I have two older sisters, am trans, and am an artist. So needless to say my personal connections to Quinlyn Can Paint abound—and, the thing that's most beautiful about this piece to me is that anyone can connect to this work because it reaches out and grabs you with its paint-covered hands and stares into your soul, inviting you to really see the art, see each other, through these sisters. For me, having sisters and being an artist are two of the greatest sources of simultaneous bounding joy and sharp pain; you may find that watching this work. You may laugh or tear up or feel stabbed by the harsh reality and opinions shown on stage. I won't tell you what you should feel. All I care about is that you feel something—because in a world that tells us living beyond a binary is damaged/fake, that encourages us not to feel because to do so means constant grief, that diminishes the power and purpose of art: to do any and all of these things is a radical, powerful choice. What a privilege it's been to be trusted with these characters, this text, this little niche of complicated life that Zach wrote. How lucky we all are to get to witness it together. So sit back and feel something.

See you in the gallery,
Cee

Zach initially submitted Quinlyn Can Paint to our staged reading+ series and we as a company decided we could not do it at the time. It was simply too finished. Too whole. It did not need another workshop. It didn't need more development. What it needed was a team that was willing to trust Zach's words with a full scale production behind it. And in preparation for our first full length production, a big step for us as a company, we felt we simply had no other choice of what to produce. Zach had written a play that fit all three of our major tenants: it is queer, both in the sense of being strange AND being gay. It is a new work. And its language is heightened. That last one is particularly interesting to me for this show. Because on first read, or first listen, it appears to be very modern and very conversational. And that is the goal! But there is a roadmap in their words. A path to follow. We trusted that path. It might not be heightened as in Shakespearean, but it is heightened as in the words carry weight. We used the clues set out before us. We did what we could to trust the brush and let the painting come out however it needed to. I hope you see all of the artists that worked to bring this show to life in it. I hope you see yourself in it. I hope that it feels intimate or personal.

- Jared