Chicago-based actor and playwright Will Wilhelm is spreading trans joy through the magic of theater. The conduit for that magic? The spirit of William Shakespeare, summoned via séance in Wilhelm’s solo show, Gender Play, or what you Will.
Co-created by Wilhelm and Erin Murray, the magic-infused play combines comedy with literary analysis, tarot readings with a dance party, and genderqueer interpretations of Shakespearean characters with an inclusive, empowering message.
Gender Play premiered in 2023 at About Face Theatre, a Chicago company that produces theater by LGBTQ+ artists, and the show has been further developed at the Island Shakespeare Festival in Washington state, Northwestern University in Illinois, and Wofford College in South Carolina. A new production, directed by Emily Tarquin, opened at Indianapolis Shakespeare Company in April and is playing May 15-24 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. After the Chicago run, the production will tour to Washington, DC; Louisville, Kentucky; and Winnipeg, Canada.
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A trans/nonbinary millennial who grew up in a suburb of Detroit and graduated from Northwestern University, Wilhelm began their career in Chicago’s storefront theater scene and is now an Equity actor with credits at Steppenwolf, Goodman Theatre, Chicago Children’s Theatre, Oak Park Festival Theatre, Portland Center Stage, and Shakespeare Theatre Company. In 2018, they became the first openly non-binary company member at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), where they reimagined genderqueer characters in As You Like It, Macbeth, and Oklahoma!
In a recent interview with INTO, Wilhelm said that they had a “really good experience” in their two years at OSF, where their very presence was an act of “education work,” but “not in a bad way and not in a way I resented at all—just in a way that was like, if you want people to know who you are and take care of you well, and all of these things, it behooves you to make sure they understand things about your experience.”
Wilhelm described OSF as a theater where “audiences feel [a] really personal connection to their ensemble members.” Met with a sense of openness and curiosity, Wilhelm’s experience of “making work and taking up space as a very visibly genderqueer person on their stage” was “very rewarding.” Through conversations with Murray (who was a college friend) after returning to Chicago, Wilhelm began to wonder, “What if I got to do that on my own terms?”
This question sparked the idea for a trans reclamation of Shakespeare’s canon. “I’m constantly looking for a more nuanced understanding of the way that things can be, and I just think with queerness and especially with transness and with gender, it’s just such a thing that everyone’s trying to wrap their mind around and ‘figure out’ for themselves,” said Wilhelm. “And Gender Play really came out of me wanting to contextualize my contemporary experience with something that I think theater people already think they understand or are used to constantly reinvestigating and reanalyzing.”
“And also, as a young person in my 20s when I started developing this, I just also really wanted to know what it felt like to allow my stories to not exist at the margins, but also exist at the center,” Wilhelm added. “Because we go on and on and on about how [Shakespeare’s plays] are the universal stories, [and] that’s why they’re the perfect classics, my question is always like, ‘Well, if they’re everyone’s story, can they also be my story? Specifically, mine. And if that could be true, can they be specifically your story, too?’”
With Gender Play, Wilhelm aims to create a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere that feels more like a collaborative event than a formal evening in the theater. Guests are invited to play dress-up with “fabulous garments” from a costume rack as they enter the venue, and Wilhelm mingles with attendees before the show begins, identifying several willing participants to play small roles in the upcoming performance.
In the play’s opening scene, Wilhelm recounts the incredible experience of spending the previous night hanging out with their “new bestie,” Will Shakespeare, whom they summoned by incanting several lines from Romeo and Juliet. “We instantly bonded over our hatred of normalcy and our love of a good dick joke,” Wilhelm says in the script. On a more serious note, Shakespeare agrees to help Wilhelm “traipse through his canon as me. Maybe his characters can help me make better sense of myself. Or maybe they can reveal their true selves through me.”
After inviting the audience to help summon Shakespeare again, Wilhelm launches into a series of vignettes that reexamine several Shakespearean characters through a trans lens: Helena (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Edmund (from King Lear). Through recitations of famous monologues, textual analysis that offers fresh perspectives on these characters, and personal reflections from Wilhelm’s own life, they guide the audience on a journey of self-discovery and a celebration of “[t]he experiences you and I have in common, and the ones we could never,” as stated in the script. Gender Play also explores queer subtexts in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the role of marginalized identities in his plays, the gender fluidity of Elizabethan performance practices, and the pitfalls of modern ideas about historical accuracy.
We go on and on and on about how [Shakespeare’s plays] are the universal stories…Well, if they’re everyone’s story, can they also be my story? And if that could be true, can they be specifically your story, too?”
Will Wilhelm
Through performing this show in different cities over the past two years, Wilhelm has encountered a range of queer communities across the country. During the recent run in Indianapolis, they didn’t observe many noticeably queer people walking around the city, but they were pleasantly surprised by how many queer and trans people from across Indiana attended the performances. “People were coming from farther away because people really need that space, and people will travel for it,” Wilhelm said. “It was so awesome. It was so much fun.”
Wilhelm is proud to bring Gender Play to Steppenwolf, where they previously appeared in Young Jean Lee’s play Straight White Men in 2017. Although Wilhelm resists the terminology of “coming out,” they said that that production “was my first time standing on a stage as a publicly visible nonbinary person, to take up space as a publicly visible non-binary character on stage, and so that was huge for me.” Returning to Steppenwolf eight years later feels like “the culmination of a really important chapter of my life that started with that moment.”
After Chicago, the next tour stop is Washington, DC, where Theater Alliance and Shakespeare Theatre Company will co-present Gender Play as part of World Pride. Wilhelm feels that “this play responds so heavily to what’s happening in our federal government” in the present, even though the writing process began more than five years ago. While some of their friends have expressed concern about bringing Gender Play to the nation’s capital in 2025, Wilhelm has a positive outlook: “I’m coming with joy and celebration and my art, and I’m offering that to other people. If people have some sh*t to say about that, like, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“As this play responds to this current moment, I think a lot about the idea of magic, and that the power of magic is that it allows us to not need to explain everything that we’re seeing and to understand everything that we’re seeing,” Wilhelm continued. “And I think that a common dialogue around allies or cis people or whoever, trying to understand the trans and queer experience, is they’re like, ‘Well, I just don’t get it.’ And sometimes you don’t have to. You actually don’t have to understand everything to love and cherish and honor and respect it. That’s all you need. If you honor and respect something, why would you need to actually understand someone else’s lived experience? It’s awesome if you want to try, but that’s not the prerequisite for support. Understanding is not the prerequisite for support.”
“So, this play is all about magic,” Wilhelm said. “We do a ritual together. It’s mysticism. And theater? All about magic. Baby, it’s all make-believe; it’s all made-up. We’re all pretending as if this is true—and what a beautiful, communal exercise in pretending.” ♦
Gender Play, or what you Will plays May 15-24 at Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago; May 29-June 1 at Theater Alliance, Washington, DC; June 13-22 at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, KY; and July 16-27 at Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, Winnipeg, Canada. In September 2025, the script will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Volume 2.
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