Home

Queer Soup presents the world premiere of Home, written by award-winning playwright and Boston’s own, Jess Martin. Home delves into a family whose faith is rocked with the death-bed revelation that the minister’s grandfather was born biologically female. The production is an original work created by Queer Soup’s producers/performers.

What does it take to make a man? God? Is it testosterone, anatomy, or some elusive all natural male scent? Gender identity is rarely discussed at the dinner table with one’s grandparents, and in Home, Minister Lulu Edwards lashes out at her family over what she sees as a secret that her grandfather kept from her while he was alive. However, her grandfather never identified as anything other than a man, and so this calls into question, how can his gender identity ever be something he considered hidden? Complicating this revelation, Lulu learns that her new love interest, Kai, is a professional drag king who, in Lulu’s opinion, “grinds her audiences with a silicon penis on a weekly basis.”

Home explores this spectrum of gender from female-to-male transgenderism to the ‘genderqueer’ identity of Kai to Lulu’s identity as lesbian while balancing a blend of comic with the dramatic – within a religious community setting. Faith as a term finds itself in tricky territory in the queer community since it is so often associated with organized religion. But it is in faith, which is defined as that confident belief in something whether it be a person, a value, or one’s identity, that the queer community centrally exists.