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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello, and welcome to the Drama Book Show! My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia. In this episode, we explore the third volume of The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays, featuring nine new works by trans playwrights and centered on young trans characters from age 12 through their late 20s. The collection brings together a wide range of voices, genres, and theatrical styles with stories exploring coming of age, family, relationships, athletics, dating, and navigating challenging social and political environments. Each play is accompanied by an introductory essay offering additional context and insight into the work. Together, these plays offer a look at the expanding landscape of contemporary trans theater and the diverse stories being brought to the stage by a new generation of trans playwrights. Here's a conversation about Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Volume III live at the Drama Book Shop.

[1:12] Angela Farr Schiller: Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Angela Farr Schiller. This is the fabulous Liana Keys over here. I want to say good evening and welcome to all of you who are here with us in person and also welcome to all of us who are with us on the internet on HowlRound. Yes, right over here. Hello, HowlRound. Good to see you. So we are really blessed to be able to be here to celebrate The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Volume III, one, two, and three. I'm so excited about that. And tonight we are going to be moving through this work in the same way that you would move through it on the page. You will be meeting a lot of the playwrights. You will be meeting their interlocutors.

That word always gets me. As they talk about their plays, they talk about their process. They talk about their ideas that brought these works to life. I also want to acknowledge, hello, Lindsay, our third co-editor, Lindsay Mantone, who isn't able to be with us tonight, but was obviously a very essential part of making this work what it is. And I will just also say for those of you who are here tonight, I know that you have all purchased a book and that all of the royalties go to the playwrights. Those of you at home, get your books. All the royalties go to the playwrights. And now here's Liana to talk about the origins of this work.

[2:32] Liana Keys: Thank you. Yeah. Hi, everyone. If you're anything like me, you're either nervous or very sweaty because of the weather. So I invite us all to take a deep breath and be present together. Part of what I love about this book is that this book exists in part because of one crazy fan from the first book, which is that our editor, who is in the UK, Dom, was at a literary academic conference and someone somehow recognized him as the person who had helped publish book one and came up to him at the conference and cornered him and was like, listen, this book completely changed my life and the life of my students. I don't know what we would have done had this not come when it did. And he was like, wow, yeah, sales were great.

However, like the personal impact that someone felt compelled to speak on made the difference for him to then approach us about coming for volume two. We were like, oh my God, yes, of course. And then we put out a call for submissions and there were so many wonderful submissions that I felt that it would be criminal to not publish more of them. So in a classic Liana fashion, I said, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we did a third version? And he's like, that's a great idea. Can we specifically make it young adult focused? And some of our mostly American playwrights were a little skeptical about like young adult. This is not theater for young audiences. And in doing that, we learned that in the UK, it's a different connotation when they say theater for young adults.

What they actually mean is anyone basically under 30, which I also think in trans years basically means like anyone who can still remember taking their first hormone or being uncomfortable in a dressing room for the first time. So these plays are for those people. I feel deeply humbled about the fact that we were able to get many multi-coastal people. People flew here, people were on trains here. As we were looking around in the green room, I realized that I could spend 90 minutes talking to any singular one of those people and not be done. And we've got eight, probably nine of them here today. So think of this as less of a presentation and more like you're hanging out in a really long, weirdly shaped living room with a bunch of your friends.

And everyone is paying attention to those two friends on the couch who are telling you a really cool story about some art that they made. So with that, I would love to hear a little bit about The Enterobangers. Come on in.

[4:59] Percival Hornack: Hi, I'm too short. Okay, there we go. Hello, I'm Percival Hornack. I wrote an intro essay for Fig Lefevre's play, The Skin of Other Men in the second volume of this anthology, which you should get if you don't have it. But I'm also just a really big fan of Sloth. So that's why I'm here to be their interlocutor. So Sloth, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about The Enterobangers and what inspired you to write it?

[5:31] M. Sloth Levine: Yeah, thank you. Hi, I am M. Sloth Levine, again, I wrote The Enterobangers, which is a spooky little play about some teenagers in a van smoking weed with their dog and solving mysteries and it's based on nothing. And yeah, it's about looking into your past and raising questions that you maybe don't want answered and trying to ask yourself whether ghosts or aliens or men in masks are scarier.

[6:05] Percival Hornack: Yeah, we were talking a little bit upstairs about the long development history of this play and many trans plays, which for some reason are developed more than they're produced, I would say, and also about what it means to write for young adults. Can you talk a little bit about your evolving relationship to the themes of this play through its development history?

[6:28] M. Sloth Levine: Yeah, yeah. I do think, to your point, that it's in general for playwrights a problem, but I think often for trans playwrights that we get trapped in the new play development industrial complex. And Enterobangers happened in an interesting way to me where I started this play a couple months after I graduated from college, which is now 10 years ago. And in that time was writing about a version of myself that had just found closure, which is these characters are high schoolers, they're high school seniors. And so I was looking back at a part of my life that had just shut. And then I bounced around readings. A really key part of the development of this play was led by Josh Glen Caden, who's a wonderful director based in Boston, works with Company One Theater.

We developed it at a university in Massachusetts Amherst, which was like an incredible investment of time and development. But then something happened called the COVID-19 epidemic. And so although we had hoped to produce it around then, it was a couple more years until it got produced in Boston. So it was really like I kept growing and changing as this play evolved. And I think when I was writing it, I was dealing with a lot of questions that I didn't have any sort of answers to. And the play is about sitting in that ambiguity and accepting that not all mysteries have a clean solution. And then in producing the play now a few years ago, it was really interesting feeling like I was talking to a younger version of myself. And in that rehearsal process being like, I couldn't write this play now. It's just a different version of me. Yeah, I couldn't do it.

