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Cecilia Gentili, the author, advocate, and all-around icon of queer and trans life in New York City, is an atheist — kind of. Her extraordinary one-woman show Red Ink spends ninety minutes exploring what it means to find God where you least expect it: in a childhood nativity play; with a transmasc security guard at JFK; beneath a man who has Jesus tattooed in a certain, unholy place. As I left the show, I was struck by the sensation that God can be everywhere you look — even on a stranger’s dick.
The performance is loosely based on Genitli’s 2022 book Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist, which charts her upbringing in Argentina through eight alternately harrowing and hilarious letters. Gentili also developed a handful of new stories for this performance under the guidance of Red Ink’s Director and Producer, Nic Cory. The result is a stunning portrait of a young trans woman coming-of-age in the 1970s and 1980s.
After a successful run at The Wild Project, the show debuted off-Broadway at the Rattlestick Theater in the West Village this October. Founded in 1994, Rattlestick has long been a launching pad for a generation of actors and playwrights, from Lucy Thurber to Jesse Eisenberg. The theater is currently helmed by Will Davis, a transgender director and choreographer. “It just all made sense that this is where the show would be,” Gentili tells me, reflecting on the magic of working with an all-LGBTQ+ crew that included projections by Sasha Velour, lighting by Adam Honoré, and wardrobe by Gogo Graham. “Everyone just made me feel so safe.”
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The show is divided into almost a dozen short stories. Before each one, Gentili offers, “I’m an atheist, but…” From there, we meet various family members and friends who make up the cast of Gentili’s early life, such as her godfather, a delightful gay man who passed away when Gentili was a child. Taken together, Gentili produces a moving portrait of her early community with all of its myriad rivalries and alliances.
Her energy and timing had the audience eating from the palm of her hand like we were puppies lapping up treats. Her ease on stage comes in part from her experience putting on her previous one-woman-show, The Knife Cuts Both Ways, in which she improvised stories. Working with a script and crew provided new restrictions, such as lighting cues, but the structure only seemed to deepen Gentili’s natural acting chops. I felt like I was watching Lucille Ball — an actress with extraordinary comedic timing who has the capacity to work on many registers at once. Like Faltas, the show was both grief-stricken and comedic, a feat only a true actress can pull off.
This tension between love and loss was on display throughout the show. In one highlight, Gentili’s grandmother, played by Gentili herself, takes her to a new Baptist church. Gentili is dressed in layers of jewelry, which the pastor says God disapproves of. However, rather than agreeing with him, Gentili’s grandmother declares that she will never return to the church again — a moment that felt like collective healing for the largely queer and trans audience. We seemed to wonder together: What if we had all had grandmothers who protected instead of condemned us?
In another highlight, Gentili’s mother believes she has to wait a full year after her husband’s death until she has a sexual relationship with another man. This commitment only lasts for a few months, ending when she falls for a construction worker. As her mother recounts the experience of having sex with him, Gentili slowly realizes that her mother has never had an orgasm before. “He wasn’t only a bad father,” Gentili muses about her dad. “He was a bad fuck.”
The punchline is that it is unclear to the audience — or Gentili herself — which is worse.
Woven throughout the play are photographs of Gentili as a child and young adult. After recounting her experience as one of the Three Kings during The Nativity (“It was never giving villager,” she says, pointing to her flawless body), we see her adorned in layers of jewelry and cape, a tiny icon in the making. In later photos, she is posing with the trans legend Allanah Star. Together, they look like the best party you were never invited to, all skin and leg that made me wish I could time travel, for a single night, to dance with them.
In many ways, the show felt like a bittersweet victory lap. Despite everything, Gentili has survived — but one is forced to consider why she was made to survive so much at all. This, Gentili says, was her goal. “I wanted people to leave the show confused,” she says. “I wanted them to laugh, but also to wonder why we have to make trans people’s lives so hard.” This question is still at the heart of Gentili’s relationship to religion.
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During the show’s run, Pope Francis met with a group of trans women, many of whom were Argentinian. “I joked to Nic, the Pope listened to us!” she says with a laugh. And yet, she continues to wonder what religious repair might look like for trans communities, who have been wounded by the Catholic church for centuries. She hopes that her show is one way of exploring that question but is clear that she has, in fact, found God. “I found it in Bamby Salcedo, in Qween Jean,” she says, listing off a litany of trans women she sees as saints.
The show will return for one, legendary night at Joe’s Pub on April 3rd. Beyond that, Gentili says they are having several conversations about the future. “A televised special?” she teases. We would all be so lucky.
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