‘Cassandra & The Boy Doll’ is an intimate look at a trans woman going through their transformative journey who says goodbye to her constructed male identity.
Artistic Director Artemis Maedre talks about how she and activist/ playwright Miranda Sparks joined forces to create a spectacular showcase of diverse talent. “We externalised in the character the idea that society puts on people expectations of gender, and for trans people that becomes almost a completely separate identity because everyone expects someone to be male, and they’re actually not that. So the boy doll is a constructed male identity, and Cassandra has to decide if she’s going to violently kill him, if she’s going to say goodbye to him, [or] if she is going to accept him as part of her life.”
Artemis says there are very few opportunities for trans people to tell their own stories, which a lot of the time are just trans stories tacked onto a greater discourse about gender or masculinity. “I’m not saying those stories shouldn’t be told; I’m just saying that the people who are affected by any particular story sort of have the best insight into what kind of story needs to be told.
“I think the really special thing that Anywhere [Festival] does is create spaces that aren’t theatre spaces; it removes a lot of barriers to entry that theatre companies might face. So, if you are from a culturally diverse background, maybe you’re not white, or you’re transgender, or whatever, you may feel like theatre is not the place for you, that you’re not very welcome. Anywhere says, ‘you can just put on a show anywhere and we’ll support you in that'.”One of the main issues within the Australian theatre community is LGTBIQ people are poorly represented on stage. Artemis says Magnetic North is an inclusive company who makes sure they only give people roles that pertain to them.
“Our main character is a transgender woman, [who is] being played by a transgender woman, and in our chorus we have genderqueer people, we’ve got women, and we’ve got a cis man playing a cis man… I don’t think that means a woman can’t play a man if she wants to, or anything like that. But when it comes to disadvantaged stories, like stories of people of colour, stories of transgender people, it really, really needs to be from those people. Because it’s really disrespectful to be like ‘well, we can plonk any white person in that role of an Indian man, because that’s fine,’ as if there aren’t millions of Indian people who could have taken that role, or millions of transgender people who are willingly looking for work.”
Artemis says working with Miranda was a process of interesting creative development. “[Miranda] is a trans woman, and she started writing her story to talk about the way trans stories are used by the media in a really fetishised and sensationalist sort of way, and we wanted to remove some of that venom…that comes from a cis gender view.“We thought that my theatre company would be a really great match, [as] most of our company is trans, we all identify as some kind of queer, [and] we’re really working hard to get more linguistically diverse voices. We’re just really trying to make sure that the right people are telling the right story.
“Miranda is a really great trans activist and writer in her own right, and she’d never written a play before, so she pretty much slammed out the play overnight and presented me with the script. And then we sort of took it apart. I said, ‘Miranda, don’t freak out, but I’m going to take your baby, I’m going to wreck it, and then we’re going to put it back together and it’s going to be great.’ And she said, ‘OK, I trust you,’ and we took the script into rehearsal, obliterated it, put it back together, and made it into what I think is a trademark Magnetic North non-linear narrative. It’s a lot more episodic, and all over the place.
“And I think what was really important in this process was that Miranda and I kept talking about… the necessary facets of this trans story. I think sometimes we managed to get ourselves almost into knots because we were trying to be so inclusive in our story. [Then] we realised we can’t speak for all trans people, we can only speak for Miranda and me, and the few people we have contact with, and [so we] just hope it resonates with other people.”
