“You are probably thinking I’m a small-town woman with a small mind,” says Trisha Lee, the middle-aged mom who is the sole character in Elise Forier Edie’s The Pink Unicorn, several minutes into the play. She’s right—but only because Edie goes to such great lengths to portray her as such, leaving pretty much no stereotype unturned in the process.
Where to start—with Trisha’s preference for reading Debbie Macomber books and watching “Rachael Ray”? Her tendency to use expressions like, “nervous as a naked man in a river fulla snapping turtles”? Did I mention she lives in a (fictional) Texas town called Sparkton, and has a late husband named Earl, and a daughter named Jolene?
It’s a turning point in Jolene’s life that launches the journey traced in Pink Unicorn. Shortly before starting high school, the 14-year-old sits her mother down and declares that she is gender-neutral. And despite her shock, fear and confusion, Trisha is eventually driven to do the darnedest thing: to support her kid, down to using the name Jo and the pronoun “they” instead of “she.”
Edie herself has a transgender child, and her goal is a virtuous one: to show us that even the most apparently unsophisticated folks can harbor open (or at least flexible) hearts and minds. And she and director Amy E. Jones have managed to recruit a Tony Award-winning Broadway veteran to play Trisha: Alice Ripley, who speaks in a Southern accent that, if not recognizably Texan, is as thick and labored as, well, syrup pourin’ outta a clenched bottle, so that “say” can sound like “sigh” and “husband” like “has-been.” (Dialect coach Rena Cook is credited in the press notes as “a TEDx speaker, author, and voice, speech, confidence, and presentation coach.”)
“We don’t have a lot of what y’all call diversity,” Trisha explains, “except for the Mexican farm workers who live in a trailer park on the edge of town and they pretty much keep to themselves.” We hear about a pastor who wears a cowboy hat, and likens the USA Presbyterians’ endorsement of openly gay ministers to German churches’ support of the Nazis during Hitler’s reign—a comparison based on an actual sermon Edie heard several years ago—and a school principal, named Cyril Makepeace, who tries to stomp out a fledgling Gay Straight Alliance and prevent students from reversing their assigned, gender-specific attire on picture day, other developments inspired by real-life events.
If the abundance of clichés in Pink Unicorn threatens to overshadow these fact-based elements, it’s hard not to be at least intermittently moved by the sense of urgency and compassion in Edie’s writing. There’s also a vital subtext, for the largely cosmopolitan audiences who will attend this intimate staging, produced by the non-profit company Out of the Box Theatrics: that it requires a lot more courage and perseverance to fight bigotry from Trisha’s position than it does within a progressive echo chamber like the one most of us live in.
Ripley, too, deserves praise for bringing obvious commitment and contagious affection to her character, who in learning to accept Jo also acquires empathy for others, from her estranged, alcoholic brother to a once-closeted lesbian neighbor emboldened to join Jo’s campaign—which eventually gains the attention of the ACLU and People Magazine.
“Truth is, I don’t even know where we’re going,” Trisha admits, near the end of Pink Unicorn. “But I’m gonna keep my heart open and I’d ask you to do the same.” It’s a big request in these times, but all of us, in big cities and small towns alike, would do well to take her up on it.
The Pink Unicorn opened May 15, 2019, at the Episcopal Actors’ Guild and runs through June 2. Tickets and information: ootbtheatrics.com
