Back in 2017, Fly Jamerson (pictured left) was undertaking their MFA in Theatre Arts (Generative Dramaturgy) at the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television. Among other research, they studied Affect Theater and Devising with Greg Pierotti and Advanced Playwriting with Elaine Romero. It was in Professor Romero’s class that they began writing a “gender non-conforming creation myth” play that would become Frozen Fluid.
Seven years later, after multiple readings across the nation and the premiere of the production in Los Angeles, the play has earned Jamerson a 2024 Stage Raw Theatre Award for Playwrighting.
“Grad school is such an intense time. You focus so much on the work you’re doing in your program that it can be hard to see that what you’re doing could have lasting impact,” says Jamerson. “When I started writing Frozen Fluid in Elaine’s class, I didn’t know what it would mean for my career. Or what the work would mean to the national community. I was so lucky to have the freedom to do the work I was called to do and the support of my faculty mentors to fiercely pursue it.”
“From the first draft pages of the script,” says Prof. Elaine Romero, “many of us knew Fly had sparked a creative original fire. Fly has stayed with their play and workshopped it a lot in advance of their production. They have invested their heart and soul and belief into their play. In the end, education can empower voice or curtail it. How do we locate voice? How does a student find a way to hear themselves amidst the noise to get to the truth? Fly Jamerson and their play Frozen Fluid have done just that.”
Set “somewhere in Mythic Antarctica,” the play follows three scientists at a research facility who live and conduct research out on the ice, continuously becoming and unbecoming themselves as they play out the creation of the world. Through a series of fables, Frozen Fluid chronicles the arrival of phytoplankton scientist Tay and the unraveling of the fantastical Antarctic world in which they find themself. Together, the scientists construct and deconstruct notions of gender, identity, religion, climate, and time itself.
Frozen Fluid was developed over the years with staged readings at the University of Arizona, Skidmore College, Woven Theater (Tennessee), the National Women’s Theatre Festival (North Carolina), Angels Theatre Company (Nebraska) and the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre (Arizona) among others. Along the way, the play was a finalist for the In-Progress New Play Reading Series at Unicorn Theatre (Kansas City) as well as the 2020 New Works Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater (Dallas), and a semi-finalist for the 2020 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and the 2019 MITTEN Lab.
The play made its World Premiere at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre (Los Angeles), a co-presentation of Coeurage Ensemble and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, in November 2023. A reviewer applauded Jamerson’s challenging of traditional values with “considerable wit combined with … an investigatory impulse, i.e. an attempt to figure stuff out about who we are, how we got named, what those names do to us, all while the ice-caps are melting.” Another reviewer described Frozen Fluid as “an astonishing play. In rhythmic cadences evocative of heartbeats, dripping water, tides, three characters endure a slow-motion apocalypse and the human need—and fear—of being known.”
The Stage Raw Awards annually honor distinguished work on Southern California stages.
Fly Jamerson (MFA Theatre Arts, ‘19) works nationally as a playwright, dramaturg, director, and designer. Fly’s plays have been developed at theatres and arts-based institutions around the country, including Woven Theatre (Nashville), Spooky Action Theater (Washington, D.C.), and The Battery Factory (Milwaukee), among others. Fly’s mixed-reality project, Time What Day, premiered at MIT for the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s NarraScope conference in 2019 and was recently featured in an exhibition curated Electronic Literature Organization. Fly is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild, as well as Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA).