Posted June 4, 2021

Dragonfly Wins the Chris Johnson Award

Congratulations to Lara Rae on winning the 2020 Chris Johnson Award for Best Play by a Manitoba Playwright for her play Dragonfly.

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.