[8:16] Percival Hornack: That's really beautiful. And I think the thing that sticks out to me most about the play is that just living in uncertainty and becoming at peace with that and the way that being with your friends and people that you love can help you do that. I think my last question to you will be, what is one thing that you hope that readers or audiences will take away from the play?

[8:36] M. Sloth Levine: I think that what I most want people to take from The Enterobangers is embracing the fun in fear and confusion and being able to sit in that in-between space between phases of life, between gender, between whatever two things. And not only be able to hunker down and get through it, but embrace how fun that can be and feel.

[9:02] Percival Hornack: I love that. Thank you all very much. I'll pass it to the next one.

[9:15] Angela Farr Schiller: Hello, it's me again, Angela. So I have the great pleasure, because I'm a huge fan of this next work, of introducing Charlotte Snow and her work Magic Girl and Her Demons, which is the second play that appears inside of this work. Can I just say, can we give a hand to Charlotte?

[9:37] Charlotte Snow: Thank you.

[9:41] Angela Farr Schiller: And just going off of the last conversation, thinking about fun, this is a piece that is full of fun, adventure. Can you talk to us about where this play begins for you, the inspiration of it?

[9:54] Charlotte Snow: It didn't start in a very fun way. It started with me banging my head against a wall screaming fuck, because COVID happened. And I was in the middle of my junior year of college. And I knew I had my capstone coming up. And I just remember being back home in the Bible Belt South, and just feeling so trapped. And I felt like I would do anything to be able to go back to the life that I had that I was enjoying. I would even sell my soul. And then that kind of clicked. And I was like, oh, I always kind of have been interested about satanic deals. And what would happen if I, I don't know, got magic powers and couldn't make all my problems disappear. That kind of has always been on the forefront of my mind.

So I then just I developed the play from there. And it has changed a lot through the years through many different readings that I've had a lot of amazing people be a part of through some kind of workshoppy productions. But the most kind of the reason this play holds a special place in my heart is that as I was writing this play, I began my transition. So it was very, it was very like the script was evolving as I was evolving. And I was putting in things that felt very new and very real and very fresh. So yeah, that's where it started tough. It started tough, not gonna lie. But then the joy was eventually found. Yes.

[11:34] Angela Farr Schiller: I was just thinking maybe we should tell everyone what this what the play is about.

[11:38] Charlotte Snow: Yes. So it is about a young girl named Knox. She is living in the middle of Wyoming. And she is pretty impoverished. She does not have a support system of her own, really. And so she then decides, you know what, I have this really scary book on my bookshelf, and I'm going to use it to summon the son of Satan. And I'm going to make this deal that if I can get super magic powers, and not kill anyone for six days, very important, that I will be able to keep that magic powers. And if I don't, if I end up accidentally exploding someone beheading someone ripping someone's heart out, then I will be going to hell, and the demon will become a human in place. So it's really a cat and mouse game between these two.

[12:39] Angela Farr Schiller: Yeah, and a really interesting take on Faust, right, that kind of deal with the devil, that kind of idea of yearning and desire. Can you talk a little bit about what you were exploring when it comes to these ideas of desire and yearning and wanting?

[13:03] Unknown speaker: with

[13:19] Unknown speaker: way, then maybe I'd be a little happier and maybe if I just felt right in some clothes or in some skin or in some makeup. That I would perhaps feel proud of myself. And so… that got a little personal and I don't really remember what the question was…

[13:36] Unknown speaker: Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

[13:38] Unknown speaker: So, if you were thinking about the plays that you needed when you were the age of the characters inside of this, where do those things intersect?

[13:50] Unknown speaker: Yes. Yeah. I think it for me, it really intersects with a sort of a love of comic books that I've always had and this has a very almost kind of graphic novel exploding onto a stage feel. At least I like to think it does. And so for me, it really felt, oh, I don't have a character who feels very real that I can relate to in that space. And I also just really wanted to create specifically a trans girl that wasn't a perfect little angel and I didn't want one that was like killing people and wearing their skin. So I was like, we need to find some nice middle ground and create kind of an anti-hero. And so for me, that was really the thing of constantly editing of where do we find the humor? Where do we find the light versus where do we find the deep truth of this and really dig in and make it dark and gory and creepy in some places.

[14:47] Unknown speaker: Yeah. I definitely felt that after reading it.

[14:50] Unknown speaker: Good. My students are going to love this particular piece.

[14:54] Unknown speaker: Huzzah.

[14:55] Unknown speaker: Yeah. Because there's a lot of times you have students and they're plain middle-aged characters, right? Characters that don't have anything to do with them. And so it's such a great gift to be able to bring this into the classroom.

[15:07] Unknown speaker: One last thing.

[15:08] Unknown speaker: Yeah.

[15:10] Unknown speaker: How are you different writing this piece?

[15:13] Unknown speaker: Oh, okay. I feel different after writing this piece of really feeling like I can write something that is from perhaps my own experiences. This little cord dangly. It's something that is from my own experience, but also feels removed in a way that is powerful and in a way allows me to go even deeper in that. So I feel like as a writer, it has made me a lot bolder. And then as a person, I think it really has just allowed me to be appreciative of kind people and people who really want to go out into the world and not just do things for themselves, but actually do things because it's going to help someone else along their journey. Because so much of the world and so many people act from selfish places and that's not entirely their fault, but it just really makes me value the people that show up in my life and are just really amazing and kind.

[16:30] Unknown speaker: Thank you so much, everyone. Charlotte's now. Thank you.

[16:33] Unknown speaker: Wasn't that an exciting buzz, everyone here in person?

