Metamorphosis of a drama

Lara Rae’s autobiographical Dragonfly begins much where the author did — as a boy in 1960s Glasgow with the uncanny sense of not being a boy in the narrow way expected.

“If there’s one cliché I guess I lean into, I’ve loved opera since I was a youth,” says the trans playwright and comedian.

“I mean, it’s the joke in Philadelphia. (The gay character played by) Tom Hanks says that he’s listening to La Mamma Morta and it’s such a cliché that he’s crying over Callas.”

Now Rae is expressing her early love by developing Dragonfly into a 75-minute chamber piece with Manitoba Opera, making it the first Canadian opera centring on a trans person.

Dragonfly’s first life was as a two-person play written by Rae and brought to life in its 2019 Theatre Projects Manitoba première by director Ardith Boxall and performers Eric Blais and Sarah Constible, with entrancing lighting from Hugh Conacher.

Both performers played a side of Rae, sometimes pushing and pulling at one another, sometimes taking on roles of others in the play.

The operatic version, which Manitoba Opera hopes to première in fall 2027, will feature two singers, one dancer and three musicians, with music by composer Maria Thompson Corley.

Rae’s script, economical on the surface, packs a lot into one act: moving across continents, the AIDS crisis, harrowing personal experiences and identities as Rae transitions to Lara.

Yet it was inevitable that this seasoned standup comic and co-founder of the Winnipeg Comedy Festival would also deliver something irresistibly funny, even if it couldn’t be classified as a comedy.

The TV writer will be the first tell you that the libretto she’s crafted for the new Dragonfly, which had its first workshop this week, is also a new creature.

“The play was six years ago. I transitioned 10 years ago, and the play ended with me being assessed to get on the list for surgery. It’s going to cover more of my emotional development (since then),” says Rae.

Much has happened since 2019, impacting both the libretto and the perspective Rae brings to it.

“Essentially, (Dragonfly) is story from my birth to knowing I was transgender by the time I was four years old to being groomed and sexually assaulted. Three weeks ago, I named that person publicly,” says Rae.

Rae also reflects on the 2023 death at age 53 of Jocelyn Morlock, the Winnipeg-born pianist who was the opera’s original composer, and the impact it’s had on her and the show’s development.

“She was one of the finest classical, modern composers working in the world, and it was such a gift and an honour to begin working on the libretto with Jocelyn during COVID,” she says.

Dragonfly’s operatic development was paused for a period of reflection before Corley was invited to become the chamber opera’s new composer.

The Jamaican-born, Canadian-raised musician has been presented, often as a pianist, on radio, TV and stages across the world, including Wigmore Hall.

Corley — who says “not a single note has been written” yet for Dragonfly — met Rae for the first time in person at this week’s workshop. Speaking with the two a couple of days later feels like eavesdropping on a conversation between old friends.

“I grew up in Canada, so I had the chain of composers,” the Philadelphia-based pianist says of her influences. “You grow up doing the canon of dead white European men, and so all of it is in there somewhere,”

Corley and Rae share an obvious affection for early 20th-century music and poetry — a time when the lines between musicals and opera, popular and art song, were blurrier.

“My thought process may be a little bit more dissonant just because of the subject matter, but I’m thinking there are places where it seems like it’s asking for something more accessible, whether it’s folk tunes or pop or whatever,” says Corley, while the two discuss musical inspirations such as hymns, the Scottish folk music of Rae’s youth, Scott Joplin, Kurt Weill and George Gershwin.

“My pledge to the listener is there is not a single lyric … that will be as cloying and irritating as anything Ira Gershwin ever wrote,” Rae chimes in, referring to composer George Gershwin’s brother and lyricist.

Rae’s rattles off a list of influences — she likes unorthodox Protestant English poets John Milton and William Blake, mostly skips the writers of the “puritanical Victorian era” and finds home again in modernist experimenters such as Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and Ezra Pound — before talking pop culture.

“Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette changed the way I thought about telling my story, which is to not let the audience off the hook every single time with a punchline,” says Rae of the Australian comedian’s groundbreaking Netflix special. “You un-dignify yourself by stopping your pain with gallows humour.

“It’s Rilke who says… there are some things so deep that irony cannot touch.”

The theme of reverence slips in and out of Rae and Corley’s conversation.

Rae, one of the developers of CBC’s international hit show Little Mosque on the Prairie, identifies as a Quaker, while Corley, who comes from a line of Bermudian pastors in the African Methodist Episcopal tradition, was raised Anglican and is a church musician.

“I’m not a big sectarian. It’s like my eclecticism with everything else,” says Corley.

With Rae’s taste for rebellious Protestant writers, her Christianity also clearly has something of an iconoclastic streak.

“I’m not saying everybody in theatre is gay, but everyone in theatre is queer in the original definition,” she says.

“We’re all oddballs,” adds Corey.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca