“Tea Party Review: Theatre Should Be Above A Regressive Portrayal of Trans People in 2024”

by Clara Tan, Guest Editorial

“Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Tonight, on the 28th of September in the Year of Our Lord 2024, I attended the third-week run of First Look Buffalo’s production of Sean Abley’s Tea Party. The audience was small, barely less than ten people in a house capable of seating forty times that. The synopsis on New Play Exchange reads as follows:

“Frank, a married heterosexual crossdresser in his late 30s living in Montana, discovers Miss Olivia's Finishing School for Girls, a club for fellow recreational crossdressers. Finally able to share his secret with another like-minded man, Frank's newfound freedom threatens his marriage and his relationship with his best friend.”

Seems harmless enough, no? Why not put on a play that makes “man in a dress” humor its central thesis, in a time when transgender people are vilified more than ever, treated as a political football and scapegoated for all the evils of the world, from pedophilia to child sex-trafficking. 

My colleagues reviewed the play as follows:

“Tea Party remains a compelling and timely piece of theater.”
– Anthony Chase, Theater Talk Buffalo

“Fun stuff.”
– Peter Hall, Buffalo Rising

Respectfully to the two esteemed gentlemen of the Buffalo critical landscape, I do not believe we watched the same play.

But first, Let’s talk about hubris, because I believe there is a lot of that in the show I just watched. In Greek mythology, the conception of hubris was transgression against the gods themselves. Icarus flying too close to the sun. Phaethon stealing his father Helios’ chariot. Arachne challenging Athena to a weaving contest. Beings who came too close to upsetting the natural order of things. The word today refers to ideas of a less lofty nature, that of extreme overconfidence, or excessive pride. For example, one might consider that a presentation of, shall we say, Flower Drum Song, or Finian’s Rainbow in their original, unedited forms would be an expression of hubris by the producers. These are shows that did not age well and would not be readily accepted by an audience with modern sensibilities. Moreso’s the better, because it demonstrates clear growth and evolution of our tastes as sophisticated theatregoing folk. Comedy as a form ages even more poorly, because our ideas of what was funny a hundred, fifty, even ten years ago are very different from what we find funny now.

One might consider the origin of musical theatre within vaudeville, which traces its roots to, among other influences, the minstrel show. I need not explain why the very thought of painting one’s face black with shoeshine and giving oneself exaggerated puckered lips to lampoon the appearance and mannerisms of Black Americans is naturally repulsive nowadays (to most normal people, at least). So then, why is it still acceptable to perform what amounts to a minstrel show, but with transgender people as the butt of the joke? 

The United States stands at a critical juncture, with our democracy hanging in the balance and queer people constantly being used as a cudgel to motivate and galvanize a base that has been constantly pushed towards more open and overt bigotry. Yet, in Buffalo, New York, in a city that is ostensibly the “City of Good Neighbors”, the theatre community constantly leans into the proliferation of negative tropes and stereotypes in order to put their shows on. This is not an isolated problem, with communities that portray themselves as liberal all too happy to do the same in order to appeal to the median theatregoer, who is usually older, white, and well-to-do.

Of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am a trans woman. I absolutely have a dog in this fight. Mr. Abley might claim:

“Although there is humor to be mined from grown men dressing and acting like proper school girls, and certainly this script has its share of laughs, the comedy should never come at the expense of the characters' dignity. These men are committed to indulging their feminine sides, and in most cases we should feel they understand the absurdity of the situation, and be in on any jokes or humor that will arise during the course of the play. It is not the playwright's intention to make fun of these gentlemen, but rather to celebrate men who are brave enough to present their true selves to the world.”

Lofty words and intentions, to be sure. But when I, a trans woman, sit in the audience and feel nothing but othering, hatred, and sheer disgust emanating from the stage, one must discard intentions and consider the consequences instead.

First off, you cannot claim that you want to celebrate crossdressing men, and then have the actors prancing around, behaving like every Republican’s most extreme conception of men in dresses. I will note, that even with this intention, the audience laughed every time one of the crossdressing characters spoke with their feminine personas and using the playwright’s idea of feminine language. Mr. Abley, the text betrays the disgust with which you view the feminine. This is reiterated with the character of Gayle, the only cis woman in the show, a construction worker who behaves in a completely unladylike manner throughout. Gayle is also presented as the voice of reason, with Frank, Oliver, and Justin being the butt of all of the jokes. It is telling that Mr. Abley needed to have his single female character behave in a masculine manner to be taken seriously, while the two crossdressers and the one gay man are the source of all the humor. Cis gay men are lambasted within both the trans and the lesbian community as being the worst allies towards women, more often than not hiding their misogyny under the guise of “I’m gay, I can’t hate women”, and I believe Mr. Abley is party to those beliefs.

