A performer has become very good at being someone else. Now growing older threatens to take that person away.
That is one way into Boy My Greatness, Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s play about the young performers who played women in Shakespeare’s theatre. In its imagined backstage world of 1606, Tom faces his final female role. Another former performer has become a preacher who wants the theatres closed. The playwright’s character descriptions suggest lives that continue beyond the costume: ambition, attachment, faith, and uncertainty about the person an audience expects to see. Explore the playwright’s synopsis and characters.
The premise opens a question larger than theatrical disguise. What happens when a role gives someone a way to live, and the world decides they have outgrown it?
At the University of Central Oklahoma, students Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch wanted to direct the play together. Their department selected it for a student production. In September 2025, university support was withdrawn. The Oklahoma Observer, drawing on interviews with the students, describes preparations interrupted just as rehearsals were about to begin. The students subsequently organized an independent production, advertised for October 23–26 at Upstage Theatre in Edmond. Moving meant finding resources beyond the campus structure that had originally supported them. Read the students’ account and the move off campus.
The explanation deserves care. Welch told Playbill that the department head cited Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 796. UCO’s public statement instead emphasized legal review of the production contract and a decision not to use university resources. Its general counsel also raised Title IX concerns. The department said a revised agreement might permit a campus production; Senese-Grossberg said the replacement contract introduced liability and gender-related casting provisions, and that she declined to sign on the Dramatists Guild’s advice. Those are overlapping accounts of a dispute, not a court finding that the play violated any law. Read the university’s and playwright’s explanations in Playbill.
The playwright’s public casting notes welcome performers of any gender while asking producers to prioritize actors with trans feminine experience. That makes casting part of the work’s artistic intention. It does not establish which contractual provision stopped this particular production; the original and proposed agreements would be needed to resolve that. Read the casting notes.
The play has continued to find stages. A July 2026 review documents a separate production by San Diego’s Loud Fridge Theatre Group. That continuation matters, although a later production cannot tell us what the Oklahoma students lost or gained by leaving campus. Explore the San Diego production.
For this project, the interesting measure is not simply whether the play survived. It is what an institution’s withdrawal asks young artists to absorb: another venue, another budget, and the decision to keep going when the project has become publicly contentious.
To explore: Begin with the New Play Exchange listing, which offers the synopsis, characters, and a route to script access and rights inquiries. Full-script access may require an account. The Edmond event listing preserves the planned production’s credits and content notice; it is a past event, not a current ticket recommendation. It flags discussions of transphobia, suicide, and child abuse.
A question to carry away: When a production survives only because its makers find new money and a new room, how should we describe both its freedom and its loss?
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