Transgender Actor Films One-Man Show At 7 Stages
Atlanta actor Scott Turner Schofield is filming “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps” over two weekends, Aug. 18 and 25 at 7 Stages Theatre.
credit Olivia Hemaratanatorn
As the stories and lives of transgender people are becoming more normalized and accepted, there is increased demand to hear them told. Atlanta actor Scott Turner Schofield is prepared to give us not one, but over one hundred stories. He premiered his one-man show at 7 Stages in 2007, called “Becoming A Man in 127 Easy Steps.” And he is back at the theater filming that show.
The show is indeed made up of 127 short scenes and stories ranging from thirty seconds to several minutes. And they tell stories ranging from his birth to what it’s like to live a full life beyond transition.
Typically, audience members get to choose the order and content of the show by picking out numbers corresponding to the stories in Schofield’s repertoire. However, for the filming, he has chosen fourteen of them to perform.
“I’m taking the ones that audiences have loved the most over 10 years, so it’s really my greatest hits” he says. “And that’s from being forced to wear a dress as a child, to the last time I wore a dress. It was at a debutante ball. There’s one about health anxiety. There’s one about meeting my wife. There’s one that I come out dressed like Prince.”
Schofield explains that he hopes to not only craft a feature-length film out of the performance, but to include the rest of the material in other formats, such as a podcast and an interactive website, to help retain the randomized presentation of the live show.
“The show’s about identity, right? It’s about becoming who you are. [The format] is this acknowledgement that we all get to choose our own adventure every single day. Our identities are fluid and our lives are made up of stories.”
7 Stages commissioned “Becoming A Man…” in ’07 through the National Performance Network, so returning to that space represents a kind of homecoming for the show.
“I made a very specific choice to come back to Atlanta because I want people to see the magic of our community,” Schofield said. “There’s nothing better than a full house in ATL!”
Schofield is filming “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps” over two weekends, Aug. 18 and 25 at 7 Stages Theatre.
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