←Recommendations of Telling Dad (Ten Minute)

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.

This is a sweet play about a father's acceptance of his transgender daughter. It's almost a fairy tale, but acceptance should be that simple and that complete. Unfortunately, it's tempered by the reality that politicians manufacture transphobic outrage to gain power. It won't be an easy road ahead for Billie and her family, but acceptance, love, and communication give them, and us, hope.

Beautiful, sweet, earnest, on-point, current, and ultimately heart-warming. Telling Dad by Paul Donnelly is a lovely piece of storytelling with an authentic family dynamic. You'll love all three characters as they struggle with the situation and the pressure of the outside world. You'll be rooting for Billie and their transition long after the last page. Read and produce!

This brought tears to my eyes. This is such an important play and it is told with the most authentic dialogue. Bravo Paul Donnelly. I'm sure this play could help a teen or a parent and the people around them who might be more tolerant if they let Donnelly's play sink in.

In TELLING DAD, Paul Donnelly presents a family in all their complexity. And in ten minutes explores so many urgent themes: mental health crises due to transphobia and not due to a trans identity, children caught in an anti-trans political climate that threatens their safety, and the power of family. Paul writes with so much empathy and a deep understanding of queer identities. More plays exploring these same themes are desperately needed to tell these stories that have been hidden for so long.

A father willing to try to understand us—isn't that what we all dream of? So many queer stories are centered on replicating tragedy—by contrast, Paul Donnelly has written a ray of hope. A lovely and timely ten-minute piece modeling how the coming out conversation should go despite how hard Billie's life has been so far. I have in mind a few people who need to see this play and recognize trans people are people. Thank you, Paul, for modeling love and acceptance with this piece.

This honest and ultimately uplifting play says so much about the world of transgender kids — the inner world in which they find themselves and the outer world that they have to navigate, too often filled with hateful politicians who want to legislate away their existence.

I want to see this piece performed in front of every self-righteous asshole who wants to deny humanity to transgender people.

Paul creates a piece of wonderful of opposites here. The way the piece begins with the judgements and steorotypes of what it means to be transgender vs the way the piece ends is beautifully balanced. It's a very real conversation a lot of people are having and that's what makes it a relatable piece of theatre for so many. The very real situation constructed with very believable characters is what would make this a relatable and powerful piece for performance, particularly for young people. Brilliantly done Paul!