[16:47] Liana: Hi, again, I'm Liana. I know this is shocking. I wear multiple hats. One of them is the technician. And if I'm very lucky, then Jessica Scott is on the line from LA right now. Jessica, can you hear me?

[16:59] Jessica Scott: Yes, I can.

[17:02] Liana: That was cool, right? We love a dramatic entrance. So Jessica, before I talk to you about your beautiful play, I wanted to tell you the moment that I decided that I wanted to publish your play, which is before anyone says a single word, it's just in your first stage directions. So we're like doing stage directions, talking about like describing the space. Here's the one sentence that made me decide that I wanted to publish the play. A trans pride flag and a progress pride flag, each without the creases ironed out, hang vertically from the back wall. And as soon as I read the bit about the creases not being ironed out, I was like, oh, this is talking for us by us. I was like, you know where we are as people. So I would love to know a little bit about how this play started for you. How did you decide that you were going to write the wonderful play, T for T?

[17:58] Jessica Scott: Yeah, so this was the first full length anything that I had written. I was in my undergrad at University of Arizona and initially was writing it for a class, but then continued on it after I graduated over the following summer. And honestly, it's it as a play and just as a work is it grew, it kind of grew up with me through my early transition in a way. As I was like initially writing it, it was a lot of active, roiling emotions that I was dealing with at the time. But then after some time and getting to have community and stuff for the first time and where I was at in Tucson, then it was like a reflection on this, this character that had a lot of the worst, the worst internal self-talk and everything that I dealt with.

So then it was a reflection on who I was. And then when it got accepted into this anthology, then I did an initial full, full heavy rewrite when I did the stage reading of it over the summer. And then, then a year later, did another full rewrite for this. And it, yeah, I don't know.

[19:31] Unknown speaker: Has it changed much over time?

[19:33] Jessica Scott: Sorry, what?

[19:35] Unknown speaker: Has it changed much over time? Is this version that we have?

[19:37] Jessica Scott: Oh, great. Yeah. Like the whole ending wound up entirely different.

[19:44] Unknown speaker: It's always endings.

[19:46] Jessica Scott: Yeah. Yeah, the whole ending. And I think there's a fair number of bits and pieces throughout that just as I was continuing to revise and look back on it, I think I was more able to precisely point out and focus on like the, the flaws, the flaws within this character that, you know, were flaws within myself.

[20:21] Unknown speaker: Yeah. Let's talk.

[20:23] Unknown speaker: So let's talk a little bit for people who don't have the play open in front of them right now. So we have a protagonist here named Lily. And an important part of the structure of the play is that she has two different aspects of her consciousness visible on stage who speak but can only be seen and heard by her Lily. Right.

[20:42] Jessica Scott: So one of them is named Visceral. One of them is named Cerebral. So basically these sort of like internal influences made external so that the audience in my reading of it at least it's you're basically like opening a curtain into a part of the character's personality that is so difficult to understand on a stage as opposed to like in a novel or even even a movie where you get these like intense close ups. You're like giving voice to her thoughts. So what and they're very honest and very brutal at times. What was it like writing some of these like internal thoughts of a struggling trans woman on the page?

[21:21] Jessica Scott: Yeah, it like I think like it played a role that this was the first that this was the first like serious full length thing that I had written that having that vehicle to really like break open the character and and have it be I don't know have it be as I don't know what is it Cerebral it isn't technically like emotional but it is still very much and like at that point like in early transition and everything especially I had all these like loud as all hell roiling emotions within me all the time that felt to me like it was just like a constant screaming out in my head but obviously people aren't gonna see and hear that and so I wanted to have have those voices that negative self-talk that like rush of excitement and everything else be like right there for all to see.

[22:38] Unknown speaker: Yeah to close us out who everyone should read this play obviously but who should rush to read this play?

[22:44] Jessica Scott: I think hmm I think it should be people like I think that if you have that on unironed out creases flags and are like on like a year or less into transition or into finding community this it's yeah if you are like fledgling into finding your way into trans community and connection then that's how that's who I think it would hit like a brick.

[23:37] Unknown speaker: Can confirm I'm a little bit out from that in the Paleolithic era but can confirm that so much of this I was like feels very visceral from when I was very young and in my in my young adult era thank you for calling in remotely big applause to you for doing that thank you for being here.

[23:53] Jessica Scott: yeah thank you for having me.

[23:59] Unknown speaker: yeah let's hear about a little play called The Brunch Crowd.

[24:02] Unknown speaker: yeah everybody oh hello are we switching things up hi everybody my name is Jameson I'm one of the playwrights as well but I was very excited to start having this conversation with Dylan Yuegas right here about their play The Brunch Crowd.

[24:18] Dylan Yuegas: yeah hi y'all so Dylan can you tell us a little bit about your play?

[24:22] Dylan Yuegas: yeah totally it is a group of four queer trans POC folks group of friends who meet up for brunch and I guess the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying Austin Texas awesome awesome and can you tell us about the origins of this play?

[24:43] Dylan Yuegas: yeah I want to know the beginning so how we got here yeah gotten our book here yeah I grew up in Central Texas lived in Austin proper for about 10 years and I had this idea actually for a web series back in 2010 2011 y'all remember I some of y'all might remember that era of web series and I was like I'm gonna write about brunch and friends it'll be fun and I'm gonna be famous for writing this show and then my computer lost all of my writing yeah no literally I just kind of sat away from that I was like I guess I'm never gonna write ever anything ever again it's fine and also fun fact this is before I transitioned as well fast forward to 2019 and I got a fellowship at HowlRound hi y'all and so I moved from Austin to Boston and I decided okay I'm gonna actually take writing a little bit seriously and I was gotten to company one's play lab and so I wrote a 10 minute version of the show which is the first opening scene and then of course COVID so I did a it got accepted into Boston Theatre Marathon that 10 minute version and then a couple of other little festivals that we had during that lockdown time and then I said fuck it I'm gonna develop it into a full-length these characters.

