Ben Brantley, March 10, 2016
Bobby Steggert is a good little girl. Let me clarify: In the title role of “Boy,” the diligent new play by Anna Ziegler that opened on Thursday night at the Clurman Theater at Theater Row, Mr. Steggert is very good at portraying a little girl who wants to be good but is thwarted by the discomfort that comes from being born a boy, a fact of which she (he) is unaware.
Hmm. That’s a confusing clarification, isn’t it? But just imagine how confused you’d be if you were Samantha (born Samuel, later known as Adam). Her bewilderment is affectingly and persuasively embodied by Mr. Steggert, a gifted actor in his 30s who assumes the aspect of a child in a dress without any assistance from a feminine costume, a wig or even a toddler’s lisp.
What he does convey is the heartbreaking unease of someone who has been denied the chance to inhabit the body he was born with. Best known for his sensitive performances in musicals (“Ragtime,” “Yank!”), the open-faced Mr. Steggert once again brings disquieting shadows to his naturally sunny presence.
“Boy” — a world premiere production from the Keen Company, the Ensemble Studio Theater and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — could use more of such shading. Ms. Ziegler applies a strict organizational hand to a subject that is anything but tidy.
The play is inspired by the true story of David Peter Reimer, whose genitalia were mutilated during a botched medical circumcision when he was an infant. His parents consulted John Money, a specialist in gender identity, who believed that gender was determined more by nurture than nature and encouraged them to raise David as a girl.
The ways in which Money’s approach backfired are chronicled in John Colapinto’s fascinating book “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl” (2001), a grim portrait of a tortured soul. Dealing with the same subject, “Boy” is so determined not to be sensational or bleak that it bleaches itself of troubling complexity.
Given the difficulty of relating a multilayered tale that encompasses many years, Ms. Ziegler’s script — and Linsay Firman’s direction — is admirably comprehensible. But it often feels like the work of a scrupulous schoolteacher, eager to introduce a potentially off-putting but important topic to uninformed students without frightening them.
Ms. Ziegler demonstrated a similar gift for making difficult material accessible to mainstream audiences in “Photograph 51,” her study of the DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin, a hit in London for its star, Nicole Kidman, last year. “Boy” similarly unfolds in a brisk, back-and-forth counterpoint of short scenes, with projected dates.
We first meet Mr. Steggert’s character as Adam Turner, a man in his 20s, in conversation with Jenny Lafferty (Rebecca Rittenhouse), a cheerfully drunken young woman at a Halloween costume party in Davenport, Iowa, in 1989. She’s wearing a sexy bunny costume; he has on a Frankenstein’s-monster mask.
They flirt; she advances; he retreats. The chemistry between them is real, but it’s also confounding, embodied with a charming and slightly ominous bewilderment by both performers. It is also a perfect setup for a story about navigating sexual uncertainty.
What follows reads, perhaps, as a too-helpful diagram that charts the sources of Adam’s behavior in that first scene. We alternate between sequences showing the life of Adam, in the late 1980s, and that of the girl he is being trained to become in a doctor’s consulting room in Boston in the 1970s.
We then step back even further in time, to 1968. Trudy and Doug Turner (a suitably perplexed Heidi Armbruster and Ted Köch) have written a letter asking for the advice of Dr. Wendell Barnes, a psychologist, after the circumcision that left one of their twin sons effectively without a penis.
Dr. Barnes — played by Paul Niebanck with a single-note affectlessness — sees in their plight an opportunity to further his research on gender identity. He assumes the role of, yes, a Dr. Frankenstein to the Turners’ sullen child, shaping a new person out of human clay with what turn out to be disastrous results.
Remember that monster mask that Adam was wearing? Ms. Ziegler can be a bit obsessive about connecting the dots, a trait that tends to transform the wavering paths of human life into blunt lines.
Running a densely packed 90 minutes, “Boy” suffers from its rigorously sustained double focus on Samantha then and Adam now. We wind up feeling that the central relationships — between Samantha and Dr. Barnes, and Adam and Jenny — aren’t given the time or space to breathe naturally.
It’s still a pleasure to watch Mr. Steggert stride across the stage of Sandra Goldmark’s single, all-purpose set, shedding years on the way, to become the unhappy Samantha. That he does so without any change of clothes or voice provides this production’s most powerful image of a fixed identity under siege, striving to remain itself.
