“You need to do a transgender play,” actress and playwright
Carla Pridgen told
Steph Hickling Beckman immediately after
Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective’s inaugural production in spring 2011.
Hickling Beckman was game, and after several coffee conversations about published works, she suggested Pridgen write a play that would appeal to both cisgender and transgender audiences. Hickling Beckman's Different Strokes, a diversity-oriented theatre company she co-founded and is the managing artistic director of, would workshop and produce it.
The resulting play,
Incongruence, now flies off to New York City for another moment of evolution with
Ivy Theatre Company. The play features monologues and vignettes derived from a series of interviews with transgender women and men of all generations and backgrounds.
“It’s not just about transgender,” Pridgen says. The play embraces the fact that we are all on the same journey despite gender, orientation, race, or ethnicity.
Since the summer 2013 Asheville premiere, Pridgen has reworked the play and its characters. In the revision, titled
Incongruence: A (trans) Gender Looking Glass, an entertainer named Tammy takes the audience on a journey into a looking glass of gender identity that is really about the other or the misfit, whether seen or sensed, reflected in anyone’s mirror.
On Tuesday, October 14 at 7:30 p.m., Different Strokes presents a staged reading of the revised play on
Asheville Community Theatre's mainstage, just ahead of the November 8 opening of Ivy Theatre’s production.
Proceeds will benefit Ivy Theatre’s production costs. Tickets to the reading are available
online or at the door.
About Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective:
Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective Inc. is a 501(c) 3 certified non-profit organization that purposes to increase and sustain opportunities for more diversity within the Western North Carolina performing arts community by producing and working with other performance artists or groups to present works which confront issues of social diversity in a provocative way, and by providing opportunities for audiences to explore visions of our diverse world.
Steph Hickling Beckman, co-founder, has been active in Asheville’s theatre scene since 1999. She has worked with several local theatre companies as an actor, stage manager, and director, and toured nationally as an actor. As Different Strokes' managing artistic director, Steph is committed to directing and producing theatre that makes a difference. Steph serves on the boards of directors for YouthOUTright, Center for Diversity Education, and The Magnetic Theatre, and has previously sat on the boards of Montford Park Players, Black Mountain Arts Center, and Western North Carolina AIDS Project.