25
Waiting for Maura
People say to me, “You must be having the best time of your life.” And I say, “Yes.” What I don’t say is it can also be very hard because I get into a bit of a state when I play Maura. It would be wrong to say “nervous,” because I’m not scared, or not “performer scared.” The word that comes to mind is “cranky.” It’s bad mood–adjacent, just a bit north of “grumpy.” And it’s because I am obsessed with doing Maura right.
It’s like having a rope around your neck. When I’m away from the set, the rope is very loose, but I know the rope is there. If I have a 10:00 a.m. call, the rope begins tightening at 7:00 a.m. when I wake up. It’s tighter by 8:00 a.m. when I have yogurt; 8:30, granola, tighter. By the time my assistant, Van Barnes, picks me and the vultures up for the ride to the set, I can’t talk. Van thinks I’m just being actory and preparing, but I’m actually just asking myself, Can I pull this off again? Every day I drive past the Paramount gates, I get in that mood. I get uncomfortable. And it’s the ideal mindset, because that discomfort is exactly how Maura feels every day. This is the most successful I’ve ever been, and it’s the most antsy I’ve ever been. At the same time, I love playing Maura from “Action” to “Cut.”
It began on a Thursday in July 2013. I flew to L.A. to appear on an interview show called The Talk. In the car from LAX to the Fairmont Hotel, where I always stay when I’m in town, I opened an e-mail from my agent, Leslie Siebert. She’d attached a script for the pilot of a new series written by Jill Soloway. “Look at Mort/Maura,” she said. “This is a game changer.” The last time she said that was when she told me I had been cast in The Larry Sanders Show. Another game changer? Mort/Maura—what the…?
I believe it was on page eight—a scene about eating barbecue—as my car was passing Whole Foods on Lincoln Boulevard, that I said to myself, “Oh my God.” Game changer? I had never read anything like this before—a family whose patriarch comes out as a woman? The Pfeffermans are West Coast Jews who put the d back in dysfunctional. You could describe the Tambors of Westlake the same way.
I called Leslie as soon as I got to my room. “I’m in. Tell them I’m in.”
“Well, you have to meet Jill Soloway.”
“Fine, whatever, I’m in.”
The next day I did my segment on The Talk, a CBS show filmed in the Valley. I arranged to meet Jill right after that at a Le Pain Quotidien right around the corner from The Talk on Ventura Boulevard. I walked in and Jill met me at a table and told me to wait just a bit as she finished up with a reporter who was interviewing her for Afternoon Delight, for which she had won the directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival. While she was telling me this, the first thing that hit me over the head was Jill’s eyes. There is such a presence, and they shine and go deep. There is just no doubt that she sees, that she is a seer.
When she was done, she came over to my table and sat down to talk. She showed me pictures of her parent, Carrie, who had recently come out as trans and was the inspiration for the show.
This is how the conversation went:
Jill said a sentence, and I said, “I’m in.”
Jill said another sentence, and I said, “I’m in.”
Jill said another sentence, and I said, “I’m in.”
I all but threw myself at her, because this script of hers had struck me in much the way I’d been struck by The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development. In all three, there were risk and great characters and great writing. All three also shared a nontraditional platform: Larry Sanders was one of the first original shows on HBO, Arrested was one of the first original shows on Fox, and now Transparent was going to be a streaming show on Amazon—it’s television that isn’t even on television.
But this show had so much more, because Mort Pfefferman becomes one of the most fantastic people I have ever encountered—Maura Pfefferman.
“I’m in.”
I put my hand up to high-five her, and she put up hers but stopped. “Not quite yet,” she said. “Give me a little time.” Was there another actor in line ahead of me? I had no idea. I still have no idea. And no, never tell me, ever.
I went back to my room at the hotel and watched a copy of Afternoon Delight that Jill had sent me. I loved it. I could see that Jill never rushed a moment; she let a moment play all its truth. Her director of photography was the brilliant Jim Frohna, and she was bringing him on board for Transparent. I loved the film’s star, the great Kathryn Hahn, who plays Rabbi Raquel in Transparent.
