Playwright/performer: Maureen Muldoon
At: Madison Street Theatre, 1010 W. Madison St., Oak Park. Tickets: 708-406-2491; mstoakpark.com; $15. Runs through: Sept. 23
Solo performer Maureen Muldoon's autobiographical show ( first in the new Power of One series at Oak Park's Madison Street Theatre ) starts, quite literally, with a signone reading "A Pansexual Transgender Lives Here." The words are emblazoned across stripes of pink and blue"a flag for a country I've never been to before," she tells us. And then she adds, "I need to Google that shit."
But it's hanging on the bedroom door of her teenager and youngest child, who also uses the sign ( in smaller print ) to inform his mom that he now uses masculine pronouns. And the search engine Muldoon really needs before talking to her kid is the one that takes her back through her own early life.
Fear was the guiding factor for her, she tells us. As the "baby sister" in a large Irish Catholic family in New Jersey's "Springsteen country," she never worked up the courage to jump off the high dive. Her mother worried about her being holed up in her own bedroom as a kid, "living in my own little world." ( "It wasn't that little," she addsa sign of the defiance bubbling just underneath her seemingly compliant surface. ) Nuns scolded her for asking too many questions in class. Sex equaled shamebut also provided a temporary balm after an early profound loss. No wonder Muldoon worries about screwing up this first crucial conversation with her newly out trans child.
It's not that she's judgmental. Far from it. But she worries about how her kid will be accepted in a Midwest suburb. ( Given the recent stories about the bullying and death threats faced by Oklahoma trans teen Maddie Rose and other crimes against trans people, those fears aren't unfounded, of course. ) Muldoon wonders if it would be easier for both of them if her child came out as lesbian instead, then instantly berates herself. "I shouldn't have hierarchies of what is or isn't appropriate."
Muldoon brings a self-effacing charm to this tale, laced through with bits of made-up songs. Love of music was a survival strategy in her family of "passive-aggressive hummers." And when she finally knocks on the door and starts talking to her son, it's clear that they're helping each other grow up by being honest with each other.
Her meditations on the imaginal discthe cells that survive the process of a caterpillar self-digesting before it turns into a butterflyare a touch heavy-handed as a metaphor for metamorphosis. But Big Giant Love succeeds at showing how parenting is also a process of sometimes-messy, but absolutely necessary, transformations for the future achieved through confronting the past.
See related article at www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/One-woman-show-focuses-on-challenges-of-raising-a-trans-child/63904.html .