Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  Transparent tries to answer these questions in quiet ways. Maura gets tutored in the rules of femininity by trans friend Davina. (Pushing Maura’s knees closed, Davina teases, “Can we just close up shop here a little bit?”) And she experiences sexual pleasure for the first time as Maura with someone who sees her as she sees herself, new girlfriend Vicki (Anjelica Huston). Ali embarks on sexual adventures, seeking communion via threesomes and trans men and lesbians, with the same volatile energy she brings to everything else in her life. Sarah, as her marriage crumbles, has wild sex with her ex-girlfriend Tammy, and finds violent relief at the hands of a dominatrix. But we also find her standing stark naked in front of her kitchen microwave one night after a bad PTA gala, shoulders slumped, an exhausted middle-aged woman with an imperfect body being herself.

  And then there’s Shelly. Like most older women on television, she is assumed to be asexual, a Jewish menopausal eunuch who cares only about nagging her children and fattening them up. Soloway decimates that assumption in one startling season-two scene, when Shelly coaxes ex-husband Maura to give her a hand job in the bathtub. “You know that thing you used to do with your finger?” she says coyly. “What did we used to call it? Flicky-flicky thump-thump.” Maura obliges impassively, almost as if her hand were disconnected from the rest of her. (In a sense, it is: “flicky-flicky thump-thump” is the property of Mort.) But the camera is in thrall to Shelly, lingering on her ecstatic face as she comes.

  To film that bathtub scene, Soloway cleared the set almost entirely, personally depositing bubbles in the water to make actress Judith Light comfortable. “When I saw it in the script, I said, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” Light says tremulously. “What I meant was: I don’t know how I’m going to get myself to this place. But I knew how important it was in the grand scheme of things. How many times in television have we been told, ‘Nobody wants to see that’?” Before they began rolling, Soloway held hands with Light, Tambor, and Frohna, and said, “We ask that this be received in the way we are giving it,” Light recalls. “She was thinking of the much larger context. It took my breath away.”

  Soloway says she encouraged Light not to think of a moment like this one as a nude scene but as part of a revolution: “We are showing things that no one has ever seen before, and you are going to get to share with the entire world what everybody is afraid to see, which is Mom having pleasure. I say the same thing to Amy [Landecker] as she is standing in front of the microwave naked: we never see women look like this on television, and yet every woman is going to understand the feeling.”

  Sitting at her kitchen table, Soloway wipes tears from her eyes. “Nobody ever shows this stuff, because whether or not we are conscious of it, we are always trying to make things that satisfy man’s desire. It makes me cry to think about it.”

  For all of this seriousness about feminism, Transparent routinely tips its sacred cows. Soloway made a cameo appearance in the show as the professor of a women’s studies class being audited by Ali. Clad in a shapeless smock and huge red eyeglasses, she delivers a lecture on the patriarchal nature of punctuation, particularly warning against exclamation points, “which are in and of themselves small rapes.” After class, Ali tells the professor admiringly, “I loved your TED Talk on rape culture and breast-feeding.”

  Ali soon embarks on a love affair with Cherry Jones’s iconic poet Leslie Mackinaw, a lesbian rake who has a thing for young teaching assistants. “I guess that Leslie harbors a little disdain for the aging female body,” one of her housemates confides to Ali. While the poet keeps aging, her girlfriends “all stay twenty-one.”

  Leslie’s character was loosely modeled on Eileen Myles. The poet’s name had come up in the writers’ room, and Soloway developed an art crush after reading her work. That feeling accelerated when the two met in the flesh at a museum event in San Francisco. “I went to the San Francisco museum planning to seduce you,” Soloway confessed to Myles in a 2016 onstage discussion. Soon the two were a couple, and in addition to Transparent featuring her poetry and a character inspired by her, Myles showed up in several episodes as part of Leslie’s entourage.

  “Jill is very open about the fact that a lot of this stuff is coming from her life as she is living it right now,” says Hoffmann. “So yeah, we talked about Eileen on set, and we met Eileen, and Eileen was there talking about Leslie being Eileen.” She pauses and giggles. “Jill has recognized that not only can her life be her art, but her art can be her life—and her therapy.”

