Christine Howey Traces Her Transgender Journey in 'Exact Change' She already crossed a gender line. Now this northeast Ohio critic is crossing another barrier to become a playwright/performer. The theatre has long been a safe haven for the LGBT community, on both sides of the proscenium arch. One reason is that the stage is often the first and frequently the only place to reflect, endorse or jumpstart social change. In fact, a new breed of plays about life in the LBGT community is slowly replacing the necessarily political and typically tragic plot points found in such groundbreaking 1980s and '90s plays as The Normal Heart, Torch Song Trilogy and Angels in America. Dramas like Geoffrey Nauffts's Next Fall, for instance, simply place the everyday concerns of Americans in a queer context, while Alexi Kaye Campbell's The Pride shows the contrast between life for gay men in the '50s and today. Modern musicals like Kinky Boots serve to support the normalization of nontraditional gender identification-and do so with a candy coating. Yes, things are changing. But not nearly fast enough for Christine Howey. For more, go to: http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/06/02/christine-howey-traces-her-transge...