Throughout the play, the characters of Frank and Oliver constantly repeat some variation of the line, “I’m not gay”. It’s repeated almost like a mantra, a means of warding off some other, deeper self-realization. Once or twice, sure. But the number of times it comes up in two hours (at least five, based off of the script), it morphs into a prayer. Almost like the characters are attempting to convince themselves and us that they aren’t gay (or trans). As Billy Shakes wrote, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”.

On the subject of self-realization and self-actualization, the entire play is predicated on Frank and Oliver rejecting any deeper analysis of their emotional states. In Scene 11, Frank has this revealing line:

“I have this thing that I like to do. It makes me feel better. It makes me happy. It could be riding a motorcycle or hunting or playing softball but it’s not it’s wearing women’s clothes and looking and feeling pretty.”

Oliver reiterates this sentiment in Scene 12:

“I’m a person who needs to wear women’s clothing-- Yes. I need to. I enjoy looking feminine at times, or observing the world as a twelve-year old girl-- It’s bedrock for who I am. And yes, I could stop. But I’d be miserable. Infinitely miserable because I’d be... It would be like I was strangling myself, like a tourniquet.”

Now, in both these moments, Oliver and Frank are describing the feeling of gender euphoria, the sensation one feels when one’s outward appearance aligns with one’s inner self. Abley claims that these two people are nothing but straight men who like to crossdress, but I have information that gives the lie to his assertion. I had the opportunity to discuss the play with a person who was involved in a staged reading produced several months earlier, and this individual mentioned, among other things, that Abley had taken inspiration for the play from spending time lurking on crossdressing forums in the “Wild West Days of the Internet”, writing it in the early aughts and tens.

It certainly shows.

As it happens, I too happened to be hanging around those forums during those days, I can even name a few of the prominent ones, such as Susan’s Place, Crossdressers.com, TGForum.com, among others. That is the reason why I say with confidence that this play is not a comedy about two straight crossdressing men, but instead, a tragedy about two trans women in severe denial. I am absolutely certain that Abley never returned to the forums to check on the “men” who inspired his characters, because most of them either transitioned, or turned into Nazis. Some did both.

I’ve buried the lede enough. The play is rife with transphobia and homophobia, using the pain and dysphoria of Frank and Oliver to drive the humor of the show. There are so many moments when both characters talk about the pain of having to take off their dresses and return to their life as men, that the audience laughed at, while I was cringing. Because Abley, in his inept way, touches upon the inverse feeling to gender euphoria, gender dysphoria. The severe disconnect between body and gender that presents as emotional turmoil and torment to trans people. Many of my brothers and sisters have killed themselves because they were unable to access treatment to alleviate that pain. Here? Fodder for cheap laughs.

Let’s not mince words, the play’s transphobia is apparent with Frank and Oliver’s constant need to reassure themselves that their masculinity is not in question despite their affinity for feminine garb. Abley, parroting classic transphobic talking points, essentially depicts these two trans women as being actually feminine men, with no need to take any more active steps to resolve their gender dysphoria. We hear it all the time from the TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) contingent, “Why can’t you just be feminine men? You don’t have to transition, why turn yourself into caricatures of women? You’re so much better as feminine men”, all the while lambasting any kind of gender non-conformity.

Speaking of TERF talking points, Abley somehow manages to squeeze them in too, with these lines from Gayle in Scene 12:

“I just... I can’t... I mean, you have to understand how ridiculous that sounds. Right? Don’t you? Wearing a dress? As important as, I don’t know, food?... You think this is what girls look like? This is a costume. You’re in, like, a petticoat. You look like Shirley Temple… Okay, but this isn’t a girl. You realize that, right? Shirley Temple was a character. If you think this is a girl, that’s actually hugely insulting to actual girls. You’re just sort of hollowing out a child so she’s an empty shell that’s pretty. That’s a doll.”

These sentiments are almost a perfect echo of Janice Raymond writing in The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male:

“All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves ... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive.”

Abley’s text is lighter and softer, but the parallels are too clear to ignore. The script is full of notions like this, in essence flattening and reducing the very real concepts of gender dysphoria and euphoria to “feeling happy wearing a dress”.