Chris Jones, January 18, 2018
David Peter Reimer, who shot himself in 2004, was a Canadian man whose penis was damaged beyond repair when he was a baby during a medically necessary circumcision gone terribly wrong. A psychologist named John Money then oversaw what was, in essence, an involuntary gender reassignment. Reimer, who had an identical male twin, was told he was a girl and had his testicles removed while still a toddler. He was given the name Brenda. But by the time he was a teenager, Remier’s regretful parents had finally told him the truth and Reimer transitioned to living as a male.
Money, meanwhile, had used the case as evidence for his conviction that gender identity was, primarily, learned.
“Boy,” a 2016 play by Anna Ziegler that now is at TimeLine Theatre, is a fictionalized version of Reimer’s case: a horrific example of what well-intentioned but naive parents can allow to be done to us when we we are too young to scream “stop!” and have someone actually listen. Ziegler’s 90-minute drama imagines Adam Turner (Theo Germaine), as a young male adult, falling in love for the first time with a young woman, Jenny (Emily Marso), the both trying to navigate what this relationship means. As you watch that journey, Adam’s past is revealed in flashback scenes, featuring both his traumatized parents (played by Mechelle Moe and Stef Tovar) and his creepy doctor, here known as Dr. Wendell Barnes and played, in oily fashion, by David Parkes.
Since Reimer’s life and death were real, part of the experience of watching “Boy” involves the nauseating realization that this unethical act was perpetrated, not in the distant past but as recently as the late 1960s, and that the medical professional involved continued to practice (Money died in 2006). Money’s legacy is arguably complicated: He wrote early and extensively about the fluidity of gender, and argued that Reimer’s problems flowed from interference by “the anti-feminist movement” and by those who argued for gender immutability. Whatever. If there is one thing we have finally learned about gender and humanity at this point in our evolution, it is the crucial role of choice. For ourselves. Only we know who we are.
As a show at TimeLine, “Boy” functions as an overly efficient melodrama. As soon as you hear Barnes say the line “and you can never tell her,” you hear the cue for creepiness, which is the way director Damon Kiely and Parkes approach the character, which makes it yet harder to believe the parents would have been so duped. The script has a rigorously symmetrical structure: I found myself resisting some of that and wanting the central character of Adam, the only person who really matters here, to have more time to be, to breathe, and for the script to be willing to rip away some of this impositional neatness. Although carefully wrought and visually rich (the set is by Arnel Sancianco), the emotionally restrained production follows the same path: Whenever the actors are beginning to approach a deep place, and both Germaine and Marso do at times, we’re whisked elsewhere to a scene that could wait.
“Boy” certainly has value as a dramatic work. It’s just hard to contain this explosively experiential narrative in a very cautious off-Broadway play that feels somehow removed. You keep wanting Adam to be given more of a chance to self-actualize, to go further, to love as he has the innate human right to live.
Bert Osbourne, October 3, 2017
Anna Ziegler’s drama “Boy” is based on the real life of David Reimer, a young Canadian man who was raised from infancy as a girl, after a horrific surgical accident during a circumcision procedure. The play renames the character Samuel (or Samantha) Turner and relocates the story to Davenport, Iowa, where he/she grows up, and Boston, where a renowned psychologist periodically counsels him/her over the span of some 20 years.
Jumping back and forth in time, the action takes place between 1968 and 1990 – long before gender identity issues became more commonplace, and before even the most well-meaning parents or doctors knew better than to follow the course of “treatment” they do in this case. For all of their misguided attempts to “nurture” her, Sam is aware of his true “nature” from an early age. But he/she is sadly unable to fully express it or to assume much control of the situation, lacking what’s described in the play as the “power to shape one’s own reality.”
Although Dr. Barnes advises the parents to avoid subjecting the child to any of the usual “boy stuff,” Sam gradually begins to exhibit “classic tomboy” tendencies nonetheless. He has Sam read “Jane Eyre,” hoping to encourage a certain identification with the heroine of the novel. And later, after Sam sees the movie “Star Wars,” Barnes tries to discourage the kid from relating quite so strongly with Luke Skywalker.
Under the direction of Melissa Foulger, Theatrical Outfit’s “Boy” co-stars associate artistic director Clifton Guterman in the title role, opposite artistic director Tom Key as the doctor.
Guterman clearly has the showier part. The play runs 90-odd minutes with no intermission. Given Ziegler’s zigzagging structure, from one instant to the next, Guterman transitions from an adolescent “girl” to a 20-ish man awkwardly embarking on a courtship with a young single mother (played by Annie York).He’ll take off his jacket, wrap it around his waist as a skirt of sorts, and suddenly step back into the past for another therapy session with the doctor.