[26:07] Dylan Glick: It deserves so much more. And yeah, so I did that. And it was accepted into the Black and Latino Playwrights Celebration at Texas State University, which is my alma mater. So that was really cool to go. Thank you. Yeah, to go back home to that. And then it was also selected into Soul Fest at the Soul Theatre Project. And those two development times were actually happening simultaneously as the publication.

[26:38] David Rigano: Oh, nice. Nice. Did any of that development inform what ended up in the play?

[26:42] Dylan Glick: Oh, totally. Even the notes you got from publication, like informing what you were doing there? Absolutely. Yeah. So I actually submitted a completely different version to the publication. And that at Texas State, like I completely changed the formatting a bit. I cut out an entire character. I was like, you know what, I had the token white girl. And I was like, no, we're not gonna have her anymore. We're not gonna have the token white girl. Sorry. We're gonna talk about her offstage. It'll be fine.

[27:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[27:05] Dylan Glick: So it really did help inform that. Yeah. So we have like primarily black Latina cast right here in this show. I was very intrigued. I was very like, I love this. It starts, you'll notice when you read our anthology, that it's split up into parts. And Dylan's play actually starts our dance break section. And so there's a lot of brunch, a lot of dancing, a lot of joy. Can you tell us about like the inspiration that trans joy, queer joy brought to this?

[27:27] Dylan Glick: Yeah, absolutely. I two hands. So one, I wanted to write a play that was a lot about like me and my friends. This is these four characters are an amalgamation of me and my friends growing up. Like this is the way we speak. This is the way we talk to each other. These are the kind of relationships that we have with each other. So I wanted to be very realistic in that way. And I also wanted to highlight our joy. So often, especially for the great American theater, the only way that we gain empathy or sympathy from folks is if we're talking about the struggles of transition, the struggles of coming out, someone has to die, like all these kind of things. I was like, No, absolutely not. We can actually have a really fun show that an empathetic show and a sympathetic show that highlights queer joy.

And so in that way, I was like, Oh, wait, we can't just be happy, we have to have something else. That's a conflict, that whole thing. So that I by setting it in Austin, one, it's a love letter, because I started writing it when I had left. So it's a love letter to the Austin that I left, which does not really exist anymore. And so then that kind of gave the conflict of hype, like hyper rapid gentrification that's happening. That's actually what is driving these people out and away from each other.

[28:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice, awesome. And then, is there anything you would like our audience to take away from this play?

[28:54] Dylan Glick: Yeah, celebrate your friends, celebrate your family, your chosen family, your found family, and know that the struggles that are happening outside in the universe, in the in society and whatever government things are happening. We have we got us my one of my dear friends because also playwright has to spy is they always say we only got us. So make sure that you have that find inspiration to play that the silliness of your everyday going to brunch, going out to a drag show, your shared love of Selena, that's very highlighted in this play. Like those things are what binds you together. And that is how we will survive and thrive.

[29:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It is I really feel a strong sense of community in this play. And I really hope that you all do too when you read it. Yeah, I always said this is this feels like the rom com with a backdrop of gentrification. And I love that for trans stories, because that was very unique to this book when I was reading it. So yeah, thank you so much, Dylan.

[29:54] Dylan Glick: Oh, no, you can stay James.

[29:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So next, I'm going to be in conversation with the fabulous Jameson Murray, and we are going to...

[30:02] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[30:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Thank you.

[30:05] Dylan Glick: We can't skimp on the love, right? Okay. Oh, let me just say the more the man. Yes. So talk to us about your inspiration in this particular piece. Because let me just tell you, when it came in, it was like, yes, this one. So tell us more.

[30:22] Jameson Murray: I love that this play was really inspired by me growing up in New Orleans. I'm from New Orleans. This play is entrenched in the culture of the city, as well as entrenched in my trans experience coming up. I Yeah, it's about a little trans kid from New Orleans, he drops out of school comes home and has to come to terms to his mom that he's dropped out of school. But while dealing with these real world issues, he's having dreams of his father. And these moments that are trying to teach him about masculinity. And the interesting thing about his father is he's never met him. So he's really taking these messages as they come. And over the play, you learn some things, he learned some things about what it really means to be a man, even though he doesn't have any in his life that he really looks up to.

And so in this, I was very inspired by just the idea of the concept when I was growing up down south. I was a very masculine child. I love sports, I love to play rough. And being the little girl that I was that wasn't seen as cute at all. But on the playground, I actually enjoyed being there with all the other boys, because they would say you act like a boy, we're gonna treat you like a boy. So that was the time that I was very entrenched in this masculinity. But through that also found a lot of toxicity in that. Like I give a content warning for this play all the time that it has toxic masculinity, because I really want people to know that is what is happening here. This isn't just guys chopping it up and everything.

It is toxic. And so yeah, I brought it up my own experience. A lot of these when I first injected tea, one of the things that happens is toxic masculinity. It seems like one of the side effects. They say you'll sweat a lot, grow a lot of body hair and be really misogynistic. And so in learning that through my own transition, I knew that I could come up with my own definition of that I didn't have a father that really beat down on the expectations of what it means to be a man. So that was really important to me coming into this play to show that.

[32:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Can you talk about the city of New Orleans?

