Bo Frazier wants people to know that transgender and gender nonconforming people didn’t appear suddenly with the advent of social media.
To dramatize that point, literally and figuratively, they are launching the Trans History Project at Baltimore Center Stage to commission 10 plays written by and about trans and gender nonconforming people.
Frazier began working in the marketing department at BCS when they lived in Chicago, working remotely. Their Center Stage colleagues knew they were also a director and producer, and when Frazier pitched the idea of a trans history project to artistic director Stevie Walker-Webb, he was immediately supportive. Frazier became BCS’s artist-in-residence a year ago to facilitate building the project and applying for grants, all in addition to their role as associate director of marketing and communications.
They conceived of the Trans History Project when they were in grad school, pre-COVID, sometime in 2019.
“There is no representation of trans or gender nonconforming people in TV and film, let alone even less on stage,” Frazier told Baltimore Fishbowl. “I was always so frustrated that general society thought that we didn’t exist until TikTok and we’re just a trend.”
Especially frustrating was the fact that all Frazier had to do was the most basic of Google searches to find a breadth of information confirming that trans and gender nonconforming people have existed across cultures for millennia.
“Gotta love the European Christian colonizers ruin[ing] everything for us, and they just erased that history, and literally erased the Native American Two Spirit history and culture,” Frazier said.
Listing other cultures who have traditions of recognizing more than two genders and gender nonconforming identities, Frazier mentioned “hijra” people in South Asia; Mexican “muxes” people; other Indigenous American tribal cultures who recognized five genders across the board; the Sulawesi people in Indonesia; tribes in Africa who wait until children are older, even after puberty, to assign gender; and traditional Hebrew culture, which recognizes anywhere from three to eight genders, depending on Talmudic interpretation.
The Trans History Project involves choosing five playwrights in two cohorts. Each playwright (or possibly a team of playwrights) will be placed into a residency at a regional theater, one of which is Baltimore Center Stage. Each residency lasts for two years: at the end of the first year, the play gets a reading, and in the second year the play will get a more extensive workshopping at the theater.
“There are a lot of playwriting residencies that are not at theaters and sort of don’t connect you to a theater that is already interested, already has chosen that as interested in being produced,” Frazier explained. “So, this is bridging that gap, hopefully, because when we sort of select the list of playwrights to choose from, that theater is going to choose a play and/or playwright that they are interested in.”
The first cohort begins in the 2025/2026 season and involves one theater in California, two in the mid-Atlantic, and one in New York City. The play must be an original story or adaptation about the history of transgender and/or gender nonconforming people, to broaden public consciousness and understanding that these groups have always existed.
Adam Frank, Baltimore Center Stage’s managing director, is proud that Center Stage is supporting the launch of the Trans History Project and is enthusiastic about Frazier’s vision.
“There’s a rich history of commissioning programs in the United States like this that add to the canon of work for the American theater that helps expand our collective understanding of who we are,” Frank told Fishbowl. “This is in that tradition in a way that we feel is really powerful. It serves a dual purpose to support trans writers and artists in the making of the things, and then for everyone to just expand our sense of history and our sense of ourselves across time, which I think is a really important role for the arts to serve in society. That’s something that performers have done for a really long time, and so we’re proud to be in that tradition, working with Bo on this project.”
Frazier agrees the commissioning of new plays is standard, though a program like the Trans History Project, which places playwrights in residencies at regional theaters around the country, is a first to their knowledge. Additionally, Frazier said this is the first of its kind focusing solely on trans and gender nonconforming history and playwrights.
BCS and Frazier are partnering with Breaking the Binary Theatre to bring the project fully to life.
“Breaking the Binary is a really great theater company that literally just started post pandemic,” Frazier said. “And George Strus, who’s a Latina non-binary agent actually turned producer and dramaturg, they saw this niche where there are plenty of queer-focused theaters, but there were none focused on the trans and non-binary experience. And they started this great company, and they’re quite good at fundraising, which is amazing.”
The Trans History Project serves dual imperatives: rejecting erasure from history and impressing on society’s consciousness that trans and gender nonconforming people belong in the same spaces as everyone else.
Applications for the first cohort of the Trans History Project are due Sunday, May 11, 2025, at 11:59 EST. Information, details, and the application can be found at this link.
