Emmett: Okay. Anyways—
Nicholas: All right. Here we go. The idea is making a space where everyone is just set up to—
Emmett: Succeed, yes.
Nicholas: Thrive and be able to engage in the way that we need. Accommodation tends to be a very individualistic approach, but I think that’s the idea with access intimacy, is that there’s not any sense of shame or burden to having access needs. I think it’s really a cultural shift from a lot of the theatrical spaces that I’ve encountered. It’s just we walk in expecting everyone to have needs, and we set this expectation that like, “Alright. Cool. We’re collectively responsible for making sure that this is a space where everyone can have what they need to work.”
Emmett: Yes, and it makes such a great piece too in the end because if everyone’s happy working on it, then they’re going to put more into it, and it’s beautiful to have gotten to work in that space with all this to make what we got in the end.
Nicholas: I want to pick up the conversation again with J.C. Although they didn’t use the term “access intimacy,” they spoke to a very similar sense of ease, understanding, and orientation toward addressing barriers in their own work with fellow trans and nonbinary artists.
J.C.: [What is] really nice when I’ve worked with directors who are trans or nonbinary or both, [is] the immediate understandings around casting. I’ve worked with good cis directors who also understood that. I had to check in about it very briefly and then we don’t have to have that conversation again, but it’s really lovely to just know that understanding is going to happen. Speaking for myself as a playwright writing trans characters, whenever I go into a new process, even for something like a reading, I carry a lot of anxiety around having to make things clear. For me, it manifests as anxiety. I think maybe for other people it could manifest as annoyance or perhaps anger. For me, it manifests as a lot of nail-biting because I’m like, “Okay. Are they going to understand nuance around casting? Are they going to be able to communicate this to…” I think we were also in a unique situation in terms of who you had to answer to, for lack of a better phrase. There was a certain amount of freedom there in terms of the “institution”.
Part of the cast and crew assembly process and pulling people from all of the different places was also creating one of those spaces for this story where there would just be this baseline understanding of transness—where I wasn’t going to have to explain myself, you weren’t going to have to explain yourself, Emmett was not going to have to explain himself. No one in the room would have to worry about that.
Nicholas: I had a lot of freedom with this project to do what I wanted with it. I did have to make it research and give a talk about it to make it count as research.
J.C.: Right.
Nicholas: Separate academia problem. I think there was a lot of flexibility to get really experimental with it and break a lot of theatre norms.
J.C.: Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes, and I think that you didn’t have to explain to those people why we needed to hire trans people. Why… I mean, partially because I’m like, “I don’t know. How much do they know about what auditions are like?” But you have to spend a lot of time and resources going into the community to find people because this is a group that historically has been pushed to the margins of the theatre. Obviously, there aren’t no trans parts ever, but a lot less, or having bad experiences with casting. There’s so many… A myriad of things that go into how to get someone connected to an audition notice.
Nicholas: And how to field the responses to the audition notice that are… questionable.
J.C.: Right. Not only from people who need to be in the room–or not need, but we would really want them there–versus well-intentioned cisgender people who are like, “Of course, I’ll play a trans person. I’m an actor. I’ll do anything,” and then I’m like, we have to rethink the ways we teach people about stuff. There’s so much… God, we could talk for six hours to start unpacking that statement from a person who was just like, “Well, yeah, I want to work.”
Nicholas: We could have an entire separate episode dedicated to a few of the email exchanges in the audition process.
J.C.: The Gender Euphoria podcast outtakes.
Nicholas: Bonus episode.
J.C.: The mail bag is just emails that you’ve gotten and… Oh my god.
And I will say, it’s an effort of extraordinary labor because you were doing this by yourself. Whereas in other situations, somebody might have a casting person that they’re working with, or a producer—just a lot of other people who they have to talk to in a conversation. And the understanding that this is not going to be a thing that you could schedule from 3:30 to 6:30 on Tuesday and Thursday, this one week of February.
It was like, I’m going to need to go. I’m going to need to email people first. Teachers, I’m going to have to email community people. I’m going to have to really spread a wide net. I’m going to have to go to events and see if I can talk to people or have a community person introduce me to another person.” I think especially for someone who was new to the community, you put in an extraordinary amount of effort to figure out what were the appropriate, respectful, and authentic ways to go meet people who were involved in the performing arts scene or the drag scene or whatever to connect them with this opportunity.
