FringeArts and Ninth Planet present Arielle Julia Brown’s fallawayinto: Corridors of Rememory

Pulling from memory

“As a Black person, as a queer person, as a gender-expansive person, it felt like a no-brainer to say yes,” said Nia Benjamin, co-founder of Ninth Planet and director of fallawayinto, on the decision to produce the play. “It felt like a glorious challenge: not only to lift up the divine memory of Donna Booker, but also to exercise our devised practices in this new way.”

Written by Arielle Julia Brown, fallawayinto: Corridors of Rememory charts the life and teachings of Donna Nicole Booker, a Black trans ancestor who was an artist, activist, sex worker, evangelist, and theologian. Since her death in 2006, her memory has lived on through the communities she touched in Waukegan, Illinois, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and has provided the animating force for fallawayinto. It’s a generational story, in more ways than one. Brown, the playwright, is also Booker’s niece.

Though the play is a world premiere, it builds on past iterations in Brown’s fallawayinto series, the previous of which took place as an outdoor performance ritual in Waukegan, Illinois. With this new version, Benjamin aims to preserve the dream logic that shaped the play’s prior forms, while telling a story that is accessible to a Philadelphia audience unfamiliar with Booker’s life. Under the specter of our current politics, her story of radical self-actualization seems to resonate now more than ever.

“With the inauguration of our current president, with the conservative leaning Supreme Court and political climate, it feels like an honor to be able to tell the story of a Black trans woman who was well loved by her family and her community,” said Benjamin. “And whose name is carried on by so many people—blood relations, chosen family, and now with this growing artistic lineage that honors her as well. Donna Booker lives and lives, and she is a beacon of possibility for us all.”