I called Jill (in the same way I called Garry Shandling years earlier) and left a message telling her how floored I was and “I’m in.” We swapped a few e-mails. Days passed.
Finally, my agent called. Yes! “Jill wants you for Transparent.” YES!
And here was a bonus: among my amazing costars was my friend from the Milwaukee Rep more than forty years before, Judith Light.
I flew out to L.A. two weeks before we were to begin shooting the pilot. Kasia and the kids stayed in New York.
Our first table read was on the Paramount Studios lot. There were no nameplates, no scripts premarked in yellow, but there was this: Jill Soloway seated at the head of the table. “I want to make the world safe for my parent.” With that mission statement, the actors began—as Neil Young would sing it—and that baby lifted right off the ground. It sailed and soared, and it ended with a trio of three actresses accompanied by a lone guitar singing “Operator” by Jim Croce: “Operator, well could you help me place this call?”
As the music came to an end, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. There was silence, and then the room burst into applause that lasted forever. I was sitting next to Judith, and we looked at each other. We had just witnessed the best table read of our careers.
But there were a lot of days I spent alone—not lonely, but alone. I had rented a bungalow in Pacific Palisades. It was very small, with just the fundamentals—sofa, table, chairs, all covered with the first drafts of Season One. I was paralyzed in the face of the daunting task and season ahead of me. There were friends in the Palisades—I used to live there back in the day—but I couldn’t pick up the phone. It was just me, the bungalow, and all the scripts from Season One of Transparent.
One night my friends Jay and Julia Phelan invited me to dinner at a local restaurant, but during the meal I realized I couldn’t understand what they were talking about and I was unable to talk. I saw them stealing looks at each other. That was my last night in public till filming. I hadn’t found Maura, nor did I have the technique of playing Maura or really know what I was doing. I took me and my paralysis back to our bungalow.
I met with Jenny Boylan, Zackary Drucker, and Rhys Ernst, my trans teachers. How do I, Jeffrey Tambor, how do I do this? This is not putting on clothes, or getting a mani-pedi. This is a transition to another life. How do you do it right?
All of this Sturm und Drang, the shaky hands, became a godsend, an unintentional way to Maura. She too is alone—not lonely, but alone—she too has shaky hands. She too doesn’t know how to do Maura; she just has to. She has no choice.
I remember dropping my kids off at a French summer camp in Montreal, and as I was leaving I turned and saw Gabriel sitting by himself eating his awful dinner, and the table came up to his nose. We got in the car, and Kasia drove while I blubbered. The reason I was blubbering is, I am that kid. And that’s the universality of Maura. There’s alone and there’s alone.
Then Jill arranged a field trip for a few of us to a bar in the Valley called the Oxwood. It would be Maura’s debut. Jill, Jim Frohna, Rhys Ernst, and Zackary Drucker came to my room—609, Fairmont Hotel, Santa Monica, to be forever called the Maura Suite (I stay there still)—and we talked a long time. They helped make me up and dress as Maura. I remember her coming to life in the mirror and meeting my new friend for the first time. She looked nice, friendly, rather pretty, and a bit shy—she kept averting her glance.
I walked unsteadily through the hotel lobby to the car. I thought, Don’t ever forget this feeling because this is every day of Maura’s life. My new friend and I were “stepping out.”
When I got out of the car in front of the bar, the valet said, “Do you know who’s here tonight? Judith Light!”
I walked in and Maura was welcomed by everyone there. It wasn’t about Jeffrey, it was about her. The staff knew what we were doing, and they were incredibly supportive. We all danced that night—Jill, Judith, Rhys, Zackary, Jim, and Maura.
When I needed to use the bathroom, Judith said, “Where are you going to go?”
“I’m going to the ladies’ room.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” she asked and started to follow.
“No, I’m going to go on my own.”
