BOY MY GREATNESS Loud Fridge Theatre Group

Boy My Greatness is a profoundly affecting, beautiful trans work of art.

Stop what you are doing and give all your money and worldly possessions to Loud Fridge Theatre Group.

I’ll give you a second.

August Nikoli (left)  and Phoenix Velona (right) Photography by Ben Handley

Okay now we can start the review. Boy My Greatness is a truly amazing show tackling queerness, coming to understand oneself through acting, and how easily it is for young people to hurt one another when they are all still struggling to know who they are. And the medium by which it explores these ideas is the rehearsal space for the boy actors in Shakespeare’s troupe.

Ranging from the age of 12 to 22, these children and young adults would portray most of the women in Shakespeare’s plays, before aging up into masculine roles. While historical narratives tend to overlook or even omit these players, this show chooses to shine a spotlight on them and invest them with immense humanity, crafting a beautiful queer story out of these young actors who dance over the societally imagined line of gender.

Behind the scenes of the original productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night, we see some archetypical inter-actor tensions: the seasoned veteran threatened by the appearance of a talented newcomer, the participants in a not-so-covert showmance, and a kindly patron who once was a prolific actor but has since stalled and taken to teaching. Under a microscope, all these relationships reveal the struggles of a youth spent striving to understand one’s feelings that we would now call homosexuality and transness, but which the characters lack the contemporary vocabulary to articulate. The boy players attempt to understand their feelings while under surveillance not only from their mocking peers, but from lecherous and rowdy audiences.

The character study is enhanced by the phenomenal acting and direction on display. Lee Engelman has done a fantastic job teasing out the particularities of every dynamic in the show, and the actors’ chemistry is a magnificent component of this show’s greatness. 

Boy My Greatness follows an ensemble who navigate uncertain relationships with one another, who struggle to understand their own feelings and others’ feelings towards them. The complexity of love and hate are not flattened when one is young and new to the world; it is instead magnified because every new sensation is the first time one has experienced it. 

The actors play out these adolescent difficulties wonderfully. The romance between Henry Fletcher (Phoenix Velona) and Henry Lawes (Jaysten Merced Ares) is deeply compelling, Velona and Ares make you care profoundly about these young queer men who discover themselves in each other, but still have much to learn.

John Sharpe (Michael Rodriguez) and Robert Howard (August Nikoli) have a mentor-mentee relationship wherein the child prodigy dreams of greater stardom and his seasoned (because of the salt and pepper beard) guardian tries as best he can to protect him. Rodriguez’s paternal abundance of concern is endearing and Nikoli’s boyish exuberance makes him a hilarious presence on the stage.

Another notable triumph of this show is its excellent tonal balance. Scenes of hilarity blend effortlessly with dramatic moments in a manner characteristic of well-done plays.

The final core pairing of the show is Thomas Reade (Jacob Lopez) and Samuel Clark (Maybelle Shimizu), the former the star of the Shakespearean boy actors, who is now 22 and moving on from female roles, and the latter a previous member of the company who fled to join the Puritan movement. Their history and confrontations throughout the piece are a treasure trove of drama, and they eventually become the central relationship in the show’s plot.

The energy onstage is beautiful, and the interplay between the characters is perfectly funny, human, and emotionally devastating.

When—not if—you attend Boy My Greatness at Loud Fridge Theatre Group, you will be dazzled by the very strong costume design by Heather K. Nunn. The wardrobe of the characters supports the Elizabethan setting, and the rehearsal dresses the boy actors wear cultivate the atmosphere of preparation and anticipation extremely well. Their cross-dressing, too, instantly demonstrates to the audience the queering of gender roles that will take place throughout the play.

I will now give the appearance of impartiality by naming certain things that the show could have done better. The fight choreography did not feel as dynamic as it should have been, its pacing and flow were not as honed and precise as the show proved itself capable of in its scenes of dialog and dance. The story also narrows over the course of its development in a manner that was less satisfying to me than a version of it that remained broad. The later parts of the show choose to focus intently upon Thomas and Samuel, which deprives the other relationships in the show of further focus. The show is so incredibly successful when managing the complexity of all the relationships at once that I was sad to see it allow many of them to fade into the background.

Nevertheless, Boy My Greatness is absolutely fantastic, and is everything it needs to be. A story that centers trans voices both in the script and on the stage. A paean to queer life, an ode to queer sorrow, and a promise of a brilliantly queer future. If you are invested in seeing trans people loud and proud on the stage in roles made for them, you must see Boy My Greatness. It is playing through July 19th at Moxie Theatre.

Buy tickets here.