An Antarctic Gender Non-Conforming Creation Myth

Selection: The Loom New Works Festival at Woven Theatre in Nashville, TN (2019)
Semi-Finalist: The Mitten Lab (2019)
Second Round Selection: The Austin Film Festival Playwriting Competition (2019)

Three scientists - enduring the vast tundra, close quarters, and three hundred beached whales on a melting glacier - are faced with questions of gender, biology, identity, climate change, and faith.

TAY, a scientist specializing in Phytoplankton, is a genderfluid person trying to quietly organize and understand their place on the ice while their presence cracks every foundation. HERMAN, a scientist specializing in Glacial Disintegration, builds an arc to get the team off of the melting glacier while struggling to keep his relationships afloat. TERRA, a whale biologist, is overwhelmed by the deconstruction of her faith and her identity as the world threatens to swallow her whole.

Frozen Fluid is a celebration and investigation of the complexity and multiplicity of the self and the struggle and ultimate triumph to find and live as one's true self in mind, body, and spirit in a time of uncertainty in faith and future of the human race - with one another in society, and in our threatened climate on this planet. The play centers Trans and Gender Non-Binary characters and performers.

I am currently developing the play in both length and depth as it relates to the representation and presence of non-conforming genders as well as the sciences. The world of the play has evolved so much in the time I first began writing it, and the current draft thirsts for clarity and progress toward this new focus. I want to point more toward the (de)construction and performance of gender, of mythos and religion, of family and parenthood and community, of ecology and biology - in bodies and genders of all kinds. I would like to more explicitly fold in a reversal of Genesis, of the Ark story, and research on climate change and the other scientific focuses that are somewhat superficially represented in the characters.

I want to explore the formal dramaturgical structures of the Old Testament, of children's games, of more than just binary gender and a nonbinary femme position. I think the world of the play as its shown itself thus far brings me to the edge of these explorations - and there's more to be found. I want an unmaking of Eden, an un-naming of the animals, where all the ice in the world has to melt to start over. I want to ask questions about a New Flood for a New Age of the Post-Gender Family in a Post-Glacial world.