Nicholas: I did attempt to recruit some folks at a drag show.
J.C.: Yeah?
Nicholas: I did! I was so close. I gave them my contact information and all the show information and failed to get theirs. And all of those little slips of paper are backstage, alcohol-soaked somewhere.
J.C.: Yes. But the thing is, too, is that I think about, hey, even if those people did not get involved with the show, maybe they will be more open to the next thing. It just leaves the door open a little wider to be like, “Oh, I think there are things for you here.”
So, I’m a very early career playwright. I have had the ability to interact with a lot of different institutions, some that are big and some that are small. I am often running into the problem of people being like, “We have one person we can ask. They’re not available,” because that’s life.
And then the question is like, “So who do you have or can you recommend someone?” and the thing is that I think that institutions really need to recognize that they need to… If they don’t have a relationship with trans, queer, nonbinary, anybody who is outside the gender binary, that theatre community, that they have to put in work like that to get them to want to be there. They need to have programming that speaks to that experience, whether that is the shows they’re putting on or what kind of audience outreach are they doing? What kind of people—
Nicholas: What kind of guest artists are you bringing in if you don’t have anybody already?
J.C.: Yes. Right. Do you ever offer your space to those communities as a way to acquaint people with where you are? And I think there’s lots and lots of possibilities but I think, A, because people believe this is new and these stories are new—they’re new to them—they don’t have the same type of long community relationships that they might have with other marginalized communities. Not even to assert that they have those relationships. We may all be in the same boat. This is really what I can speak to. You can’t just do it through the usual channels. You have to go to places and be like, “We have these opportunities. We have these people coming in.” You have to really go and build those things.
If you don’t have a person… Like, if it’s three days before something’s supposed to start and you’re like, “I’m going to find someone in this time,” no, you’re not. I mean, you might. I don’t want to be like, “No one will,” but it’s really hard and I have experienced this where then we don’t have the right person. But all of this is to say that it is really great working with you, working with other trans and/or nonbinary directors. I think because we probably share some of those experiences, we’re just able to talk about it in a different way immediately as opposed to having a check-in.
There’s something unspoken about just being like, this is… You understand that this is a really big deal. And it may be a true understanding of like, “I understand all of the emotions that must be happening.” Maybe that’s it. I think maybe it’s truly knowing that these are things that, even if you have done this a hundred times, are frustrating and annoying and make you sad and mad. And I think that there’s just a knowing that in the same way that the name of the game is we know we have to deal with it, the name of the game is also that it does not feel great inside.
Nicholas: With all that, I think part of the cast and crew assembly process and pulling people from all of the different places was also creating one of those spaces for this story where there would just be this baseline understanding of transness—where I wasn’t going to have to explain myself, you weren’t going to have to explain yourself, Emmett was not going to have to explain himself. No one in the room would have to worry about that. Just having to walk in and be like, “Ugh. Are they going to get it? Has this been considered before? And if I bring it up, is anyone going to understand or am I going to have to dive into a twenty-minute educational session that I don’t want to have to do because it’s 9:30 p.m.?”
J.C.: We don’t have time. We have so many other things to do.
Nicholas: For this last segment, I’m coming back to Emmett. We thought it might be useful to model some of the conversations we had applying consent-based intimacy tools from a queer-trans perspective, and we thought it might be useful to other directors, actors, intimacy choreographers to hear some of the things that we were thinking through as we worked through the specifics of the show. The most choreography heavy scenes were the ones where Reuben is performing the insemination.
I’m going to play the audio of the first of those scenes performed here by Emmett, Samantha Cocco, and Minor Stokes. Just to give you some context for what we’re talking about. Heads up, the scene involves detailed and explicit description of the artificial insemination process and a whole host of bodily fluids. If that content is outside your boundaries, you’re welcome to skip ahead past the next two minutes to the end of the scene or to where we’ve moved on to our discussion of costuming. That starts just a little before the forty-nine-minute mark.
As is typical with intimacy work, we started with the story.
All right. Set the scene. Reuben’s bedroom. It’s 5:00 a.m.. It’s time. We are ovulating.
Minor Stokes: Phone is tossed to the bed. The cap of the cup—
Samantha Cocco: Carefully—
Minor: Unscrewed.
Samantha: Okay. Now, draw the semen into the syringe.
Minor: It’s up.
Samantha: Okay. Now, just lean back all the way in the bed—
Minor: Under the blankets, here. A tiny moment of mental debate.
