by Kitty Felde

I’ve been working all summer on a new podcast. Honeymoon Road: Pete & Me & our Model T.

Exactly 100 years ago, my Felde grandparents drove across the country on their honeymoon, riding (and sleeping!) in their cranky old Model T Ford. My cousin Marie Felde and I recreated that journey, stopping at all the places along the way that “Gert” wrote about, to see what remained of the America they saw back in 1925. My actress cousin Terri Felde Shauer voiced the 25 year old Gert and the show includes interviews with folks at the Kansas State Fair, honeymooners from the Grand Canyon, and gal campers on their way to North Dakota.

I assumed the audience would be the 32 grandchildren of Pete and Gert. I was wrong.

At the going away party for my niece, heading off to college, I played the first episode. Three of my brothers got up in the middle of it and headed to the kitchen for dessert. I was crushed.

It was the same kind of rejection we all feel when our scripts are rejected by the theatre we were certain would jump for joy at our work. Ouch. It makes us doubt our talent, our work, our very sense of ourselves as writers.

But really, it should make us reassess who our audience really is.

I know that my plays are highly unlikely to ever be performed at the Taper. Or any other regional Equity house. I don’t write knockoffs of Jane Austen or small cast musicals or edgy political screeds. That doesn’t make my work bad. My war crimes play found its audience on college campuses around the world. A one-woman piece about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice played twice in her adopted hometown of Washington and among retirees in Naples, Florida. A piece set among the water lily garden of a feisty entrepreneur got a reading in her lily garden.

The key is not to get discouraged. Think creatively about the people who NEED to see your play, hear your message, experience your creation. Don’t let somebody else’s rejection sink in and make you think your work is worthless. You just haven’t found your audience. Yet. Believe that. Find your people. They are out there. I promise.

Oh, and that podcast? Honeymoon road did find an audience. It’s people who have their own tales of family journies. Every time my cousin and I told folks on the road trip what we were doing, they had an equally interesting story to share about their own family history. In fact, we set up a place on the honeymoonroad.com website for them to post them.

I haven’t given up on my entire family. Some of our Felde cousins have become our biggest fans. One even wants to write an opera with a song called “Meet Pete.” Perhaps the rest of my brothers will come on board. But if they don’t, I know they are just not my audience.

Kitty Felde hosts three podcasts, including Honeymoon Road: Pete & Me & our Model T. She is the author of The Fina Mendoza Mysteries series of childrens books.

—Constance Jaquay Strickland—

I turned another year older / 

life is clearer, not easier, yet I feel brave and bolder.

Although time has brought blessings, I can’t help but hold my breath as I pray for the mothers who huddle and hold hungry babies in their arms in the midst of rubble. 

As I walk through this unfamiliar Italian town, I hold my head high |  I remember I’m the first of our matriarchal line on my mother’s side to leave the country: 

I hear my grandmother’s voice in my ear__remember / we’re Black and we’re proud….so I keep moving.

During dinner, it begins to rain in Genoa. The wind blows remarkably heavy; it starts to speak / 

I wonder if I am the only one who can hear our ancestors whispering?

It’s 3am and I’m still awake. Naked, I lay down in this bed that is not mine on top of a vintage mattress. How many before me have laid their head down in this same spot, staring out into the darkness // dreaming of a future that may not come. 

I drift. I allow my eyes to close. Allowing my body to find a sense of renewal | I  give control to the darkness as the Medeterrian Sea sings me to sleep.

As I enter a new realm, I hear her voice:

What if we slowed down and healed?

by Cynthia Wands

I wanted to share the article in this week’s issue of THE NEW YORKER, it’s an interesting take on what is happening for women playwrights. It’s a bit of a read, but I found it very informative. Here it is:

In the late days of June, as the old theatre season was ebbing away and new-season announcements were streaming in, a shock hit New York. 

Playwrights Horizons, the birthplace of shows including the Pulitzer Prize winners “Sunday in the Park with George” and Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” announced its programming for 2025-26. It was, in some ways, a standard mix, including works by returning Playwrights artists (John J. Caswell, Milo Cramer, Shayok Misha Chowdhury) and several writers new to its stage (Jacob Perkins, Nazareth Hassan, the writing team of Jen Tullock and Frank Winters). These days, a six-show season is a surprisingly full slate; many theatres of similar size, crippled by rolling funding crises, have reduced their offerings. But something else stood out, too: in a notably diverse lineup (the majority of lead artists are queer, and two are nonbinary), there was only one woman writer, and she occupied half a slot.

