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About a year before Donna Nicole Booker died of cancer in 2006, she asked her niece, — Arielle Julia Brown, a precocious 17-year-old playwright — to tell her life story.

“She knew that she was dying. She had colon cancer and she was HIV positive,” Brown said of her aunt, a transgender woman then living in San Francisco. “I was, like, ‘You’re fabulous and larger than life and you say things like that, so, sure!’”

It took about 10 years to start and another 10 years to finish. Now “Fallawayinto: Corridors of Memory,” a poetically ritualistic piece of experimental theater about the life and afterlife of Booker, is premiering at FringeArts in Philadelphia.

“She was a Black trans woman amongst other Black trans women who came before,” Brown said. “Many other Black trans women exist in this work who so deeply matter in the world.”

Coincidentally, the production by the theater company Ninth Planet opened two days after President Trump signed an executive order that the federal government would no longer acknowledge trans people, only recognizing male and female genders based on reproductive biology.

Brown said, regardless of the shifting sands of politics, the stories of trans people are transgressive.

“There’s something so beautiful, tending to Donna’s concern with the making of herself, that obviously some people find transgressive. In that way, it is its own resistance,” she said.

“But we’re not concerned with that,” Brown said. “I don’t think that’s the conversation here.”

“Fallawayinto” is a nonlinear performance that hops through memories and stories about Booker, sometimes in poetically abstract ways. Booker was involved in the sex work industry in the 1990s and 2000s in San Francisco, while supporting other women doing sex work. Brown said she took it upon herself to support Black and trans people by going into prisons and churches.

Booker was a member of the Transcendence Gospel Choir, the first transgender gospel choir formed in 2001 by the City of Refuge United Church of Christ. She also did social work for the organization Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Disease (WORLD).

“She did so much work as an activist sitting with young girls who were incarcerated, girls she just saw on the street, supporting them,” Brown said. “She was a sex worker. She was a pimp. She was somebody who found ways of facilitating new modalities for other girls to make money.”

“Fallawayinto” is loosely structured on the Yowa, a Congolese cosmogram describing the relationship between the physical and spiritual realms as a circle. Booker appears simultaneously in both her younger (played by Nikki Edwards) and older (Janelle Luster) states. Her mother Eve (Pamela A. Hooks) mourns her loss on a sofa covered in plastic while looking at snapshots of her departed daughter.

Booker’s dog, Julius, acts as a familiar spirit wordlessly played by Mawu Ama Ma’at Gora performing choreography based on African dance. The soundtrack includes excerpts from interview recordings with people who knew Booker in life.

“Memory works in circular and fragmented ways that are ritualistic,” Brown said. “Sometimes memories get rewired the more we remember. I’m curious about that with this work.”

Brown staged an earlier, outdoor iteration in Waukegan, Illinois: “Fallawayinto: ‘round the corner from the honey hole on yeoman creek,” on land owned by her grandmother, Booker’s mother, where Booker spent formative years as a child beginning to understand herself. Brown said that performance was primarily for family and friends of Booker.

Brown describes the Philadelphia performance as the world premiere. She had struck up a relationship with Ninth Planet and felt comfortable letting director Nia Benjamin bring this very personal project to the stage.

Benjamin leaves the facts of Booker’s biography vague in favor of a translucent fog of memory. Booker died before the widespread use of Facebook and social media gave virtually everyone a digital footprint. Most Philly audiences will discover little to no information about her offstage.

“The previous iteration was really for Donna’s people, and now we have this beautiful task to bring Donna to people who didn’t know her,” Benjamin said. “Without over-explaining herself. I don’t think Donna would have liked to be over-explained. Rather just to be let be.”

“Fallawayinto” was originally targeted to open Nov. 6, Booker’s birthday (she would have been 61), but the production had to be pushed 10 weeks, beginning Wednesday. Benjamin did not intend the play to be a response to the new presidential administration, but the connection is nevertheless there.

“I think it’s important right now to remember that queer and trans people, Black people, immigrants, anyone who came under attack in that sweeping executive order, we will just continue,” she said. “I feel very hopeful, in a strange way, being able to work on this play at a time like this because here is proof that these communities continued on.”