i love theatre. i love acting. i think it’s a beautiful art form, and it’s one that i would happily continue to engage with if i has#d ever once been made to feel like there was a space there for me.

but as a fat person, first and foremost, and then as a person who actively chose to be visibly gay and visibly gnc, there was no space for me to engage with roles that were actually interesting and dynamic.

i lucked out twice. i worked my ass off and got to play lady macbeth in hs and masha in college. it should, of course, be noted that lady mac is the antagonist in macbeth, and that masha is a “spinster” in the throes of unrequited love.

nevertheless, these were substantial roles that i consider myself lucky to have played. the rest of the parts i was cast in? elderly women. women with no love in their life. comic reliefs. that’s it.

there were two key turning points for me in my decision to step away from acting as a passion/hobby/potential career pursuit. the first was my father recommending that i play the female lead in neil labute’s “fat pig” — a play by a misogynistic writer in which the the titular

character is a fat woman who enters into a relationship with a man whose friends are all horrified by her presence in his life, and that ends in their breakup because he can’t handle the “burden” that comes with being romantically involved with a fat woman. i was 16 at the time.

the other was my junior year of college, during prep for our final project — a presentation of monologues that we would hypothetically be able to use for real world auditions. everyone in the class met with the professor for play recommendations.

when i met with him, he recommend that i include a monologue from the rainmaker by n. richard nash. he thought i’d be “perfect” for the female lead — another blatantly misogynistic role where the character in question is so drastically ugly that she cannot fathom ever being loved

by a man. i was 19 at the time. now, so i blame either of these men for these experiences? no. they are generally good men who were trying their best to give me a helping hand at that moment. but i do blame the environment & institutions surrounding theatre for creating a culture

in which the only people allowed to engage with a lot of larger themes are people who are considered conventionally attractive by rigid & eurocentric standards of beauty. my personal experience is a microcosm of this problem; these experiences exist tenfold for people of color,

disabled people, and people who find themselves intersecting in multiple minority identities. when you deny a large range of the population the opportunity to perform in varied roles, in roles that encompass the full breadth and beauty of the human experience, you automatically

other them and teach them that they are, in fact, subhuman. theatre as an art form is suffering. it is dying out. it will continue to do so until space is created for people of every background to engage with the ideas, themes, and experiences within the art form.

until theatre is accessible, it will not and cannot thrive.