Spy in the House of Men

by Penny. For Your Thoughts. Rochester, NY

Review by Ross Haarstad

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She’s a big woman, slightly zaftig, with a basso undertone, soft inflections, a haze of reddish hair framing a tough-gentle face.

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She opens her one-woman show, Spy in the House of Men, with the anecdote of sitting next to a slightly drunk man at a party who bellows out ‘What are you?’. Tension. Not ‘who’, but ‘what’. Since this is a trans woman’s story we’ve come to hear, just like Penny (the performer/ playwright) we anticipate the worst.

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But it’s a feint. While Penny has taken the occasion of a Halloween party to wear women’s clothes instead of the male drag she is used to wearing ’12 out of 14 days’; as she quips, “Halloween is the transgender Get Out of Jail Free Card.” She is supposed to be a ‘what,’ except she just wanted to dress up.

Penny Sterling has a way with the unexpected turn, the sharp observation, and the delineation of a life with rue self-awareness, that make Spy a rare delight.  Having spent 50 years living a lie as presenting a man, she has a lot of truth to tell. Her truth is the story of a ‘boy’ dressing up in mother’s clothing; when it first happens, it feels so right, she says, like the feel of a cool washcloth on a hot day.

 

Her childhood is 1960s suburban with a tradition-spouting father, an older brother who gets the gender stuff right, and a rage-filled mother. Splitting her story into chapters, each with a visual slide and music cue, the culmination of her early years, is “The Bette Midler Incident” a hilarious, suspenseful, heart-stopping story of an hour blissfully alone at home, preparing meatloaf in a beautiful yellow dress, singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” along with the Divine Miss M, when suddenly the sound of the garage-door opener interrupts. This complicated moment of the secret being discovered by mother, plus the onset of puberty ‘which hit harder than mom’, propels Penny into four decades of masquerading as a man (never dressing up again), lifting weights, and adopting the persona of the weird, fat, sarcastic guy who aggressively chases women, but rarely catches them.

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The first sober kiss shared with a woman doesn’t happen until ‘his’ 30s, ‘She’s the woman I married. She’s also the woman I divorced. It’s a small world.’ Raising kids, coming out, an assault and a delicious encounter with a 5 year old all find their way into the enchanting, heartfelt spell that Penny weaves with us. It’s a superlative solo performance. Catch it!