Baltimore Center Stage Names Second Cohort of Trans History Project Playwrights
Baltimore Center Stage (BCS) and Breaking the Binary Theatre announced the next cohort of its Trans History Project, a national initiative created by BCS Artist-in-Residence Bo Frazier. The project is dedicated to commissioning and developing ten new plays by ten transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) writers. Cohort Two includes five plays by five TGNC playwrights.
"At a moment when trans and gender non-conforming people are being targeted, erased, and forced to fight for the right to exist openly and safely, telling our stories is an act of resistance," said Frazier. "The Trans History Project is about more than representation. It's about reclaiming the history that has always been ours, honoring the artists who are shaping our present, and ensuring that future generations know we have always been here. By investing in trans and gender non-conforming artists, we are insisting that our stories belong in the American story-and that our voices deserve to be heard, celebrated, and remembered on stages across this country."
Selected from a pool of 12 finalists representing 100 submissions for this second cohort of the initiative, the five playwrights are Ty Defoe, Justice Jamal Jones, Youri Kim, Nico Pang, and K.T. Peterson.
Each playwright will receive a $10,000 commission and will benefit from development support through a coalition of regional theaters, including Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky, About Face Theatre in Chicago, East West Players in Los Angeles, and Native Voices in Los Angeles.
The 12 finalists include playwrights NOVA BLACK, Grant Evan, Tyler Rocio Econa, Reese Fernandez, Alex Lee Reed, Charlie Amaya Scott, Nigel Semaj, Ryan Matthieu Smith, Shariga Yazmeen, as well as playwriting duo LexXavier Francis & Che Flory and the ensemble Friend of Friend.
Ty Defoe's Trans World Chapter 0 - Obsidian will be developed at Native Voices. Philadelphia, 1976. As America celebrates its Bicentennial, Yarrow, a two-spirit transsexual artist, discovers that art and obsidian can open portals into erased trancestor histories. Moving between queer nightlife, colonial pageantry, and ancestral memory, Yarrow unearths stories the nation has tried to bury, histories of resistance, survival, and revolution that began long before 1776. But as each portal draws her deeper into the past, the boundaries between memory, myth, and the present begin to fracture. Yarrow must choose between preserving the world she knows and unleashing ancestral truths powerful enough to unravel America's founding myths and reimagine its future.
Justice Jamal Jones' La Prophetesse will be developed at About Face Theatre. Based on the award-winning book The Priest and the Prophetess by Terry Rey, La Prophetesse is a blur of possession and performance, exhuming the life of the gender-queer Haitian revolutionary and mystic Romaine La Prophetesse. Here, the revolution is not televised but theatrically portrayed, where the archive becomes an afterlife and theatre becomes ritual.
Youri Kim's SABANGJI.exe will be developed at Baltimore Center Stage Theatre. SABANGJI.EXE is a work of fiction built from a single line in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty that records a person named Sabangji, and it follows that one line across six centuries to ask, who gets to write a person into the record, who gets to erase them, and what it costs to be consumed by systems never built to hold you. The ability to erase someone, race, or country is a form of power, the same power the current administration is using to remove trans and nonbinary people from passports and government records.
Nico Pang's Stone Maiden will be developed at East West Players. In 1851 Qing Dynasty China, Liao Zhanggu is labeled a "stone maiden" for being unable to reproduce and is exiled to a Daoist monastery. Two hundred years later in the United States, a trans Chinese musician finds Zhanggu's buried court record. As music jumps off the page and the archive cracks, they are pulled through time and wake up inside Zhanggu's body. Within the monastery, where the ideal self is androgynous and ritual kinship offers new ways of belonging, they begin piecing together a lost history from within. But this spiritual refuge is threatened as imperial investigations loom. They must choose: fight to return to 2051, or stay and alter the fate of someone who may be an ancestor, a mirror, or both.
K.T. Peterson's Everybody's Total Pal! will be developed at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Everybody's Total Pal! is part public access show, part cabaret aboard the ship ENDURANCE! A frostbitten sailor from Shackleton's crew puts on a show to keep himself from going mad, but the sailor is not who he seems. Through a shape-shifting solo performance inspired by historic TGNC figures like gender-queer prophet Public Universal Friend, trans doctor Alan L. Hart, and Shaker founder Ann Lee, the play asks what happens when we reclaim the divine, the creative, the queer, and the joyful from the boxes we've inherited.
Building on the inaugural cohort's work, which includes A Continent of Forget by Dane Edidi Figueroa, developed at Long Wharf Theatre; Days of Awe by Bree Lowdermilk, developed at Round House Theatre; The Gladys Bentley Project by Roger Q. Mason, developed at Diversionary Theatre; miss EMERICA by Yona Moises Olivares, developed at BCS; and LES BI(T)CHES by Mirage Auto Depot, developed at Rattlestick Theater, the second cohort will continue the Trans History Project's mission of developing new plays that center TGNC histories, experiences, and perspectives.