Shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award for Best LBGTQ Anthology!
The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (May 2021), co-edited by Leanna Keyes and Angela Farr Schiller, compiles eight new plays by trans playwrights featuring trans characters. This foundational book traverses a broad landscape of trans performance and represents a variety of performance modes and genres. Themes addressed by these pieces range from gender identity and expression to racial and religious attitudes toward love and sex.
Purchase here!
REVIEWS
This anthology is special: a book of trans plays about trans life as it is actually, materially lived in time and space. It does not lump together trans identity and performance under the abstract figure “queer,” where “inclusion” means including one trans character in a compilation of plays by cisgender gay and lesbian playwrights. Instead, this collec- tion treats the minutiae of transgender life and experience (love, sex, trauma, joy, friendship, exile, spirituality, family, boredom, etc.) in all their genres as capacious modes of theatrical capacity—from the ordinary to the fantastic, from the mundane to the revolutionary, and from childhood to old age. –Anthony Sansonetti, Theatre Survey 63.2 (2022)
The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays, a 2021 anthology edited by Leanna Keyes, Lindsey Mantoan, and Angela Farr Schiller, is precisely what my students and I had hoped for. With these eight plays, each accompanied by an intelligent introduction, the collection highlights how trans writers play with time in order to shed light on—and undermine—the strictures of white Western heteronormativity. -Jess Barbagallo, Cincinnati Review
Lindsey Mantoan, Ph.D. 