Women+ On The Edge Of Democracy

A body of work that asks us what kind of world we want to live in, and then challenges us to go about the business of creating it.

Women+ on the Edge of Democracy is a collection of thirty-four new short plays commissioned by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Vermont in partnership with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The project brings together past winners of the Blackburn to respond to a shared set of questions about democracy, civic life, and the role of the individual at a moment of profound political uncertainty. The works center women+ as founders and preservers of American democracy. By excavating a variety of topics, the works also position women as necessary leaders for a brighter future.

In Paula Cizmar’s The Betsy Ross Book of the Dead, the flag seamstress returns to sunset democracy with the help of an AI chatbot.

In Dael Orlandersmith’s Maya, a custodial worker at a New York library fights against book-banning.

Justice Hehir’s Churn finds two friends working at a historical reenactment theme park questioning the roles they play in depicting women from the past and what consequences it may have in the future.

The Pardon by Jane Anderson drops the reader into a winding conversation between an ICE agent and his grandmother who is mourning the loss of her dog.

In Sarah Ruhl’s An Uplifting High School Graduation Speech, a woman returns to her Catholic high school with an axe to grind about the ways religion is used to erode women’s bodily autonomy.

Migdalia Cruz’s The Collapse of the Hive goes inside of an urban apiary in Washington, DC where worker bees are getting ready to revolt.

Together, these thirty-four monologues and short plays wrestle with a variety of pertinent issues from immigration to gun violence, misogyny to the fragile state of public education. They do not argue for a single point of view or prescribe a single course of action. Instead, they invite reflection, conversation, and community through live performance.