I took Maura on another field trip, to Gelson’s Market, because I thought that’s where she would do her grocery shopping. I stood in the middle of an aisle thinking, What would Maura eat? Another shopper looked at me and smirked. It was one of the meanest smirks I’ve ever seen. Oh my God. I had been clocked. So that’s what that feels like. Don’t forget this feeling.
Zackary and I got a couple of salads to eat in the seating area outside the store. There were no free tables, so Zackary pointed toward one where a man was seated talking on his cell phone.
“No,” I said.
“Go,” Zackary said.
We sat down and the man kept talking, glancing up at us every once in a while. He finished his call and stood up. “Have a good day, ladies,” he said and walked away.
Zackary beamed and immediately high-fived me as I spiritually flew around the world.
I was throw-up nervous before my first scene on the first day of shooting, but it turned out to be a love fest. I will forever remember sitting around the round dinner table with the actors who play the Pfefferman children: Gaby Hoffmann, Amy Landecker, and Jay Duplass, all of our faces smeared with barbecue sauce, and just offscreen are Jill Soloway and Jim Frohna behind the camera. Everywhere I looked—there was genius holding down the fort. Whatever this is, this is home base.
In that first scene, I was playing Mort, and Mort is about to tell his children his secret. I put my head down and said this line that I adore, “I love you guys love you guys love you guys.” I barely whispered it, and when I looked up, I saw this powerful table—Amy to my left, Gaby to my right, and Jay opposite. It was in that moment that I said to myself, This thing is going to go.
The pilot was done, and I returned to my life in New York to wait. When we got picked up for ten episodes and I returned to L.A. to shoot the season, I had to confront something: I had to build and embody Maura, a transgender character. I am a cisgender male. I was seventy years old. I’d never played a trans character. I thought I knew a lot about the trans community, but I knew nothing. I was certain that there would come a day when there would be a tapping on my dressing room door and someone saying, “I’m sorry, we made a terrible mistake. We’re going another way.”
Shortly before the first season aired, Jill screened the first couple of episodes at the Directors Guild of America. I sat behind a trans woman who was flipping through her program rapidly and dismissively and saying, “Oh! Oh!” When the lights came down and the show started, she didn’t watch. She put her head down. Growing up in that house where the corridors were filled with danger, I got good at sensing when something was amiss. The whole energy field around this woman was not good. I remember elbowing my assistant Van Barnes and nodding toward the row in front of us. “Something bad this way comes.”
When the lights came up after the screening, Jill and I and the rest of the cast took the stage for a panel discussion and Q&A with the audience. After some very nice questions and answers, the “Oh! Oh!” woman stood up and—Here it comes. And indeed it came. Eileen and Barney grabbed the microphone. “This is like watching blackface. What is he doing in this role? A transgender actress should be playing Maura.”
Jill and Zackary handled the situation artfully, but I went into a fugue state all the way back to Daly City, California. Shtick drek. Shhhhh…shhhhh. Keep your nose clean, Beppy. Don’t make waves…shhhhhh.
When we left the stage, people were saying words of congratulation to me but I couldn’t hear, I could just see mouths moving. My friend Peter Binazeski, who is the head of publicity for Amazon, had to put me in my car. I recovered by Season Three, but I feel that tap tap tap every day when we’re shooting, still.
Do this right. Do this right. Do this right.
Much of the show, and of my effort to embody Maura, is figuring out where she belongs. Once she comes out as a woman, she can’t go back. She can only go forward; but what does forward look like? Is it femme? Is it Mother Earth? Is it maidenly? Is it sexy? Is she going to take hormones? How does she talk? How do you wear lipstick? How do you walk in heels? What does she look like? Who are her friends? Will she be loved? Will she be able to love?
This show is a revelation not just in what it addresses but in the alchemy Jill Soloway brings to it. Jill has the lightest and yet deepest touch of any director I have worked with. She is actor-centric and understands what an actor does and what an actor has to do to get to the truth of a scene. Under her baton exists the safest, most innovative set I have ever been on. There are no mistakes, there’s just another take, a different take.
