It was August 18, 2024, at about 7 p.m., and the doors to the Rattlestick Theatre were not yet open.
Entering up past the 17-step walkway, a young long-haired theater employee smiled. “Can you please come back in 5-to-10 minutes? We should be ready then,” they said.
That night, the theater filled just before a barrage of rain, thunder, and lightning – a fitting symbol.
Community members hugged, kissed, and said hello to each other in the theater. It was as if they were just realizing how big Cecilia Gentili’s world was.
Born in “the middle of nowhere” Gálvez, Argentina in 1972, the Pose star tells the story of herself, an “atheist, [that] God won’t give up on…” and the trials and tribulations of immigrating to the U.S. as a transgender woman in this one hour 15 minute play, RED INK.
Except this year, RED INK takes a solemn, and different approach. Gentili passed a year ago on Feb. 6 to fentanyl-laced heroin in her Brooklyn home. Nine days later, more than 1,400 people attended Gentili’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
With the help of queer, trans, and nonbinary stars in entertainment like Peppermint, Jes Tom, Angelica Ross, Nic Cory, George Strus, and so many others, RED INK was revived in the form of community, love, grief, and the joy Gentili brought to so many.
The play has also been named a Special Recognition Honoree for the 36th GLAAD Media Awards, for its compelling story and inclusion of LGBTQ people.
Peppermint closed the play’s 20-day run in the summer. Audience members showered her with a rousing applause, hugs and flowers at the productions end. With a smile, Peppermint paused, and looked at the audience with a tightness in her voice when she spoke. Performing in RED INK, she says, was unlike anything she’d ever done before.
“I’m so grateful,” the GLAAD board member and Survival of the Thickest star said. Playing Gentili in the tribute rendition of RED INK brought Peppermint closer to Gentili’s lived experiences. Peppermint knew Gentili in her personal life, and her first impression of her was pivotal.
“She was my first counselor at The Center who helped me and guided me at the very beginning of my medical transition,” Peppermint reflected. “And there were moments when I started my transition where it was life and death for me. I’m so grateful for her.”
Peppermint had no idea that more than ten years after meeting Gentili she would have the sorrowful honor of helping to tell her story after her passing.
“While her story is not identical, while her experiences aren’t identical to mine, I’ve done so many different plays and stories, and lots of different things I try to do in entertainment, and this is the closest I’ve ever come to really being able to just live through the material,” Peppermint continued.
Throughout her life, Gentili has been an outspoken activist for liberation. From joining actions against genocide with Jewish Voices for Peace to dinners with the Black Trans Liberation Kitchen to founding her own transgender policy and education consulting firm, Transgender Equity Consulting, Gentili’s footprint outsizes New York City.
When director, actor and producer Nic Cory met Gentili as Billy Porter’s associate while working on the set of The Life – a show centered around a sex worker in the 80s – at New York City Center he fell in love. Gentili was a consultant for the show. With two weeks to stage the entire production after having been rearranged, there was no time to waste. Indubitably, when Gentili arrived at work, when she spoke, Cory remembers Porter saying, “She can have as much time as she wants.”
“Everyone was just transfixed with Cecilia and her humor, the wisdom she had, and the knowledge she shared with all of us,” Cory said. Maybe it was the set life on The Life, or maybe it was just the way humor came natural to Gentili. Either way, the two struck up a creative, collaborative friendship.
“I want to do something theatrical,” Cory remembered Gentili saying.
It was April 1 of 2023 and RED INK was in the works.
Just months later, people would cackle once again at the recurring announcement in the campy one-woman show: I’m an atheist!
Cory and Gentili set a date for May. What would the two get done by then? Could they break something into production in a month and a half? The two worked diligently, and, yet again, there was no time to waste.
“I would go over to her house and we would work the whole day, and then [Cecilia] would ask Peter, her partner, to drive me to the train,” Cory remembers. “It never felt like work with Cecilia,” he continues. “It was just the happiest, most exciting artistic experience I’ve ever had.”
Around this time, Gentili purchased a house Upstate. She would work on RED INK there, where the photographer Oscar Diaz shot the notorious promo shoot for the show. She went to church up there too. At 52-years-old, she never stopped feeling the goosebumps that grazed over her flesh when she entered a place of worship – as if a beckoning.
Cory is not alone in this experience. In the realm of art – across age, generation, and experience – Gentili reinvigorated a passion, a fire in people, or as Cory calls it: “a real sense of wonder, laughter in creation.”
George Strus – an award-winning trans nonbinary Latine producer and self-described “dramaturg” – has known Cory for a few years. Strus is also the founder of Breaking the Binary Theatre, a company for and by trans and nonbinary theater artists.
“‘I’m doing this play with Cecilia, and I think it’s really good,’” Strus recalls Cory telling them. “He invited me to see it,” Strus said. At this time the one-woman show had just left Wild Project in the summer for a self-produced run at Rattlestick in autumn of 2023.
“And so, I met Cecilia through the show, which is why [it] was such a special sort of moment that we were able to keep that show and that work alive,” Strus continued.
Strus officially met Gentili after the show. Strus was inspired by her ambition, her talent, and her dreams for the future. At the time, Strus and Will Davis, artistic director of Rattlestick Theater, were looking for a show to collaborate on. And Davis considered RED INK a “no brainer.”
With that said, Davis is the first transgender person to run a non-Broadway theater, and it’s his self-described mission to keep theater “queer, trans, and honest,” and likewise, Gentili unequivocally radiated that mission.
When Strus started Breaking the Binary Theatre, Davis sat on the theater’s board as their first board member. Davis recalls having the mindset that Strus and he were going to help each other elevate the LGBTQ plays of their dreams and reality. Both note that in the profession of theater, queerness is often deemed “risky,” something they and Gentili knew not to be true. Gentili’s story is one of overcoming and becoming again and again. She’d become in such a way that when she wasn’t in the room, people noticed.
Upon Gentili’s death, grief struck thousands. Activists, artists, members of the LGBTQ community, felt a sting, a break, a void in Gentili’s passing. This grief lives on in a living memory of Cecilia Gentili: a woman who opened up worlds, and took them by the horns with a great laugh, with passion, and a need for justice.
In late September, both people charged with distributing the fentanyl-laced heroin that caused Gentili’s death pled guilty to the charge, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Gentili was otherwise scheduled to perform RED INK again on April 3, 2024 for one night at Joe’s Pub. People like Davis, Strus, Cory, Peppermint, Jes Tom, and Angelica Ross summoned Gentili’s spirit, immortalized on the stage. The chant “Cecilia! Cecilia! Cecilia!” rippling through time and space.
“There is something very real about being in that room,” Davis said, “for that last show with Peppermint, and any of these performances that happened for RED INK, where people in the room who have been moved and helped and affirmed by Cecilia, are moving and helping and affirming the room of people who are here to see each other, and feel the power of being together,” Davis added.
When I asked if RED INK will come back to the stage in the coming seasons, the answer wasn’t ‘no.’
“I don’t actually know,” said Davis, “I think that definitely should happen.”
Strus said that the team learned a lot artistically from reproducing the show, as well as from the emotions that would come months after the death of Gentili. “I think we are trying to think of ways to make sure that the work lives on, but always in a way that honors her.”