The early stages of The Placeholder were slow and deeply internal. Ben describes long hours spent by the local lake, watching ducks, letting his head settle enough to write. Living with ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) means creativity arrives in windows, not schedules.

When a Midsumma mentorship program for disabled artists paired him with mentor Kate Mulvany OAM, the concept accelerated into a commitment. Mulvany, one of Australia’s most celebrated playwright’s and actors, told Ben she had goosebumps when he described the idea. That endorsement became the turning point.

With Kate’s guidance, Ben learned not only craft but confidence. She championed the work, encouraged him through doubt, reminded him to rest, and treated him as a peer.

Authenticity mattered and Ben’s characters are born from real conversations and hours upon hours of people watching. Ben met with groups of women from regional Victoria to explore how friendship, sexuality, and identity might shift when someone in their circle transitions. These conversations grounded the characters and ensured they weren’t archetypes but fully inhabited people.

The project has taken three years from the initial conversation to make it to the stage. Three years in which the work has been slowing, lovingly, and delicately crafted. Workshopped with actors, including a development period supported by Melbourne Theatre Company, that culminated in a showing to an invited audience in early 2025, from which feedback fed into the next lot of rewrites.

What has eventuated is a stunning, moving, funny, and unmissable story of a group of women, grieving the recent loss of their friend Barb, when one of their own announces their transition. It explores how feminism, friendship, and chosen family collide and how love is tested when those closest to us change in ways we never expected.

Although The Placeholder tackle’s identity, grief, gender, community tensions, and the politics of being trans post–marriage equality, Ben ensured that a key compass for the play’s messages is humour.  Humour, for him, is essential, a bridge, a way to create community inside the theatre. “When you laugh with someone,” he says, “you’re not far from crying with them.”

The Placeholder isn’t a sweeping political conversion, nor a grand gesture meant to silence those already committed to their views. Instead, Ben is reaching for the quieter middle. The people who sit in uncertainty, good-hearted but underexposed, thoughtful but without lived context. He writes for those who may have never knowingly held a trans story in their hands before. He calls them “the ones who just haven’t met us yet,” and it’s with them that he sees possibility. Rather than lecture or confront, the play extends a hand and asks only that audiences walk beside these characters long enough to recognise something familiar in them.

In a world where opinions harden quickly, Ben aims for something softer. Curiosity, recognition, and genuine human connection. His desire is simple. That audiences recognise their own friendships, fears, and loyalties reflected back at them through the characters onstage. That identification becomes the bridge. Once we see ourselves in someone else’s story, judgement gives way to understanding, and understanding often welcomes compassion without needing to shout for it.

He hopes audiences leave with a deeper awareness of how small moments of empathy can shift the emotional temperature of an entire room, an entire friendship, even an entire community.

The Placeholder doesn’t argue. It invites. It nudges. It opens a window rather than a battlefront. And Ben’s hope is that, through that opening, someone might see a neighbour, a colleague, a relative, or even themselves, a little differently than they did before.

This is Ben’s first major production. Like any playwright watching a director and cast bring their words to life, he’s balancing excitement with terror. He loves watching audiences. Seeing where they smile, gasp, fall silent, or weep. Each performance, to him, is a collaboration between script, actors, and audience. He wants audiences to understand the urgency of trans allyship, not in theory, but in the everyday moments that shape someone’s safety and belonging.