Dragonfly

By (author): Lara Rae

In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos. So often, it is the external changes in trans lives that the world is exposed to and confronts. Here as Lara says, is the “inside voice” of a trans child, ever present, ever demanding to be heard, ever rising upward, to growth, peace, security and love.

AUTHOR

Lara Rae

Lara Rae is a writer and stand-up comedian.She is one of the co-developers of the internationally acclaimed comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie. Her radio plays include an episode of Afghanada and the series she created, Monsoon House starring Russell Peters. She was the first trans woman to host the CBC flagship news program The Current. Her food project PANTRY feeds people in her West Broadway neighborhood in Winnipeg, where she lives with her dog and three rats.

Reviews

“It’s a wrenchingly personal, honest and open story, told through exquisitely poetic language…Ultimately, though, Dragonflyis about more than just the details of Rae’s life story. It’s about how we construct and perceive gender, and how that can hide a person’s true identity not just from those around them, but even from themselves — and about emerging from that. Dragonfly tells that challenging and rarely heard story with elegance.” –CBC Manitoba

“Funny, gritty, tragic, and crucially, relatable. This is a brave new work.” —Winnipeg Free Press