Another highly transphobic trope that Abley plays on is that of autogynephilia, a discredited theory of transness invented by sexologist Ray Blanchard. Frank is depicted as highly jubilant when he returns from his secret crossdressing escapades with Oliver, usually rushing home to bed his wife immediately after (and to bottom for her, yet another hilarious punchline). This happens at least twice in the play. Abley claims in his foreword that, “In Tea Party, the intention is to portray pure crossdressing, without the commonly attached sexual fetishism.” Yet, the actions of his own characters belie his point. Anne Lawrence summarizes the definition of autogynephilia as such:

“Autogynephilia is defined as a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as female. Autogynephilia explains the desire for sex reassignment of some male to- female (MtF) transsexuals. It can be conceptualized as both a paraphilia and a sexual orientation.”

This “theory” has been rejected by WPATH (The World Professional Association for Transgender Health), and has been noted as an anti-trans theory promoted by hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Interesting that Abley, as self-described LGBTQ playwright, would depict his sympathetic characters as having such tendencies. Frank literally comes bounding towards Gayle in the first scene following his meeting with Oliver and sweeps her off to the bedroom.

Following this, is the entire section of the ageplay. Oliver for the most part, and with some coercion Frank, portray themselves as twelve-year old girls. With exaggerated facial expressions and elephant stomps across the stage to match. It’s like Abley took every single transphobic meme from the Republican Party and said to himself, “how many can I fit in there?” The false-analogy of being trans-age as a means of discrediting trans people is an old trope too. “Oh, so men can identify as women? Why can’t I, a thirty-year old identify as sixty-five and collect my Social Security?” 

Yet here, there is no reason given as to why Oliver, and later Frank choose to portray pre-pubescent girls, and it is never fully explored. What it does serve is to other Oliver and Frank further, portraying them as not just deviant freaks who enjoy dressing as fake women, but wanting to regress in age besides. Ageplay in and of itself is a highly specific subset of BDSM practitioners, and reams of scholarly research have been written on the subject, but is just thrown in here as more icing on this queer cake. 

But wait, there’s more! We haven’t even touched on the character of Justin yet, Frank’s best friend who also is outed as gay in the second act. Justin depicts himself as stereotypically hyper-masculine, constantly hitting on Gayle and making allusions to wanting to bed her. Yet, Oliver clocks Justin immediately as gay and outs him to Frank. Frank, of course, is devasted that Justin kept his sexuality a secret for all the years of their friendship. There is nothing that dates the play to being a product of the early aughts than the fact that Justin’s homosexuality is hidden by the veneer of performative masculinity. Even in Montana, gay people do exist in 2024. Abley seems to want to hit almost every single comedy trope of the early 2000s, ragging on trans people, gay people, and women. It would almost be impressive. Like squeezing every bad joke from How I Met Your Mother into a single painful two hours.

Structurally, the play is a mess. It opens with Justin discovering Frank in a schoolgirl uniform. This scene is revisited two more times throughout the show, as if Abley felt the need to highlight the importance of this scene, or maybe he was just so proud of the humiliation that Frank was suffering, he needed the audience to savor it thrice. The pacing is extremely erratic, with the scenes featuring Frank and Oliver almost dragging while those with Justin and Gayle seem played on 1.5x speed by comparison. The conflict of Frank’s secret crossdressing is set up as pivotal in act one, but is resolved by the end of the act, leaving us with a dragging marriage melodrama as the conflict of act two. A well-made play, this is not. It’s more like an overstretched juggler, attempting to keep far too many balls in the air to give any single one real attention, depth and exploration. 

Now, let’s talk about the performances. This show lives and dies by the performances of Frank and Oliver, here portrayed by Andrew Zuccari and Bob Rusch respectively, dying for the most part. Much water is made about the joy that Frank and Oliver describe themselves as feeling when dressed up, but Zuccari and Rusch look simply uncomfortable wearing the ill-fitting costumes. Those uniforms looked like they were bought for $5 off AliExpress. On top of that, costuming made the bizarre choice to have neither Zuccari nor Rusch shave facial and leg hair, wear makeup or wigs, or any kind of shapewear or undergarments. 

For girls at a finishing school, they definitely didn’t carry themselves in a manner becoming of such. All of this adds up to have Frank and Oliver portrayed as the ultimate transphobic caricatures, overweight men in dresses, with no interest in actually presenting as female but instead exhibiting a fetishistic paraphilia for the clothes.