  As Soloway immersed herself in LGBTQ culture, the series deepened its portrayal of the alliances and clashes between feminism and LGBTQ circles. These tensions and cross-purposes were explored in one of Transparent’s most striking episodes, season two’s “Man on the Land,” written by Ali Liebegott. Having decided she is gay, Ali persuades Sarah and Maura to take a road trip with her to the Idyllwild Wimmin’s Music Festival, a fictionalized version of the legendary Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. While many jokes are cracked at the expense of earnest wimmin—sample activities include a tampon-making workshop and a “Drumming Away Racism” session—the sense of liberation unleashed by swarms of seminaked lesbians dancing joyously is real. So is the sense of darkness that descends when Maura realizes that the festival is open only to “womyn-born womyn.” Suddenly what looked like freedom feels hostile.

  Waiting on line for the Porta Potties, Maura is suddenly surrounded by womyn yelling, “Man on the land!” They are warning of male maintenance workers arriving on site, but Maura cannot help but take it personally, and walks off alone into the woods, as if on a revelatory acid trip gone bad. Later, a festival veteran explains to Maura that the exclusionary policy began with a simple idea: “that we women could have one goddamn safe space in the world.” When Maura tries to argue for her right to be there, the woman bristles. “I don’t give a shit about your goddamn penis. It’s about the privilege.” Does the fact that Maura is privately suffering inside that male body and doesn’t experience it as privilege obviate the fact that she has accrued societal benefits from being seen as male for the first seventy years of her life?

  The series constantly circles the messy ways that gender, sexuality, class, and race define and empower (or disempower) its characters—that a person who feels oppressed according to one axis of identity politics (gender, say) might simultaneously belong to the class of oppressors in other areas of their existence (through being white, or rich, or feeling a comfortable fit between their gender identity and the body they were born with). There is even a term for radical feminists at odds with the transgender community: TERF, short for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. So combustible are these issues that the real Michigan Womyn’s Festival ended in 2015, after decades of debate over what defined womynhood.

  Liebegott volunteered to write that episode, having performed at the real Michigan event in the past. She says she was dismayed by the division in the queer community between trans and cis women and felt immense pressure to represent the scene in all its complexity. “There’s not a lot of actual queer characters on TV, so I want it to be done right. At the very least, you don’t want to do anything offensive. At best, you want to show the most complete version of something as you can.”

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  Sometimes it seems as if everyone on Transparent is lost in the woods. All the central characters are in transition, in one way or another. Maura’s announcement sets off a chain reaction in the family, and over everyone topples, like a set of dominoes. Sarah leaves her husband to marry Tammy, a woman she dated in college, but then ditches her, too. Josh starts coming to grips with the fact that he was sexually abused by his babysitter in his youth, and that he has a son he never knew he’d spawned. Shelly pours the secrets of her own life into a one-woman show called To Shell and Back, which is played for laughs, until she performs it live on a cruise ship and it becomes beautifully serious.

  And Ali—well, she embraces the confusion. In the first season, she instigates a drug-fueled threesome with he
r African American trainer and his roommate. (Amazingly, Gaby Hoffmann was heavily pregnant and had to watch from the sidelines, baby kicking inside, while a body double played out the most graphic parts of the scene.) Similarly, when Ali goes on a date with a teaching assistant trans man named Dale (played by trans comedian Ian Harvie), the camera shows us what Ali sees: a super-macho guy who drives a pickup truck and lives in a rustic cabin with a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign in his living room. Dale demands that she call him “Daddy” and orders her to lie down on his coffee table so he can shave off her bushy pubic hair. But after their attempt at sex in a public bathroom goes awry (with Dale dropping his prosthetic penis on the floor), Ali returns to his place and sees something very different: a thoughtful guy with a Prius and a modern LA house. “Want some tea?” he asks gently, making us wonder how much of the earlier scenes was real and how much Ali was projecting her own fevered fantasies onto Dale.