[32:13] Jameson Murray: Oh, yeah, the 504. Yo, my play is in the section of the dance break for a reason. I love it. It's full of culture. It's full of music. There's a really big queer community. I include bounce music in this play. It is at the core of New Orleans, just like jazz is. One of the origins of bounce music comes from queer culture. If bounce music outside of the city of New Orleans, 90% of the time, you know it because of Big Freedia or somebody else who is queer, but that music comes from us. And so I wanted to include that part of the culture because you can't take this play and have its transness and queerness without New Orleans. And you can't take this play and have New Orleans without the transness and queerness because of the way I've intertwined those two through music.

[32:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Absolutely. I love what you were talking about earlier, thinking about toxic masculinity, right? I think a lot of times when I'm teaching in class, patriarchy is one thing that my students don't clock that much, right? They clock this, they clock that, but that's one thing they have a very high tolerance for. So I think that one of the things that your play does is enter into this conversation around masculinity and some really clever and ingenious ways. Can you talk about some of your inspiration, some of your curiosity in thinking about this subject matter of masculinity?

[33:21] Jameson Murray: Yeah, the questions really came to mind when I was recommended the book, The Will to Change by Bell Hooks. It is an amazing book. If you haven't read it, I recommend go out and read it. Please, like anything Bell Hooks writes, just buy it off the shelves and our book as well. Bell Hooks then this book. Yes, but Bell Hooks breaks it down in two categories. There's the patriarchy and then there's masculinity and how the patriarchy is often the thing that we have the issue with. It's where violence comes from, war. It's the toxic masculinity. Even that term feeds into the patriarchy. It is about violence. It's about war. It's about putting down other people versus masculinity where Bell Hooks begs the question, once you take away violence and war and hatred out of masculinity, the only thing that's left there is love.

That should be the definition of masculinity versus the patriarchy, which is often there. I brought it up in this conversation, in this play, as a way to separate these things. There are the men that exist in the play who represent the patriarchy. Then actually, there are the women. Bell Hooks actually argues that women can't teach men how to be men. This is where my play differs from that theory a little bit where I put the women in the play that exist there to fundamentally teach the men how to be men in this world. It's not just how to be men and chop it up with your bros. It's how to be men and treat people with respect and love. The mother is a character in this play, inspired by my mom, of course, but a lot of women in my life who, and even some people in my life who just led with love, just men in my life who led with love.

She's really just a character that represents love in its entirety. There's a chorus in it that I bring from the Greek storytelling mode. I bring them in to be these examples as well, these archetypes of patriarchy, masculinity, and then femininity as it exists in the play.

[35:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love thinking about Bell Hooks. I love thinking about this idea around love. How have you been changed by this idea of love through this particular work? Because there's a lot of different modalities of love inside of this particular piece within the community, within self, within romantic relationships, parental relationships.

[35:33] Jameson Murray: Yeah, it's shifted and molded. Similar to the other playwrights here, I developed this play years ago. In fact, the beginning of development for this play started during the start of my transition. The same month I took my first shot was the month I started writing this play. At first, the play, the main character, our protagonist, King, he wasn't out and trans. He wasn't outwardly trans. He was informed by that background, but I didn't straight up write in the play, this is a trans character. Through the development of this play and writing it, being tucked away in that, my relationships with my friends, with my family all shifted with coming out, with being in a new place. I also was in Boston.

Shout out Boston. Yeah, shout out Boston. But yeah, I was also there. The development of this play, the trials that it's went through, the stage readings, the drafts, the many drafts. I thank so many people just in the play in general. Everybody that is a part of this play has helped its development. Even got some folks in the room who have been here directing for me, acting in it. Those relationships, that love, will continue to inspire the play through those developments.

[36:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Excellent. Thank you so much, everyone. Jameson P. Murray.

[36:42] Audience: Thank you.

[36:55] Sienna Chongchua Morris: Hello. Hello. I'm Sienna Chongchua Morris, and I wrote Man and Moon.

[37:02] Caitlin Kane: Great. Yes, please.

[37:07] Sienna Chongchua Morris: And I'm Caitlin Kane. I'm one of the contributors to this collection. I introduced Samuel Achille's play that we will discuss in a minute, but I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you about Man and Moon.

[37:15] Caitlin Kane: Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the premise of the play?

[37:20] Sienna Chongchua Morris: So Man and Moon is a story about a transitioning man who's diagnosed with breast cancer, and he meets this 12-year-old girl in the waiting room of a hospital's oncology unit, and basically they just sit around in the waiting room and talk about life and navigate their own changing bodies and kind of just discuss how that affects how they feel within space and within time.

[37:46] Caitlin Kane: The two characters, Aaron and Luna, are in such different places in their lives, except that they're grappling with the same issues around gender, around illness, around loss. Can you share a little bit about what inspired those two characters to be in this space together?

[38:00] Sienna Chongchua Morris: Yes. Holding for the buzz.

[38:07] Caitlin Kane: I love that. Okay. Basically, Aaron and Luna are the same person, but on different sides of the spectrum is how I see it. Aaron being a 28-year-old man who's going through a transition, not only with his own gender, but also with the fact that he was diagnosed with breast cancer and dealing with that whole journey. And then also with Luna, whose mother has breast cancer, and she is just on the verge of becoming a woman and going through her own first puberty and trying to understand and accept what that means within herself and what that looks like for her.

[38:47] Sienna Chongchua Morris: I like to think that they give each other different kinds of points of view. So with Aaron, he provides a level of gravity for Luna, who likes to kind of go into a very fantastic place and go out into outer space in her mind and kind of reach into these far places. And then Luna brings Aaron a sense of vastness.

