When writing Cowl Girl ten years ago, the story was born out of a fear of losing a loved one, specifically my mother. I was already conjuring up the Cowl Girl plot in my head when the news of my mother’s illness came about, and suddenly Cowl Girl made more sense to me. What would happen if I lost my mother? What would happen if I lost both my parents? My world would come crashing down, and I would hide indoors, behind a mask– behind a cowl perhaps. The character of Cowl Girl was left alone with the memories that live in her toy collection, the cartoons, comic books, and superheroes to which her parents exposed her. And of course, Pee-wee Herman. The agoraphobic Cowl Girl needs to unmask herself, open her door, and step foot into the outside world to fulfill her family’s wish of meeting Pee-wee in person at the mecca of all cons in San Diego.
As the real-life creator of this fangirl character, I already knew what it was like to meet my hero, Paul Reubens/Pee-wee Herman. I was lucky that I got to speak with him and told him about this play; how it was created out of my love for him and my other fandoms. But Pee-wee is the drive for Cowl Girl to leave her shut-in life behind her. To me, personally, watching the Playhouse weekly as a child helped me forget certain unfortunate events in that time of my life, and I will forever be grateful to Mr. Reubens for that. He made it OK to be weird and off-kilter; if this kind of art was misunderstood then so be it. This was his art and his legacy. Being geeky and queer (in every sense of the word) is a bit more acceptable these days, and Pee-wee helped usher in that kind of accessibility and understanding to our kind of art.
The Cowl Girl team thanks Paul Reubens for his inspiration and generous spirit of inclusivity, as seen in his diverse casting from Pee-wee’s Playhouse. We take that spirit and pay it forward in our stage play, Cowl Girl.
inDfilm 