  It was a provocative way to probe Ali’s sexual-adventurer stance, as a privileged white girl taking a vacation in someone else’s exotic otherness. But the scene upset some trans critics, who felt the episode mocked Dale’s masculinity. Harvie, who had served as a consultant on the show and whose personal stories had inspired the writers to create a character for him, defended the ambiguous plotline. In an interview in The Advocate, he argued that the episode poses deep questions that sit at the heart of the series—“Will you love me if I’m not who you thought I am? . . . Will you love me if I’m struggling with my own gender experience?” Harvie continues. “Will you love me if I . . . drive a Toyota and not a Ford?”

  Rhys Ernst admits that when he first read the Dale scripts, “I was intrigued to see them be kind of messy and complicated and unsatisfying. They were nonaffirming, awkward moments.” But once the episode aired, he realized that they had tried to move too quickly. “What we missed was that this was the first time in history that a trans man had ever been represented on TV played by a trans man. We were trying to jump to a future level of messiness when everybody else felt they needed positive affirmation first.”

  So, while women on television are fighting to be allowed to be antiheroes and screwups, other marginalized groups are at a different point in the process, craving an idealized or, at the very least, less denigrated version of themselves. As the first mainstream series focused on a trans character, Transparent bears enormous pressure to fulfill a whole community’s expectations. As Ali Liebegott points out, “You could have ten trans people in the room, and they would not necessarily agree on what they want to see. You would never ask that of a straight white guy: [to represent] all straight white guys.”

  The Dale story line was not the only thing that upset the LGBTQ community about Transparent. The casting of cis-male actor Tambor as Maura caused major controversy, something that deeply saddened both Soloway and Tambor. Accepting his second Emmy for the role in September 2016, Tambor made a speech asking Hollywood to “give transgender talent a chance,” and solemnly declared, “I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television.” In a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter decrying the trend for casting cis actors in trans roles, GLAAD’s transgender media director, Nick Adams, called Tambor “the rare exception where the casting fits the story being told—that of an older trans woman who is just beginning her transition,” and lauded Soloway’s “deliberate decision to bring in many transgender people behind the camera and in front of it.”

  In season three, the writers fleshed out characters such as Davina and Shea, two of Maura’s trans friends. Both are played by trans actresses. Shea, a conventionally attractive yoga teacher, is conjured with great sweetness by Trace Lysette. A romance blossoms between Shea and Josh, but he backs off the moment he learns she is HIV positive. “I’m not your fucking adventure! I’m a person!” she shouts at him. “Grow up!”

  Growing up is a tall order for the Pfeffermans. Like her kids, Maura has a knack for projecting her needs and ideas onto others. The third season opens with a stylistically startling episode that yanks us out of Transparent’s usual upper-middle-class havens. Volunteering at an LGBTQ hotline, Maura screws up a suicide call from a trans teen and races out to try to track down the girl at a crowded South LA shopping center. The only white person in a maze of dark faces, Maura makes assumptions based on her biases: in a wig store, she spots some Latina trans women and asks if they’ve seen this girl “on the streets.” The women recoil at the implication, pointing out that they are nursing students. Fainting from heat exhaustion, Maura gets carted away in an ambulance—to a public hospital, much to her horror. Soloway has called the episode an “intersectional fairy tale,” but there is no happy ending here, just the understanding that being transgender is but one facet of Maura’s identity.

  Soloway knew from the start that she wanted a series structured around all five family members, the narrative encircling them like a “ring of light.” She largely used the process she learned from Alan Ball and Alan Poul on Six Feet Under, which is to fill big grids with sharply detailed story lines for each character in every episode, a kind of antidiscrimination policy that keeps the main characters in play and forces viewers to regularly shift their sympathies. Like Soloway, Ball was a fan of General Hospital, and he elevated that soap structure into a finely woven tapestry of voices.