[39:10] Sienna: The Waiting Room might be a surprising space for a section focused on dance break. How did you conceive of The Waiting Room? How did you lean into the theatricality and possibility of this sort of otherwise sterile, but also liminal space? It didn't initially start in just a waiting room, but I ended up confining myself to that space because I thought that is where the most amount of possibility can happen. In the sense that like, when you're waiting for something, there's this level of boredom that arises. There's also this level of anticipation and anxiety that comes from it. You're stuck with your thoughts. You're alone with your deepest desires and your wishes. And it gives you an opportunity to play with this unknown and have a little bit of a mask off moment before you're like going in for a treatment or something and you are the focus and there's a task to be done. There's this space where you're able to just ask what if either about yourself or about the person that you're talking with.

[40:39] Sienna: Yeah, absolutely. And there are these lovely moments in which the waiting room transforms into a lecture hall where Luna's giving a lecture into a sudden dance club. It's really exciting to see how the space evolves in those ways. And now I've lost my train of thought entirely in terms of our next question. I apologize. Who would you want to read this piece? Who are you imagining as its primary audience?

[41:04] Sienna: I would imagine people who are early in their transition would be an ideal audience as well as a younger audience just because it does involve a younger person as one of the leads and they're dealing with a lot of big things, a lot of grief and self-discovery and self-acceptance. And I think that it's a good way to allow younger people to just take a breath with how they're developing into who they are and remind themselves that you don't have to have it all figured out right away. It's okay to be a transitioning star and kind of figure it out as you go.

[41:43] Sienna: Definitely. And so we have about one minute left. So I'm gonna ask one more question of which is, it's not common for us to talk about this overlap between chronic illness and trans experience, particularly gender transition. That was an obvious statement. How did you come to that overlap? What makes you curious about that overlap?

[42:03] Sienna: A lot of personal experience. Personally, I have had a lot of family members who've dealt with either breast cancer or some form of debilitating long-term illness. The big reason why I wrote this piece though is because a dear friend of mine was a directing major at the time when I was in college and they had their mom who was going through a lot of breast cancer treatments and was dealing with that waiting a lot growing up. At the same time, we were both going through our own gender journey. And I like to think that this piece was my coming out in some way. It helped me discover a little bit about who I am. I kind of allowed that to be what it is, just a way to explore the what if about myself and the what if about them and just allow that to be a beautiful piece about friendship.

[42:52] Sienna: It absolutely is. Thank you so much for sharing that. Another round of applause for Sienna, please. And I have the great pleasure of also being in conversation with Samuel Achilles about his play, Keneus. Do you want to introduce yourself in the play?

[43:13] Samuel Achilles: Yes, please. So I'm Samuel Achilles. I'm a playwright also based in Boston. This play, it takes place in a version of ancient Greece where this trans character has his gender transformed to be what he's always dreamed it will be and then goes on this kind of journey of both self-exploration and discovering what it means to now be relating to this world when people suddenly see you in a different way. And also encountering other trans characters along the way who have different stories and encountering kind of what it means to be like a trans person in the world.

[43:53] Samuel Achilles: Yeah. Keneus is a much lesser known figure in Greek mythology. How did you come to the story and how did you develop this work?

[44:00] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, so I was very interested in Greek mythology growing up as a teenager. And part of why I ended up writing this play was I had found this story when I was reading Ovid's Metamorphosis when I was probably 16 or so. And I got very obsessed with this trans character because I was living in rural South Dakota. I was the only trans person in the village. Like I was very much like felt very isolated and didn't see a lot of models for myself in media. So I got very interested in the fact that this was this thousand-year-old story that was telling a trans story. So that kind of stuck in my brain and then it ended up morphing into my final thesis at New Hampshire College.

[44:52] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, thank you. And so in terms of the development of the work, one of the things that I find really interesting about this piece is that Keneus doesn't physically transform but everybody reads him as himself. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspires that? How you think through that particular?

[45:03] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, I think for me that was important in part because at the time when I was writing this, like 2016 through 2018, there was a lot of emphasis in trans media on the dramatic nature of someone's appearance changing. So I kind of wanted to play with what does it mean when everyone sees you differently but maybe there's not necessarily a dramatic physical change that's taken place. I also had experiences like that myself so I was trying to think through that idea as well.

[45:44] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, absolutely. And it's such a powerful thing to show and do in a moment in which so many trans kids aren't getting access to gender affirming care. What does it mean to be fully supportive of their identities when that access is being taken away? I wonder if you'll also speak with us a little bit about the decision to have the entire cast be trans, though there are characters who might be presumed to be cis. And so how do you think about that casting?

[46:08] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, so when I was working on this production for my senior thesis, I was in a really wonderful community of other trans artists but there wasn't necessarily a lot of trans work being put on. So it was important for me to both to kind of create a trans art space and to have trans people be able to make art with each other, which is why I emphasize in the notes of this play that even if you presume a character is cis, you can, you should in fact cast them with trans actors. And in the original production, I think we only had one cis person on the cast and it's a quite large cast of seven people. So that was really important to kind of create those creative spaces because I think so many trans people have an experience in art spaces of being the token trans person in the room and feeling objectified by that.

[47:04] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, it does really exciting things in terms of characters like Medea and Jason being played by trans actors, sometimes in really campy ways, I think helps complicate our understandings of those possibilities of gender.

[47:16] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, what do you hope, we talked about this for the interview that we, so we did an interview while developing the introduction and I'm putting you on the spot, but what is your hope for young people who engage with this play? How do you want?

[47:25] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, I think that I would love to see this put on by people who are high school age, who are college age, because I think so much of it is inspired by my experiences as a trans teenager and then a trans young adult. And I think especially because it is a story that kind of centers the trans character when there's so much about trans youth that's just talking about trans youth and not really to or hearing from trans youth or people who were trans youth that now are trans grown-ups. So I think that is an important piece of this and something I'm excited to see explored more.

