Glace Chase knew she needed to be the person to write the first trans love story to premiere on Australian main stages.
"I had the craft to be able to pull it off … I could tell it in a bold way," the writer and performer says.
She also had the perfect story to tell: her own.
In Triple X, which premiered at Sydney Theatre Company this month, depressed Wall Street banker Scotty (played by Josh McConville) welcomes his mother and sister to stay at his luxury Manhattan apartment on the eve of his wedding. But when he hears about a fatal shooting in a popular nightclub, he can no longer concentrate on his upcoming nuptials.
The play flashes back and forth between the present and scenes from his affair with trans nightclub performer Dexie.
Chase herself plays Dexie, a role that draws upon her eight years working as a "nightlife queen" in New York City, running a drag queen tour guide business and hosting bingo, karaoke, and interactive comedy nights.
Scotty and Dexie's relationship rapidly escalates into a passionate, honest intimacy – leading to one of the most memorable sex scenes in recent Australian theatre.
Even though an audience is aware Scotty is engaged to someone else, they root for Scotty and Dexie as a couple.
And that was exactly Chase's intention.
"I wanted to make it a hero narrative; to give it the epic love story scope."
She adds: "I wanted to make an audience feel that if they [Scotty and Dexie] could not survive, then love in the world is doomed and everything is f***ed."
Chase was born in country Victoria, but has lived in Melbourne, London, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney.
She won the Griffin Award for a new Australian play in 2008 with the gap-year sex work drama Whore; and then again in 2011 for A Hoax, a play drawing upon a spate of controversial literary misrepresentations, where writers would write 'memoirs' under pseudonyms – such as Wanda Koolmatrie, later revealed to be Leon Carmen, and the American writer JT LeRoy aka Laura Albert.
Playwriting wasn't her first choice of creative career.
"I stumbled into it because I was always mad on wanting to be an actor," she says.
She graduated from the Actors Centre Australia in Sydney in 2009 but struggled to land roles.
"I was kind of gender-variant. I was very effeminate, it was before my transition, and it was just clear I was never gonna work. I could write, so I started to write plays."
But the writing process isn't easy for Chase.
"Though I'm good at it, it's not really good for me at all."
She also found traditional theatre spaces claustrophobic compared to the irreverence and ribaldry of nightclub stages.
"Writing the whole thing [a play] would be like trauma from woe to go, and then getting the damn thing on would be traumatic from woe to go.
"I never really felt supported or understood. I was criticised a lot, and ultimately a lot of that was linked to transphobia I think and femmephobia and a bit of homophobia as well.
"Ultimately it cost too much."
Triple X is the first new play she has written since she left Australia in 2011.
"Since I moved to New York officially, which was like 10 years ago, I stopped writing, and I had no desire to pick it back up, and no intention."
When fiction becomes reality
In New York in 2017, Chase was talking to Australian director Paige Rattray about a relationship that had recently ended – and the idea for Triple X began to take shape.
But it was a subsequent relationship that provided much of the real-life fodder for the play – with eerie parallels to scenes and characters she had already written.
"In some ways I guess I manifested the central love story of the play," Chase told ABC TV's Art Works last year.
For instance, she had already formulated the character of Scotty when a drunken banker walked into the bar where she was working.
"We were flirting a lot and I ended up going home with him. And then boom, it started an actual relationship that lasted a year," she says.
"I only found out six months in that he actually was engaged. And not only that, when I found out about the fiancée, it was basically the exact same way that Scotty in the play's fiancée is described as."
It worked the other way too, as moments from real life – including lines of dialogue – were threaded into the script.
"You think you're observing and commenting from afar and then it becomes very personal," Chase says.
Finding herself
Triple X is a trans love story – but it didn't start that way.
As events unfolded in both her real life and the play, she found herself examining not only her romantic relationship but her gender identity.
"And it [writing the play] sort of unlocked a lot of my transition."
Likewise, writing the play uncovered a new kind of confidence in Chase; the woman that we meet in Triple X through the character of Dexie, evolved through the writing of the script.
"Triple X fundamentally changed me. It was a very profound experience," Chase says.
Now she feels that she's gone beyond her character in terms of her acceptance of – and pride in – her gender identity.
"I see someone now that's able to accept, to be more at peace with who I am, and what that represents in the world – to let some of the trauma go."
But her journey was not a comfortable one, and writing the relationship between Dexie and Scotty meant grappling with painful questions.
"I think the big question that I had to really interrogate myself was, 'Am I worthy of love?'
"There's a really obvious answer to that: 'Of course you are, everybody is!' But everybody can relate to [the feeling that] perhaps there's a more nuanced, darker version [of that answer]."
Centring Scotty
Ultimately, however, Dexie is not the centre of the play; instead, Chase chose to focus on the straight cis male character of Scotty.
"Scotty is the character with more conflict," she explains.
"Dexie's sort of got a fun-but-going-nowhere life, but she's quite resolved in who she is… Scotty, there's a lot more at stake for him, about authenticity and happiness and shame."
She was also interested in telling the story from a perspective that's often derided: men who are attracted to transgender women.
According to Pornhub data, searches for 'trans' increased 141 per cent in 2021. 'Transgender' is now the 10th most watched category by male visitors to the site.
"When you're watching the play, this could be your brother, your son, your ex. This is not something that happens over there, this is something that is happening within so many family units, and no one talks about it."
In part, Chase's focus on Scotty was also a protective mechanism.
"I thought it would shield me a little bit more. I underestimated the power of the story and what it means [for] me telling it," she says.
"It took me quite a while to warm up to, but I'm ultimately a gossip and in life I do sit at the end of the bar and just tell stories about my sex life and my nervous breakdowns.
Delayed gratification
While Chase is usually based in the States, she's been living in Australia since early 2020, when she returned for Triple X rehearsals.
The show was first scheduled to hit the stage in 2020 at Queensland Theatre in Brisbane, before travelling to Sydney Theatre Company.
Both seasons were delayed by COVID and rescheduled to 2021; in the end, lockdowns cut short the Brisbane season and scuppered the Sydney one.
The delays have meant cast changes, and the Omicron wave sweeping through New South Wales this month has necessitated the introduction of understudies.
Chase describes the uncertainty and the delays as "devastating".
"Previously with all the shutdowns, you're living on a knife edge the whole time because you knew that one case potentially could ruin everything.
"This [season] doesn't feel quite as bad … You feel like the show will go on. Thank God for understudies!"
The play finally premiered in Sydney to an overwhelmingly positive reception, with critics describing it as "a beautifully constructed piece of storytelling" and "emotionally persuasive, physically intimate and … revelatory".
"It's been very moving. It's been two years in the making," says Chase.
"[But] we've still got a really long run to go, so I'm still holding myself together. I think I'll exhale properly come 26 of Feb [the end of the show's run]."
She hopes to one day mount Triple X in New York, where she'll return after she performs her new comedy show Glace's Big Things at Adelaide Fringe in March.
She's also working on a new commission for Sydney Theatre Company, titled Drag County.
But for now, she's letting herself savour the feeling of finally opening the show in Sydney.
"It's really important that I allow myself to have this moment," she says.
"What is great is to validate the trans experience and a trans romantic experience and have it put at that level. We are seeing trans characters finally on screens [but only] a little bit, barely.
Triple X runs until February 26 at Sydney Theatre Company.