  The writers’ room of Transparent, tucked inside a Paramount Pictures building named after golden-age starlet Carole Lombard, is surrounded by whiteboards broken into grids by episode and character. There are also vertical columns of colorful Post-its with tiny writing mapping out possibilities (“Ali’s first nitrous trip. She hears the voice of God” or “Shelly getting diddled”) and papers tacked to the wall reminding the writers of the bigger picture, like: “Maura WANTS to control her own transition, but NEEDS to conquer shame.”

  The intimate connections among family members fuel the series’ action, which means the writers must find ways for the characters to come together regularly, such as at funerals, weddings, and birthday parties. Transparent also relies on religious rituals: in season one, the family gathers for Shabbat, during which Maura says the prayer reserved for the matriarch; in season two, there’s a spotlight on Yom Kippur, with Ali throwing a fast-breaking party to celebrate her new interest in Judaism; and season three culminates in an impromptu Passover Seder on a cruise ship. Jewish-American newspaper the Forward dubbed Transparent “the Jewiest Show Ever”—which is not saying all that much, since generations of entertainment industry Jews internalized the saying “Write Yiddish, cast British,” as we saw with Amy Sherman-Palladino’s WASP heroine Lorelai Gilmore, who drops Yiddishisms as if she were to the shtetl born.

  The funny thing is that the Pfeffermans are not a religious family; for them, Jewishness is mostly about matzo ball soup and lox. Shelly is a member of the temple’s board, but probably less for spiritual reasons than for the sense of community. The same goes for Sarah, who enlists the help of Rabbi Raquel in throwing social events aimed at young creative Jews (much as Soloway herself did with LA’s East Side Jews events), but puts little thought into the God stuff. Raquel, the still, ethical center of the series, finally loses her patience with Sarah’s half-assed Judaism. “Can you clarify for me really fast what spirituality is for you, Sarah?” Raquel demands. “I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not changing your mind whenever you feel like it. It’s not following your bliss. It’s not finding yourself by climbing through your belly button and out your own asshole and calling it a journey”—a line that seems as much internal self-questioning by the show’s writers as a rebuke to the spiritually foggy Pfeffermans.

  Despite Soloway’s attempts to forge an inclusive, trans-affirmative workplace, Transparent became enmeshed in controversy in the fall of 2017. Allegations surfaced that Tambor had sexually harassed his transgender costar Trace Lysette and his former assistant, Van Barnes, leaving the show’s future in limbo when this book went to press. Former Transparent writer Micah Fitzerman-Blue to
ld the New York Times, “It’s just incredibly sad that that happened in the midst of something that felt so revolutionary.” And yet the very fluidity of Soloway’s approach might allow the show to make something of this culturally chaotic moment.

  * * *

  When Soloway talks about the skills needed to be a director, she starts to get angry at the ways the industry has convinced women they are unqualified. “I always understood directing as something I didn’t know how to do. There’s all this equipment and you need to know lenses and rules and math and . . . ‘Don’t worry, women, we’ve got this!’ ” she shouts in a deep mock-macho voice. “It’s all very militaristic, with long shooting days and talk about attacking things like it’s an invasion.”

  Soloway suddenly sits back in her chair and smiles, explaining her own very different way of doing things: “I recognize that actors are artists who use their bodies to feel things and that I am filming those feelings with a camera. So I privilege the emotions, I privilege the actors.” If a crewperson says there’s a problem with the focus, Soloway doesn’t call “cut” if the scene is working. One of her techniques, inspired by American Honey director Andrea Arnold, is letting actors ease from rehearsal into being filmed without shouting, “Action,” which allows her to capture fresh, awkward emotions. “I’m a bit of an evangelist around helping women recognize that a lot of things that come very, very naturally to them actually make them better directors.”

  Jessi Klein, the head writer on Inside Amy Schumer, who worked on season three of Transparent, extolls the way Soloway “creates a feeling before the cameras are even rolling.” Trusting her actors, Soloway is confident “that if there is something that is felt strongly, there will be a way for it to make sense on the screen,” says Klein. That sometimes leads to long hours, staffers note, as Soloway follows her instincts.