ATTN: Jack McManus
I’m writing to you today in regard to your nomination for the World’s Most Perfect Person. I want to preface that as a panelist judge, I cannot yet disclose your status in the competition until the show closes on Sept. 28th, but I wanted to give you my thoughts despite this.
I was impressed with your character’s humor, their eloquence, and their disinhibition. Their ability to perform perfection enchanted me; that is, their ability to dodge questions and say nothing, while conjuring an intangible glamour that compels everyone around them. I thoroughly enjoyed the bits of comedy oscillating between backhanded quips and the darkest tragicomedy known to humankind.
Eventually, I felt a transformation. As your character’s guise of faultlessness began to crack, you broke down in front of everyone, demanding we tell you WHY you weren’t perfect, WHY the low scores? Then you plunged your head into a pillow and screamed. I remember the entire audience laughed without me. I assume the physicality was humorous to them, but in that moment, my heart shattered. I saw a part of myself reflected onstage I wasn’t expecting to see, and I was flooded with a compassion that drove me to tears.
For the rest of the show, I found myself questioning my relationship with technology, with selfhood, performance, and authenticity. What immeasurable toll does my daily performance of self (of my gender expression, my professionalism, my humanity) take on my mental health? When is it ever enough?
The most compelling element to me was your show’s unapologetic transfeminist point of view. I have a feeling the reason some of the presumably cishet audience members mentioned you were “rationalizing your feelings too much” was because you’d expertly verbalized the way transmisogyny has shaped your interactions with the outside world.
Near the end, in striving for perfection, attempting to eliminate all traces of humanity for an audience, I witnessed your character expose their deeply human emotions, and I felt relief. Your character asked the audience, “Is it bad that I want it to be true? That I am not the world’s most perfect person because I am a robot?” In my head, I answered: Of course not. Because sometimes it feels like it’d be better to be a machine, whose flaws are mechanically inevitable and universally less scrutinized, than to be a trans person whose flaws, both internal and external, are picked apart by peers and onlookers like vultures.
This is a piece I needed to see. I believe it is a piece we all need right now. Thank you. Lastly, I wanted to share that I have reached a similar conclusion: in defiance of our tech overlords, I choose to be consumed by the simple imperative to play. Soon I will join you as I walk into the ocean, with a smile on my face as bright as the sun shining overhead, never to be recorded again.
Signed,
Tyler Rocio Ecoña
Jack McManus’s Traffic Cam plays through Sept 28th at the Icebox.
Tyler Rocio Ecoña is a playwright and actor, appearing during the festival in Eliana Berson’s Queers in a Thrift Store with Monsters, which plays for one night only on Sept 21st at Tattooed Moms.
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