KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS CULTURE Always a Boy IDENTITY, FAMILY AND ACCEPTANCE ARE AT THE HEART OF A PLAY DEBUT- ING OCT. 9 AT PLUSS THEATRE. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN “I won’t do the whole life story,” laughs Jo Ivester, co-author of “Always a Boy,” a new play coming to Denver from its debut in Austin, Texas. It’s about the gender journey of a young man, explored primarily through the lens of a family coming to understand how to sup- port that journey. The co-author is Jeremy Ivester, Jo’s son, whose life the story is based on. In a way, it is indeed the story of a whole life: both that of a young transgender man and his family. The story of those lives is told in “Always a Boy,” which will make its Colorado debut at the Pluss Theatre at the Mizel Arts and Cultural Center (MACC), a part of Denver’s Jewish Community Center, on Friday, Oct. 9, running through Sunday, Oct. 25. Tickets are available on an economic sliding scale ($18/$36/$54) to ensure more accessibility. When we sat down to talk with Jo Ivester — and Director Lisa Scheps from Austin’s Ground Floor Theatre, where the play was fi rst put to stage — Ivester made it clear that while Jeremy couldn’t make time for the interview, he’d given his mother full permission to speak on their mutual behalf. That makes sense, especially in this context, when lessons of honesty, clarity, revelation and consent are so fundamental. “When Jeremy was born about 35 years ago now,” she says, “we didn’t know we had a son. As a kid, we thought of him as a tom- boy. He used that terminology himself. While we were thinking of it in the more traditional sense of the word, he defi ned it differ- ently, as a specifi c type of boy.” It was one of the discoveries the family saw revealed in the process of Jeremy’s transition. “We were using the same ter- minology without knowing what each other meant,” she adds. Still, Ivester says the family was supportive in the sense of not de- manding conformity to the gender norms of the day, growing up in Texas no less: “So when Jeremy wanted to cut his hair short, wear boy cloth- ing, things like that, we had no is- sue with it. So elementary school was easy for him. It was in middle school and puberty that the internal battles started [within Jeremy]. There was no level of acceptance on our part that was going to take away that developing gender dysphoria.” Jeremy played football. Jeremy was academically active. Jeremy wasn’t talking about the gender dysphoria he was encountering. “So we didn’t support him,” ad- mits Ivester, “because we didn’t know he needed the support.” It wasn’t until Jeremy went to the University of Colorado Boulder for college that he found a group of friends who neither needed nor cared to pigeonhole him. Then, upon his return to Texas, he found the exact oppo- site. “He fi gured that if he was going to be labeled,” Ivester says, “that label is: a man. It was really those moves back and forth from Texas to Colorado that helped him fi gure things out.” Witnessing this process in- 6 Jeremy Ivester at 23. spired Ivester, already a working writer involved with social justice, that this story might be of use to others. “Wouldn’t it be powerful,” “Always a Boy” will run at the MACC Oct. 9-25. she thought, “to share our family’s story so that acceptance and awareness are built?” When she asked Jeremy if she had his per- mission to write a memoir about it, he said yes. And then the follow-up: Would he write it with her? “He said yes,” Ivester laughs again, “so long as he didn’t have to write.” Instead, he gave his mother his recorded journals to serve as his voice in the project. That book was the award-winning “Never a Girl, Always a Boy,” which hit shelves in 2020. Ivester says she contacted Scheps, the founder and director of Austin’s Ground Floor Theatre, who is now visiting Denver to stage “Always a Boy.” Scheps fostered the project along, moving it through early drafts, seeing that it was ready for a reading and helping with the editing process. “’Always a Boy’ from the get-go was such a positive process,” Scheps says. “When we fi nally got to put a full production in front of an audience in 2024, it was very well received. One of my supporters who comes to all the shows kept saying, ‘You have to do “Always a Boy” again.’” The play was something of a perfect fi t for both Scheps, who is herself transgender, and for Ground Floor Theatre, which she says was “founded with the idea of producing works that focused on historically underrep- resented communities. With ‘Always a Boy,’ we’re able to focus on the underrepresented of the underrepresented.” “What’s so unique about ‘Always a Boy’ is the sharp eye on the family dynamic,” adds Scheps. “What we see often in trans stories, we see the most diffi cult examples: Trans youth being kicked out of their homes, left with very few options. We hear those stories, and they’re tragic and important. But this story takes a family that’s already progressively minded, and looking at their challenges in discovery and helping their son lead an authentic life. I love telling that story.” Often, once a show is fully produced, the tendency is to assume the script is locked, which is to say, that it’s done, it is what it is, and few changes — if any — are made. This isn’t true for “Always a Boy,” which is still dynamic and shifting to some degree. Al- ready, what Scheps describes as “some really big changes” to the script have been made. “I just love that,” she says. “It just keeps continuing to grow.” “One of my favorite things about the Austin production,” adds Ivester, “was when folks would come back a second time.” Par- ents would come and bring their adult trans kids to see it. Trans adults would bring their parents or grandparents. “It became a conversation starter for many families. That’s what we’re hoping to do in Denver.” “Always a Boy” opens at the Mizel Arts and Cultural Center’s Pluss Theatre, 350 S. Dahlia St., on Friday, Oct. 9, and runs through Sunday, Oct. 25. OCTOBER 1-7, 2026 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com JEREMY IVESTER KAIROS LOONEY FOR GROUND FLOOR THEATRE