[48:04] Samuel Achilles: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Sam. Thank you.

[48:10] Sienna: Thank you.

[48:21] Sienna: All right, moving on along. I want to welcome to the stage or the floor or the podcast, the writer of Unfair Advantage, Tyler Rossio-Iconia. Let's give him a hand. Come on now.

[48:41] Tyler Rossio-Iconia: Hello, my name is Tyler Rossio-Iconia. I wrote Unfair Advantage. Unfair Advantage is a play about two unnamed sports teams on two unnamed Ivy League campuses navigating newly introduced trans-exclusionary rules for their leagues and the competitions. And so it's about them and how it affects the players, how the rules affect the players. It's also about transphobia and transphobic indoctrination and how that affects families and family dynamics. Like what happens if you are a parent and you are absorbing a lot of this ideology that you unknowingly also then spew to your children who may or may not be exploring your gender? So what happens if they're absorbing those sentiments? And what happens to a family?

[49:32] Tyler Rossio-Iconia: Yeah. Yeah, and I have to say I, as I mentioned before, I was reading the script in the book right before bedtime and I remember just going, oh, oh my, oh, what? What's going on? She did that? She really did that? So this play has a lot of twists and turns to it. And a part of what I love, these athletes in particular are swimmers. And one of my favorite things about this play is how magical it feels. There is this, there is this, in the play, there is a fictional nautical video game that takes place under the ocean called Siren Call. And it is where one of the characters hops on, chats and hangs out with their virtual friend. But as the play progresses, it becomes this beautiful underwater dreamscape where a lot of the characters, specifically the trans characters, get to have their moment away from the world above, from the land of cis. And they get to revel and celebrate together. How did that very striking component of this play, how did that come to be?

[50:44] Tyler Rossio-Iconia: So it definitely comes from my lived experience as a trans kid, I think, especially in my generation. If you're young and trans and exploring yourself, the outside world, unfortunately, isn't always a safe place to do that. Right. So at least in my generation, in my experience, you will find another way. You'll find any place that you can be. And a lot of the times it was on the internet, right? On the internet, you are who you say you are, 100% of the time. And that can be really liberating if you want to try on something different. I think it also, I think I'm personally very interested in exploring different realms in my writing and different realities that can be true all at once. I think a lot of that comes from like Quechua cosmology.

My family's Peruvian, and a lot of that does tend to bleed into the work, even if it is not necessarily about Peruvian culture or a topic like that. I think it does definitely have an influence on the way I build worlds and tell stories.

[51:48] Tyler Rossio-Iconia: I love that. I love that. And it comes across as so fantastical and so authentic and grounded at the same time, which is very hard for a kind of fantasy world fantasy setting to come across. And so not to put a little bit of a damper on things, but it's such an elephant in the room, an elephant in the drama bookshop, that I have to ask,

[52:14] Unknown speaker: That yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that states can ban trans athletes from competing in women's sports. Can you maybe shed a little bit more light on the importance and the prescience of this play and its message in spite of the recent ruling?

[52:28] Tyler: Yeah, definitely. So I think at the core of this work is about play. I think it's about exploring what bodies and what expressions are allowed to take up space and move with other people. I think it really sucks that who you are and what your expression is can just determine how active you're allowed to be and how much you're just allowed to move your body around other human beings. I think it really sucks and I think it does go against our nature as like our very primal instincts to move around and be with other people. I think with this play I was also really trying to hammer in the fact that you, the traits that we share, like the chemical traits, the chromosomal biological traits that we think separate us so much are actually way more mutable and not tangible than many people want to believe.

I think I was also really trying to highlight how we should be supporting those affected by trans misogyny whether or not it affects us personally before it happens, before it affects us personally, if it even does. For no other reason than I think that is the right thing to do no matter if it will then end up affecting you or if the rules bounce back and affect other people and that also goes for other marginalized identities right about why should I support this person if they are being discriminated against if I'm not feeling that they can just disappear and I can be included that's less for me to do. I think I was really interested in exploring that and how we can be complicit and everybody can be complicit in exclusion.

[54:23] Unknown speaker: Yeah, yeah that was a nuance that I remember reading and I just felt was handled so so tactfully and so honestly because genuinely it is a little bit of a domino's effect of when it starts to happen to one of us it branches out and it happens to a different marginalized group and that was just really beautiful how you set that up in the play. To end on a little bit of a more hopeful note than that what do you hope a eventual cast and eventual creative team of this project will take away from this play?

[54:57] Tyler: Yes that is a very like exciting question for me. I would love to see a pool on stage. Yes so we all want some water on stage. I would love to see how that is handled and what other people can imagine for that. I also think that physicality, movement, the way that you could represent swimming on stage on a very limited play space. How swimming differs from walking or running or the different ways that they what doing laps you know to practice feels like versus sprinting for sprinting in the water. I don't know I'm not a swimmer.

[55:34] Unknown speaker: No no I'm right and honestly even just you saying that I was like oh what I wouldn't give to see this play done site specifically and done in a school done right by a play. I know I heard that. So I'm just throwing that into the universe. But yes that is all the questions we have for you. Thank you so much for your time for this amazing play. Let's give Tyler another hand. Thank you so much. Thank you.

[56:06] Unknown speaker: Time to talk about water in a different way with Tides by Eliana Rubin. Hello. Hello. Hello. What is Tides about?

