Else Went is a trans-identified playwright based in Brooklyn, author of Initiative and Saving Throw, a two-part reverie on adolescence in the new millennium. Their work has been developed through Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Trans Lab @ The Public & WP, The International Shakespeare Center, The Tank Theater, a Stillwright Retreat, and other organizations. They are a cofounder of The Renovationists, with whom they have developed Boxcar, Three Seconds, Old Names for Wildflowers, and Courage! To the Field! Their play Initiative was recently made a semifinalist in the ongoing 2020 O'Neill Playwrights Conference.
During their residency at MacDowell, they developed two plays to completion while in residency, one called Mongrel (a false and incomplete history of the island of Barbados), and the other An Oxford Man (a warped biopic about the first trans man to receive a phalloplasty). The latter of these was a project entirely conceived and drafted while in residency.
