NEW YORK CITY: Life Jacket Theatre Company has announced a new commissioning program for trans playwrights. A $10,000 commission will be awarded to a trans playwright to create a full-length play based on interviews with trans people from across the country.

“This new commission uplifts and celebrates trans voices,” artistic director Travis Russ said in a statement. “America has a long and painful history of censoring, erasing, and whitewashing trans stories. This is unfortunately true today, given the aggressively vitriolic political climate and hatred faced by the trans community. This commission will fund a new theatrical work that pulls trans stories from the margins and places them centerstage, where they belong.”

The deadline for interested trans writers to apply is July 12. Playwrights will conduct interviews with trans people across diverse geographic regions in the United States in the fall and winter of 2023, and will build a verbatim play from interview transcripts through the winter, spring, and summer of 2024. Life Jacket will produce a full reading of the play or excerpts from the play in fall 2024.

Interested playwrights can find out more here.

Life Jacket Theatre Company is committed to championing untold stories and uplifting underserved communities. Life Jacket uses ethnographic research and documentary materials to create highly theatrical, visually inventive, and lyrically rich works.