Joshua Irving Gershick (center) surrounded by performers in a previous production he did. Circling around him (l to r): Seth Gomez, Lee Faelner, Jen Winslow, and B. Alexander. Winslow and Alexander will appear with Gershick in TRANScripts at Provincetown Theater.
Photo: B. Alexander
Joshua Irving Gershick’s TRANScripts
by James Judd
“It’s always a marvelous experience and not a little scary because the material is intimate,” says Joshua Irving Gershick on the topic of sharing his personal stories with an audience. “I’m not an actor. I’m a storyteller.”
Gershick is one of four performers who will be presenting new solo works for the Provincetown Theater’s 4-Star Solo Show Festival, each week this month. The busy writer/playwright/documentarian has written several award-winning plays but has never performed at 75-minute solo work.
He explains from his home in Los Angeles, “I have done the through-line pieces of this show at various storytelling shows in L.A. but I’ve never brought them all together.”
Speaking about the show, called TRANScripts, Gershick adds, “It’s not a solo show in the way you think of solo shows.” The work is described as a “funny, though-provoking multimedia show,” on Provincetown Theater’s website. “It’s meant to be more immersive and different from a more typical solo show,” he explains. “Between the larger pieces I’ve written micro-monologues performed by other people through the miracle of modern technology.”
But what compels someone who could rest on their laurels as easily as Gershick could to get up on stage and reveal their inner lives to a room full of strangers? He sees it as a natural progression from the work he has already done.
“Honestly, this goes way, way back to the publication of my first book Gay Old Girls,” explains Gershick. Gay Old Girls is a collection of oral histories of older lesbians talking about their lives and experiences in their thirties, forties, and fifties. It was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award for Best LGBT Nonfiction.
“When that book came out, I thought let’s gather some actors together,” says Gershick. “Let’s craft some monologues out of these oral histories and perform them. We did it at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. That show was where it all began.”
Gershick started out in the newspaper business “a long time ago when there were still typewriters in the newsroom,” he says, reflecting on his long writing career, which included stints at Newsweek and The Advocate, among others. “What journalists essentially do, the good ones, is they listen. Listening is really an essential. Listening for the story. Listening for the wonderful bit of dialogue. Listening for the turn of phrase.”
“The thing that has bound my work together is my principal aim to illuminate the lives of LGBTQ people who’ve been hidden from history,” he says. “Sometimes the medium for those stories is a film. Sometimes it’s a documentary. Sometimes it’s a news story, an oral history, a play. I don’t view this as something different, I see it as part of that storytelling continuum.”
Gershick, now 65, credits the good fortune of growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970’s and 80’s when San Francisco was the West Coast epicenter of the gay rights movement, and a peak moment for creative self-expression.
“At my first teen job, I worked in a café, and the manager was a very elegant, French lesbian,” he says. “During the week, the establishment was a kind of a businessman’s lunch spot. But on the weekend, it turned into the gayest of gay brunch places. All of her friends, from just the most fabulous fairies to the boldest leather dykes, and everyone in between were there.”
“If you can see yourself, you can be yourself,” says Gershick. “I saw a lot of L and G and B people, and lots of varieties within the L, G, and B, but I saw very few T people or T people that I was aware of. But it was a splendid beginning. I began to see myself in that café.”
Today, Gershick, like so many in the trans community, including allies, is concerned about the relentless vituperations of the current administration and its abettors. He feels the urgency for members of the trans community to tell their stories to the people who feel they don’t know anyone who identifies as trans.
“I was in San Francisco in the late ‘70s and in the early ‘80s at the height of The Save Our Children movement, Anita Bryant, and all of that,” says Gershick. “The same things that were said about gay men and lesbians then are today being said about transgender people…It’s all recycled hate, recycled rhetoric,” he adds.
“In the day, if you wanted to hear those hateful people you might have to go to a meeting in a basement somewhere or read their little newsletter that was mimeographed and mailed to you. But today it’s all around us. And in the absence of knowing trans people, folks believe this folderol just like they believed it back in the day.”
Lately, Gershick has been working with a large healthcare organization on the West Coast, as part of their trans cultural competency team. They get in front of everyone from doctors, nurses, and receptionists to the car park attendants and the senior-most surgeons to share stories about their lives as transgender people. It’s something he has been doing for more than 40 years.
“As a little gay girl in my cute little linen suit and high heels, and my lipstick, and my little bob,” says Gershick, smiling at the memory. “I was talking to nursing students, high-school assemblies and the Kiwanis about my life as a lesbian. I do believe in the power of the personal story to change hearts and minds. I have seen it happen.”
TRANScripts will be performed Thursday through Saturday, June 12 – 14 at 7 p.m. at the Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St. For tickets ($57.80 including fees) and information call 508.487.7487, visit provincetowntheater.org or go to the theater box office.
