 Well greetings town meeting TV viewers. I'm Catherine bloom and I'm here with Sandra Dooley and Mary Beth McNulty and we are here to talk about a show we've got coming up. Called the suffragist reenactment society and this has been produced by the Vermont Suffrage Centennial Alliance to honor and celebrate the 100th anniversary 100 months as it were of women getting the right to vote. We were going to tour it last fall and of course that couldn't happen and so we took actually an advantage of the year to do even more extensive rewrites and digging into the script and and we are here to celebrate women getting the right to vote. But we, this is an opportunity to do a little bit more of a deep dive into the origins of this piece and what we're trying to accomplish with it. And so, Sandy, let's start with you and can you just give me a thumbnail, you know, three sentence bio of you first. And are you know are you do you come out of women's history do you come out of politics what and how did you get involved with that with the Alliance. When I come out of human services I politics somewhat I was the city councilor of South Burlington. I was also on the Vermont Commission on women for many years. And it was the communications coordinator Lily Talbert at the commission who recruited me to be become part of the Alliance. So that's, that's how that happened. I live in South Burlington. That's great and who all is on the Alliance who who comprises it. They're about 60 between organizations and individuals we have people from AAUW, the peace and justice center, the law school, business and professional women, the Vermont Women's Fund, people from UVM and history professors, lots of different people, high school, especially social studies teachers, runners. It's been great meeting all these new people. This is quite a deep bench we have behind us I don't you know those of us involved in the show aren't even completely aware of who all is out there making this happen. Fantastic. And Mary Beth little little same little bio on you. Who are you where'd you come from what's going on. Um, so I am both an educator and a playwright and I've been writing plays since I was quite young and I'm excited to, it's always fun to have a play produced and I live in Burlington I'm originally from the south. It's been a number of years in Los Angeles as well, but it's great to be a lot and to have a Vermont play to share with books from across the state. That's fantastic we're so glad you're here. Sandy are you a native or are you a transplant as well. I was born and grew up in Pennsylvania, sort of the rural area not far from Philadelphia, but I ended up at Middlebury College, and I pretty much been in Vermont since then, much longer than I was in Pennsylvania. Yeah, it was similar for me so I grew up in Portland, Oregon and came to school on the East Coast but beat it back to Seattle after I graduated and thought I was never going to go east of the Rockies again and I've been in Vermont for almost 30 years and go figure things happen and life evolves and my background is both in theater and environmental activism primarily and I have a history of doing one woman shows which is sort of where the origin story of this piece comes from because I've done stuff around the Iraq war I did a one woman show about climate change. And, and if I'm remembering correctly there's few years ago Sandy you contacted me to ask if I would be interested in doing a one woman show about the history of women's suffrage, and because I had been dealing with the health stuff I said, absolutely not. But I think I know who would be appropriate for this and reach out to Mary Beth, and her theatrical partner, Laura rolled, who's our director who unfortunately could not be here today. And, and Laura and Mary Beth have this little company called complications theater and they seem to be very oriented towards women's narratives and I had a feeling that this would be an appealing thing for you. But Mary Beth did you have to think about it at all before before you made any kind of decisions. Not a minute. We sat down with you and then when we sat down with Sandy, this is, as you say, right up our alley, because of the focus on telling women stories. We, Laura and I started the theater company because we felt like there was sort of a gap around new work, or actually new work development so there's lots of new work that happens in Vermont a lot of fantastic playwrights a lot of really exciting creative producers. And we, Laura and I are both familiar with a process of development. And so when we had the opportunity to really develop new work. We were excited and thrilled to have the connection with you Kathy and then to be able to work with Sandy and all the other folks from the suffrage Centennial it's been just really exciting. And where did the idea of a theater piece come from. Was it was it part of the DNA of the Centennial Alliance or was that something that popped up. Well, surprising way. I think two, two ways to describe the suffrage movement history is that it's complicated. It's, it's largely untold. And we knew we needed a variety of vehicles to try to, we want the story to get to as many Vermonters as possible. And, you know, lecture, well of course, you know, there'll be lectures and we had a 5k rod and things. The idea was sort of brainstorming and I in the spring of 2019 that we came up with the idea of a play. And people liked it and I thought of you, Kathy and I said I, I initiate, you know, I'd reach out to you. And we're also very woman focused in terms of wanting to showcase talent and we knew there was a lot of talent around. So that's, and people have been very enthusiastic about this project or whatever you want to call it this, this great endeavor. It's really our largest project, which of course, our whole sort of program got scaled back by the coronavirus. Yeah. And did you, when, when you can see you David being a theater piece did you have any sense of what it would look like did you was there early imaginings of what this was going to be or was it was it kind of a great big blank slate for you. Other