FringeNYC 2013: The 3rd Gender

Review by Ed Malin · August 10, 2013

The 3rd Gender is sci-fi with a heart. It comes from the mind of Peter Zachari, whose work on Fat Asses: The Musical earlier this year was particularly noteworthy. It took me a while to warm to this cautionary tale of  a gender-controlled future.  When I see sci-fi in which there is discussion of eugenics mixed with waving of guns, shouting, and hot pursuit, I think of  Logan’s Run, or perhaps A Brave New World or Sleeper.  Fortunately, this play is not black-and-white, but asks us to pick up the gay man’s burden and imagine a world where anyone displaying “heteronormative” tendencies is killed at birth to avoid society’s relapse into a primitive past.

In the year 2397, Manten Vierge (J.P. Serret) wakes up in a treatment facility to be told by medical technician Avanis (Victoria Guthrie) that he may be killed today.  Manten also interacts with Dr. Tulkan (Marc Geller), who removed his patient’s hypothalamus and did many other benevolent things which might allow Manten to live in a world where > 98% of the population are of the 3rd Gender. This means that Men who have the souls of women and Women who have the souls of men are the most intriguing (where is Susan Sontag when you need her?) and that, quite apart from physical attraction, people’s compatibility is determined by computers.  Grey (Joey Mirabile), a lowly functionary who has been graded as not much more spiritually enlightened than Manten, compassionately helps him to escape along with a heteronormative female named Cassie (Lara Clear).

They do not run for the Quilombo of fugitive heteros; no, they take their weapons and break in to the home of Raven Vierge (Karen Lynn Gorney) , whom they believe did not want to give up young Manten or his siblings (now deceased).  In this they are mistaken, but they learn, or re-learn (Manten has lost his memory) that Dr. Tulkan is closely related to the family.  Next they encounter Grey and his fellow dissident, Phoenix (Jacob R. Thompson) , who have chosen to be a couple and, remarkably, are alive.  Declining another offer to flee, Manten and Cassie brandish their firearms and return to the treatment facility.  Manten is grateful to Avanis, who has been saving his life for 20 years on the grounds that their society’s predictions of degenerate behavior are sometimes wrong.  But is it too late to save Cassie?

This is an intriguing play well capable of inspiring debate.  Who gets to decide how to avoid repetition of society’s past barbarism?  20  years after the end of apartheid, many South Africans live in a world of reverse racism. Marriage equality, at least, is on the rise in our country.  I think Peter Zachari and the fine cast are making a good case for treating people like people.  Porsche McGovern’s lighting lends sinister overtones to Marc Marcante’s futuristic sets.  Kimmerie H.O. Jones’s costumes are also future-perfect, although several characters go through the play half-naked, like in some of my favorite scenes from Barbarella.