One morning, Gaby Hoffmann and I got to the set early to do a scene together. When we arrived, there was Jill, all scrunched up in her parka (soundstages can get very cold), with her eyes closed, thinking. I could tell she had gotten to the set earlier than all of us and had been there for a while, imagining the scene to come. She wasn’t blocking it or storyboarding it, she was simply imagining it.
She runs an intuitive set where things can change on a dime. In Season One, on what happened to be my seventieth birthday, we were doing a Shabbos candle-lighting scene that is interrupted by Sarah’s husband (played by the wonderful Rob Huebel), who is furious that she is in a lesbian relationship with another woman, and Maura lets him have it. It was going very well, and then Jill came on the set and whispered in my ear a complete reversal of what we were doing. She prompted me to have not a masculine reaction, as I was naturally inclined to, but a woman’s reaction—gentler, inclusive, more befitting Maura than Jeffrey. And yet she didn’t tell me what to do, there was no “direction” in the conventional sense. She was adding ingredients and taking away others, in the process changing Maura’s mind. At the end of the next take, Jill didn’t yell, “Cut!” She simply walked up to me and kissed me on the cheek. Then she led me down the corridors of the Pfefferman house set, turn left here, right there, until we reached the final door. Through it, in the vast arena of the soundstage, was a huge birthday cake, every member of the production team, and Carrie, Jill’s real-life Moppa, ready to sing “Happy Birthday.”
Another day, another scene, another Jewish ritual, this time Yom Kippur, and again all the Pfeffermans are seated around the huge table. It is revealed that Shelly had had a miscarriage years ago. Once again, it was going very well, and then, walk walk walk, here comes our Jill, who whispers something very quickly, not even fifteen seconds, into the ear of Judith Light, or as I like to call her, “Killer” (because she murders a scene). On the next take, there came from Judith such a mournful keening it could only have sprung from the underworld. Whatever Jill whispered to her elicited this performance.
Jill isn’t only about her direction; she encourages us to be in the moment on the set. In the first episode of Season Two, Maura’s older daughter, Sarah, is marrying Tammy. The entire family, all dressed in white, gathers for a wedding photograph. Maura asks the photographer, “Do you want my head up or head down?” And the photographer says, “I think chin up for you, sir.” It was a mistake, but with the freedom we’re given by Jill, I went with it. I said to Judith/Shelly, “Did he just call me ‘sir’?”
“Yes.”
“We’re done. We’re done.” And Shelly and Maura walk off. It was entirely unintended, but it was a spectacular way to open the episode. Amazon used it in the publicity for the season, all because Jill fearlessly didn’t yell “Cut!” In fact, I distinctly remember the sound of Jill’s laugh from all the way over in the video village where she was watching the action on screen. It was Jack Cook all over again.
By the third season, Maura had infiltrated my life. Sometimes when I’m talking, I hear her. Even in my daily word choice. I wear Maura’s ring on my pinky even when I’m not working on the show. And I do use the ladies’ room probably more often than I should. I am known for walking into women’s bathrooms in airports all over the country until someone says, “Excuse me, sir?” That difference no longer exists to me. There was one episode that season when I had to play young Mort, and I had no idea how to do it. I felt false and actory, because this wasn’t who this character was anymore.
One day, my daughter Evie said, “Dad, I want to go to the set.”
Kasia and I looked at each other.
“Uh…er…see, um, Daddy’s playing a…”
She got right to it. She was nine years old. “Daddy, I understand. I know that the character is more comfortable as a woman.” Out of the mouths of babes.
I took her to the set. She sat next to me and watched as Daddy put his makeup on and was transformed into Maura. And then my daughter and I had a mani-pedi together.
On the morning of the first day of shooting Season Three, Jill got up on a box and gathered the entire cast and crew together to address us. People streamed out of offices to gather on the stage. When Jill was done, I said a few words. Then, one by one, other people got up on the box and said something. It was profound, the inclusivity of this group. Someone said, “We should do this every morning.” And so we did. The beginning of each day began with a chorus of people yelling, “Box!”
