Tender, honest, and deeply affirming, Telling Dad captures a moment of vulnerability with compassion and nuance. Donnelly shows how love, growth, and imperfect understanding can still lead to genuine acceptance and hope.

Paul Donnelly’s short play Telling Dad is a loving, touching play about the difficult of being a transgender teen. Just that Donnelly was able to cover so much truth about such a complex subject in such a short piece is incredible. I was very moved by how the 3 members of this loving family deal with Billie’s life choice. Beautifully done.

Although brief, this depiction of a trans girl & her family resists simplistic depictions of acceptance/rejection as a binary. People can be hurtful to those they love. People who have caused harm to their loved ones can take their pain seriously & seek to prevent further harm. The urge to protect can manifest simultaneously in immediate acceptance & in limiting expression. Transitions of all kinds are what theatre is about. None of these characters are the same at the end of this 10 minutes as they are at the beginning.