THEATRE REVIEW: Man Lessons: The Live Show
07.02.2023 at Basement Theatre
This review is part of the Auckland Pride Review Project - a collaborative project between four local publications (Pantograph Punch, Theatrescenes, Bad Apple Gay and Rat World) to provide more critical discourse around queer theatre and performance work. We will be reviewing a range of shows throughout the month of Pride - so keep a look out and go support our local queer performers!
Man Lessons: The Live Show, where to begin!
I’m hardly an impartial perspective on this show. I am myself a trans performing artist, who is myself‐interested in creating a show about myself. Accordingly, I came to this show not to be moved but to put it under a microscope in order to learn how to better tell my own story. Despite that, I was incredibly moved. If you find the rest of this response fails to convince you to see the show, try reading the blurb instead!
Man Lessons is a documentary charting Adam Rohe’s transition journey. Man Lessons: The Live Show is the self-told coming-of-age story of performer and subject Adam Rohe, in response to the documentary he and a friend are making, called Man Lessons.
I think it’s an interesting and worthwhile piece of theatre that produces such a description. Rohe uses multimedia presentation to be dialectically self-referential. What makes it work is that the theatrical techniques and manoeuvres are not to impress, and neither are they for their own sake. The structural complexity, the internal dialogue of the show, is all directly in service of telling as honest and sincere a life story as I’ve ever seen staged. Not only that, it appropriately conveys the experience of ‘queer time’, a non-linear state of becoming, preserving and changing the self that is not beholden to clocks or calendars.
“The structural complexity, the internal dialogue of the show, is all directly in service of telling as honest and sincere a life story as I’ve ever seen staged”
To talk further about the content of the show feels weird, since in some ways it means discussing the narrative merits of Rohe’s life. To dive into that weirdness; it’s truly hard to go wrong with a good coming-of-age story, especially a queer one. Being queer and sharing the story of your own self-discovery is somewhat radical. To expose oneself in this way, including flaws and thought processes and life path, and especially as part of a Pride Festival, is inviting other queer people to see themselves in you, or you in themselves. This is especially poignant for trans stories - it’s weirdly common to live your life not consciously realising you are in fact a man, or a woman, or other, until you have an experience that makes you question the assumptions that were made about you at time of (or even prior to) your birth. Especially if you don’t know any trans people with a certain degree of emotional intimacy, this show may cause you to realise you yourself are trans.
“To expose oneself in this way, including flaws and thought processes and life path, and especially as part of a Pride Festival, is inviting other queer people to see themselves in you, or you in themselves”
Rohe talks about his own experiences, but there’s some touchstones common to the trans experience that I’ve never seen anyone, ever, talk about publicly before. I hate the word ‘brave’, but that’s just what this is. There’s a discourse within the work itself about the limits of what’s communicable to an audience. You need context to even comprehend what’s being said, and there’s only so much context anyone can possibly give in an hour, or a day, a week. Nobody will ever know the full story of your life. I never imagined anyone would be able to speak some of the truths Rohe conveys to a cisgender audience. He shares his truths successfully, because a single heartfelt, trusting hour is able to give context to months and years of trans-formative experience.
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Check out more about Man Lessons: The Live Show here!