Samantha: There’s no time. Tent your underwear with one hand and then slide the syringe in with the other and then—
Minor: It’s awkward—
Samantha: It’s uncomfortable for a second. Pull out, get the lube.
Minor: He has to find it in the drawer with just one hand and then he’s got to open it up without even looking at it—
Samantha: A practiced skill for sure.
Minor: Never like this. Okay, lube retrieved.
Samantha: Okay. Both hands back in the underwear, slide the fingers in first, then the syringe, and then push the plunger down, and now, it’s done. It only takes a second or two—
Minor: But it feels like forever. We can see it on his face.
Samantha: Pull the syringe out, bend your knees, and hug them to your chest. Nothing left to do but wait for a while.
Minor: He covers his face with his hand. You have lube on your face now. You can’t wipe it off with your hand.
Samantha: Maybe a pillow, or a corner of the sheet?
Nicholas: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about how we went about staging that moment and the things that we were thinking about for it. As is typical with intimacy work, we started with the story and what do we need from this moment. I think the choreography itself, we started way before Reuben even got into bed.
Emmett: Yeah. I think when we first started doing it, we just had the random assortment of furniture you’re able to scrounge up from the basement.
Nicholas: And my air mattress!
Emmett: Yes.
Nicholas: And we had to work into the choreography where you needed to sit on the air mattress to not tip it over.
Emmett: Yes.
Nicholas: Which probably took almost as long as actually doing the insemination, figuring out how the air mattress needed to be set up on the crates to not tip.
Emmett: Fun times. So with that, for that rehearsal, it was a one-on-one rehearsal just you and me which was definitely how those things, I feel, should be. Like as an actor, just keep it… Well, if the actor is comfortable with it. Yeah. That should be—
Nicholas: Often, it’s recommended that there’s a stage manager in the room, documenting what are we coming up with for the choreography and just having a third person. But Kassie wasn’t able to make that rehearsal and I hadn’t trained her on it yet anyway. But we did check in ahead of time like, “Hey, we know it’s just going to be the two of us in rehearsal. Would you like to do this tonight?”
Emmett: Yeah. Definitely.
Nicholas: I think I gave you the option to be like, “We can do this a different day if you would like.”
Emmett: Oh yeah, I was ready for it that day though. So yeah, for me, I felt very safe in this space already by that point. The stuff we had already established helped a lot. So definitely starting early on with making everyone comfortable is the way to go, for sure. Which seems like a, “No, duh,” type of thing but some directors are like, “Okay, everyone, read your scripts, kiss each other. You just met five minutes ago. Who cares?”
Nicholas: And this is why intimacy direction exists.
Emmett: Yes, exactly. So yeah, we talked through it all. We talked through the movements and the words going on with the movements and what need to be what words, and then we ran just the general movements, which involved me miming inseminating myself with a syringe.
Nicholas: And we used a highlighter for a placeholder.
Emmett: Yes. So many random things were used as a placeholder like highlighters, colored pencils. Position the item to make it look like I was inseminating myself with it, which during the production was done with layers of clothing on me. I had a pair of tight boxers over a baggier pair of shorts and there’s a blanket on top of all of that so I just mimed it and we worked on how to make that look realistic, how to do it in a way that I felt comfortable doing in front of a room full of people while still looking what needed to look like.
Nicholas: I think we talked a little bit about even during the choreography like, “Where is this going to take place? What are you going to be wearing?” Making sure you know that you’re going to have a layer underneath those shorts and really no one can see where exactly your hand is so you’re in control entirely of placement of where is this going on your body.
Emmett: Yes, so it was that and figuring out how to tell what I was trying to show with the limited visuals, which I made up for with my breath and with my breathing. We worked on that a lot, but we talked through it. We worked on little bits. We mixed it with the rocking. I think one of the comparisons I made was the game where it’s the maze with a little metal ball where you turn the maze to get the ball into the hole. Except instead of the ball into the hole, it was a semen into the… whatever. And instead of the game, it was my hips.
And it’s like that’s another thing that helped a lot was having little silly things to laugh about during the rehearsals, to make it fun in the rehearsals. Make it fun for Emmett to be doing it so that while Reuben’s doing it, Emmett can help Reuben do it.
Nicholas: Yeah. The language that we use in intimacy direction is a de-loaded process and a desexualized process.
Emmett: I like that. I like that.
