Claire plans to sit on her friend's couch, eating toast, while those around her await the election of America's first female president. When she's pushed to engage, her apathy falters, leading to surreal visitations from women vying for her vote.
In this uncanny comedy, the voices of Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1870), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972) echo through one woman's struggle with ambition. Blending archival and contemporary text, Good Lazy Women explores why America still resists a female leader.
Good Lazy Woman responds to the striking fact: since 1789, only 3% of the 12,506 individuals served in Congress were women, and less than 1% were BIPOC women.
In 2016, New Hampshire Theatre Project commissioned Catherine Stewart to interview millennial voters in the run-up to the presumed election of America’s first female President. Unwittingly, those interviews uncovered vitriol towards female candidates. Even though some remarks espoused pragmatic gender solidarity, many women privately vilified females considering throwing their “bonnet” into the ring. Through devised collaboration, this source material became the one-act docudrama She Will Lead, which premiered the weekend before the 2016 Presidential Election after Hillary Clinton's loss. The audience response confirmed that political persuasion matters less than the dominant perception that women cannot lead in America.
The devised play included a participatory forum in those early workshop performances. The “second act” of the evening opened the theatrical floor up to facilitate conversation between voters of different positions, genders, ages, races, and socio-economic backgrounds. The approach has always centered on avoiding partisan politics in favor of interrogating gender equality within our democracy. An account of that work, produced by NHPR, can be heard here.
In 2020, and then again in 2022 during more elections, amid the global pandemic, Catherine returned to the source material at the behest of Atlanta-based Director Lauren Morris. During two virtual collaborative development processes focused on creating text, Good Lazy Woman emerged as a full-length script that utilizes the original interviews, historical transcripts, and the experiences of the newly formed ensemble.
Rather like the Dickensian yuletide tale, Claire is visited by three (dead) female presidential candidates from American history. They try, along with their modern-day counterparts, to convince Claire that the world men made may be against her, but she can still succeed because they did. But in their shadow, Claire finds that hopelessness and cynicism threaten her resolve to realize her ambitions. Set on election day, in the apartment where she is staying with friends after a personal and professional humiliation, Claire unravels as the domestic environment becomes an ever-increasingly menacing place to hide from the truth she can't admit.
Now it’s time to let the voices of these pioneers be heard across America and encourage your community to add their voices to the discourse central to a democracy that is supposed to serve us all.