The day Prince died, DJ, one of our camera operators, talked about how important Prince had been to him. Everyone on that set was affected, across generations, from me down to the pishers. Then Jill said, “Can someone in Sound put on some Prince?” The music came on and everyone started dancing. I said to a PA, “Mark this moment, because you will never see this again.” You will never see this on any set where fear reigns, where there’s not enough time, there’s not enough money, there’s no sense of play, where everyone is worried about being canceled and billing and the size of their dressing room. On this set Jill has, everyone is wearing a red bowtie.
The final episode of Season Three (spoiler alert) takes place on a cruise ship. There’s not enough Xanax or Ambien to persuade me to take a cruise. I was certain I would die on this cruise. I mean, I did The Love Boat. Why would I ever get back on a cruise ship?
I fucking loved it. I had my own little cabin and my own butler. The one concession we had to make shooting on the boat was that we had to dress and do makeup in our cabins. My butler was from the Philippines, so he had zero idea of who I was. What he did know was that sometimes when he brought the breakfast rolls, Mr. Tambor would be in full Maura costume and wig. One time he walked in when my assistant Van was on her knees painting my toenails.
Anyway, the cruise ship was perfect for me. My whole life, I’ve loved two things. I love to be by myself, but know that people are nearby. The ship outside the door of my little private cabin was filled with thousands of people. I would leave my cabin and take the elevator to the deck where we were filming. Some days on that elevator, I was dressed as a man. Others, as a woman. The looks on the passengers’ faces when I was in full Maura were amazing. Van and I laughed very hard after some of those elevator rides.
The other thing I love is knowing that food is there. I don’t want to eat the food because I have a fear of gaining weight (“Look how you look”), but I need to know it’s there. On the ship, there was food everywhere. It’s in your shoes. They put it in your toothpaste. You walk out of your cabin and there’s food. My butler brought me sandwiches every day. I never ate them, but I was so happy the sandwiches were there. Then you go down to the dining hall and there are choices as far as the eye can see. I would walk around the room to the Asian station to watch them cook pot stickers, to the German station for the sausages, then to the BBQ and the pizza. I didn’t eat any of it, but I felt joy because I love the kitchen. The kitchen makes me think of my grandma, and I associate it with creativity. For me, cooking is like acting, putting together ingredients until they become art. I’m addicted to The Great British Bake Off; I could watch it on a loop. Hi, Mary Berry! Bye, Mary Berry!
My crowning achievement during that week at sea was getting my photograph taken with the captain of the ship while wearing a captain’s hat. In a nutshell, forty years of my career bracketed by cruise ships, from fourth billing after Sylvia the Seal on The Love Boat to Transparent. From shame to fame.
Judith Light asked me during a panel we did together at the Paley Center in New York, “What has changed for you since Transparent?”
“Aside from my tendency to use the ladies’, I find myself getting cranky easily. It’s like when you have a tag on your neck that scratches you.”
“You mean like old people get?”
“Not a skin tag! A tag on your shirt!”
One day when we were filming, I was sitting in a stall in the women’s room right off stage 15 at Paramount. I’d already peed, so I was just sitting there collecting my thoughts when two women from production came in. “It’s going very well,” I heard one of them say. “I’m glad he’s in a good mood today.”
I waited for a beat, and then: “I’m in here.”
They hightailed it out of there. I probably should have kept my mouth shut. I guess I wanted to acknowledge that I knew that they knew that Maura could make me cranky.
See, here’s the thing about acting. When a dog dies in most people’s lives, you’re sad. When you’re an actor and the dog dies, you’re sad and your acting gets better. In my case, my friend Garry died while we were filming the third season, and that passing knocked down any emotional barriers I had. It gave me more access.
And following Garry’s orders, I “let it happen.”
As I said to the crew during that lovely seventieth birthday party, this is what I always thought acting was supposed to feel like. All I ever wanted to do was this.
