Heidi Schreck was about to perform her play What the Constitution Means to Me on Broadway one night when her mother called. Apparently, the Tony-nominated work—which examines gender bias in the Constitution through the stories of women in Schreck’s family—had neglected an important figure from history: a hotel maid named Elsie Parrish.
By now, of course, it was a little late; the show had long been locked, and was indeed about to be filmed. But Parrish’s long fight for fairer wages stayed with Schreck—eventually forming the basis for a new play, Searching for Elsie Parrish, which will be published this month in Women+ on the Edge of Democracy.
An anthology of new plays by female-identifying writers, Women+ on the Edge of Democracy was commissioned by the Flynn—a center for performing arts in Burlington, Vermont—in partnership with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It features pieces by playwrights from 30 states who were prompted with two questions: What is the current state of democracy in America? What can history, global context, or futurism offer us in this pivotal moment?
Jay Wahl, the Flynn’s executive director, describes the anthology as a response to a particularly tumultuous moment in American political history. “I spent a long time teaching and thinking and producing all sorts of different performance work in public spaces and thinking about how performance can rewrite the cultural memory of a place,” he says. He envisioned an art project that took on “the negotiation of this public space known as democracy.”
When Wahl began reaching out to playwrights he wanted involved in the project, he thought six or seven people would say yes. The final anthology has 34, including Schreck, Tony nominee and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, Tony and Pulitzer nominee Sarah Ruhl, and two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow Migdalia Cruz, among others.
“It feels like we just touched a trigger point,” says Leslie Swackhamer, executive director of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which honors women+ and nonbinary playwrights writing for English-speaking theater. “Women’s writing has had a big shift into fearlessness—embracing new forms. I think that writers of color just unleashed themselves. If I’m looking at them now, since when Trump was elected, you can see more political stuff. The bodies that are on stage are not what people are used to seeing—they’re aging, queer, nonbinary people. How these people support each other—that’s political.”
