging groceries, playing video games and meeting girls.
And the girls love him. Falls City is full of “unhappy, bruised girls who got some baby hanging off them,” and they are soothed by his careful lovemaking that will not permit them to touch him. They call him “Prince Charming” and “the best kisser.” He quits his job and begins stealing from his girlfriends because they “owe” him. He hooks up with Tom and John, two thugs who epitomize big-fisted, cruel machismo. They pull him in over his head, into a corruption of lies and bad behavior that bring the world down. It seems obvious that Brandon is shaping his masculine identity, perhaps to conform to the only model he knows. He grabs his crotch, saying, “I walk like it’s there, talk like it’s there.”
His lies are so compelling because they call into question the very notion of “truth.” In Brandon’s world there are several truths, and each one seems valid. But these truths would not be as self-evident without the dazzling performance of Maisel, who prevents Teena’s tragic tales from crumbling into so much meanness. After all, Brandon Teena was a white-trash hoodlum whose ethics and identity were shaped by bad TV and cruel parenting. But this boy, as played by Maisel, was also alarmingly innocent and painfully clear about the cruel mistake he felt his body to be. Maisel’s performance brings these paradoxical truths together with stunning clarity.
The last line says it all: “Yes sir, fate can be a motherfucker.”
Brandon Teena runs through Saturday, November 20, at The Little Room Downstairs Theater, 2326 Bissonnet, (713)522-5737. $12-$15.
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 1999.