Playwright Artistic Statement

Why hadn’t I heard of Charlotte Cushman?

I turned the question over and over in my mind after listening to an episode of the Folger Shakespeare Podcast. It featured an interview with author Lisa Merrill about her book, When Romeo Was A Woman, a biography of the famously androgynous Victorian perfomer, her fascinating career, and her romantic relationships with women. 

I’d been a Shakespeare fanatic for over 25 years, having read most of his plays before entering high school (understanding them, of course, took much longer). Here was a woman who not only played Lady Macbeth, but Hamlet and Romeo as well. She was a founding member of the Walnut Street Theatre, a Philadelphia theatre I grew up attending, and her childhood home and gravesite are both in Boston, where I’ve been based for over a decade. Why, I wondered, didn’t I know that she was the model for Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain (famously featured in Angels in America, and sculpted by one of her lovers, Emma Stebbins)? Why didn’t I know about a woman who made a fortune and achieved international fame performing my favorite plays, while exploding perceptions of gender? Why did I know about other actors of her era—Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Forrest, William Macready—but not their arguably more famous (and infamous) female counterpart? 

In her time, a limited understanding of female sexuality meant that her many “romantic friendships” with women were perceived as just that. Over her 40-year career, she was was regarded as “the most spectacular…in the history of American theatre.” But after her death, cultural understanding that women could engage in sexual passion—that Cushman had not been asexual but in fact, a lesbian—resulted in her erasure from history, at least for a while. 

Charlotte Cushman’s story is fascinating, there is no doubt. In Romeo & Her Sister, I tried to get behind the wall that history had built when she was thrust into obscurity, and explore who the real woman might have been. I imagined her relationships with her sister, who we know little about outside of where her life intersected with Charlotte’s, and with Sallie Mercer, a free Black woman who had been her dresser for over twenty years. (I had to invent very little about her romantic relationship to Matilda Hays, which was documented by reams of letters, and was even more tumultuous and dramatic than I was able to convey in one play.) 

I feel a kinship with all these women, struggling to find their place in a world that had a very narrow view of womanhood, and with the ever-present fear that success, happiness, and safety might be taken away for existing outside of it. I relate to their longing for connection with each other, which was in conflict with their desire for self-protection and their shame about their choices and identities. During the writing of this play, I came to terms with my own queerness, at nearly forty years old. 

Ultimately, I hope that R&HS celebrates the power of female friendship and sisterhood. The love and support of the women in my life has been a ballast in the storm. This play is for them.