His performance is very evenly matched by Key, who’s most often prone to portraying singularly virtuous and upstanding characters, as opposed to deeply flawed ones. While the doctor is largely sympathetic and hardly a “bad guy,” Key brings a sufficient shading to the role to substantiate later assertions in the play about his motives and intentions.
The supporting cast is somewhat weaker. York is OK as the love interest, but the climactic revelations of the last scene don’t adequately register with her. Likewise, Matt Lewis and Daryl Lisa Fazio are effective enough as the long-suffering parents, but more accomplished actors could have achieved a lot more.
The production values are respectable: The detailed set is designed by Barrett Doyle and Joel Coady, the subtle lighting by Lauren Robinson.
At one point, the doctor talks to Sam about the ability of high art to move and inspire. At the very least, that “Boy” may fall short of that level doesn’t make its sensitive subject matter any less interesting.
Stephen Collins, April 3, 2016
Good set design can really improve, amplify and illuminate the themes and narratives of complex writing for the theatre. Sandra Goldman’s deceptively simple design for Boy, a new work from Anna Ziegler, is profoundly eloquent, and adds immeasurably to the texture of the work.
The action spans the years between 1968 and 1990. To the left of the stage is a formal space, perhaps an office or waiting room. There are two doors built into the back of the playing area, a couch, a lamp, a sort of coffee table, a single chair. It looks normal, domestic, unpretentious.
But above this simple, easily adaptable space, directly above, is an upside down not-quite mirror image of the furniture and objects in the playing area. Colours are different and some objects are similar, not identical, but there is a specific duality between the two spaces.
The impression is of a world that is both upside down and normal; an everyday experience and a quite extraordinary one; of things looking like one thing but being another. Goldman’s design sets up the key pulses of Ziegler’s play with stylish efficiency.
Twin boys are born to Trudy and Doug Turner in 1968. They contract a disease and the medical recommendation is that they both be circumcised. But the procedure goes horribly wrong and one of the twins, Sam, has his penis severed off completely. The distraught parents seek help from a Doctor they see on television and he recommends that they raise their boy as a girl, call her Samantha, and chemically and surgically alter his gender from male to female. Dr Barnes is a proponent of the “Nurture over nature” ideology.
The toll that Barnes’ advice takes on the Turner family (including the never seen but much spoken about twin, Stephen) is excruciating. Despite all the nurturing and the other interventions, Samantha just wants to be a boy, then a man. The gender she was born with proves dominant and true. Samantha is erased and Adam is born. Adam is sure it is right for him but will anyone else agree? Especially Jenny, a vivacious pretty girl that Adam wants to marry.
Ziegler has written an intense, profoundly human play which deals with big picture issues in a very powerful and unsentimental way. At 90 minutes, Boy covers a lot of ground in a short space of time. Every word is carefully chosen, each character sharply observed, each situation marinated in, sometimes quite lyrical, acuity. It is luminous and exacting writing.
Happily, director Lindsay Firman understands what a gift to the theatre Ziegler’s script is, and delivers a production which truly does justice to it. The pace never slackens, the jumps in time are easily followed, no attempt is made to play for sympathy or to gloss over the hard edges of these very real, very believable characters. Like a great conductor of a marvellous symphony, Firman marshals the best players and ensures the sweeping majesty of the whole while not overlooking the virtuoso moments along the way. Everything is entirely pitch-perfect.
As the ordinary working class parents caught up in a nightmare, Heidi Armbruster (Trudy) and Ted Köch (Doug) are quite remarkable. Armbruster seamlessly shows the anguish and hope of the mother wanting the best for her child. The moment she realises that Dr Barnes may have been wrong all along about what was best for her son is profoundly shattering. She encapsulates the hopes and fears of parenthood in direct and resonant ways.
Köch makes much out of little. He has much less dialogue than Armbruster, or so it seems. His Doug is a classic working man father, hard-working, taciturn, fond of a beer, and protective of his wife and children. He goes along with Dr Barnes’ solutions because his wife thinks it is the way of hope and because he does not trust his own instincts over a learned man of medicine. Köch conveys the cancer-like effect Barnes’ advice causes in him and his family with painstaking, mostly unspoken, clarity.
There is a devastating moment when he finally breaks and expels Dr Barnes from their lives. Köch handles this with raw, repressed fury and you can feel the heat in his veins as surely as you can see the effort it takes his Doug not to thrash Dr Barnes to within easy reach of death’s embrace.
