At the end of the world, a trans girl finds an unlikely confidant in a cockroach. Oscar Reynolds delivers a complex, moving performance in an intimate meditation on self-acceptance and mortality.
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Trigger Warnings: Suicide, apocalyptic themes, transphobia & mortality
Jennie & The Cockroach (Forty-Nine Minutes and Thirty-Six Seconds Before the End of the World) is ‘a story about a trans girl’s struggles with love and grief at the end of the world,’ as described by Fat Cow Theatre’s Evie Chandler and Elliot Aitken in an interview with Everything Theatre. It is also about something more universal: self-acceptance on one’s own terms.
The Hope Theatre’s intimate stage is set with a wooden bed frame, its bed linens in disarray. Markers of femininity are scattered on the floor (pearls, roses, a hairbrush) amidst takeaway containers, papers and books. A computer monitor is set on a side table, the show’s title flickering against a static background. Blue lights roam over a prone Jennie (Oscar Reynolds), then brighten into a warm wash. A sound montage plays: voicemails, news clips warning about the coming apocalypse, radio static and coverage on recent backsliding on trans rights. The voicemails are from Jennie to her mother, which illuminates one of the work’s central wounds: it’s the end of the world, and she cannot seek comfort from the person who should offer it most.
Another voicemail reveals a friend’s suicide. These clips efficiently establish the play’s world and Jennie’s isolation within it. Reynolds slides off the bed, a puddle of defeated goo. A brilliantly extended self-pitying beat is unexpectedly punctured by Reynolds’ scream – a fanfare of sorts for her co-star’s entrance. Though the show’s titular cockroach is a tiny, immobile and plastic prop, it is cleverly used to repackage the classic soliloquy. Reynolds addresses rhetorical questions to the cockroach, mockingly and later tenderly named ‘Heathcliff,’ but really, she asks them of the audience: if you knew when the world would end, would you have lived life differently? Can we admit the excuses we make to resign ourselves to unhappiness? Reynolds draws the audience into Jennie’s inner world with ease, though at times, rapid or quiet delivery makes it hard to catch every word. She portrays Jennie with just the right amount of silliness (the sheer absurdity of slow dancing with a cockroach in a takeaway box is chef’s kiss), deeply felt anger and tender apologies. This complexity is hard to nail, and is the production’s essential ingredient.
Jennie’s trans identity informs the tenor of her core relationships, though it is, refreshingly, not a token to manufacture drama. Of course, parallels to the central bug in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis are easy to draw – when society’s rules lose their meaning, what really is the point of cleaning one’s room, or, for that matter, conforming to normative ways of living? Chandler’s writing is honest and poignant, gently revealing uncomfortable truths about the things we feel but dare not say out loud. One gets the feeling Chandler does this lovingly, like a friend who tells you your fly is down.
There are interesting contrasts within Jennie & The Cockroach: a roommate who becomes chosen family versus the rejecting parent; the anxious, searching human versus the silent, resilient cockroach, and how Jennie experiences her transition versus how she is socially expected to perform it. ‘Whatever souls are made of, yours and mine are the same… we’re indestructible,’ Jennie croons to the cockroach. This understanding gives Jennie & The
Cockroach’s ending is its emotional weight: the relentless march of life must be done alone, and the bravest act of self-acceptance is making peace with who one is, not who one should become. As in T.S. Eliot’s oft-cited poem, the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’
You can read more about this show in our recent interview with Fat Cow Theatre here.
Written by Evie Chandler
Directed by Elliot Aitken
Jennie & The Cockroach runs at the Hope Theatre until Tuesday January 20
