American Girl, Mikki Gillette’s new play, tells the story of Nikki Kuhnhausen, a bright and confident seventeen-year-old trans woman from Vancouver, Washington. The teenager disappeared in the summer of 2019 and her body was found in December of that same year. She had been murdered.

It was a brutal and tragic ending to what had been an oftentimes difficult life. Kuhnhausen’s death led to the passing of Nikki’s Law, which “prohibits defendants charged with violent crimes from relying on a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity – the so-called ‘gay or trans panic’ defense.” As terrible as Kuhnhausen’s ending was, the law seems a fitting epitaph for a young woman noted for standing up for the underdog in her life, as noted by her mother in a CBS mini-documentary.

American Girl, which is directed by Sarah Andrews for Fuse Theatre Ensemble and stars Naomi Jackson in the title role, opens Thursday, April 6, at Portland’s Back Door Theatre. And there is perhaps no one more suited to telling Kuhnhausen’s story than Gillette, who’s spent years working in the nonprofit sector as an LGBTQ and trans activist and advocate, and who is one of Portland’s most prolific playwrights. Gillette came to Nikki’s story when, she says, “someone from the Justice for Nikki Task Force, a grassroots group that sprang up to bring attention to her case, reached out to me, asked if I would help them, and I said yes.”

Left: Playwright Mikki Gillette. Photo: Greg Parkinson. Right: Naomi Jackson, who stars as Nikki. Photo: Naomi Jackson.

At a meeting of the task force, Gillette met Lisa Kuhnhauser, Nikki’s mom. “I asked her if she would be comfortable sharing Nikki’s story, because I was a playwright,” says Gillette. “If she was, I’d be interested in writing a play. After that we started meeting every week for a few months. I would drive up and then I asked if I could meet other family members and she introduced me to them.”

American Girl is a departure for Gillette, whose work in the past has sprung from her own experience and imagination. “It was an adjustment. In some ways, it was liberating. It was good to put my imagination at the service of another story which was not mine.”

That adjustment was a journey. Except for being trans, Kuhnhausen’s life was very different from Gillette’s. “Nikki died so young, and I was much older when I came out, so there wasn’t a lot to compare there,” she says. “She was braver than me. Her brothers, at first, weren’t into her being trans and tried to get that out of her, but she just wasn’t going to hear it.”

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Naomi Jackson, the actor who flew in from New York to play Kuhnhausen, notes that “Nikki never called herself trans. She was just a girl. She was always a girl. That’s a very different experience to a lot of trans people. That’s a different experience than what I’ve had in my life.” Kuhnhausen’s life had its struggles, but identity wasn’t one.

American Girl doesn’t shy away from what her actual obstacles were. Fuse’s website warns that the content of the play includes “addiction, homelessness, domestic abuse, sex work and murder.” With such intense themes and subject matter, director Sarah Andrews, as passionate and committed a young artist as we have in this town, decided a more theatrical approach would be necessary on a variety of levels.

“For me this is a story about the death of innocence,” Andrews says. “How can I make sure that the message of the story is being told and not clouded by the substance abuse, by the child abuse, by everything else that this story has in place?” Her answer was, “Everything is going to be stylized within this play. I didn’t want to lean into realism. I felt like if I leaned into realism with this piece, it would turn people off right away. So, I hired a choreographer (instead of a fight choreographer) and an intimacy director.”

This kind of physical storytelling seems particularly suited to Jackson, who plays Nikki. “I think of myself as an ‘outside-in’ actor,” she says. “I like to figure out how a character moves and stands before I think about what they feel. Finding a bouncy, agile, stretchy sixteen-year old vibe really activated an understanding of who this person is. She’s not afraid to take up space.”

Kuhnhausen was also a social media darling, with a special aptitude for makeup (she had a dream of one day becoming the makeup designer for no less than Nikki Minaj). “Makeup was very important to the real Nikki, and it’s a very important part of the show,” says Jackson. “Trying to teach myself how to do the kind of makeup looks she did and trying them out and experimenting with them ignited a passion in me for makeup I hadn’t really had before, and created a real connection that helped me get into [Nikki’s] point of view.”

Together, Andrews, Jackson, and the rest of the cast and crew worked deliberately to create a supportive environment within which to explore such emotionally taxing subject matter. “The entire ensemble is phenomenal,” says Jackson. “The amount of care and time that everyone has put into finding just the right way to physically communicate these incredibly difficult topics has been very important. There are some scenes that are hard to rehearse and are going to be hard to watch. Those scenes could have been impossibilities. But with these people, with my scene partner, Milo [Vuksinich], it’s a caring environment – caring about each other, caring about the story, caring about these people, and I think that’s really gorgeous.”

Andrews concurs: “The trust is beautiful. We laugh. We talk. We go so far on these journeys to figure out who these people are, and, yeah, we’re having tough conversations, but we’re having tough conversations in a safe space, which is what is making the process joyful, even though we know that at the end of it, it’s going to end in death.”

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In 2023 historically marginalized communities such as the trans community often want to focus more on joy and celebration of their identities in their storytelling, rather than suffering and trauma. Gillette is aware of this trend but feels it is still too early to turn away from stories illuminating the violence the trans community continues to face.

“A lot of people don’t know this happens,” she says. “There’s so much awful stuff out there about trans kids and how they don’t exist or they shouldn’t get their medication. This is a different way to focus that conversation.”

The fact of the matter is that off the stage, Kuhnhausen’s life was not “about” being trans until, all of a sudden, horribly, it was, and American Girl is not centered on that aspect of her life, either – until it is.

“There’s a stereotype that if you’re poor you don’t give a shit about queer people, right?,” says Jackson. “You’re homophobic by default; you don’t understand it. [Nikki’s family and friends] were fine with it. It was never an issue with them. This is not a tragedy about ‘a poor trans person facing all of these problems because they’re trans and isn’t it terrible how we treat trans people.’ It’s a story about a family struggling – and a daughter and a sister – struggling under immense pressure economically and socially. For Nikki, being trans was not the fulcrum of her life.”

It is important, too, that American Girl is a local story. It’s not about New York or L.A. or Pittsburgh or Westeros. The events of the play happen just over the Columbia River in Vancouver, or right here in Portland. It’s a regional tragedy, and as such, one that affects all of us, or at least it should. It should give us pause. In an ideal world, we would be impacted by Kuhnhausen’s life and what she brought to the world as much, if not more so, than her death.

“One thing I’m sad about is when you write a play you only get so many characters because of budget,” says Gillette. “So, in this play we don’t really see a lot of Nikki with her friends, and I think we would have seen a whole different side of her. She was a loud, brash person who liked to have fun. We don’t  see that side of her, because we just see her with her family and doing what she feels is most important, which is trying to help her dad and help her mom.”

“Nikki is a Pollyanna,” says Jackson. “She’s a constant optimist, always upbeat, always goal-oriented, always working towards making a better future towards her loved ones, despite the weight of the world she faces. It’s been a real pleasure and a joy to have her in my life.” 

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American Girl opens Thursday, April 6, and continues through April 30 at The Back Door Theatre, 4319 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., Portland.