Theatre | The Guardian: ‘I’m always hungry for historical queer representation,” says Charlie Josephine, the non-binary playwright of I, Joan, a sweaty, heady, joyously queer new drama about the patron saint of France. “Because our history has been erased – particularly transgender people’s – there is very limited documentation of us throughout history, even though we have existed since the beginning of time.”
2 comments:
The headline is what made me read this article; it made me cackle because it felt so out of the blue. After reading the whole thing I really just want to ship myself off to London to watch this. Non-binary characters in theater are so rare that they almost feel like finding the golden ticket, treating them like fine china out of fear they might be taken away. I think it is really cool that the writer chose to blur the line between history and fiction. More so, I think it is really impressive that the Globe chose to give this story a chance. They definitely knew it would backfire in more ways than one, but if no one ever gives different stories an opportunity to be presented then we will step back into how things used to be (and well, still kind of are). I love the voice of the writer and her thought process when working on this piece too.
If you're going to tell me that you don't think that an adaptation of THE Joan of Arc who identifies as non-binary today doesn't shift your world then I don't know what to tell you. Like there are account in her journal that could be interpreted as body dysmorphia today and other moments in the writing where she questions her own identity. The article was just lovely to read too, like the way the playwright talked about how Joan's story related to their own experience and why they decided to write Joan as non-binary. One of the other beautiful parts of the article was when they were talking about how they incorporated movement into the play to add another interpretive layer into the show, truly forcing you to question moments and think about the show. Not to be ridiculously cheesy on the newspage, but I really liked this article and I'll be thinking about it for a while. It's also just like really quotable and it makes me happy.
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