than the one woman show idea. It really was a blank slate. And we were ready to find people that were willing to fill in a canvas so to speak. And I think we found some great people. And Mary Beth did you know much about women's history or the history of the bridge before you jumped into this. I just knew the big names that are sort of when I was growing up, your social studies textbook would tell that your history book would have the story of everything and women and people of color. That story was in a blue box on one page in the whole chapter is, and usually it was just like at the bottom of a page so there would be like a paragraph and you, I would learn the name, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, or Susan B Anthony. And that was probably the extent of, you know, I knew some broad brushstrokes, but certainly not all the rich stories that I know now. Yeah. And so what's this process been like for you. Did you have any kind of inkling of where you were going to start the story and, and when and where did the notion of reenactment group come from. Which I think is phenomenally clever by the way. Thank you. So I, as a, as a playwright I'm a bit of a nerd, and I love. You know, I have a lot of a number of stories that are in my own head that I want to tell but then this is probably the, the third piece that I've had where I've been approached and sort of commissioned I've worked previously with my friend, Aaron, is the theater teacher there and so I've worked with young people and developing new work. And, you know, so I, there's a research process, which I totally geek out on, and the suffrage and send the Sandy kept sending me. Oh, here's a book. Here's a CD and I don't have a CD player and have to go and stick it in my car to listen to it and here's a CD player. So, it was just wonderful to have the rich resources coming my way, along with lots of email links. There's been some great pieces in the New York Times that Sandy was always really good at my way. And so I had a really wonderful immersive time and then, you know, I came up I knew that there were so many stories so there was no one story I wanted to tell there was no one person that that really leapt out at me. And because it's so complex and it's, we're talking over 72 years of history. And so the, you know, I had three or four ideas, and the idea that I kept coming back to was the idea of reenactors because you see the Civil War reenactors and why do they do that well because they're so excited about this story. So what would the equivalent be for the suffragist and, and it just kept making me laugh, the idea that these that that passion could go into reenactments. And it was a way, you know, it gave me, because of my experience developing new place. I knew I had to have sort of a framing device for telling a bigger story. So it gave me a really nice framing device for pulling in lots of little individual stories, which you know I can imagine is part of the challenge you're talking over 70 years of history, and you're talking history that happened all over the country. And that, you know, you had to encompass the Civil War you had to encompass World War one you had to there's an enormous amount going on in American history during that time. And, and how do you condense it all down so I think, you know, and what people will see when they come see the show is that the basic premises that we are reenacting group and we're trying to figure out one story to reenact for a fourth of July is that there's a lot of information in the town where we're wherever it is that we're traveling to. And there's a lot of back and forth around who are the most who are the most visible members of the suffragist movement, who what are the most compelling narratives what's exciting what's disturbing. So there are the three characters in the play I played a Deborah the president of the society who is clearly representative of a somewhat older generation of women who are who might not be as infused with an understanding of intersectional social justice. And then we have Tori who is our historian and then we have a young woman played by Julia Syos, who is very excited about this and loves the costumes and loves to get on it but she is definitely I think more conscious of the the dark undercurrent of what you know in the there was racism and there was a lot, a lot more going on than just a bunch of women trying to get the right to vote. In thinking about that whole history, Mary Beth, how when, you know, the play has changed a lot from when we were going to produce it last fall to this year. And when you when you began thinking about those, those lesser known threat narrative threads in the suffrage movement. How did you, how were you wrestling with them how did you think about trying to bring in all that stuff as well so it's not just a long history it's a deep history. In conversation with the centennial folks, we knew that we wanted it to be more than just white ladies history. And during my writing time. There's a lot going on in our country related to terrible events, terrible racism. And so there really has been a reckoning and continues to be a reckoning and one of the wonderful things about I'm telling this historic story. The characters the character you play Kathy is in America now. And so there's this wonderful because it's both the past and the present. I'm able to weave that together. And then we start to see, Oh, those conflicts of the past have not really been addressed and resolved. And here we are today with some of these same issues. And so how do these, these parallel stories really intersect, and what is it that we can walk away from both thinking about the past and thinking about its impact on us today. So I feel really lucky, actually, that I had this, this gift of time that an added year gave me because it's hard to write about something that's currently happening you actually need a little bit of distance in order to understand what you're looking at, you know, when when George Floyd was murdered. And we all saw it like it was, it was really close and really hard to have some