The first thing you notice is the floor. The floor, despite its carpeting, takes you back into a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse; corn cobs litter the stage. The Wilma Theater has kicked off its season with the world premiere of “Horsegirl and Cowdaddy,” a new play by DJ Hills. The play is co-produced with New York’s Soho Repertory Theater, which brought its artists to Philadelphia for an exciting collaboration. Directed by Adil Mansoor, the play follows Horsegirl, a trans woman in her 30s, and her father, Cowdaddy, who have been on their own since Horsegirl’s mother left. However, their stable routine is about to be shaken up by a dinner guest.
The Wilma describes the play as a “funny and compassionate story [that] explores family, intimacy, and the messy beauty of becoming yourself.” To me, it all centered around one main idea: transformation, where bodies change, families adjust, and people try to understand each other across gender, class, and the distance between rural and urban life.
The play opens on an ordinary evening at home. Horsegirl (Samora de la Brisa) is repeatedly correcting Cowdaddy (Lindsay Smiling) on gender-neutral pronouns as he struggles to refer to their incoming guest with the correct they/them pronouns. Smiling, who is also the theater’s artistic director, does an excellent job portraying the kind of parent who tries hard to understand because he loves his child, even when his old habits are deeply ingrained and hard to change. Here, the house already feels a little tense.
Then, as yellow light hits the backdrop and a shadow stretches across it, a figure appears with their hands lifted high, holding a bouquet. That’s Bethel (Ni-Ni): a teacher and graduate student who is about to burst into the world of these two, looking completely, disarmingly affable.
Yet, even before the guest arrives, transformation has already gradually begun: when Horsegirl accidentally cuts herself, she lets out a horse’s neigh. If that sound is a crack in the surface, the rest of the night pries it wide open. After dinner, the play commits fully to Horsegirl’s physical transformation into a horse. She invites Bethel into her room, where they look through the horse drawings she has made. She bends down, backside toward Bethel (“Is this what you want to show me?” Bethel jokes), to pull out a horse head mask. She puts it on and nuzzles her head against Bethel, leaning into the sexuality of the scene. Bethel unbuttons their shirt, slides off their belt, and uses it to tease her in a BDSM kind of way. Throughout the scene, the shadows on the wall look like something from a sci-fi movie: the birth of a creature that is at once an animal and human.
So what exactly is Horsegirl turning into? The play’s imagery keeps hinting at an answer: something newborn. At one point, the characters talk about the membrane that covers a newborn foal’s hooves. Later, as they wander through a cornfield, a white substance suddenly appears on Horsegirl’s hand, and Bethel, for reasons I still can’t explain, licks it. In other scenes, she wears a woven bamboo horse head, her hands turn into hooves, and she moves remarkably like a horse. It’s as though she is being born into a new self, one scene at a time.
While Horsegirl is busy becoming herself, one of the play’s most fascinating scenes shows what the world around her expects people to be. All three actors look out at the audience as if they’re watching TV. The lighting, designed by Kate McGee, drifts from one color to the next, washing gently over the actors’ faces like the glow of a TV screen in a dark room, as they react in real time, sharing the same emotions at the same time. They’re watching a reality show featuring “twelve Men and twelve Women,” built on rigid ideas of gender. At this point in the play, we already know Cowdaddy’s understanding of gender is pretty basic, so his enjoyment is no surprise. What is surprising is that Horsegirl enjoys it too. Only Bethel is uncomfortable, growing annoyed as they watch people perform a social construct. When Bethel lets that frustration show, Horsegirl tries to distract them and never attempts to understand why they’re upset. Changing yourself, it turns out, doesn’t automatically mean you understand someone else.
But if you think Horsegirl is the only one transforming, physically and mentally, you’re wrong. Cowdaddy goes through his own transformation, and so does Bethel, both becoming cowboys. At one point, a cowboy hat drops from the ceiling, and Cowdaddy ends up swinging a lasso. Later, a hat falls for Bethel too, and they put it on and break into an expressive dance. It wasn’t always clear what triggered these moments, but the message comes through: nobody in this house stays the same.
For me, what makes all this more than a strange night on a farm is how the play weaves gender together with belonging and class. As I watched, I saw it looking at masculinity and femininity through a transgender lens, then setting them against a rural social background, asking what it means to come from wealth compared with living somewhere that offers very little of it. Bethel, an educated outsider who wants to help underserved students, seems to bring that tension right into the living room. When I caught Lindsay Smiling after the show and asked him about it, he put it simply: “It’s about offering human conversation. The character just happens to be trans,” he added, “and there’s a wonderful conversation in rural and urban intellectualism and what it means to be happy.”
Despite all it gets right, the play stumbles at the very end. For most of the night, the set is a pleasure to look at: strikingly realistic, from the soft carpet to the wooden table to the corn tucked into every corner. But that realism is exactly what makes the ending so hard to read. In the final moment, all the corn is removed, and it feels as if an illusion has shattered. After a whole whirlwind of transformations, I was ready to buy into the play as a kind of sci-fi story on stage. Then, suddenly, it seemed to tell me none of it was real, and that the physical transformations had never actually happened. The play appears to externalize changes happening inside the characters’ heads, but the staging never makes that shift clear. I left dumbfounded, wondering whether what I’d witnessed had really happened or had been in someone’s head all along. Why build such an overtly realistic world, only to break it at the end?
Even with that puzzle, “Horsegirl and Cowdaddy” is a bold, funny, and tender play about the messy business of becoming yourself. It runs about an hour and 45 minutes with no intermission, and it includes simulated sex, partial nudity, kink, strobe lights, loud sounds, and haze, so plan accordingly. The show plays at the Wilma through Oct. 4. After that, you’ll have to wait until next year, when it moves to Soho Repertory Theater in New York, opening March 8, 2027. Catch it before the corn is cleared away, and the cowboy hats head north.