People like to use words like authentic. It’s all around social media, posted on Facebook, tweeted around the word at Mach speed. But for the character of Maura, those words are her daily life. She has lived a lie for seventy years, not authentic, and alone and full of shame. That lie has made her see the world very clearly; she knows friend or foe immediately. Even after she comes out and begins to live her “true self,” she struggles to find her place in the world.
But here’s the deal—another “lie,” if you will: at the end of the day, I take my wardrobe off, hang it up, take off the makeup and nail polish (most days I leave it on), and put on my cisgender costume and head home to resume that life. I am an actor—I have been an actor for fifty years—and I have been trying to play Maura for only three seasons now. We have just been renewed for a fourth season as I am writing this book. Hi, Amazon! Hi, Jeff Bezos! Hi, Roy Price! Hi, Joe Lewis!
That said, I don’t pretend to know the real-life transgender experience. As I said at the 2016 Emmys ceremony, I hope I am the last cisgender male to play a trans role. There is a wonderful pool of trans acting talent, and their journey needs to be acknowledged and honored. Roles need to be created and auditions need to be had.
Back in 1966, when I taught my first beginners’ acting workshop at Wayne State as part of my scholarship to the graduate program, I had no idea what I was doing so I made up the class on the fly. The administration had given me a book from which to teach, but there is no book on acting. Mr. Mackley and Jack Cook didn’t use a book. I flipped through the chapters and came to a section on comedy—seriously? There was a paragraph that outlined the sound of an audience’s laughter from the beginning of an actor’s line to the end of the laugh. There was a point on the curve where the performer was supposed to come “in.” I took the book off the syllabus, which caused if not a furor in the department, certainly a “furette” and an academic “harrumph,” and earned me a great deal of static from the bookstore. Already I was an outlier.
On the first day of this first acting class, my friend Dave Regal sat in the back row of the Studio Theater and smiled as he watched me twisting in the wind. Hi, Dave! The first thing I did was have the students lie on the ground. I have no idea why I did this; probably to give me time to think of something. I moved among the bodies on the floor and talked to them about following impulses and how important intuition is to being an actor. I talked about the danger of squelching impulses and trying to please people. Meanwhile, there was no book and a teacher new to Detroit was quite literally making the class up on the fly.
The world was in turmoil at the time. People were in the streets protesting the Vietnam War. I was out there too, on Woodward Avenue. The distrust of the government and a sense of fear were palpable in the air. You could see it in the faces on campus. I could feel it in this workshop. I was trying inexpertly to say to my students that here, in this room, they were safe. I promised them all passing grades and respect. (Indeed, I gave A’s to everyone who even walked through the door.)
I looked down at a young woman, Dede Cavanaugh, and she was weeping. I wasn’t at all sure of what I was saying, but her tears were the first sign that whatever the fuck I was talking about was somewhere near a truth. My friend Dave in the back had lost the smirk; he was sitting up and waiting to see what I was going to say or do next. As was I.
One by one, the students walked up on the stage and started talking to me. I had told them to bring a poem or something to read or a piece of art to show. When they were in “performance,” I would interrupt and ask questions. Where were you born? What’s your home life like? What are your parents like? When they resumed the performance, it would ineffably change into something very specific and human. I was getting them off “performance” and getting them onto the source—themselves. That made them “real.” I have used this opening technique for fifty years, both with pishers and the veterans with multipaged résumés.
CUT TO: The LGBT Center in Los Angeles, spring 2016. Some of the cast and crew of Transparent were invited to talk to people in the trans community and sign up people to work as background artists for the third season we were about to shoot. It was late afternoon, and I was seated at the Transparent table, shaking hands, taking pictures. In that afternoon, my Maura education was rebooted. This wasn’t soundstage 21 at Paramount, this was a real center with real people from this community, trans men and women in every size and shape and stage of transition.
I kept waiting to be called out for my performance, as I had been at the DGA screening, for my entitled cisgender actor status, but I was welcomed and embraced. It really was a community—a revelation to me—and I wanted in. Just like I said to Jill, “I’m in.”