perspective and so this year has allowed me I mean it's still really close, but at least a little extra time allowed me to to reflect and get some distance and try to think about how this is a, this has been a problem in America from the get go. This racism in our country and this white supremacy and how can I speak to that as a white privileged woman here living in Vermont. And another thing that the Centennial folks were able to do as we Kathy you've been part of these conversations, thankfully, the Centennial folks have been able to help us connect with women of color to support that process as bringing a perspective that I don't have. And that's been really wonderful and I think the play is the richer for bringing in more of those stories and more of those perspectives that so that we can have a richer story to tell and think about today. I was going to ask Kathy, and that is that the whole issue of voting has taken on just so much more controversy and importance we had the effect of coven that radically changed how people vote. And, and in virtually the entire country access to the ballot box was greatly improved, and then we've had a lot of backlash. And that leads me to what I left out earlier and that is the role of the League of Women Voters of Vermont. Really, they have, we are a project of the, the Alliance, the Vermont Suffrage Centennial Alliance is a project of the League of Women Voters of Vermont, and their presidents who Rakanelli has has been the devoted director of this, this process but there's more between the social justice issues that Mary Beth talked about and then the voting issues which are very much a part of the social justice issues became front and center. The more important to go forward with this play became for all of us. And do you, do you find that the conversations that the characters and the player having around how to address these issues are reflected in the conversations you're having with the, with the coalition that you're, you're doing or the organizing with. I have to tell you, Kathy, I haven't read the play in its most recent version. Oh, wow. So, I can't really respond to that, but maybe, maybe Mary Beth can or whatever but I'm, I'm really, you know, the creative process has really been with Mary Beth and Laura and the cast so I appreciate the question. Perhaps you can speak to that Kathy having been the nice piece about being a playwright and developing a play as I was referring to earlier is, you have a draft process. So, I write alone, which is fun because I have that introverted side of me and then I have friends. So, I get to bring the draft to you and Kathy you've been there through several of those drafts I mean you can speak to that evolution of thinking about voting and how the play intersects or reflect some of the, this is larger conversations we're having. Well, I, the thing that I was really struck by from the very beginning is this question of yes we want to tell these stories that are both the told and the untold we want to hear about everything. And we want to be able to highlight all of the women of color who were deeply deeply involved in the suffrage movement. So there's, but there's the challenge of the fact that we are in Vermont, and it's a very white state, and the pool of performers that we have to draw from is a very white small and white pool of people. And so they're wrestling with that question of how do we tell everybody's story when we don't represent everybody has been really fascinating question and I think it's also one thing I've run into as a theater maker is that you don't want to just hire anyone because of the color of their skin. And if you need an actor of color, but there isn't, you don't find the right person. Do you take somewhat, what do you do because you have the opportunity to hire whoever you can find who's willing to participate. If you're not an adept performer because that's not their background, then you're putting them in a position of not being able to only fully realize your vision but also see someone who is not a trained performer, have to struggle with the, with the content and there are people who are naturals but they're also I mean I've you know there's there's a challenge right there you can't teach someone to do something that they have to do while they're doing it. And so, how do you know that question of do we try to write actors characters of color and try to find the actors, or do we write for the people who we know we've got. I know that was a big piece of the tension in a lot of the early piece of parts of development. And I don't actually remember how you landed on the solution of just resting with the with the white ladies, but finding ways to talk about everybody else. So, one, yes. That conversation was certainly part of this earlier drafts and the suffrage alliance participants who would come and because of commissioned piece you were part of the process as well and there was certainly this excitement over can we can we have an actor of color how do we and and how do we tell these stories of the women of color in the movement because we knew we needed to hear those stories. We did not want to be part of silencing or ignoring or erasing any of those stories. So that was a tricky conversation. But the more we talked about the racism, the more, you know, Laura and I went back on fourth of the racism is a white lady problem. We are the ones who need to do the work. And so, more than the, the producer, the producer problem of finding an actor of color, which is certainly something that we need to continue to work and think about and train and have conversations with a lot of women. So, more than that the conversation shifted to the content is that white women need to do better telling this story. And so, that became central to the work and what was so wonderful about having our readers, the readers of color, Denise and Catherine Dunney, and then Judy Dow were our readers and and they were part of the process of helping us recognize where that tension is. And recognize that start how do we move the conversation forward and how do white women do the