Genre: Body Horror, Historic Horror, Sci-Fi Horror
Audience: Y/A
Diversity: Trans characters
Content Warnings: Abelism, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Gore, Illness, Medical Procedures, Transphobia/Misgendering, Violence (Highlight to view)
Blurb:
A “Gender Specialist” is brought into a secret Victorian–Era medical facility deep within the earth to unravel the mystery of a series of murders and body mutilations which have taken place. As he meets the sole survivor and begins to unravel the mystery as his claustrophobic paranoia begins to overtake him the specialist finds it hard to believe anything he's told.
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| My wife watched me draw this and wanted to know why I put her in such an ugly skirt. "It's for the review honey!" |
Anyway, like I said, Ashley is a talented writer who has written for Cosmopolitan, The Mary Sue, SFWA, and John Scalzi Blog. And for you other writers out there looking to diversify your work, she also developed a workshop for writing trans and nonbinary narratives available on WritingTheOther.com. She's also the one who introduced me to Rick and Morty and has fantastic hair. Neither of those things has anything to do with her writing, she just has excellent taste.
Ashley's new play, Oddity, is part of the Trans Theatre Fest at The Brick in Brooklyn. It's a creepy, suspenseful, psychological body horror play about gender that includes: flashbacks to a carnival freak show, a subterranean steampunkesque facility à la Jules Verne, and monster crabs (the crustacean kind, not the pubic lice kind).
The plays starts with terrified screams and the professor (who's never given a name) violently awakens to a doctor trying to push mysterious pills on him, a soldier "guarding" his room who won't use his correct pronouns or let him out for "classified" reasons, and the discovery that he's been losing time. His concerns are dismissed, his questions ignored, and he's consistently told to calm down. The professor is experiencing classic gaslighting, and here's the brilliant bit: between the dreams, flashbacks, lies, discrepancies, seemingly out-of-place items, and all around weird occurrences, it's difficult to determine what's real and what isn't, mirroring the professor's paranoia. At parts, I found myself frustrated because I couldn't figure out what was going on, and unnerved by the overall feeling of "wrongness". The body horror was pretty scary in and of itself, but it was the gaslighting that was truly terrifying. But fear not, everything makes sense in the end.
In fact, the ending was probably my favorite part. When everything finally falls into place it hits you like a punch to the gut, and I couldn't help yelling out a few expletives in surprise (much to the annoyance of my napping cat). This was literally my reaction while reading the play: "Hmmm, okay, that's creepy. Wait, what the...WHAT? WTF!?!!? Oh god oh god oh god, no no no no no no. Wait... but then that means... OMG. HOLY SHIT. SHIT. SHIT. WTF." So yeah, good job Ashley, I actually yelled out loud at my computer screen after finishing your play.
And that was just the script. I can't even imagine how I'd react to the actual performance, with actors Kelsey Jefferson Barrett, Kitty Mortland, Sam Lopresti, Aliyah Hakim, and Samantha Elizabeth Turlington, and directed by Ariel Mahler. So if you'd enjoy a creepy mindfuck of a play about trans people, by trans people, check out Oddity at the Brick theater (579 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn NY) on the following dates:
Thursday, July 20 @ 9:20pm
Saturday, July 22 @ 2pm
Monday, July 24 @ 9pm
Tickets are only $20.00 and you can purchase them here:
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