Becoming a Man
P. Carl
Z Space
Polly spent the first fifty years of her life as a girl/woman who came out as queer and eventually married her girlfriend of twenty years, Lynette. On March 16, 2017, at the Hotel Chandler in New York, this same person was called “sir” at the front desk, in the elevator, and at breakfast. As bearded Carl proudly tells us, “I became a man … This is what euphoria feels like.”
P. Carl’s 2020 memoir, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition, is the basis of his 2024 premiering play, Becoming a Man, now receiving its West Coast initial staging at Z Space in one of the most important queer productions to open in San Francisco in years. Becoming a Man is a brutally honest portrayal of not just the many moments of euphoria that Carl experiences in finally being on the outside the person he always felt he was on the inside, the play also lays out in no-holes-barred terms the dark and dangerous parts of his journey of transitioning — especially in negotiating the reactions of the world around him who are not ready yet to transition to the new Carl. With a grippingly superb cast and a script that builds to a climax never to be forgotten, Z Space’s Becoming a Man is a must-see production that will change your life.
Lyam B. Gabel directs with even flow and sensitive yet purposive intent the cast of seven through thirty-something scenes that crisscross time and the lives of both Carl and Polly. Memories are part of what exasperates and even haunts Carl; and most scenes of Carl’s present life find Polly watching on the sidelines, with a number of times the old and new selves having conversations together that can be funny, poignant, and/or confronting. At the same time, as he remembers events in the past — falling in love with Lynette, trying to tell a therapist mother why they both need to see a therapist together — Carl watches intently and sometimes emotionally the Polly he once was.
From the moment Carl comes forward to meet us and begin to tell his story, Petey Gibson astounds us with the authenticity, the vulnerability, and the overall humanness brought to the role of a man who also is not shy in sporting his newly found strutting cockiness, his bro-feelings when just one of the guys at a bar, and even his proneness suddenly to be sexist in his views of women. As he tells his old self, Polly, “I like man-only space; man-talk sustains me.” So male does Carl now feel that he admits to his slightly confounded friend Nathan (Casimir Kotarski) — himself now a trans man and once a lesbian friend of Polly — “I’ve never had feelings of being queer in my body,” claiming with surety that even when they were once marching for queer rights as young women, inside he was “a regular guy.”
As Polly watches Carl at the gym with supportive trainer Eddie (Eric Esquivel-Gutierrez) or sees him on his first guys-trip hiking with Nathan, she watches often with longing looks, saying, “You’re living the life I wanted” or “I’m jealous when I watch him [Eddie] train you.” As a Polly who long presented self as male in dress and even used the pronouns of he/him before beginning the transition, Shoana T. Hunt is singularly impressive in scenes as a lesbian in love with new-found Lynette, as a young person near paralyzed what her next step toward a transition might be, and as the wife who announces that she is starting testosterone treatments. She is also the memory that Carl cannot figure out what to do about — a memory along with pictures of his past that he thinks he wants to throw away but somehow cannot. Yet, Polly tells him bluntly, “We don’t get to chose what to remember or to forget.”
Those returning memories and the reactions of those around him who are not yet ready to accept the new Carl are some of the reasons Carl finds himself not only in therapy but even in a mental hospital. As we journey with Carl in the months after his proudly declaring “I am a man” and as we watch the struggle for others to transition with him, we begin to understand better the National Institute of Health’s estimate that 32-50% of transgender individuals consider and/or attempt suicide in comparison to a general population rate of 4-5%. The terrible lows that Carl experiences like when he calls his therapist, Barbara (Joanne Winter) in the middle of the night unable to breathe and shaking like a leaf are a part of the transition that we cis individuals — straight and LGB — can hardly imagine and yet need to understand exists.
As much as our hearts go out to Carl, the playwright P. Carl does not want us to short-change the effect his transition has on especially his wife, Lynette, whom over and again Carl tells everyone who will listen — including her — of his deep love for her even as their relationship seems to be collapsing in shambles. Laura Domingo as Lynette is yet one more cast member whose performance is nothing short of jaw-droppingly stunning.
While Lynette definitely tries to be supportive of a wife who is now her husband, she has yet to call him “Carl.” Suddenly she lives with someone who is buying neon tennies and is a fifty-year-old dressing as a twenty-something. Suddenly a woman who has never liked being around other men has this new machismo in the house who loves flaunting his new sense of manhood. For all the empathy that we are having for Carl, we cannot help but also find sympathy mounting for Lynette’s desperation as she expresses, “I don’t know who you are anymore,” or as she cries out to Carl, “I’m gay, and you’ve obliterated our history together.” And how is she to respond to a lesbian friend like Janet (Joanne Winter) who declares emphatically, “If you want to be a lesbian, you can’t stay with him”?
These are just a few of the scenes we watch unfolding as time travels back and forth over a lifetime of Carl’s arriving to the triumphant yet life-threatening place he is now. We learn that transitions like his of course do not take place in isolation. There is an abusive father (Erin Gould) that he nor Polly have ever had an easy relationship who is suddenly an invalid seeking his help and care. At the same time, his mother (Joanne Winter) is suffering dementia and can only see him as Polly (while being envious that her ‘daughter’ has such a pretty beard).
Altogether, P. Carl and Z Space’s Becoming a Man is a heart-rendering, eye-opening, thought-provoking night of live theatre that is in the end, an educational experience that needs to be seen, felt, and fully absorbed by as many Bay Area people as the Z Space theatre can hold between now and closing. Whether you are cis or trans; male, female, or non-binary; straight or queer; young or old — I urge you to grab a ticket and go see a play that all of America needs to see in this age of increasing transphobia, Z Space’s current production of P.Carl’s Becoming a Man.
Rating: 5 E, MUST-SEE
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Becoming a Man continues through June 14, 2026, in a ninety-minute (no intermission) in a West Coast premiere production by Z Space, 450 Florida Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available at https://www.zspace.org/.
Photos Credit: Kayleigh McCollum
