I recently saw Boy My Greatness, a new play by Zoe Senese-Grossberg. It was performed by the Firebird Project, which, per the program, “is a grassroots theater production and arts education company dedicated to telling stories that burn.” It was performed at the Hudson Guild Theater, a comfortable off-off-Broadway space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The Hudson Guild, with roots going back to a settlement house in the nineteenth century, is, according to its literature, a “community-based social services agency . . . that has a variety of programs and services, including after-school care, professional counseling and community arts programs to the neighborhood.” For me, it was an afternoon of firsts: I had never seen a play at the Hudson Guild Theater orby the Firebird Project or by Senese-Grossberg. I picked the play not because someone told me about it or because I had read a review, but because its description on the website of one of my discount ticket services seemed interesting.

The play explores the lives of the boys who played the women’s roles in the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays. We may know that boys and young men between the ages of twelve and twenty-two performed them, but we give them little thought. As the playwright says in program notes, “The focus seems to be more on the absence of women rather than the presence of boys.” Senese-Grossberg senses that the short, dual lives as male and female must have had an effect on them. She asks, “What did it mean to be trained to be a woman at the age when we learn to become our assigned genders? How did it feel to be a child asked to embody characters decades older than you—asked to play love scenes opposite adults? How did it feel, in your 22^nd year to be violently thrust back into a rigid, gendered world?”

Boy My Greatness thought-provokingly explores these themes with the background of the rise of Puritanism seeking to close theaters and the onset of another wave of the plague in London. The play is often touching. It is worth seeing although this almost uniformly well-acted production only runs for a few more days. I hope it is mounted again. However, I also hope that the next time it runs it is tightened and shortened from its almost Shakespearean length of almost three hours.

Once again my prejudices have been assailed. I would have thought that South Carolina is a place where gender at birth is considered by the state to be immutable. However, the impressive women’s basketball team at the University of South Carolina is called the Gamecocks not the Gamehens.

A young woman sitting in the row behind me on a flight from Phoenix to Palm Springs at first seemed to be tipsy, but she was only excited as she pronounced again and again to her seat mate that this was her first flight. She said she was from Idaho or Utah (those are different places, right?) and going to Palm Springs to meet her girlfriend. She was carrying a cat who she said, as we began our descent, did not like landings, presumably from the one experience of flying from Provo or Boise to Phoenix. The woman, although she talked incessantly, did not say how she happened to have a girlfriend in Palm Springs, but she was met at the airport by a large woman all dressed up in what I would describe as a babydoll outfit. And I wondered what percentage of American adults have never flown.