Media Archive

The American Repertory Theater’s “Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women,” playing through Feb. 5, should be mandatory viewing for anyone who identifies as human. 

Paul Lucas has crafted a script with an exquisite sense of balance; Trans Scripts, Part I is thoughtful, informative, honest, and playful, all at once.

Trans Scripts is much more than a distillation of interviews: It is an airtight example of humanity woven into a compelling 90 minutes of storytelling that runs the gamut of emotions.

This is not just about gender identity. It’s about what makes us human.

Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women distills hundreds of firsthand accounts into seven distinctive characters and curates authentic, from-the-heart stories that are sometimes painful, unstintingly frank and often cathartically funny.

How, on stage, do you create a house-sized peach that rolls down a hill and crushes two cruel aunts? How do you make that peach fly, float and impale itself on the Empire State Building? And we haven’t even gotten to the sharks yet.

It was love at first read for actress Tracee Chimo when she encountered Sue Trinder, the unconventional heroine of the Sarah Waters novel “Fingersmith”.