Equally devastating, but for very different reasons, is the scene where he visits Adam and has what might be their first real “father/son” chat. In lesser hands, that scene could be tiresomely manipulative, but Köch is entirely honest in the delivery, to very affecting ends. His real love for his son is profoundly clear as well as his permanent sense of failure over what happened to his little boy, something he berates himself about and which leaves its haunted handprint all over Köch’s Doug.
Together, Köch and Armbruster are believable in every way: as a couple, as parents, as people betrayed by their trust in a medical professional, as people bewildered by how to cope with and help their son, as loving, frightened and wonderful protectors of their family.
Rebecca Rittenhouse is also in winning form as Jenny, the spirited single mother Adam wants to pursue. She is beautiful and comes with a son whom Adam wants to parent. She may not be very well educated but this Jenny has plenty of sense and she falls for Adam despite knowing that something is not quite right about him. Rittenhouse imbues Jenny with sparkling life, and the careful, watchful gaze of the lioness when it comes to matters involving her son. Unafraid of directness, she calls Adam out on his stubborn evasiveness, with consequences that will change her life, and the lives of all of the Turner family, forever.
In a performance of glorious simplicity and finely judged maternal and carnal instinctiveness, Rittenhouse is sheer delight. Her final scene with Adam is both gloriously hopeful and catastrophically confronting. (Couples all around me were interlocking hands, holding each other, crying – the honesty of the performance was profound)
In some ways the hardest role in the play is that of the medicine man who fails everyone: Dr Barnes. Of course, he is no villain, just someone who completely believes in his own ideas and methods and who thinks that they actually benefit others. There are Dr Barnes types everywhere in the real world. They are the ones who think sexuality is learnt behaviour and that it is impossible to be born into the wrong body; that torture can change desire or instinct; that all behaviour is a choice capable of modification; that things are only black and white.
Paul Niebanck is masterful in this difficult role. He is helped a little by the fact his advice is given in the late 1960s, but it takes real skill to permit the audience any kind of empathy with this driven, self-constructed manipulator of other lives. Yet, Niebanck manages that: astonishingly, he ensures that Dr Barnes is not just a moustache-twirling villain of obsidian complexion. Just as the medical practitioner who severed Sam’s penis made a mistake, so too did Dr Barnes – and Niebanck demonstrates that subtly and surely.
He establishes a warm, paternal relationship with the Samantha that he creates and comes to loves. There is a scene where young, troubled Samantha begs Dr Barnes to let her come live with him, as if he is the only person in the world who could possibly understand her. It’s a quite devastating sequence, not the least because of the other Frankenstein references which occur in the play. Samantha is the creature created by Dr Barnes and when she ceases to live, he suffers in real and carefully conveyed ways. Niebanck is faultless in a part which is difficult and exacting.
But for Boy to work, a truly virtuoso, bravura performance is required from Samantha/Adam – the role requires lightning fast changes of mood and character, switching from a pre-adolescent confused Samantha to a early twenties angry Adam often, with no help in the costume department. The character experiences every emotion known to mankind during the course of the play, and it’s a roller-coaster of total commitment, emotional evisceration and telling, bruising reticence.
Bobby Steggert is quite revelatory in the role, astonishing, powerful and completely convincing. This represents a significant step-up for Steggert, and he shoulders the leading man responsibilities with consummate dedication and utter conviction. Every moment of his performance is superb, finely judged, beautifully conveyed. It’s a career defining performance.
Steggert is very convincing as the struggling Samantha: he plays a young girl simply, to devastating effect. The transformation is total with the aid of any makeup. Steggert just becomes Samantha and then becomes Adam – and in both incarnations of the character he is unfeasibly convincing and committed. It’s acting in its purest, most supple form.
There are so many moments of savage power it is impossible to list them all, but especially astonishing are the scenes where Adam finally confronts Dr Barnes, where Adam introduces Jenny to his mother, where Samantha begs Dr Barnes to essentially adopt her; and where Adam listens to his father tell a story about a car ride when he and his twin were toddlers. And the final scene between Steggert’s Adam and Rittenhouse’s Jenny is immaculate, a triumph of dramatic storytelling and faultless acting.
This is a spectacularly good production of a truly wonderful and inspiring play. It is easily the best play Ziegler has written to date, confirms her as a major talent on the world stage, and ought to make her a real contender for a Pulitzer Prize. Sensational and insightful writing, combined with unbeatable performances and sensitive, unintrusive direction – truly wonderful theatre.
Do not miss it.