Gayle and Justin, clearly the two supporting characters, as portrayed by Kaylie Horowitz and John DellaContrada, were given far more leeway to actually play with their performances. However, the quality of the writing is so severely lacking that even though Horowitz and DellaContrada were the more compelling of the performers, I was simply not interested in Justin and Gayle’s shenanigans. They could’ve been cut and the central conflict would not have been affected. The play could’ve been an hour shorter and nothing would’ve been lost. Gayle and Frank’s marriage is depicted as being the core of the show, with them being the first two characters we actually spend some time with, but Zuccari and Horowitz do not have any chemistry whatsoever onstage. In fact, if there was one word I would use to describe Zuccari, it would be discomfort. He simply looked like he did not want to be there. 

So many words are dedicated to Frank’s happiness at being able to discover their own person and femininity, but that joy, excitement and wonder were simply not present in Zuccari’s performance.

Rusch, on the other hand, seemed to be playing into the creepy crossdresser vibe. From the choice of over-exaggerated facial expressions to over-enunciated speech, Rusch’s Oliver came across not as a person discovering the joy of a childhood denied to them, but as one of those guys who slides into the DMs of trans women online, begging to be feminized. I myself have had numerous encounters with folk of that ilk. It is clear to me that director Lara Haberberger did not have any queer people in the room to provide insight or guidance during the rehearsal process, because any trans woman would’ve told Rusch to stop being weird. This performance made the three older cis women sitting behind me laugh uproariously. I could not help but wonder if they were laughing at Rusch, the conception of men in dresses, or some combination of the two.

There has been much discussion of late about Jane Schoenbrun newest film, I Saw the TV Glow, a surreal thriller as thinly veiled metaphor for the trans experience. Watching Tea Party, I could not help but think of it as an anti-I Saw the TV Glow. While in TV, the characters strive towards achieving some understanding and agency over their gender dysphoria, the characters of Tea Party reject any achievement of self-awareness. Frank and Oliver constantly run away from any deeper analysis of their gender euphoria from dressing, other than “it makes me feel good”. There is no real interrogation of the subject matter, or of the characters’ motivations. They constantly skirt on the boundaries of deeper understanding, but ultimately reject it. They wish to be dilettantes of womanhood, yet never question why returning to masculinity is painful. They never wonder why they need this constant release of dressing in secret, never dreaming that there is a better solution. Going through life as shells of people, living simply for the moments when they get to put the clothes on. Why do I know this? Because I have known many men and women who did the same. I did the same too, out of a desire not to abandon the privilege and comfort that came with being male. It’s an old story, repeated over and over, with society forcing queer people back into the closet, through pressure, shame, and the assertion of deviance.

I brought up the notion of hubris before. Tea Party, more than anything, speaks to Abley’s hubris, that a play written from a voyeuristic perspective, at least ten years behind the times would hold up in 2024. That the production team and company thought this would be a good idea to put their brand behind. That the actors involved thought this would be a worthy use of their time and talent. That the director thought she could direct this piece without input from any trans people at all. 

However, this play was not written for trans people. It was written by, and for, cis people to laugh at this parody, this caricature of transness, confident in the knowledge that no trans person would ever see it. And if they did? Well, Abley claims it’s not about trans people in his foreword, so that should cover it, right? Liberal theatregoers get to pat themselves on the back for how accepting they were that they supported a weird piece about crossdressers, and the reviewers get to say how timely and meaningful the play is. Everybody wins.

Except us, your trans neighbors. Your friends and relatives, who know that you see us not as people, but as scarecrows to point and laugh at. Rough sketches of people who don’t have real feelings.

To every single theatre community around the country, I’d like to say, I hope you could take heed. Please, do not make the same mistakes that have been recounted here tonight. Please listen to the people in your community who are begging to be heard. Consider that sometimes, it might be better not to put a specific show on. Some pieces of art are better left unmade. Because you might find it funny, but the friends and relatives who are targeted by productions such as these will not, and they will remember what side you chose to take.

The words “joy” and “happy” appear numerous times throughout the play. I did not feel that, watching this. What I felt, was the self-loathing that Frank and Oliver were constantly grappling with. I was gifted the knowledge that no matter what “allies” might say and claim to feel, they still see me and my siblings as other, as strange, as deviant. As freaks. Joy was not what I felt as I left that theatre. Instead, I was suffused with despair. Nothing really compares to the hollowness that one experiences, re-discovering that people who claim to be supportive have nothing but empty words and meaningless platitudes, while they laugh at you behind your back. Finding out the bigotry you thought was behind you is omnipresent. Being reminded that you are nothing but a circus attraction to them.

A man in a dress.

Well, I hope you had fun. Tea party’s over.

“Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland