April Kirby

Name as you’d like it to appear: April Kirby

Gender as you’d like it to appear: Female

City you live in and/or improvise in most: A fairly equal split between Charlotte, NC and Raleigh, NC.

Personal website or another project that you’d like to link to: @msaprilkirby on instagram if you want to see mostly pictures of baked goods and occasionally a show promo!

Impro(v) Bio: April has been performing sketch and improv across North Carolina for 15 years, from festivals to bars to comedy theaters to weird little corners of the museum where they store all the mannequins she is always excited to put on a show and create worlds with her scene partners that she could never dream of on her own. These days she performs every second Saturday of the month with Capital City Culture Club at Comedyworx in Raleigh and with Now Are the Foxes in venues across Charlotte. You might even catch her with Ham Family or Higher Education, two of her favorite improv teams. And she is so excited to see what the future holds!

How does being trans/NB influence your impro(v)?

In comparison to how I improvised before I chose transition I feel considerably more freedom to be myself and to inject more of what I feel is my “true” personality into my improv. Masking was a huge part of my closeted experience, and I put so much effort into maintaining my mask that I often felt like I did not really know what parts of me were real. This feeling extended to improv, where I worked very hard to get good at fitting into the worlds being built around us. Much like in real life, I now feel much more comfortable simply existing in those world and seeing where those interactions take us. One thing I heard early in my transition that really struck with me is that yes I was transitioning to be my gender, but I was also transitioning to be myself. In that sense being trans has certainly impacted my improv since I started transition but also did before I had even reached a point of fully understanding my identity.

Do you play trans/NB characters often?

When I play different characters I like to think some of them are trans, but that reality is not always conveyed to the audience if it is not directly related to what is happening in the scene. It is something I want to get better at doing in an artful way – if it were for a sketch or a play I would have the luxury of being able to plan something out because I think it is important to convey trans/NB characters in situations where our identity is not always the main thing about us so to speak. Less commonly I have come across situations where my own trans identity is central to delivering a joke and I enjoy it when the opportunity arises, but in the dozens of shows I’ve done since coming out I feel like it’s only popped up a few times. I have also had to be careful to remember that my teammates and the audience might not have the same frame of reference as me in some cases.

How do you feel about cisgender actors playing trans/NB characters in impro(v)?

If a player specifically plays a trans/NB identity to make a joke I am generally somewhat skeptical of that, as in the vast vast majority of cases where it happens there is at best a lack of frame of reference for our experiences and at worst evoking harmful stereotypes. That being said, improv is all about unexpected things happening organically and occasionally a cis performer will, often unintentionally, reference or act out a trope that suggests a trans/NB narrative. I appreciate and enjoy moments like those, and try to encourage going down that path when the path opens up. The one drawback that I grapple with is that much like when I am intentionally portraying a trans woman, it’s hard to know what frame of reference my teammates have, and that might mean the narrative goes in a direction I did not expect. This is also something I hope to get better at over time as I do not want to shy away from topics that impact my life just because they might not always be received the way I hope/anticipate.

Besides announcing it, how might you know/show a character is trans/NB?

This question made me think quite a bit more than maybe it was intended to, because my first thought is whether making reference to an event in a person’s life that might strongly suggest a trans/NB identity would qualify as ‘announcing’ it in comparison to just stepping into the scene and saying something like “Hi, I’m April and I’m a trans woman. Now here’s how we win the fart competition…” Finding ways to intentionally insert details that don’t feel like announcements is a skill I am still working on!

How do you feel about playing different genders generally, in terms of naming gender and of expressing it?

As a general rule when I am playing onstage I have no qualms about going in the direction that the scene calls for, and that includes playing men and even using my masculine voice to do so. I have a somewhat latent discomfort around my masc voice in that it’s hard for me to know sometimes whether a positive audience response is related to my scene specific choices or becaues my voice has simply gone lower, but ultimately I have landed on the side of having faith in my own choices and that a strong scene will draw focus where I want it. I will say, however, that as fine as I am playing a man there can come a point in a show where if I am assigned enough male roles it starts to make me feel uncomfortable, as I have also been performing long enough to know that part of the equation is the roles that other improvisers assign to you. When this happens I don’t really think my teammates are doing so intentionally, but it’s still a bad feeling that can make me question whether it was something about my appearance or mannerisms that led people to assign me so many male roles on a given night.

Does your local impro(v) community know/understand your gender? If so, how has that been in terms of acceptance/understanding?

I am fully out to all communities, and believe it or not I was out and doing shows as myself before I had even told my family! Improv has been such an important component of my life for so long and once I had some time to transition (coincidentally right as many theaters were starting to open back up) I decided I simply could not hide myself onstage any longer. My local improv communities have overall been wonderful and accepting, and most importantly open to taking the opportunity to learn when those moments arise. It’s my great hope that the communities I am a part of will continue to have more and more trans participation and that one day I can be on an all trans team with a super corny name that brings the house down every show.

What are some things that teachers/directors/other performers can do to make sure trans/NB improvisers feel safe and welcome?

Making sharing pronouns a part of every check in – not just the ones where you think someone might be trans – is incredibly important for normalizing the process and not turning the exercise into a roundabout way of singling out people who “appear to be” trans/NB.

One thing I have not seen a lot of but wish would happen more is for coaches to check in with players about things that can happen in shows that might make the performer in question feel uncomfortable or dysphoric. For me personally, it is crossing that threshold of getting assigned as a man a few too many times in a show. The reason I think it would be hugely valuable is that a coach can offer feedback on those things during show notes and normalize it as something players might hear. Likewise, even as someone who has improvised for years and was in very strong standing with my theater, I still get extremely intimidated bringing up that type of feedback myself and worrying whether this will be the time I cross the line and everyone just gets fed up with me. It’s both a fear of societal transphobia and the more generalized taboo in improv that players should be careful about what we say about other players’ performances. A coach is already designated as a person who is expected to give feedback and can take so much pressure off a trans improviser when they are able to notice those issues and address them!

Thinking about examples of trans/NB characters across all media (Impro(v), TV, Movies, Plays etc), what are the best trans/NB characters or stories you’ve seen depicted? The worst?

I grew up with Mrs. Garrison and the villain from Ace Ventura, both of which are such terrible and inaccurate depictions of trans women that it made me think I couldn’t be trans because my experiences do not align with these caricatures. As bad and mean spirited as these depictions were, the worst part wasn’t that they existed but that they were the only representations I knew for a long long time, and I do believe that it impacted my ability to determine whether I related to the experiences of trans women and eventually accept my identity.

Truth be told I still don’t feel like I get to see a ton of representation in media though it has gotten better over time. My first answer might be a little bit of a cheat, but I do feel strongly about The Matrix as a strong representation of trans narratives even if the move is not necessarily explicit about it. More recently I felt that A League of Their Own had a wonderful NB character as well as a couple of other characters that I don’t think were explicitly labelled as trans but seemed to be coded that way. I also liked Jim from Our Flag Means Death quite a bit!

Who do you look up to/admire as a trans/NB person in impro(v) or the world generally?

L.E. Zarling is one of my favorite improvisers and her Wisconsin Laugh Trip is an incredible show to behold. The ease with which she carries the audience along with her always blows me away and the first time I saw it I genuinely thought it was a rehearsed standup act. I’ve seen it a few times since then and can assure you it is different every time even as it consistently brings down the house. Outside of the improv world I have a huge amount of admiration for Tilly Bridges, a writer who has created the hugely valuable resource Tilly’s Trans Tuesdays, which covers both trans representation in media and general topics on trans living that are hugely valuable resources for cis allies looking to become better educated.

What’s something special that you and/or trans/NB performers have to offer?

One of the pillars of good improv, in my opinion, is emotional honesty and one thread that I believe connects most trans/NB people is the incredible amount of emotional honesty we need to exhibit to both accept ourselves and to be ourselves in a world that often wants us to hide. Emotional honesty has a gravity to it even in very silly scenes where the emotions aren’t very high stakes, and at least in my experience it has been a very common attitude among trans people I have known that being able to experience those kinds of emotions is a gift and not something we necessarily always had the luxury of experience. This joy and authenticity in our emotional expression, from celebrating lower stakes emotions to knowing how to navigate higher stakes emotional moments, makes for incredible improv whether our identities are part of the scene or not.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about being trans/NB or impro(v) in general?

Improv played such a huge role in allowing me to express myself in ways I didn’t feel I could offstage before I transitioned and I firmly believe it was an important factor in helping me to figure out myself. Once I transitioned part of me worried I wouldn’t “need” it anymore and would get tired of it or feel like it was holding me back. I am so happy to say that among all the other wonderful things it has done for me, transition has opened up so many new paths in terms of what improv can mean to me and I am so happy that I still feel the joy of getting out on stage and a renewed excitement over all the ways I can grow as a player over time.