Gender and generational divide: Award-winning script returns to Black Box Productions
- Brianna Lyttle
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Of the many challenges that young transgender people face, communicating their gender identity to family members with limited understanding is a fairly common one.
Year End Reflections, originally presented at Braver Stages Festival, is a poignant script that tackles this very issue along with the complexities of gender expression.
On March 13 and March 14 in the Ted Daigle Auditorium at St. Thomas University, Year End Reflections took place as a staged reading as part of the Black Box Productions 2025-26 season. The story follows 18-year-old trans man Charlie, who is about to celebrate his high school graduation with a gathering of his friends and family.
Having recently come out to his family, Charlie faces constant remarks and questions from his father Scott and aunt Beth when he continues to dress himself in more traditionally feminine and androgynous ways.
The bulk of the story centres on a conversation between Charlie and his mother Kristen, who seeks to understand her son in the wake of her own friend from high school also recently coming out as transgender.
The playwright, James Lockyer, said that he wrote Year End Reflections as he transitioned and came out as a transgender man.
“I present quite femininely as a trans man, so it was really just a way for me to get all of my feelings and emotions out and express those in an artistic way,” he said. “And since then, working on the show has allowed me to consider all the different perspectives and pieces of my experience put into Charlie's story.”
He said that he found a “really good direction” with how he wanted to expand the script through the Braver Stages readings in 2022 and 2023.
Later, the script went on to win the playwriting contest at Braver Stages 2024.
“I really wanted to play into those generational divides, how younger people understand gender and gender expression and how people of an older generation understand that and how a lot of families with trans kids kind of struggle to figure out, ‘where do we meet in the middle?’”
Lockyer paused work on the script for a while, but knew there was more he wanted to tell.
In the previous academic year, he was able to continue his script during his creative writing project course for his English Honours, in which he developed the story through workshopping the script with his peers and professor.
He then had a conversation with Black Box Productions artistic advisor Tania Breen about returning to the stage with the updated version, to which she agreed to find a director and included the show in the 2025-26 season.
“I feel like there's so much of me and my journey in the script and then I've obviously grown a lot in those two years. So I have a new perspective to bring to it and a fresh new cast of actors to have their interpretation.”
While Lockyer intends to keep editing the script, the current iteration is now a full one-act play.
“It feels kind of crazy how big it's gotten, but I finally feel like I've told the full story and said everything that I need to put into it.”
Lockyer hoped that attendees at the staged reading learned more about gender and its varying expressions and how to bridge the gap in communication and understanding.
Lockyer said that hearing from Braver Stages attendees that the script helped their parents understand them more was a fulfilling experience.
As for the future of Year End Reflections, Lockyer hopes to have a fully staged production one day if he can find the right company aligned with the story, but right now it’s “open to whatever comes next.”
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