Dylan Mulvaney gets real in 'The Least Problematic Woman in the World'

A theatre kid long before she became a TikTok star, Mulvaney goes back to her roots with a high-tech Off-Broadway solo show that marks her New York stage debut.

Dylan Mulvaney knows it's not easy to put yourself out there. Having cultivated her fame on social media over the past three years, beginning in 2022 with the "Days of Girlhood" video series documenting her gender transition on TikTok, she knows a screen is far from a protective shield from vicious haters. So now, she's decided to tell her story live.

Counterintuitive? Maybe. Then again, one of Mulvaney's favorite compliments on her new Off-Broadway solo show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World, is, "I thought I was going to hate this, but I ended up loving it." To her, it means someone opened their mind and learned something new.

"There's something so much safer about oversharing to a group of a few hundred people versus millions," Mulvaney said. "Right now, there's so much negativity out there that I really want to be protective of my transition and of my personal life. But on stage, I'm like, fuck it. Let's do it. Am I allowed to say that?"

Sure, why not — it's fitting, anyhow, as Mulvaney said the humor in her live show is darker and more adult than online. Also unlike in her social videos, Mulvaney intersperses her autobiographical stories — about growing up Catholic, rising to fame, and navigating ever-stronger waves of anti-trans rhetoric — with original songs written by composers like Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss (the Tony Award-winning Six), Mark Sonnenblick (the Netflix phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters), Ingrid Michaelson (the Broadway adaptation of The Notebook), and Abigail Barlow (the Grammy-winning Unofficial Bridgerton Musical).

"I basically reached out to all the people I grew up loving," Mulvaney said. "I've always been someone who works better in a collaboration. When it comes to a one-person show, it can be really isolating, but the real fun in it has been having other people help me tell my story."

She's not even exactly alone on stage; Least Problematic Woman contains 40 characters, with Mulvaney embodying 26 of them. From there, she employs a different kind of storytelling through a screen, with video projections of herself and guest stars — including The Traitors's Alan Cumming, Heartstopper's Joe Locke, and Queer Eye's Jonathan Van Ness — rounding out the count. Mulvaney calls the whole enterprise "the dollar-store, pink version of [The Picture of] Dorian Gray that just happened on Broadway."

"Dollar-store" though it may be compared to the big stage, the technology of Least Problematic Woman made it one of the more sophisticated (to borrow a word from director Tim Jackson; "I would never call my myself sophisticated," Mulvaney said) offerings at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where the show had its world premiere under the name Faghag. The new title may be less gasp-worthy, but no less tongue-in-cheek, as Mulvaney has weathered backlash from both outside the queer community (Mulvaney's brand deals with Bud Light, Nike, and Maybelline led anti-trans groups to boycott) and within it (photos of her dancing at a gay bar with men drew questions about her gender identity).

Mulvaney addresses all this and more in Least Problematic Woman, in which she explores how the various facets of her identity can coexist. Early scenes are "larger than life, and then as the show progresses, it becomes a bit more real until I'm in the most vulnerable place, which has been, recently, dealing with the backlash of what it means to be trans so publicly in this world," she said. While writing, she asked herself questions like, "'What label am I supposed to wear?' 'Do I even need to have a label?' 'What are people trying to project onto me?'"

To be able to make her New York stage debut as herself, she said, is special and even "the most important" iteration of her story, as she's been doing theatre since she was a kid. But after this show's three-week run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, Mulvaney wants to play someone else for a change. Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, Charity in Sweet Charity, Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, and "anything Annaleigh Ashford has ever done" are among her dream roles.

"As much as I want to be generating new things, I really want to see trans people be able to take on existing work and recreating Golden Age characters and Sondheim [roles]," Mulvaney said. "Hopefully, if I'm lucky enough, I'll get to do that one day."

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Photo credit: Dylan Mulvaney. (Photo courtesy of production)