Nicholas: To have it be less intense of a moment. And also figure out what exactly Reuben is doing with his hips because I tried so hard to find what these exercises were that the playwright had described in the script and my research came up short a lot. So it was also a process of figuring out in the body what exactly is he trying to do? What is happening? Why is he doing this? Marble maze.
Emmett: So lots of communication, back and forth between what the director needs versus what the actor needs versus what is comfortable versus what gets the story across. Because yes, we do need all the access and intimacy but also we’re still telling a story, and that’s something that very much is a part of it. So it’s a balance at the end between having what you need versus having what makes everyone feel safe.
Nicholas: All right. Let’s talk about costumes. I think that might also be something that might be helpful for other directors, actors, costume designers even, to hear. We don’t always apply intimacy work to costuming but I think, especially in a trans context, that seems really important. Let’s talk costumes.
One of the tools that we had at the beginning of the process was thinking about different kinds of risk boundaries and how to tell where you want to set those and how that applies to how much of your body you want to be exposed, literally, physically, and also, how does that feel emotionally for you? Holding both of those things in mind. All right. So Reuben is in his underwear the whole show. What was the description of the boxers?
Emmett: Fun but not outrageous pattern, I think it was?
Nicholas: Oh, “a nice but not outrageous pattern.”
Emmett: Yes.
Nicholas: Because Sam says, “Nice boxers,” and Minor corrects, “A nice but not outrageous pattern.” We talked about this during choreography too, that you would have a tighter layer underneath so that when you’re doing the insemination, you’re not just exposed entirely to the audience at any point, extra layer of comfort. Yeah. With that, we talked a bit about how you would need a baggier layer over to be able to do the insemination and the movements that you needed.
Emmett: Yes.
Nicholas: All right. So we have the monk robe you’re wearing for most of Scene Three. How would it work with your boundaries to be shirtless underneath that for that moment at the end of the scene to draw on yourself? I can imagine some other options where we could have a very low-cut muscle tee type thing.
Emmett: I am fine with whatever. I’m fine with being shirtless. And at that point, you asked me how I felt about it.
Nicholas: I did. Yes. I think you gave me a lukewarm, “I’m fine with it.” I’m like, “Okay, but do you want to be?”
Emmett: I’m like, “Heck yeah.” Because for me, as a trans person and just as a human in general, because society sucks with the body image issues. Being trans, you have the whole dysphoria on top of that. And my body used to be something I felt a lot of shame about for so many reasons, and it’s been part of my personal journey to be at a point where the idea of being in a play where I have my body exposed, that sounds empowering. So that’s why I wanted to do it.
Past Emmett… I’m going to draw from a real-world experience here. I was doing a show a couple years ago where part of my costume involved a very skintight layer. This was after I’d gotten top surgery. And I remember just trying it on in a costume shop and being like, “I am so glad I’m not going to have to bind in this.” But it wasn’t a conversation with me that’d be like, “Hey, are you comfortable wearing this skintight body suit?” It’s this, “Here, try on this skintight body suit.”
So it’s nice to not just have it be an expectation, to have it be a conversation of what people wear. And that’s really any sort of costuming in theatre, I feel, should have a conversation between the actor and the director and costume person about what you’re comfortable with, like whether it’s levels of exposure or what shape the clothes are.
Nicholas: If we can get people to get down with cut and exposure and boundaries around that, check-ins around that… which I think comes back to having some of these conversations as early as you can. At costume fitting is probably not the best time for it because things are made already. Things are picked out already. But just having that boundaries check-in before you go to pick things out… which also the director would need to facilitate making time for that, building in that kind of time to the rehearsal process.
And then finally, Reuben is naked at the bottom of the sea. I assured you you would not be fully naked at any point during this show. That seemed unnecessary.
Emmett: That sounds like the one limit. That’s the one I have as an actor at the moment.
Nicholas: I was not especially interested in asking you to be exposed quite that much.
So I think I told you a bit about what we were planning for, what the ocean was going to look like, and how you’d be wrapped up in a whole bunch of blankets from the bed that make the sea. We talked through some options of… Checked back in about the conversation of like, do you want to be shirtless in this scene? Do you not want to be… We can hold the ocean blankets at any point on your chest. If your shoulders are exposed, that can communicate “naked,” and we can go with that. I think that was about the upper limit of where I felt like as a director, that I could be like, “Okay. This still communicates what it needs to for the story.”