[56:19] Eliana Rubin: Oh that's such a great question. I'll tell you right now. Tides is a three-part play that takes place in a at the time written a parallel United States of America where being LGBTQ plus is outlawed except for the month of June. Part one is called May June July and it follows a group of queer trans folks in a chosen family. The play starts on June 30th then goes to July 1st the following day and then finally goes to May 31st of the following year. Part two is called The Shepherd. It follows a woman who labels herself as a hardcore right-wing conservative who is running for president and she wins and then she comes out as a trans woman and reveals that she is going to reverse everything. So now being a cishet is illegal except for the month of June.

Part three is called Ripe takes place four years after part two and it follows someone who was an aide to this now president as he runs a home for LGBTQ plus youth and parallels part one through the lens of a strong desire for youth to fight back and wrestles with the question what does violence solve or not solve.

[57:49] Unknown speaker: I love this play and I would love to know more about how it came to be. Why June? What a funny month to pick. I know but what was on your brain when you were writing?

[57:56] Eliana Rubin: The play first came to me as May June July. Parts two and three came in 2022. Part one was written started to be written in 2018 when I had realized that I was non-binary at the time. I now identify as a trans woman but at the time I wanted to come out to my grandmother a blessed memory that I was non-binary and members of my family explicitly tried to guide me away from that because she was old there was no way she was going to be able to process that information and because I can be a defiant little child I did in fact tell my grandmother and the only thing she said was are you happy and I said yes and she said great I don't fully understand it but I love you regardless applause for grandma applause for grandma bunny but I was filled with such rage that people were trying to silence my lived experience and the way that processed through me was why are people that have no bearing on these aspects of my identity trying to control it as a playwright I wanted to take that to what was the most extreme version of that which in this case was to create parameters of where queer and trans people could go outside of the month of June what laws they needed to abide by were they able to own property how were those parameters shrunk over time that's how the play came to be.

[59:27] Unknown speaker: Yeah so when you're writing it's not sci-fi right we're in a sort of speculative fiction slightly campy sort of world did you find it like fun and interesting to be able to play with rules a little bit beyond realism?

[59:39] Eliana Rubin: I like that question there's a lot of rubberiness in my plays there's a lot of ability to pull things apart and see what's between the seams with this play though I wanted to at least with part one I wanted to really dive into what are the hard and fast rules of this play and how do the characters in part one and later in parts two and three find the joy find that rubberiness for themselves part of the way that comes about in part three specifically is with this very young rambunctious little queer girl named Bridget who is obsessed with tomatoes which is where part three ripe in part gets its name from but at one point she is talking about how her chosen father has bags under his eyes and are they designer but I don't even know what a designer bag is I heard it on tv and finding the levity in that as a way to juxtapose the shit that they are living through was something that felt both out of and within our current world.

[1:00:47] Unknown speaker: Great yeah so you bring up the three-part structure and I know you wanted to talk about the end of this play and endings of plays generally so talk to me about part three talk to me about the end.

[1:00:52] Eliana Rubin: Yeah totally part three realizes that characters from the past who were thought to be gone are actually not gone and actually hold really intense positions of power the final scene of the play is a direct parallel to one of the moments in part one and when I had originally written it it tied it all up in a nice little bow and everyone was getting along and things weren't great all the time but hey we were on the up and then when I had a conversation with Sloth who wrote the introduction to the play one of the things that they were talking about was it could be messier and that terrified me which let me know that I should dive into that so the way that part three ends now is with no resolution it ends with a father and child at deep odds with each other asking questions not knowing what the answer is and choosing to go forward regardless I wanted to create a piece that felt like it could exist outside of what's on the page and the only way that I could do that for me was to not define how these characters see themselves out I wanted them to make that choice for themselves.

[1:02:13] Unknown speaker: Yeah and you gave your audience a lot to talk about in the car ride home or the transit home.

[1:02:18] Eliana Rubin: Yeah, yeah I did.

[1:02:26] Unknown speaker: All right let's give another hand for Eliana thank you.

[1:02:30] Angela: We're inviting back Angela to help close us out and then we'll hand it back to the DBS for a final word. Yeah so I have a little thank you list that I just want to make sure that we thank all of you who are here with us tonight thank you thank you over everyone over at HowlRound for the podcast thank you all the playwrights and interlocutors thank you Bloomsbury thank you Transcend streaming yes thank you Liana thank you to Lindsay and also to Mark and David where's everybody at here at the drama bookstore and to Sloth and Liana because really this was their idea we want to give credit where credit is due thank you Sloth.

[1:03:10] Angela: Yeah the final piece of news that I wanted to drop now that we're allowed to drop this piece of news is that all three of the anthologies have just won the LMDA's 2026 award for outstanding dramaturgy which is extremely cool news like due in no small part to all of the wonderful introductory essays that many of the folks contributed each play has a companion piece which helps it make it very accessible from whether you're someone who's coming from an academic point of view some of them involve poetry it's all sort of different conversations between people so if you enjoyed hearing about the thought processes and the inner workings tonight make sure you read the introductory essays as well as the plays themselves and shout out to the one strange costume conference goer who told our editor that they wanted more of these books thank you.

[1:04:01] Angela: Thank you over to you and we are back thanks for listening to this episode of the Drama Book Show. Coming up next on the Drama Book Show we'll talk with Katherine Widener actor director educator and author of Acting Heightened Text: The Basics about bringing heightened language to life on stage. Widener's book offers practical tools for actors directors students and teachers working with both verse and prose from text analysis and playing actions to auditions rehearsals rhetorical arguments and rhyming couplets we'll explore how curiosity rigor and techniques like hooking can help performers make dynamic textually supported choices while connecting with heightened language in a truthful and contemporary way so please follow us on Instagram at dramabookshowpodcast follow us on Eventbrite at dramabookshop and remember all the books we talk about can be found here at the bookshop and so can we and we will see you at the bookshop.