work. Yeah, and so that became, it became really important that white women engage and white women call each other out on the racism that we need to address. And so, as much as I love working with a diverse group of actors, this play is really about white women doing the work and that's became just that just became where as the drafts became tighter and tighter. And so I think that I think we, we hit upon, you know, the content led us to that that place in our casting. And then we realized, oh, this is really a generational conflict. And so then we had to think about how do we bring in different, the multi, the multiple generations who need to figure this out together. And so having Julia come in as an actor and tell me this character isn't really speaking was a great note. And I that became just really exciting and a way to get women to do the work white women to do the work they need it to do. Yeah, it's funny that I definitely, I don't not having kids myself I don't get to hear. I don't know how the kids are talking these days and it's when my husband is running lines with me every once in a while to run across something he's like what does that mean and like I had to look it up to an urban urban dictionary. Mary Beth, if there's something you think you're going to really come away from or come away with from this whole process. What do you think that's going to be. Oh, I have this. I've thought this a lot. As someone who also wants to be engaged in a wide variety of social justice issues from climate to race to discrimination to immigration. So, sexism you name it, I, I want to do that work. And it's exhausting and disheartening. When you watch the news and, and you see that we're not making the progress that needs to happen now. On that calendar that Sandy sent to me there, there was this line of working for progress for seven over 72 years. And, and I carry that with me that we may not see what we want to see in our lifetime. And the story, certainly the stories of the black women, the suffragists who showed up. They showed up for women's rights, and then retreated with horrible racism, but kept showing up and doing the work, even though you may never see what you want to see in your lifetime and there were so many women Charlotte Woodward as the only person at Seneca Falls who could have voted in the 1920 election. And other women weren't, didn't survive to be able to vote. And that is a lesson of this, this work is, is ongoing and you do the work. And you don't give up when it's hard, and you don't give up when you don't see the progress that you want and need to see that I was that was not the lesson I thought I was going into it but maybe having that extra year of writing. Yeah, help me see that more that we have to just keep showing up, and we have to keep doing the work. I just finished reading John Lewis's autobiography and that's exactly what he says he just has this very long vision of, you know, you may have planted tree that you're never going to see in its full glory but it's worth, it's worth it because there's nothing to do. And I think black Americans who've been doing this work know that lesson lesson, and I'm just, I just got the memo. Next time, I'm going to let everybody know this so the show opens this Saturday at Main Street landing in Burlington, October 2. And then it's going to be touring the state and if folks go to the ticketing website, which is tickets dot cat amount arts dot org and I know that our buddy Kevin from town meeting TV is going to flash the stuff up on the screen. People will be able to see the entire tour schedule and tickets are free right Sandy. And people will have to wear masks, and they have to be vaccinated, or they can have a COVID test within 72 hours. So we're really trying to make things safe because we know people still have concerns about the safety of being indoors in groups. And we're performing without masks that can see our faces because we've discovered rehearsing with masks. It's a big pain and you definitely don't want to watch a show where people's faces are covered like this because it's not any fun. All of you vaccinated. Yeah, we've been all been vaccinated and we get tested every week and so whereas we the performers are as safe as we can be and we actually have masks that will be wearing when we're interacting with the audience up close and then we'll take them down for when we're on stage. Anything either we're so we're you got about a minute left anything either one of you want to say in conclusion about this whole process or Sandy anything that you've learned coming out of this. Well, first of all, what we didn't talk about was how interactive the play is with the audience. We may not have time to get into that but I want the viewers to know about that. I've, I've learned. I couldn't begin to tell you what I've learned because I'm totally new to this but it's, it's been fun and, and I love the idea of tripping around Vermont and meeting people and and seeing how they respond to the play. Yeah, so that's my parting word. All right, beautiful Mary Beth anything else you want to say before we sign off. Oh, it's just great to have live theater in our lives again. That is very, very true. And I am, I'll tell you, I am so honored to be working with this group of people and I don't know that I have ever had. I've ever been in love with the entire crew as much as I am with this bunch and it's such been such a feminist production. From top to bottom, start to finish and we, the level of support and love and openheartedness that everyone has brought to all of this has been just extraordinary and I am deeply deeply honored to be a part of it all. So, everyone out there in TV land I hope you will come see the show and you, you know, if it if Burlington sold out and you live somewhere else. Make a date of it travel a travel have a fun time, get picnics, get an Airbnb come see us all over the state will be everywhere from Newport to Brattleboro and Bennington so we hopefully will cover just about everything. So thank you all for joining us today Sandy Mary Beth thank you and we will see you at the theater.