A Moment of Silence: Capstone Presentation by Beja Puškášová
Written by Rabi Michael-Crushshon ’26
A blue hue filled the room while audience members chatted amongst themselves. A pregnant Black trans woman entered, carrying a baby whose distant crying was heard over the speakers. In a recreation of the birth of Jesus, the woman sat, protecting and rocking her baby until darkness. The crowd was silenced, and the show began.
“There’s something about seeing a pregnant trans woman on stage,” said Beja Puškášová ’26, a Theater and English and Creative Writing double-major and a trans woman herself. “I think that is just something very cool that I wanted to achieve. I wanted to see that.”
Saturday night was the second of three sold-out showings of Moment of Silence—the result of years of labor from Puškášová. Inspired by real stories, from 13 interviews, word of the mouth, and even medical journals, this play travels forward and backwards in time, in and out of multiple dimensions, exploring community care, menstruation, and transness.
At the end of last summer, Puškášová finished her first draft, and now, she has gone through about 11 different revision phases. The majority of which happened during rehearsals — every week she was going home, rewriting, revising, and cutting parts of the 80-page script.
The performance was structured as a table read. Actors sat in a semi-circle and read scripts off music stands. Their voices and facial expressions did much of the work, drawing audience members into the story and painting the world Puškášová attentively created.
Inspired by the serial structure used in Wonderlust Productions’ performance Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project, Puškášová incorporated a series of shorter scenes that were all interconnected by similar characters and experiences. In this form, she was able to draw on her research and demonstrate a vast amount of menstrual experiences, from endometriosis to PCOS, to different trans experiences.
Rarely are these different yet connected experiences held together in one piece of art. Puškášová wanted to tell stories that aren’t often told — or at least not told with care — so while doing research, she intentionally found people and stories that represented a variety of BIPOC, gender, and menstruation identities.
Additionally, as in the Wonderlust show, the first story is completed at the end of the play, tying together the production nicely and creating a cyclical feel. At the beginning of Moment of Silence, the audience is brought into a funeral scene.
Friends and community members mourn the passing of Rachel, a trans woman, who took her own life after being forced away from motherhood by her community. They place sentimental items on her grave and hold a moment of silence in her honor. Her story connects the other scenes and characters. Audience members watch Rachel’s spirit grow into her fullest self, and then the play ends with an alternative representation of the cycle of life; Rachel is reborn, a baby to two trans parents.
Unlike many playwrights who hide in the back rows at their own plays, for all three of the Macalester performances, Puškášová sat front and center to watch her script unfold. On opening night, as planned, the Filipino father walked up to his child and asked: “Is your moontime pet okay?”
“I lost it. I just exploded laughing at my own writing.” Puškášová said, “And then the actors also lost, and we all just lost it and started laughing, because it was like, ‘Why is this man asking his child about their moontime pet.’ It was just so absurd.”
Puškášová’s writing was a mixture of comedy, realism, and speculative fiction. At times, viewers laughed, and at other times, they grew silent, sitting in the reality of what was being depicted.
Throughout the script, Puškášová incorporated magical realism, anthropomorphising periods and uteruses, introducing Trans-fomers, and trans girl superpowers to better portray aspects of menstruation and transness that can be extremely personal and harder to represent on stage.
Czech literature has a long tradition of magical realism, one that Puškášová added to with her script. When asked about her magical elements, she said, “Maybe it’s in my blood, my period blood.”
With the help of a couple of other people, she handcrafted two puppets that were used throughout the performances. She credited her advisor, Prof. kt shorb, and local drag performer, Emily Zimmer (aka Old Man Zimmer), for pushing her to use more magical elements and specifically the uterus puppets.
Puškášová said, “As a disabled trans woman playwright, I also want to show that our bodies are not as biological and static as we are taught. There is actually a lot of potential for magic with our bodies, like T4T sex.”
Puškášová’s friend, who has connections at Black Hart of St. Paul, sent her play description to the team there, and the gay bar was excited to host another rendition of Moment of Silence on April 19th in a small back room.
In this version, Puškášová wasn’t only the director but stepped into the role of an actor as well. Actors were more comfortable with each other after the three shows and countless rehearsals earlier this month, so they were able to improvise in this new space with a few new cast members. The increased movement and facial expressions made the script even more engaging.
Congratulations to Beja Puškášová for this amazing accomplishment! We are so excited to see what else she will create in the future.