This ‘Futuristic Gender Exploration’ Is Actually a Dull Anti-Abortion Rant
The 3rd Gender, at the New York Fringe Festival, is advertised as a futuristic exploration of gender and sexuality. But what I actually saw was a dull anti-abortion lecture, full of clunky plot devices. Spoilers ahead…
Note: I am writing this review in a bar a block away from the theater, because I need a drink to recover from the “play” that I just experienced.
In The 3rd Gender, it’s 2397, and heteronormativity has been outlawed. The ideal human is the third gender — biological men born with female spirits, and vice-versa. People who are so unfortunate as to exist with “old school” gender preferences are seen as an “abomination,” and either eliminated pre-birth or subject to extensive conditioning in an attempt to force them to conform.
But what the play’s promotional materials don’t tell you is that the performance is an unrelenting hour-and-a-half diatribe against abortion. The production is so relentlessly anti-choice that I felt midway I was being subject to a fundamentalist Hell House designed to terrify the audience out of making their own reproductive decisions.
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