Hir

An absurd realism play about a changing America.  

• With over 80 different productions worldwide "Hir" was named one of "25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature" by the New York Times
• Sydney Theatre Awards:  Best Play

Excerpt:

PAIGE(calling down the hallway).  HONEY, WE’LL BE IN A CAR FOR THREE HOURS, MAYBE NOW IS NOT THE BEST TIME TO PUMP YOURSELF UP.

To Isaac

PAGIE.  Max is on the mones.

ISAAC.  Moans?

PAIGE.  Hormones.  That’s what they call them.  Your mother is hip.  She knows the lingo.  Don’t they teach you anything in the Marines?

ISAAC.  She is a he?

PAIGE.  I credit the Cheetos.  How could we feed our children fluorescent food and not expect a little gender confluence?  You have a brother now.  No!  Not a brother.  You have a something.

Calling down the hallway.

PAIGE.  MAAAAAAAAX COME IN HERE AND EXPLAIN YOUR AMBIGUITY TO YOUR BROTHER.

To Isaac

PAIGE.  Isaac, stay with me.  What you think you know, you do not know.  There are no longer two genders.  No longer simply a Y and X chromosome but an alphabet of genders.  They call it the LGBTTSQQIAA community.  Or what I call the gender of

Pronouncing LGBTTSQQIAA as if it were a word.

PAIGE.  Lugabuttsqueeah.  In these new genders, exists new pronouns.  Max is no longer a she or a he.  So you call Max, ze.  You must use ze instead of the pronouns he or she and you must use the pronoun...

Pronounced here

PAIGE.  Hir, H.I.R., in place of the pronouns her or him.  Max gets very upset if you refer to hir as a she, he, her, or him.  Ze wants you to refer to hir as a hir or ze.  Ze also gets upset when you emphasize the ze as if commenting on the pronoun when speaking to hir.  For example if you were to say, “What is ZE doing today?”, ze will not like that.  Ze, understandably, is not to be treated as a side-show oddity.  Ze wants you to say ze or hir as if this had been part of your regular speaking vocabulary your entire life.  Any breach in decorum will cause hir to write in hir blog about how awful hir troglodyte fascist hetero-normative mother is.  It’s fantastic.    

ISAAC.  I’m confused.

ARNOLD.  Lugabuttsqueeah.

PAIGE.  Max is the root of who we are.  Truly.  The root of who we are and the cusp of the new.  There has never been any such thing as men and women and, Isaac, there never will be.  You know all those pretty fish in coral reefs?  They’re transgender.  It’s true.  I looked it up.  When Max was getting beat up in school, then coming home for more, from your father, I didn’t know what to do.  They kept saying, “It gets better!”, but it didn’t seem like it was going to get better, so I started search-engine-ing.  I started to learn things.  It was like being baptized, only without the male-dominated hegemonic paradigm.  Everyone is a little bit of everything, Isaac.  We’re simply us.  Hir.

Gesturing to the house disdainfully

PAIGE.  Not here.

Feeling all around her body parts, sensually, and then throwing her arms out and up, as if to say her body is all genders and it must be shot out into the universe

PAIGE.  But HIR.

ISAAC.  Stop.

PAIGE.  All this fog over my eyes for so many years.  And it simply lifted.  Once I learned one thing, I could learn another.  And pretty soon I could start coming up with my own theories, or at least theories I hadn’t heard from other people first.  This is my theory.  We all come from fish.  My whole life I’m told I was made out of a rib.  What did your father call me?

ISAAC.  Rib.

PAIGE.  “Hey Rib, get me a beer.”  That’s what that man would say to your mother.

ARNOLD.  Rib.

Paige sprays Arnold with the spray bottle.

PAIGE(blaming him a little).  I’m not blaming you I for standing by while he called me that.  You were the child and I was the adult.  I let you be raised in a way that would allow you to stand by.  But I wasn’t a rib.  In actuality I was, we were all, TRANSGENDER FISH.  Which means that part of me, despite the years of clamping down into one single homogeneous gender, is still multifaceted.  And we’re all from Africa.  So that means we’re all black.  And we all masturbate, so that means we’re all a little gay.  You’re GAY Isaac.

ISAAC.  I’m not gay.

PAIGE.  You are.  Just a little.  And so am I and so is Max.  We’re all everything.  And it took Max’s being born a little more blatantly that way than the rest of us for me to figure it out.  Max saved me.  I didn’t have to be beat up by your father.  I was bigger than that.  I was a father.  And a mother.  I am a father.  And a mother.  We are all hir.

Gesturing to the house

PAIGE.  Not here.

Touching all over her body, sensually, and shooting it out and up again

PAIGE.  But HIR!