Well-intentioned, the parents proceeded to raise Adam as a girl named Samantha on the advice of a doctor and researcher doing studies on how to cope with sexual identity problems. (The play is inspired by a real-life story.) Good actor that he is, Steggert, without changing clothes into a dress, sits discussing his life with Dr. Wendall Barnes (Paul Niebanck), and convinces us that he is a child in a series of sessions. We see him in various situations (the play flits back and forth in time), including when he has grown into a young man, dressed accordingly, asserting the identity he really feels as Adam and having established a relationship with a young woman.

When his female friend Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse) moves to touch him, he recoils, and she cannot find what is troubling him and is exasperated to the point of feeling she can't take the lack of real physical contact any longer. He assures her he is not gay, and that makes the situation even more confounding. Rittenhouse plays her role extremely well, exuding feelings of love and tenderness but also of the inevitable frustration.

The one part of the writing that kept annoying me was that, given all the time that Adam and Jenny have been spending together in a pressure-cooker atmosphere, it seems that he would have been able to tell her what happened to him much sooner than he finally does. But then, I suppose, there would have been no play.

The roles of Adam’s father and mother, Trudy and Doug Turner, are portrayed convincingly by Heidi Armbruster and Ted Koch and the same can be said of Niebanck as the doctor, who sincerely believes that the tactic he has taken is right, even though it has a devastating result. Today there is more medical and psychological knowledge, and one might more readily be able to undergo a penis transplant. But at the time the doctor is depicted as recommending surgery to physically change Adam into a woman, an idea that he bravely resists.