Pony
Cast:
Cav - AJ Davenport Stell - Lauren Dunagan Heath - Kian Johnson Marie - Julie Kuwabara Pony - Fenner Frank Merlick Crew:
Stage Manager - Nikki Egget Lighting Design - Patrick Toebe Sound Design - Christopher Sauceda Costume Design - Kathleen Qiu Scenic & Prop Design - Vincent Chau Dramaturg - Jax Blaska Production Assistant - Jacob Zimmer Fight Choreography: Dave Maier |
When Pony, a formerly incarcerated trans guy, moves to a post-industrial town to start a new life, he soon realizes that the people there reflect his own lived experiences with scarcity, isolation, toxicity, and gender identity. He starts to fall for a woman whose escapist fantasies could be a salve. Or, will this new love lead him down a path of violence?
The characters in Sylvan Oswald’s Woyzeck-inspired slow-burning thriller exist in a world that is hostile to their existence. To illustrate this, I leaned into a surrealistic aesthetic. The set was an Escher-esque jumble of jutting corners, narrow alleys, and clinging branches. Assisted by expressive lighting and a haunting sound design, my staging pushed characters approaching the brink of explosion into increasingly uncomfortable proximity with each other. Performed in the heart of San Francisco’s Transgender District, this play includes three trans-masculine characters of different generations and at different stages of self-realization and examines tropes of masculinity and gendered-violence.
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“Pony feels like part of an exciting new wave of trans theater.”
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Photos: Ben Krantz