NEW YORK CITY: Breaking the Binary (BTB) Theatre has named ruth tang the inaugural recipient of its commissioning program. The newly launched initiative aims to create and develop original full-length pieces written by trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit (TNB2S+) theatre artists. BTB Theatre uses the term “TNB2S+” in hopes to encompass any person who does not correspond with the male and female binary and is transgender, nonbinary, two-spirit, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, gender expansive, bigender, gender fluid, or otherwise lives outside of the cisnormative gender binary. Commissioned artists receive $10,000 to develop a new work with the company. All 2022 Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival artist alumni were eligible to submit a proposal for the commission earlier this spring.

“We received a large number of impassioned commission proposals from our BTB alumni,” said founding artistic director George Strus in a statement, “so while the decision was not an easy one, all of us at Breaking the Binary Theatre could not be more thrilled to continue our relationship with ruth and work to develop a new piece with them over the course of the next year.”

ruth tang writes plays and makes weird internet experiments. ruth’s piece Work Hard Have Fun Make History was workshopped in the Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival last fall and had its world premiere production in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks series earlier this summer. Their other work includes Future Wife (Theatertreffen Stückemarkt 2022) and Party in a Google Sheet (New Georges). They’re under commission from NAATCO and Long Wharf Theatre, are a recipient of the Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program Grant, and are a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship 2023/4. Currently, they are part of Ars Nova’s Play Group and the New Georges Jam, and an alum of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group and NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship. They grew up in Singapore and presently live in Brooklyn.

Breaking the Binary Theatre is a new-works development and community-building organization based in New York City. BTB seeks to be a place where trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit (TNB2S+) artists are able to come together to reclaim artistic license and liberty through a number of initiatives, including the annual Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival each October.