Special Index: Women's History Plays

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One-Woman Shows Award-winning one-woman show. A lesbian Joan of Arc returns with an impassioned message for contemporary audiences. An electrifying evening of theatre. Show has toured internationally, been featured on NPR, and received first-class production in Brazil, where it grossed top box office in Rio and Sao Paolo. In French. In Italian Captivating evening with one of the greatest actresses of the nineteenth century. Charlotte Cushman, a large butch woman, made a name for herself in “breeches parts,” and treats the audience to excerpts from her Hamlet, Romeo, and Cardinal Wolsey—as well as scenes and other monologues from her repertoire. National award for “best play about a lesbian historical figure.”
Musicals Big, brassy, full-cast mainstage musical about the greatest woman athlete in history, Babe Didrikson! Babe’s struggle for acceptance pits her against the standards of compulsory heterosexuality. Numbers include a high school dance, a choreographed women’s basketball game, and a pajama party on the Olympic train. Lead sheets, CD, and DVD available. Sparkling gem of a cabaret musical! Six leading ladies take stage with musical numbers celebrating the turning points in their respective careers. Cast includes Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, and Laurette Taylor. A special treat for theatre lovers! Lead sheets and CD.
Full-Length Plays A play with intense audience participation! Engrossing, controversial courtroom drama, where the audience must serve as judge and jury, deciding motions and verdict, in a case against the five women who betrayed the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, the last surviving daughter of the Tsar of Russia. Complex ethical questions on a set of folding chairs. An evening of theatre about alleged ax-murderess Lizzie Borden. In Black Star, the greatest African American classical actress of the 19th Century, Henrietta Vinton Davis, wrestles with a ghost who is calling into question her entire lifework. A romantic drama set against a backdrop of war in ancient Persia. A young Hebrew woman, Esther, and her former lover Vashti, the Queen of Persia, struggle against their personal and political differences to form an alliance against a common enemy. The entire play is set in a cornfield. The play is about gender-non-conforming geneticist Barbara McClintock and her companion/partner Harriet Creighton, and McClintock’s revolutionary quest to understand diversity in nature and to reframe “deviance” as an expression of natural variance. A Lesbian midsummer night’s dream with the goddesses of celibacy, love, and marriage competing for Sappho’s attention amid poetry contests, meteor showers, lessons on lesbian love-making, romantic trysting, mix-ups and disguises. Wet and wild romantic comedy! Stigmata dramatizes the rise and fall of 17th-century, Italian nun Benedetta Carlini, who becomes elected abbess on the strength of her miraculous  manifestation of the stigmata, and who is eventually tried by the Inquisition for perpetrating a hoax, as well as committing “peccatum mutum”--the so-called "silent sin" of homosexuality. Restell is an old-fashioned play filled with cigar-chomping, moustache-twirling villains who are constantly outsmarted by a circle of streetwise women and their working-class and immigrant allies. It’s also a play that explores the underground history of women’s reproductive health care, especially abortion, over a century ago—a history that illuminates the current national debate on these issues. Restell features a large and colorful Dickensian cast of characters, and explodes with the drama of the Gilded Age in New York City. About Madame Restell.
One-Act Plays Two of the most powerful women artists in history (Artemisia Gentileschi and Hildegard von Bingen) discuss their work on an explosive arts panel about survival strategies for women artists. Half-hour dramatic monologue by the notorious typhoid carrier, Mary Mallon, who refused to admit the existence of germs. Her side of the story. Three lesbian actors are rehearsing an historical play about Countess Markiewicz and the aftermath of her participation in the Easter Week Rising in Dublin. The play is about her political differences with her sister Eva Gore-Booth and her lover Esther Roper, who was a pacifists.As the women take up the issues of the play, the power dynamics of their own lesbian relationships are called into question. The year is 1960. The park is Morningside. The day is Easter. A play about love and drinking, and class differences between lesbians. It's a story about Marty Mann, the founder of the National Council of Alcoholism, and her secret relaspse. A story of redemption. Eva Le Gallienne has checked herself into a private hospital the night she was raped backstage during her Broadway run of Liliom. She has sent for her former girlfriend Mimsey, whom she has not seen since Mimsey’s marriage ten months earlier. A tour-de-force for a young actor, running a gamut of dissociative states of a survivor of sexual abuse. Fast-paced radio drama, suitable for stage production. The conspiracy of the German drug manufacturers and the FDA unfolds like a murder mystery, as Dr. Frances Kelsey, suspecting birth defects, stalls for time against mounting pressures to license sale of “the sleeping pill of the century.” Two Irish art students (Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone)meet in a student rooming house in London, late one night in 1917. Both of them are at dramatic turning points in their lives and on the brink of making disastrous choices. Will they rescue each other in time? A monologue by feminist foremother and Suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, in which she sets the bait for Anthony Comstock to ban her book, Woman, Church and State, a comprehensive exposé of the historical misogyny of the christian church. A closeted reporter arrives in the dressing room of veteran, bisexual