Over the past month and a half we’ve had some wonderful performances in churches and on the Carleton Campus.  We’ve performed before people of all ages and backgrounds and we’ve had some fabulous after-performance conversations.  But next week we’re breaking new ground; we are going back to high school!  Faith and Arts Ottawa has been invited to present Trans-Script at Sir Wilfrid Laurier Secondary School on Wednesday, May 18th at 7:00 p.m.

We were invited by the School Council and the performance is being supported by the school’s diversity and cultural clubs.  What a wonderful opportunity to open up a new conversation about things that matter with young people who are beginning to sort out who they are who they want to be.  The students, staff and community at Sir Wilfrid Laurier have made us feel very welcome and we are looking forward to sharing the evening with them.

Where: Sir Wilfrid Laurier Secondary School, 1515 Tenth Line Road, Orleans.

When: Wednesday, May 18th, at 7:00 p.m. 

We’ve performed Trans-Script three times now, enough to gauge how audiences will react to it as a piece of theatre and as an exploration of the question, “Is love enough?”

We anticipated a mixed response. The play deals with the challenges faced by friends, lovers, parents, and adult children as they navigate the stormy waters of sexuality, gender, and identity.  It plays with fire, because it openly challenges many of the comfortable assumptions our society makes about loving relationships: romantic and familial.  It plays with fire because it is drawn from the real lives of real people, so it doesn’t offer easy answers or neat conclusions.  It doesn’t offer advice.  It  does offer honest, often painful, intimacy.

So we expected some audience members would be offended, some would be angered, some would be surprised, some would be challenged, and some – we hoped – would be encouraged.

We have seen all of these responses.  But … surprisingly … not in the ways we expected.  Audiences have been offended and angered, but not by the script and the stories it tells.  Instead, they’ve been offended and angered by the injustice that creates the pain experienced by the characters, knowing that the stories are real and the pain is real. They’ve been challenged, not only to examine their own comfortable assumptions, but also to imagine ways they could act to counter that injustice.  And they’ve been encouraged, because Trans-Script tells stories that matter!

We have been so very encouraged by the way audiences in churches and on campus have opened their hearts and accepted Trans-Script as one, partial and imperfect, contribution to an essential conversation.

Go here for information about upcoming performances.