You know it when you feel it.
Often in pop music or guilty-pleasure television, you get that sickening sense of your own inner teenager and the sins they committed against your newfound adult wisdom and taste.
I try to be compassionate against the little brat I once was. But I recognize that brat in so much that is gaudy, emotional, and what might commonly be considered morally wrong. So, I also try to be compassionate to that defensive prickling up within me, that cringe.
I afford allowance to that feeling throughout the runtime of Rachel Renaud’s Beatrice Warner-directed play, Love the Sinner. In slowly embracing this Fringe-cringe watching grown actors in Catholic school girl uniforms, set to the musical hits of my own high school experience, my fellow audience and I are soothed — though not absolved.
The play centres on two teenage high school girls, one of them cisgender and one transgender, who comes out as trans over the course of the show. Catholic school student Lenna falls in love with Connor, who reveals herself to be Elle, aspiring to transition into femininity, against Lenna’s puritanical prayers.
The text frames this as Lenna’s loss. And overall, the direction of the piece judges it to be a whimsical misunderstanding of very young people.
The drama drawn out of the teen lovers is paralleled with google-eyed penile puppets re-enacting the rite of confession and slinging puns as they increase in size with every re-entry to the stage. This device comes randomly in a show about Catholic school teenagers, but undeniably brings a characteristically Fringe Festival lightheartedness to the piece.
I spoke in May with director Beatrice Warner at Beanduck Studio about her process directing a play about the wince-worthy caprices of teenage romance. She affectionately loglines Love the Sinner as, “Queer coming-of-age struggles with religious indoctrination. And dildo puppets.”
“It’s a love story,” Warner says. “On the surface, it might be about two people and the harm that one of them causes the other. But I think it’s about two people who are both in their own ways victims of overly oppressive religious indoctrination.”
The play and its director are clearly invested in representing Lenna, whom the playwright Rachel Renaud portrays, as situationally bigoted, transphobic until liberated from church and high school. This might present a conflict of interest for the playwright and performer embodying this character, with voice pitched up to giggling adolescent neurosis.
Though, Lenna, in her fearful bigotry, is easy to abandon at the moment when she throws the house lights on and addresses the audience, taking a survey of who still empathizes with her after she fails to support her partner’s transition due to her Catholic hangups.
A veteran of film and video, this is Warner’s debut directing actors for theatre, while Renaud directed a show in the Fringe Festival last year, Still Alive, by Leya Graie. As a viewer, I identify a thread of hostile confining spaces, as in their short film Convalescence (2023), for example, the real history of taking feminine bodies and restricting them. The plot lines of both these works mirror the explosive, not necessarily reactive or violent, but rather glimmering expansion of realization that can happen under that kind of pressure.
Renaud is drawn to institutional settings for all they can reveal about the relationships between characters coerced to conform, and the much more interesting results of rebellion. In Love the Sinner, it is not Renaud’s Lenna who enjoys the thrill of teenage rebellion; rather, she asks in several ways for the audience to forgive her the shortcomings of her younger years.
The play’s large-scale levity is a key ingredient of Warner’s vision for the piece, and the emotional release this show’s representation can offer the trans audience who identify with these characters, cloistered from their true selves in the context of a Catholic school, is effective.
“I’ve been transitioning for just over 3 years now,” Warner tells me. “And for me, the most glaringly obvious aspect of womanhood is how much smaller womanhood makes you, as a human being. You feel like you have to be. I feel like Rachel’s work is touching very broadly a more expansively defined term of womanhood, on the notion of that compression, that restriction, that comes with moving through the world in femme, female, or AFAB bodies.”
Elle, played by the incredibly talented Sadie Leigh Bennet, is basically understanding her trans femininity 17 years earlier than Warner did.
“I look at the character of Elle and it’s like she’s not only a young version of me; she is an alternate-reality young version of me,” says Warner. “And that’s cathartic for me to be creating this character alongside Sadie, who has this opportunity that maybe I never got to have.”
Love the Sinner insists on joyful resistance against shame. By the show’s conclusion, the audience is able to shake off any discomfort, and with it goes much of the cringe that is held in my chest.
“There are many times that I feel dysphoric about not having had the opportunity to live as a trans girl,” Warner confesses. “But there are so many ways in which I access that now in my life. And one of them, I feel, is through this play, getting to have a second-hand experience of that by creating the character, with Rachel’s writing, and Sadie’s performance.”
Love the Sinner is ultimately about trans adolescence and transness as adolescence, in the sense that to be trans is to become, to grow, and importantly, to outgrow.◼︎
Love the Sinner continues through 16 June 2024 at the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique du Québec, 4750 Henri Julien Ave.
Cover image: Emelia Hellman
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