For its second production, Qrious Theatre transplants the 2005 American film Transamerica to Thailand. TranS I-Am is an awkward US-to-Thailand and screen-to-stage adaptation, but it's sweet and offbeat enough to charm.
Like Transamerica, TranS I-Am follows a transgender woman and her biological son on a road trip. Tak (Tanwarin Sukkhapisit) is a nurse's assistant about to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, but a letter from her biological son she didn't know she had forces her to travel to southern Thailand and bail him out of jail. Without disclosing her true identity as the biological father, Tak and her son, Top (Teerapat Lohanan), drive through the South, meeting kind, cruel and eccentric people along their journey.
TranS I-Am is most likeable for treating these imperfect characters with affection. Filmmaker and first transgender member of Thailand's parliament, Tanwarin, who also co-directed the play with Qrious Theatre founder Apirak Chaipanha, portrays Tak with sensitivity and light-hearted humour. Film and TV actor Teerapat is perfectly cast as Top, a male prostitute who was orphaned early and suffered sexual abuse throughout his childhood. Teerapat gives the character innocence, vulnerability and mischievousness.
The play does less well with some of the supporting characters, especially a group of LGBTQ+ activists who are only there to repeat a few queer rights slogans and perform a dance number or two. In fact, the play could do without any of its meaningless dance scenes.
The script, written by Apirak, Wit Sudthinitaed and Nattakorn Julrasorn clings too tightly to the original plot. To transplant a road movie to the stage is already a tough job, but the writers didn't do enough to give the play a sense of place. It is as if they had never taken a cross-country road trip before. They don't seem to know the South all that well either. Instead, we get southern stereotypes: an elderly woman with a thick accent and a rubber-tree farmer.
The one significant difference between Transamerica and TranS I-Am is the ease with which the character of Tak carries herself. Films on transgender people in the West are often fixated on the body and the physical manifestation of psychological discomfort. In TranS I-Am, Tak is impatient to undergo the reassignment surgery, but focus of the performance is never on the body. The scene in Transamerica wherein Toby, the son, discovers that Bree has male genitalia is also nowhere to be found in TranS I-Am.
If you already know the film, it's strange to be watching TranS I-Am. The whole time, I wished the play's own voice and character would emerge from the shadow of the American film that inspired it.
TranS I-Am continues today at 8pm and tomorrow and Sunday at 2pm and 8pm at Sang Aroon Art Center, Plan House III building, Sathon 10. Tickets are 700 and 500 baht. Call 086-572-8077. The play is in Thai with no English surtitles.
Blackface lite
American life coach and life-coach trainer Chérie Carter-Scott, who appeared on Oprah, authored a slew of books and made a documentary about coaching, just co-wrote a musical promoting her self-development workshop with her sister and business partner Lynn U. Stewart.
Directed by Napisi Reyes, The Workshop Musical: A Dress Rehearsal For Life, which ended its two-week run last weekend, tells the stories of the people in the workshop and how a life coach helps them overcome their problems. Each character represents a typical modern-day problem. We see each one of them get coached through an exercise, repeat some self-help platitude, sing a song, and their problem is magically solved, their perception of life and self suddenly transformed. This workshop is so damn magical that the coach marries one of the attendees at the end. It's pure absurdity.
What's equally absurd is that the English-language play premiered in Thailand and starred an all-Thai cast, but none of the characters have Thai names or are Thai. Colour-blind casting is fine, but then don't have Thai actors put on an African-American accent, wear a frizzy wig and gesture like an African-American.
The music, composed by Carter-Scott and arranged by Watcharit Kerdchuen and Chawin Termsittichok, is a messy, derivative mélange of genres in the first half. It finds more unity in the second half. The production's only saving grace was the performers' competent, sometimes powerful singing. Too bad they weren't spared the indignity of the show's cheesy and cringeworthy choreography.
As in many countries around the world, the life-coaching business is booming in Thailand. Of course, if a successful life coach writes a musical about life coaching, you're likely not going to get anything critical or even mildly ironic about this unregulated and ethically questionable profession and its cultish side. You're going to get promotional material masquerading as art.
