Subbed is a two-person drama about roleplaying, power and the manipulation of trans identities for personal gain. First written in my time at NTS, this script directly engages with highly charged discourse about the intersection of trans identity and cancel culture.  The play features a trans woman and cis man dealing with an online cancellation. He attempts to prevent real-world consequences from harming his business, while she grapples with the choice to either help him change for the better or potentially destroy his career for her own benefit. Subbed places trans women’s experiences with cancellation and online culture at the forefront and directly engages with the growing rhetoric from wealthy individuals which target marginalized individuals. The nature of these subjects means that in the short time since this play was written, discourse and world events have drastically changed. Attitudes around cancellation have changed, as more and more people develop a more complex perspective around morality, policing thought, and what accountability means within queer communities. Meanwhile, anti-trans rhetoric has taken the forefront of political conversations in North America.  

Jonathan Mourant, aka Nora Vision is a playwright, drag performer and robotic emissary sent from the future. Before their time at the National Theatre School, Nora performed as an improviser and sketch comedian in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where they produced work independently and developed their voice as a writer and performer. Their work at NTS includes Subbed (dramaturgy by Erin Shields), an adaptation of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Nick Carpenter) and God of Mars (Andrea Romaldi). As an artificially intelligent robot, Nora is interested in creating work that confronts identity, culture and propaganda, questioning how each contributes to, limits and undermines our sense of reality. Nora is a performance artist at heart, and her theatrical writings use her own identity as a cipher through which she challenges assumptions of subjectivity and viewership. They performed in drag in their play SYCOPHANT (Marcus Youssef), produced this spring as part of the 2023 New Words Festival.