Playwrights Horizons wasn’t alone. Other major theatres revealed their programming, some of which reverted to familiar patterns from a decade ago. The Roundabout Theatre will give one slot out of four to a woman, whose work will appear in the nonprofit’s Off Broadway space. The Manhattan Theatre Club, which, like Roundabout, uses both Broadway and Off Broadway theatres, will host two plays written by women of the four shows it has announced so far; however, in what’s become a common trend, both will be produced on its smaller, and thus less remunerative, Off Broadway stage. Classic Stage Company, under its artistic director, Jill Rafson, confirmed a season of three shows, all written and directed by white men. And the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoying its first summer under its new director, Jeremy O. Harris—the playwright who, in 2021, requested to withdraw his “Slave Play” from Center Theater Group when it presented a season with only one woman in it—has zero plays written by women among its 2025 productions.

In 2015, the Lillys, a group that honors women in the American theatre, published the Count, a national survey that assessed the demographic makeup of playwrights found on the country’s stages. As one of the group’s founders, Julia Jordan, puts it, “Statistics are our superpower.” For years, advocates had been protesting the underrepresentation of women playwrights, particularly women of color, but they were getting little traction. Some theatres pointed to the canon and shrugged helplessly—was it their fault that Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Shakespeare were inconveniently male? Notably, when a theatre did program a woman, her play was relegated to the so-called “second space” or to a reading series. The Count gave theatres a way to see their place in the larger field. Individual programming choices—reflections of one theatre’s, or even one person’s, taste—looked rather different when placed in a national context.

Attention-getting methods like the Count—and, later, accountability projects such as “We See You White American Theater,” which published an extensive statement calling for the American theatre industry to address racial imbalance, as well as publishing hiring metrics on Instagram—pushed the field toward change. In 2023, the Lillys announced at its annual awards that, for the first time, New York theatres had achieved what the Lillys called “parity,” with the city’s playwriting lineups roughly paralleling the gender and racial distribution of the country at large. Was this victory? The Lillys began to think about disbanding; perhaps its work was done.

So when the new Playwrights season hit inboxes, Jordan called the company’s artistic director, Adam Greenfield, to ask what had happened. (Greenfield is a longtime friend of the Lillys; the group actually got its start at Playwrights, in 2010, back when Greenfield was still an associate artistic director, and the group holds its annual awards ceremony on the Playwrights main stage.) The Lillys told him that it wanted to convene an open meeting about what felt like a serious backsliding, and Greenfield instantly responded.

At the ensuing town hall, the Tony Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron said, “Adam acknowledged it as a ‘misstep,’ ” and noted that he quickly offered the Playwrights theatre for the occasion. Six days after the Playwrights announcement went public, a capacity crowd turned up to talk about representation and curation, and to try to imagine how to regain progress already fought for and, if temporarily, won. “We are here to mark that something seems to be amiss,” Kron said from the stage. “It feels emotional to us because this happened at Playwrights; it happened under Jeremy O. Harris. We feel these people to be our allies—they are our allies.” She went on. “Our issue is not with each other but with a system that considers one group central and the others as disposable.”

In the meeting, Jordan noted that the low representational numbers for women are difficult to square. By various measures (including the numbers of women graduating from degree programs in the arts), roughly two-thirds of the field’s writers are women—there is not, as artistic directors once argued, a pipeline issue. It seemed particularly bitter that, even as theatres made passionate arguments for diversity and new artistic directors took over from the old guard, certain habits were creeping back. Are we seeing a reflection of the country’s increasingly misogynist politics? Is there a kind of moral fatigue at play? “Last year, an all-male, all-white season didn’t exist,” Jordan said. “But this year . . . permission has been granted.”

At the meeting, Greenfield answered some questions from the crowd. “What does balance mean? In the past week, I’ve been thinking about that topic a lot.” Greenfield later wrote to me about his reasoning and about whether “misstep” actually describes his feeling about the season. “At the meeting, I wanted to immediately acknowledge that I should have prioritized women writers more in my decision-making. I see that, and I agree that it’s a shortcoming. In my efforts to uphold diversity and bring range to other aspects of the season, while staying mindful of budget constraints, I failed to make enough space for cisgendered and trans women,” he said. “But I would never call this slate of plays and artists a ‘misstep.’ I deeply love every one of the plays and artists programmed next season.”

Greenfield continued, “One of the many questions this meeting left me stewing over is, are we working from a shared definition? The definition of a ‘balanced’ season was vastly different five years ago than it is today, and it will be vastly different five years from now; it evolves alongside a global cultural conversation. Can any one season hold perfect balance from every person’s perspective?”

Rafson, from Classic Stage Company, wasn’t in attendance, but she told me later that she was aware of the paradox of announcing a season with no women in it while also strongly believing in inclusivity. “It would be wildly misleading to say I hadn’t noticed, and I feel confident that my colleagues were in a similar position. We know that it’s an issue when it’s happening,” she said. Rafson noted several factors that contributed to the situation: the brevity of a three-show season (“It is so hard to get a full representation of your theatre’s interests across so little work”) and the Classic Stage mission to reëxamine the canon (“I only have two commissions out right now. They are both to female writers doing adaptations of classics.”) “Don’t judge me by one season. Judge me by the breadth of work,” Rafson said. She takes comfort in the openness of the conversation around the issue. At least, she said, “we will not pretend that this is perfect and O.K.”

At the town hall, the question of what might happen next still seemed very much up in the air. One person suggested that artistic directors announce their next seasons early, weighting them more heavily toward women writers. One commenter levelled criticism at the Lillys for not studying another underrepresented group, disabled playwrights; others advocated for women writers over fifty. The playwright Chisa Hutchinson asked that the room stay “solution oriented” by reminding those present that women buy the majority of theatre tickets. “Show up! Buy some tickets!” she said.

And there did seem to be a certain amount of exhilaration, in fact, in the showing up itself. In the weeks after the meeting, Jordan said that she was actually feeling optimistic: “Our theatre community is so small and is so easily shamed!” She spoke warmly about Greenfield’s response, as well as Harris’s, who wrote to her immediately expressing his allyship. And—more than most—Jordan knows that this is a tide that can move back in the other direction. “There’s not that many theatres, maybe five hundred across the country, and, by and large, I would say 99.8% of them do not want to be assholes,” she said. “They don’t see themselves that way; they don’t want to be that way. Before, all we had to do was show them the mirror; once they looked in the mirror, they actually changed really quickly,” Jordan said. “So I just—I am extremely hopeful, and I feel like, if anybody can, we can make this correction of turning the ship.”

Perhaps the old strategy will work again: a public calling out, appeals to the well-meaning in power, careful application of both pressure and gratitude. But what’s worrying is how easy it was for the most conscientious among us to overlook such a huge swathe of the landscape. It’s true that it’s possible to program a diverse season—the Playwrights lineup shows a thrilling range of race, gender expression, sexuality, and artistic approach—and yet still almost ignore half the population. What is it that makes women so invisible? So many are standing right here. ♦

These last lines: “What is it that makes women so invisible? So many are standing right here.”

I feel this so deeply right now. Here’s to a changing culture.

Cynthia

“God’s Dollhouse”, mixed media, Cynthia Wands, 2020

by Ayesha Siddiqui

In the outdoor wildflower garden are what I call ghost flowers. They are mercurial, sprouting overnight, with translucent stems and ugly leaves, like lithe mushrooms in a bad wig. The first time I saw them I was sure they were mushrooms, wondering how they could have sprouted in such a sunny space. And then as quickly as they appeared, they disappeared again, transforming into green stems, folding or shedding their spotted sheer leaves, moving on only hours after they arrived.

My writing is often through a nature focused lens. It makes it sound like I know what I’m doing. That I know how to care for a garden, that on a walk I might casually point out the names of specific plants and trees. That is not actually the case. My cat eats all indoor plants with great enthusiasm so I’ve given up on those. The small outdoor wildflower garden that is “mine” is not tended by me. 

One can be on a close journey with a part of the world without ever needing to be an expert. I’m never going to go inside and google the ghost flowers. There is a part of me that likes walking in mystery with the surrounding world, using my powers of observation not to identify, but to respond.

Sometimes when I feel withered by life, like I have not been watered or sunned, envious of the blooms in a tiny terracotta wildflower garden, it’s because I’ve forgotten to use those powers. The senses that look and listen. To arrive in the world each day with nothing preformed, predetermined, and only an empty sense of readiness. 

When you look at the ghost flowers this way, they are tall, cursed goddesses in torn robes, returning every fortnight only in July to sway below the grapevines and night jasmine, turned back to green stalks by late morning. They are the reason for summer insomnia and restlessness, singing humans awake with songs not heard by ears. When you look at the ghost flowers this way, they are worth so much more than a name.