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Roy and Irma have been married for twenty-five years. They have two children. They live in the heartland. They've respected members of their church and their community. When Roy and Irma go to their pastor for marriage counseling, Roy confesses he's a woman trapped in a man's body and would like to have a sex change. As would be expected, Irma throws Roy out of the house. But their bond as a couple is stronger than either of them imagined, and eventually Irma finds a way to make peace with this unfathomable situation and accept her transformed husband as her lifelong mate. They not only have to wrestle with the meaning of their marriage, they must deal with the delicate dynamics of their family as well. Roy is burdened by his father's stubborn assesment of his manhood and his mother's sad acceptance of life's cruelties. Irma, in the midst of menopause, is struggling with her adolesdent tomboy daughter Patty Ann, who is raging against the injustices of her budding hormones. And the grown and absent son Wayne, who has always bemoaned his father's emotional limitations, is now outraged by his father's desire to be a woman. Overseeing it all is Roy's legendary greandmother, who left her husband and son to pursue her own sexual and emotional needs. The play explores the complexities of marriage, family and deconstructs the very notion of love. -- from book's back cover

I've had the privilege of acting in the Madison, WI production of this play, as Em, the mother of Roy, the man seeking gender reassignment. The poetry of the language throughout--from the lyrical monologues of the ghost grandmother, to the rants of the confused son--make this play more than a comedy. Every single character in some way deals with gender roles. Roy is sure he's a woman; his wife, Irma, doesn't know what that means for her, since she loves him but has no desire to live as "wife and wife." The pastor suggests that Roy's dilemma might be partly her doing -- never has the feminist in the audience wanted to punch a character more. (The pastor, it turns out, has his own misgivings as the house husband of a working woman.) Irma and Roy need look no farther than his mother to see what acquiescent wifeliness does to a woman, or to his father to see what it means to be "all man." In the meantime their 13-year-old daughter is either a tomboy or a dyke and their 20s son is impotent and angry. Roy's dead grandmother moved to Europe to buck the farm-wife role assigned to her by happenstance. And so on. Every part is a gem, both for the audience and the actor. As a result of working on this play I've become a big fan of Jane Anderson's other work, too.