stage and film star Nance O'Neil, and as Nance shares the details of her affair with alleged ax murderess Lizzie Borden, the two women share a moment of intimacy. Harriet Tubman, suspected of planning an escape, has been sent to the therapist, another African-American woman, for an evaluation. Radical activism meets one-day-at-a-time therapism. Published by Samuel French, presented at Louisville Juneteenth Festival, winner of Off-Off Broadway Festival. Hull House, rumored to be sheltering a “devil baby,” is besieged by emigrants clamoring to see the child with horns and hooves. Jane Addams locks horns with an elderly Irish woman, in an attempt to understand the strange obsession that has gripped Chicago. Thirty-five years after the infamous Fall River ax murders, an Irish woman, working in her kitchen  in Anaconda, Montana, opens a newspaper to read about the death of the alleged murderer, Lizzie Borden. The woman is Bridget Sullivan, the Borden's former maid. A gripping solo one-act that turns history on its head! A one-act about the lesbian relationship between legendary lighting designer Jean Rosenthal and her assistant Miki (Marion) Kinsella. The play opens in April 1969, after the final dress rehearsal for Martha Graham’s 35th season opener at the City Center. Legendary lighting designer Jean Rosenthal, dying of cancer, arrived in an ambulance and on a gurney for the final lighting check. The play is a reflection on denial and dying, intimacy and artists, seeing and being seen, and—of course—on light. A tribal police officer struggles with her lesbian partner over issues of loyalty and definitions of "family." The figure of Chiricahua warrior Lozen is central to the play. The writing of Little Women is interrupted when the character Jo March and her famous creator cannot agree on the ending. The struggle for control of the book becomes deadly when Jo accuses Louisa May Alcott of repressed lesbian desires and incest memories. Separated for thirty years, a white woman Elizabeth van Lew attempts to recruit a formerly enslaved woman  Mary Bowser to return to the South to work as a Union spy in the Confederate White House. Issues of race, class, and gender explode as the women confront their lesbian girlhood and shared history of sexual abuse. “Fly Rod” Crosby, a lesbian Maine hunting guide from the late 19th century, shares secrets about fly-fishing as she indulges in her romantic fantasies about her friend Annie Oakley. A ninety-two-year-old Native Hawaiian woman, Lydia Aholo, struggles with the last request of her adoptive mother, Queen Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawai’i. Succeeding in her quest, she overturns the paradigm of Western history, exposing its inherently colonial agenda. This is a play about Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor under FDR, and her superhuman achievement of the Social Security Act of 1935.  It is a story about two women in love, about the ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and a true Christmas miracle. This is a play about social justice work: the price and the promise.  The ghost of lesbian poet Renée Vivien returns to a pivotal memory from the summer of 1900, when she was in Bar Harbor (“Eden”), Maine, with her lover Natalie Barney. She wrestles with scenarios of traumatic memories in an attempt to find closure. A play about two extraordinarily courageous young women who survived the 1966 mass shooting on the University of Texas at Austin. Claire Wilson, one of the first victims, lay wounded on the South Mall, unable to be rescued while the sniper was still active. Rita Starpattern ran out, at tremendous risk, lay down next to Claire Wilson, and engaged her in a conversation that kept her conscious and alive for over an hour. Two activists visit the notorious lesbian who shot Andy Warhol during her incarceration at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. They want to recruit her as a spokeswoman, but Valerie Solanas has other ideas.
Short Short PlaysThis rowdy, fifteen-minute monologue is a tribute to masculine women living in times when lesbian or transgendered identities were not understood. Accustomed to ridicule and contempt, Calamity (Jane Cannary Hickok) survives through a combination of self-deprecating humor, myth-making, and alcohol—shrewdly propagating the myths about herself that will ensure her a place in history.A 10th century, German nun (Hrotsvitha) who is a playwright realizes that a 20th century lesbian who is translating her work (Christopher Marie St. John,) is abandoning it in the face of war. The nun exorts her translator to remember the great secret for liberation that is embedded in her plays. A two-minute monologue.A monologue. Actress Eva Le Gallienne faces her first press conference after the fire that almost killed her and the scandal of her girlfriend's divorce.
Dramatic AdaptationsA platform reading by Amy Lowell the famous Imagist herself, including the erotic love poems written for her beloved partner Ada Dwyer. Also includes diary entries, observations on writing poetry, rebuttals to critics, and her passionate tribute to the actress Eleanora Duse.
A dramatic adaptation of the lesbian writings of beloved 19th-century New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Including excerpts form her novels, diaries, letters, and poems.
A multi-media interpretation of the letters and poems of Emily Dickinson, restoring the wild frustration of her lesbian passion for Sue Gilbert, as well as her volcanic rage about living with a disability that was considered unspeakable.
Dramatic adaptations of the writings of four 19th century, New England women writers, dealing with lesbian life partners and death. Authors include Mary Wilkins Freeman, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Alice Brown, and Sarah Orne Jewett.
Dramatic adaptation of Lady Byron Vindicated, Harriet Beecher Stowe's courageous expose of Lord Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister and his domestic abuse of Lady Byron.