The Valley of the Shadow – 08 December 2023
Many of the portrayals of transgender people in theatre are about acceptance and self-discovery. It was refreshing to see a story unfold at a later point in that journey, where the struggles were not about who the characters were, or even really about who they love. The Valley of the Shadow was about two people who were utterly normal. Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. The hate crime that shattered them was the most obvious marker of anything about the story that was uniquely trans. The whole story was about two people, in relatively clear/simple gender roles, falling in love. Their love was cut short by an act of violence that killed one and irrevocably altered the other’s ability to continue his life without trauma. That kind of violence wouldn’t have happened to cisgender characters.
The Valley of the Shadow set us up to show the importance of the framework in which a person is raised, and the power that has over their lives. The perpetrator of the murder was shaped by his abusive, alcoholic father, just like the woman he murdered was shaped by her strong, independent mother. The husband who survived the hate crime was shaped by parents who abandoned him—you could see his anxiety and his loneliness. His inability to overcome grief may have come from only being taught avoidance. The message that this show beautifully hammered home is how difficult it is to break the mold of who you are—whether that’s male or female or anxious or assertive or frightened—there are certain things that can’t be taken from a person, and they’re not always good.
I loved the last moment between the ill-fated lovers where they had the honest and frank discussion about how being transgender is not always a liberating rejection of gender roles; sometimes, it’s a strong desire to embody them. I was touched by Oren wanting to protect Jazz—not in a maternal way, but in a masculine way, and that the difference for them was crystal clear.
I think there were moments where the writing held this piece back. Each scene ended with a definitive moment that felt like where a cut would be in a movie. A dramatic line or a painful truth revealed, and then a black out and a reset. It felt like the staging and the writing didn’t think much about how much time it would take to get actors on and off stage, into different costumes, etc. because they conceptualized this like a screen play, where you can go right from one moment into another. It felt like the monologues from the ghost character were an attempt at making it feel more theatrical and an attempt to cover up the scene changes. These monologues were a little confusing, and didn’t add much to the plot or the character development. They were too vague to add something thematic, and I think the show would have been fantastic without them.
I don’t know why the sound designer was not credited in the program. The sound design for this show was very elaborate, but it felt like a little bit of a crutch to cover the scene changes in a way that might have been an afterthought. The tones were scary, the ticking felt a little ominous, but it was pretty much constant, and after a while I completely tuned it out. Unfortunately, the use of sound obscured some of the more intimate dialogue.
The Valley of the Shadow’s major victory for underrepresented voices in theatre is starting at a different point in the journey from what we’re all used to. Instead of confronting identity and love and gender, it confronted how challenging it is for people who live familiar, ordinary lives, to have their lives taken from them simply because of the bodies they were born in. If these characters were cisgender, the hate crime would not have made any sense, but every other aspect of the story would have. In this respect, I applaud The Valley of the Shadow for depicting trans people as people, not oddities or commodities.
Pages on Stages 