Zackary Drucker, who is my teacher, and I arranged to do an acting workshop at the Center while I was in Los Angeles shooting Season Three. Before the first session, I told the class to bring in a personal monologue—the same assignment I have been giving my acting students for years.
I’ve noticed something that happens to me when I teach. My life gets better. I get better. Not my acting per se, but my life. It’s what Milton and other teachers had said to me: when you teach, you’re basically talking to yourself.
But I’ve also noticed that I always become angry—no, furious—on the drive to class. I think it has something to do with how much opposition there is in learning. The more years I teach, the more I can feel the opposition, and the more I fume in my car on the way.
When I enter the theater, and especially when I am in a critique with students, I can sense how many people there are in the space. It can get crowded; there are whole families surrounding each student—invisible fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, lovers—and they are there because they’ve been unconsciously invited by the student.
My first Saturday at the LGBT Center was a miracle. As I walked in, I could feel it immediately, an urgent sense of need, more than I have ever felt anytime anywhere in all my years of teaching. And no opposition. Most of the students I taught wanted to get a pilot for a TV show. I once told an actor that I’d rather he become a pilot than get a pilot. (He actually became a pilot. Hi, Travis!) But in that small dark theater at the Center, the students were there to claim their right to be artists.
To be an actor, I believe, you have to be personal and you must act as if your life depends on it. These students were there because their lives depended on it. And let me repeat: There was no opposition. They were unattended by naysayers and family members. They had been “alone” for some time now. They weren’t hoping to get a pilot, they were the pilots, and they were flying solo on this journey.
One by one, each student got up onstage and told their story.
For those hours in that room, I got to know who they were, and got to know who I was. That’s the tightrope and the baton you hold to steady yourself, what I’d been training for my whole life. Acting and comedy are about saving lives. My dad used to say, “Be useful.” This was useful.
When I teach—and it’s an old, old habit—I keep all the lights on in the theater. I want to make sure we all understand we are in a classroom and we are working. There is no verisimilitude of “reality”; this is really happening. I like to sit somewhere on the side between performer and audience so I can keep an eye on both, because performance happens onstage, but the story takes place, finally, in the theater.
During the trans talent workshop, I could see Zackary on the left side of the theater smiling and giving me overt nods as the class and I were moving forward, and on the right side was Ali Liebegott—writer, actor, standup comic, and producer of Transparent—nodding along as if at prayer.
At the end of the first session at 4:00 p.m., I backed out of the LGBT Center parking lot, drove around the block, and stopped my car on the side of the street. I just stared ahead, just as I had after my final lunch with Garry. It was all in that room—all sorts of thoughts and images going off in my head: purpose—art—sealed orders—bowties—This, This—Yes, Yes, Please—all swirling around. I sat there for what seemed forever.
There was this one image I couldn’t square with. She sat in the back that first day. She was very young-looking, probably in her twenties, and wearing a black shirt, jean jacket, and pants. Every time I looked her way, she would look away. I’m pretty good at reading people, and I couldn’t read her.
At the next class I asked her to take the stage. When she got up to do her monologue, she talked about living at home with her father. She said that to get to this class, she left the house without telling her father where she was going. She changed her clothes and put on her wig in the car.
And there it was. My mind snapped into gear and changed course. I finally got it in corporeal form: this was, and is, the movement, standing in front of me. During the course of our workshop, she came out to her dad. She changed me.
The last monologue of the final class, a woman took the stage. She was in her sixties, very well dressed and coifed. She was the CEO of a company, and she drove two hours to get to the class. She was articulate, very smart, and had obviously been through a lot and emerged brilliantly as this woman speaking in front of us, leading us gently by the hand through her world as a trans woman in business. As she talked, I thought, That’s me. That’s what I’m trying to create in Transparent. That’s Carrie, Jill’s real-life Moppa. She could have been Maura.
I was teaching her, but she was teaching me. We had come full circle.