Celebrating Women's History Month
March is Women’s History Month! We reached out to some of the female-identifying members of our company this season to speak with them about their favorite female-identifying playwrights, their favorite plays from them, and the people who inspired their craft!
Katie Jones
Two of my favorite female playwrights are Mary Zimmerman and Sarah Ruhl. Mary Zimmerman is best known for her ensemble-devised pieces such as Metamorphoses and Arabian Nights, which are adaptations of myths, involving lots of improvisation, spectacular costumes, and staging. I first saw her 20 years ago and have been entranced ever since. Sarah Ruhl writes on a wide variety of topics and blends beauty and sadness with humor, so very well. Aside from plays like Eurydice and The Clean House, both of which I love, I was really moved by her book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time To Write. It explores the idea that women, particularly, are supposed to be able to do it all and what it looks like to create balance for yourself while living an artistic life.
Katie Jones is a performer, director and educator, with a passion for original work, devised theatre and puppetry. She has worked at theatres around the country and is an ensemble member of Wishbone Theatre Collective. Locally, she has worked with Asheville Creative Arts, Immediate Theatre Project, and the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival. Katie currently serves as Co-Artistic Director of The Magnetic Theatre along with Jessica Johnson.
Mandy Bean
Two female playwrights that I admire are Lauren Gunderson (all of her plays, but my favorite is Silent Sky) and Susan Glaspell (Trifles). I took directing classes in college as part of earning a B.S. in Theatre Education, but I really fell into directing after starting out as a summer camp drama director and then moving on to directing bigger and bigger shows as time went on.
Mandy Bean is a native of Weaverville and a long-time member of the Asheville theatre community. She has directed, acted, and costumed for several theatres around town, as well as previously serving on the board of the Montford Park Players and working front-of-house for NC Stage Company. When not at one theatre or another around town, she's spending time with her two amazing children. This is her second time directing for The Magnetic Theatre and her first full-length play with the company.
Ashleigh Goff
Two plays, written by female-identifying playwrights that I’d recommend: Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman and Frozen by Bryony Lavery.
Children's Hour was one of the first plays I had seen turned into a movie. (The one with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine) It was in black and white, it was stark and painful, and I was confused. I was also 13. Much later, I saw a performance in my freshman year of college and I was floored at how different it was. It wasn't a good play. I remembered loving the play so I went back and re-read it, maybe I didn't understand it. Nope, It was still a good play. It took me a while to realize, that it was just a bad performance.
I learned a very important lesson that I never knew I needed to learn. It was possible to take a great play and make it terrible. So I thought about it; if you can turn a well-written play into a bad performance then in turn you should be able to take a horribly written script and make it a great performance. At the time I wondered what the tipping point in the equation was. What would make such a great play a bad show or a bad play a good show. I later learned that the common factor would be the director.
Frozen is one of the most painful plays I have ever been in. It's a painful play dealing with the loss of a child and man who killed her. It is such a beautifully written play. The character of the mother is written almost entirely in monologue format, so it was a painful part to play for many reasons, but the punctuation is poetry. The words are written and spaced on the page in such a way that conveys the emotional rhythm thru text. I loved being in the play and speaking those beautiful words and being challenged by the subject and character development. I have always wanted to direct it, and I almost had my chance, but then Covid. It's so full of contradictions of humanity, hurt, growth and forgiveness.
My directing inspiration is actually the woman who directed me in Frozen years ago. I was an intern at an equity theatre in MI, that lost all funding and folded while I was working there. Before we were officially closed, the theatre let the interns co-opt the theatre space and build a passion project. Frozen was one of those passion projects and the house Equity stage manager Katy (can't remember her last name) was going to direct it.
To paint a picture: I was a 19/20-year-old recent college graduate playing a 40 something-year-old, grieving, bitter British mother dealing with a missing child over the course of 20 years, discovering what actually happened to her, and then forgiving the killer. Not an easy role for even a seasoned, age-appropriate actor. But Katy worked with me, talked to me, and taught me how to reach into that role. She was patient and gentle but never soft. She never let me not try and she inspired me, as an actor and as a director. I took her lesson of patience and trust and apply it to my own work. She trusted the actors would get to where they need to be in their own time and that has proven true for me as well. With a strong cast, patience trust a few weird experiments, every show can be a good show (even if it is a bad script!).
What plays would you add to the list?