What happens when your world is blown apart by an unexpected revelation? On March 31, 2015 Harvard Square Script Writers and the Emerson College Screenwriting Certificate Program hosted Faith Soloway – comedian, musician, and writer as she discussed exactly that.
Faith, a member of the writing team for Amazon’s Transparent, explained how the show has managed to break down virtually every gender stereotype while leaving its audience both laughing and crying with new-found empathy. The series, a surprise hit, recently garnered unexpected attention by winning both the 2015 Golden Globes for both best comedy/musical and best actor for Jeffrey Tambor in his sensitive performance as a doting father of three who, at age 70, comes out as a trans-female.
Based loosely on the true-life experiences of the Soloway sisters whose own father transitioned to womanhood as a septuagenarian, the dark comedy follows a trio of self-indulgent siblings as they adjust to accepting father Mort as Maura, while exploring their own often fluid sexual identities. Faith, sister of the show’s creator Jill, provided background on two of the first season’s episodes. One, penned by her, includes a surprise ending in which a character’s vivid imagination propels her into an alternate universe of trans and genderqueer dating, populated by caricatures of what it means to be both male and female.
Faith described to a packed audience how the sisters’ comedic and creative collaborations date back to the early 90s when both women, still in their twenties, developed the unintentional musical satire, The Real Live Brady Bunch, while at Chicago’s Annoyance Theater. The sisters discovered that simply re-enacting old scripts verbatim created a terrific draw, based on a combination of nostalgia and ironic appreciation for the tone of the original program. For a time trip back to that period, click here. Going forward, the sisters vowed to address social and political themes in their work, even though they had “missed out on the 60s.” But fate guided them to different sides of the continent after a successful multi-city run of the production.
For several decades, Faith, living in Boston, wove together a riotous mix of standup, improv, and sketch writing, based on an unapologetic lesbian identity. She spoofed the folk scene with Miss Folk America “a shlock opera” and wrote the musical, Jesus Has Two Mommies in the early 2000s. She co-wrote (with Jill) a pilot script Jewess Jones about a Semitic superhero that was acquired by HBO. Her web series Secrets, currently available on Funny or Die, parodied the silliest aspects of soap opera melodrama while featuring both professional actors and non-actors, many recruited from the local LGBT community.
Meanwhile, back in LA, Jill was writing for almost-mainstream television including the Oblongs, Nikki, and The Steve Harvey Show, until becoming the showrunner for Six Feet Under and then United States of Tara. Her 2013 film Afternoon Delight about the tumultuous friendship between a restless housewife and a hooker won her a Best Director award at Sundance, putting her on the map as an original directorial voice.
When Jill learned of her father’s imminent sex change, she knew she had the premise for a series uniquely her own. Faith was brought back into the creative process, this time to develop something as opposite to the saccharine simple Brady Bunch as anyone could imagine.
Transparent follows the story of the Pfefferman family, all living separate but still intertwined lives in upper middle class LA Jewish society. Josh, the only son, finds himself terminated from his position in the music industry and, after years of womanizing, is inexplicably entranced by a female rabbi. Sarah, the older, more conventional sibling, a stay-at-home-mom, abruptly leaves her husband for her former college lesbian lover. And Ali, the youngest and most sexually ambivalent, depends on her fragile transitioning-father for constant financial and emotional support as his guilt about the emotional upheaval he has wrought makes it ever more impossible to say no to any of his offspring.
As the episodes evolve in season 1, the unsettled children, Maura and her former spouse Shelly revisit the past in hilarious bittersweet recollections and imagine a future where everything, most importantly identity, is constantly shifting. The thought is both terrifying and electrifying with possibility.
Cutting a production deal with Amazon, “the last place” Jill considered, the sisters were joined by a writing team, cast and crew generously staffed with both gay and transgendered talent. “My sister wanted writers and actors with actual personal experience,” Faith explained, and she worked hard to establish a “fully inclusive environment” in both the writers’ room and on the set. To date the show has employed more than 80 people of gay or transgender orientation.
Transparent has been renewed for a second season and Faith, in Boston for the summer, was at work on a second episode at last conversation. “I’ve got all the ideas and I’m fitting it in,” she laughingly said.