The T Party, kinky and sweet

I’m not a church-going man; the theater is my church. It’s where I go to experience, and aspire to create, the sort of communal experience that a house of faith provides so many. Call me an idealist, but I believe that theater has enormous and unique potential to tear down walls between groups, to reveal our common humanity, to build community. The T Party, Natsu Onoda Power’s sweetly transgressive skewering of gender identity, presented in its latest incarnation at Forum Theater, lives that principle more than any show I’ve seen in recent memory. Its chock full of heart, humanity, insight delivered with good humor.

T Party is split in two stylistically distinct sections. Upon arrival, audiences will find the Silver Spring Black Box space decked out from box office to bathroom like the hastily arranged prom of “Forum High”, the world’s most progressive secondary school, at which gender norms are largely a thing of antiquity. This initial section is Forum’s stab at the increasingly popular trend of immersive theater. Actors playing students and chaperones will interact directly with audience members. There’s gender-transgression themed karaoke, an open dance floor on stage, and drinks flowing. Little scenes pop up in various nooks and crannies. The party is topped off with a semi-scripted and biology-ignoring vote for prom court.

Once the prom ends, the production shifts gears and the audience is instructed to take their more traditional seated place. The bulk of T Party’s runtime is a series of skits based largely on research done by Power and the ensemble into the transgender experience. While the intended focus might be the trans community, the show seems more like a general GLBTAQ revue.

T Party revels in sex of all varieties, the queer and the kinky, but it’s also a largely chaste affair. Even, dare I say ….cute? It’s a canny strategy on Power’s behalf, I suppose. Making groups that to some might once have seemed strange or even vaguely threatening seem adorable is one strong way to break down barriers. T Party is the rare show that benefits from alley staging, aiding the productions mission of revealing the transgender community not as the other, but as part of the big us.

T Party is at its best when it keeps things hyperlocal. A late in the evening highlight follows a Dupont Circle-area meeting of the minds between a self-described occasional transvestite and a male-to-female transgender escort. Rafael Sebastian is a highlight as the escort, with an easy, sexy confidence that adds a kinky spark to a show that can sometimes feel a little academic. Another late skit follows the lovely and mildly tragic story of a long-time closeted trans activist.

Other skits, like a riff on sex education where all the kiddies have their sex-defining “xoohas” on their heads, can feel like toss-off jokes stretched too thin. There’s also a bit of a problem of perspective. A vast majority of T Party’s subject matter is from the perspective of the, biological speaking, male. Be it transvestite or transitioning MTF, T Party gives very little time to the (originally, biologically) female. A late line of meta-commentary on this deficiency doesn’t count as a fix. An interesting side effect of trying to build as big a tent as T Party does is that those left out in the cold can seem all the more visible.

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Recommended
THE T PARTY
Closes January 17, 2015
Silver Spring Black Box Theater
8641 Colesville Road
Silver Spring, MD
1 hour, 30 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $25 reserved, or Pay What You Want at the door
Wednesdays thru Sundays
Details
Tickets

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Power, one of DC’s most kinetic directors, keeps the show moving at a brisk pace. Transitions between the scenes are smooth as silk and often enough maintain the crucial communal link with the audience with a nicely timed throwaway gag. Alex Leidy, Ryan Smith and Sophia Adams provide some lovely floor-based projection work, especially during an witty skit about the vagaries and dangers of opening up to someone via text message. There’s even an appearance from a particular Panda costume that has gained near infamous notoriety in the DC theater community.

That Forum recruited Power to remount T Party is admirable and smart, proving their commitment to developing forward thinking local work. In its current incarnation, T Party feels unfinished, but appropriately so. The show’s own continuing evolutionary nature matches the subject matter of the show. Poetic and kinetic. Interactive and traditional. Kinky and sweet. Always following its heart and its muse. Like so many in the transgender community, The T Party fiercely resists being pigeonholed.

The T Party . written and directed by Natsu Onodo Power . Featuring Jonathan Feuer, Zachary Gilbert, Rachel Hunes, Nehemiah Markos, Brendan Quinn, Rafael Sebastian, Sara Dabney Tisdale and Allie Villarrel . Produced by Forum Theatre . Reviewed by Ryan Taylor.