GAY PEOPLE'S Chronicle
FEBRUARY 26, 1999
Evenings Out
A one-man show about becoming a woman
by Dawn E. Leach
New York City—If there's an award for the actor who is able to convincingly play the most characters in a single show, then Lenny Pinna must be a serious contender for the prize.
He probably thought he played the most characters he would ever play in one night when he played 18 characters in A Perfect Ganesh at Cleveland's Dobama Theatre in 1996. Now he's playing 25 characters in Making Faces in New York.
"A lot of people, straight or gay, can't imagine it: What does that feel like to be in the wrong gender? This play gives them an idea.”
There are some extraordinary characters for Pinna to explore in this play.
Making Faces is a semi-autobiographical play by Cleveland playwright Christine Howey. Born Richard Howey and raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, Howey was a successful advertising executive, husband and father when he made the courageous step of introducing the world to Christine, the woman that Howey had realized she needed to be.
"A lot of people, straight or gay, can't imagine it: What does that feel like to be in the wrong gender?" she said. "This play gives them an idea.”
Noelle Howey, Christine's daughter and the play's producer, said Pinna is the perfect person to portray that for the audience.
"He identifies as bisexual, and has had a lot of questions about different gender identities," she said. “He felt this was a role that he'd been waiting to play."
"He's good," she added. "He's scary good."
Pinna was eager to take on the task. "It's a wonderful challenge,” he said. “It just gets deeper every day, the level and layers that keep unfolding to me. What an amazing thing to me--to have the fluidity between genders and find their commonality, and not their difference."
Pinna said he thinks that gender is the last frontier of consciousness.
"I think it will have implications in many areas of life, not just sexually," he said. "I think it has implications on the foundations of life, politics, religion everything.”
Christine Howey, who currently serves as a board member of the Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center, wrote Making Faces to give a portrayal of a different kind of life from recent Hollywood portrayals of transgender characters.
"All of them are larger than life, witty performers," said Noelle Howey. "I think that allows people who are not transgender to remain outside of that experience because it's not naturalistic. It's exaggerated.”
Shows like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Hedwig and the Angry Inch make being transgender seem like a glamorous lifestyle,
while others, like The Crying Game, gloss over how difficult it can be.
The younger Howey said that when her friends learn that her father is transsexual, those Hollywood stereotypes are the first thing they imagine.
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"People always expect her to look like Boy George," she said. "My father doesn't look very flamboyant. She shops at the Gap."
In reality, a transsexual is usually just "a person who wants to live a normal life," Christine said.
Perhaps one of the reasons that people don't get a broader picture of transsexuals is that most strive to blend in and not stand out.
"It's hard to be out and proud while you're trying to fit in," Noelle said. "That's part of the dichotomy that this play is trying to address, and I think it does."
Christine wanted people to see a different side of transgender issues that haven't been addressed before-from the perspective of a suburban Midwest business executive whose nickname as a child was Duke.
There's a kind of poetic symmetry in the fact that Noelle is the producer for Making Faces. She has been involved in her father's gender identity journey since he transitioned when she was 16 years old.
"We lived in Moreland Hills [a Cleveland suburb] while I was in high school. For years, this was the secret, the thing we couldn't talk about. My mother made me understand: Under no circumstances could we talk about it," she said.
kind
"It's of strange that ten
Christine Howey
making fades
years later I'm putting up posters all over New York."
Changing your sex
isn't as hard as
changing your mind.
But talking about her father's gender transition is nothing new to Noelle.
"I feel like I've been giving the same spiel since I was 16," she said--but she doesn't mind. "Somebody's got to educate them, and if it has to be me, so be it."
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"People think it's a tragedy, and it's not," Noelle said. "The tragedy is when people stay in the closet. If my father hadn't come out, I don't think we would have the relationship we have today. I think that he would be dead.”
Now, she is excited to be able to be a part of helping even more people understand by bringing her father's story to life on stage.
"There's something about people's stories that is so much more useful than some
psychologist going on about it," she said. While she said she hopes the play answers questions some people may have about transgender issues, the younger Howey pointed out that "this is just my father's experience. It's not some kind of self-help tract."
"We hope people won't think of it as educational," she added. "It's entertaining and it's funny and it's poignant and all those things you want in theater. There won't be
study questions at the end."
After all, she quipped, “you have to have a sense of humor when you're going through a sex change."
Making Faces is premiering at the Phil Bosakowski Theater-March 3-14 at 345 W. 45th St at 9th Ave. in New York City. For ticket information, call 212-592-3675.