A wasted opportunity …
The blurby bit
A comedic, one-woman show written and performed by Maria Telnikoff based on her own experience of growing up with a trans female parent.
My Dad Wears A Dress follows a girls journey, from childhood to youth, navigating a world in which all the dads she knows are men.
Filled with hilarious tales from her school days (from toilet mishaps to failed Valentines Day confessions), it shows the difficulties of fitting in as a young person and the fears we feel about being labelled “outside the box”.
Brimming with life and sincerity, the play challenges a world of heteronormative values, from the struggles of buying a Fathers’ Day card to the questions raised describing one’s family in a French lesson.
From The Pen theatre website
The Pen Theatre is tucked away in a room in a re-purposed warehouse, now occupied by bohemia, just round the corner from Millwall FC. Although it’s a downtrodden part of town, it’s actually a nice little venue with a small bar and outside seating. Inside holds about twenty. The audience was mostly young and woke, but not particularly ‘genderqueer’, I thought. Students.
The purpose of going and this review was to critique how the issues around having, as it were, a ‘trans female parent’ were presented. I don’t think Maria Telnikoff made too bad a fist of it though (damning with faint praise, I know) as she was funny and lively and it was put together quite slickly.
However, we sadly never really learnt anything about Telnikoff’s dad’s ‘transition’, or even if he had ‘transitioned’. It’s entirely possible he was simply a crossdresser but I think we were to take it that he had gone the medical/surgical route. Nothing was said about how her mother had taken this shift, except that we guessed she had accepted it as they were still together. Tellingly a child’s drawing of mum and dad waved at us, had mum looking like a frump and dad looking fabulous. Nor was it clear at what point it had happened in her childhood (although I learned later from her GoFundMe she was six). We did learn that her father was 50.
My dad transitioned when I was 6 and it always made sense to me that my dad would want to be a woman as I agreed with her that women had the better shoes, better clothes and that girls ruled (and boys stank!).
Telnikoff’s GoFundMe
One of the experiences she recounts is being in primary school and her father randomly turning up at class. The teacher greets him and, not understanding he is in fact a man, asks him whether he is pregnant, since Maria has been talking about reproduction in class (‘babies being born from seeds’ – a moment of pointed confusion). It seems unlikely anyone would think a 50 something year old woman was pregnant, much less a man, nor being bold enough to comment on it on meeting them.
The only negative response she appeared to have around the situation was that of mild discomfort. In particular, there were no feelings of hot betrayal or of being disinherited, as you’d expect.
Notable moments in the plot included her father saving her when she got stuck in the loo when she was four years old (so pre-transition). Toilets remained a theme as later her father told her the gents were disgusting and smelly and advised her she should go in one to find out.
Also slightly unnerving was the time spent on pulling down her knickers to reenact going to the loo (we hoped that she had another pair on underneath). Unnecessary and slightly gratuitous, especially as she was dressed like a schoolgirl (think Britney Spears). All unconscious metaphors perhaps?
As for the performance it, was too one note, with her mostly shouty in a petulant child voice, which worked sometimes but also meant she never calmed down enough for us to learn who she was or how she felt. I suspect delving too deeply into genuine moments of conflict would simply have been too ‘transphobic’, although some themes did appear to have leaked out.
In her GoFundMe she admits the purpose of the play is explicitly political and it seems she couldn’t stray from her ideal of wanting ‘to normalise the representation of non-heteronormative families’. A wasted opportunity.
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The Lies They Tell 
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