The 19th Amendment Project
Through Sunday, Aug. 30, $2 (screening)/$25 (series)
Dianna Wynn knew the 19th Amendment would make a great play.
“It has all these interesting characters: antagonists, protagonists, and heroes with not-so-admirable sides to them,” says the president of Wake County’s League of Women Voters. “Theater provides a good platform for telling a story from a variety of perspectives, and a lot of perspectives have not been included in our history.”
But she didn’t imagine 14 plays—all new, from a host of notable local and national playwrights—coming out of a post-show chat last season with Burning Coal Theatre Company’s artistic director, Jerome Davis.
This year marks the centennial of the constitutional amendment that acknowledged women’s right to vote. It’s also the 100th anniversary of the League of Women Voters, which took the place of the Equal Suffrage Association after the amendment was ratified in 1920. With both in mind, Wynn asked if Burning Coal would help commemorate the anniversaries.
“The subject’s important, particularly in an election year,” Davis says. “It was a no-brainer to me.”
Through the end of August, audiences will see the results of this response: The 19th Amendment Project, a festival of 14 short films produced by 12 regional theater companies and adapted from the original 10-minute plays commissioned by Burning Coal.
Every evening August 17–30, the theater will release one new film online at 7:00 p.m. (They’ll remain online through September.) Tickets are affordable: $2 for a single show or $25 for the entire series. Patrons can see the films on their own schedule, anytime between their release and September 30.
Initially, Davis planned on presenting the works live in Burning Coal’s Murphey School Auditorium, modeled on the omnibus productions that director Nicholas Kent pioneered at London’s Tricycle Theatre: short plays by major playwrights on the same evening, on topics like the lead-up to the Iraqi War or the West’s long involvements in Afghanistan. Then the pandemic came.
“While producing fourteen ten-minute shows over two nights did not feel at the time like a bridge too far for our theater, the idea of producing fourteen short films instead did,” Davis says wryly. “The diversity of artistic viewpoints on film would have been difficult for us to accomplish on our own.”
Reflecting on the extensive buy-in he achieved with the statewide Shakespeare Marathon that Burning Coal hosted and put online in 2016, Davis started thinking about partners. Ultimately, 11 other companies from the region added their works to the three films Burning Coal brought to the project.
In Raleigh, the North Carolina Opera, NC Theatre, Raleigh Little Theatre, Theatre in the Park, William Peace University, and the Women’s Theatre Festival are contributing productions. Agape Theatre Project and NCCU will add work from Durham, along with Gilbert Theater and Sweet Tea Shakespeare from Fayetteville.
The scripts they’ve adapted focus on histories untold and present-day responses.
“There was racism in the suffrage movement, and women of color were marginalized,” Wynn says. “Nineteen-twenty did not secure voting rights for women of color. That fight continued for decades, up to the nineteen-sixties. Actually, we’re still fighting for voting rights today.”
Playwright Kelly Doyle, whose Blue Burning Coal produced in 2011, was adamant as she solicited scripts, mostly from women of color, among local playwrights and colleagues in New York, California, and a constellation of Eastern and Midwestern states.
“I said I just want your truth, whatever that truth is—angry, loud or quiet,” Doyle says. “I knew if they all told their personal truth, we’d have an exciting mix of shows. And we do.”
The festival opened August 17 with Raleigh Little Theatre’s premiere of the savage satire Inalienable Rights by Deb Margolin, cofounder of the historic lesbian feminist company Split Britches. By the project’s end, serious, comic, historical, and contemporary works—and an aria by New York librettist Ruth Margraff—will be produced, along with homages and critical interrogations of suffrage leaders including Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony.
The breadth is impressive. In Magdalena Gómez’s Apartment 19, Afro-Latina characters in present-day New York find common cause in their ancestors’ erasure from the history of feminism. A North Carolina farm woman comes to a very sharp fork in the road, seven years before suffrage, in Clare Bayley’s The Tender-Hearted. Women on a runaway train have to figure out an exit strategy fast in The 19th, and a student gets an unexpectedly up-close-and-personal education on Black women suffragists in Behold: Colored and Woman, Inconceivable.
“The size of this topic needs as many perspectives and voices as possible,” playwright and Piedmont Laureate Tamara Kissane says. In her drama, Thunderclap, a daughter eligible to vote for the first time, two months from now, pushes back hard when her parents try to get her to join them at the polls.
“I have a twelve-year-old daughter, and I think a lot about when it is her time to vote: how that world will look and what a vote will mean to her,” Kissane says. “A vote can be a burden, especially to this youngest voting generation. We desperately need them to be engaged. But in some ways, our older generations have set them up to fail.”
As Alice informs her parents that she and her friends have decided they “will no longer enable this bullshit,” we confront the potential death of hope in a deeply flawed system.
“I don’t want to imply that I’m not grateful for the 19th Amendment,” Kissane says. “Even as a young girl, I was excited by the stories of the suffragettes; I’ve always been a proud feminist. I also feel that at this moment, we really need to be focusing not on what was, but ‘now what?’ And it needs to be done with honesty, transparency, and love—along with the acknowledgment that it is painful to be an American.”
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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