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Skylar Dunn and Lucy Gardner in "The Feminist Theatre Project." Lucy Gellman Photos.
In the middle of the stage, the moon is collapsing in on itself. The sun. The stars. Glass shards falling down, a voiceover reads in an even tone. It's moonlight painting you. A breath, audible, makes its way through the theater. It's sunlight painting me. The women orbit each other, their eyes locked as the world falls away. They extend their arms, and the touch that follows contains universes.
Welcome to "The Feminist Theatre Project," a devised and highly collaborative performance from students at ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) and directors Ingrid Schaeffer and Liz Daingerfield (Schaeffer is also the chair of the theatre department, where she has taught for over two decades). Written in response to over a century of feminist thought and literature, it invites students to add their own voices to an ever-expanding canon, with nods to absurdist theater, choreopoem, storytelling, musical theater and comedy that fully meet the moment.
It comes at a time when feminism itself, which Schaeffer and students identify as in its fourth wave, is at an inflection point. Long before there were pink pussy hats and women’s marches, American feminism had what scholars call its first wave, defined by the decades-long struggle for suffrage and women winning the right to vote in 1920 (think about how recent that is while you read about the SAVE Act). The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which sought to remove racial barriers from voting and is currently under assault, did not come until almost half a century later.
Kaylin Harrell and Katie Upton in Viviana Rodriguez’ “Braids."
As those like historian Sharon Crozier-De Rosa have pointed out, the movement was often coded as white, excluding powerful voices like Ida B. Wells while subjugating Black men for the supposed benefit of white women. In many ways, it’s a helpful framing for the second wave, a fight for gender equality that sought to liberate women from their homes and domestic tasks, but still often left women of color and poor women out of the discussion, or made decisions for and about them but not with them (The Feminine Mystique is great if you’re a middle-class white housewife). Enter the third wave in the 1990s, which introduced ideas like womanism and intersectionality into the mainstream for the first time.
All of them have been interwoven with systemic racism and dominant narrative: one probably still hears about Gloria Steinem before bell hooks, and for that matter, Rosa Parks before Claudette Colvin. So it’s a relief, maybe, that the ostensible fourth wave—including protests like the 2017 Women's March—has made more room for figures like Tarana Burke, Linda Sarsour (who graced New Haven in 2017 and again last year), Adrienne Maree Brown and playwrights like Mary Kathryn Nagle and Rachel Sayet.
By this point, the sharpest edges of the wave are those that recognize that Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty and economic solidarity must live at the heart of any movement, because women cannot win until the U.S. (and the globe) has addressed the poverty, racism, land theft, male entitlement and whiteness that all live within patriarchy. That’s harder, of course, in a presidency so defined by its sheer cruelty toward and hatred of women, which is exactly where students pick up.
"I think being in the process of making this right now, it makes us all feel very powerful, and we're actually contributing to doing something," said senior Verbatim Rodriguez.
"I think being in the process of making this right now, it makes us all feel very powerful, and we're actually contributing to doing something," said senior Verbatim Rodriguez, who explored the intersection of feminism and transmasculine identity. "As somebody who considered myself a feminist before I even joined, it was really interesting to see how other people viewed feminism beforehand. We weren't given limits on what we were allowed to say, and we were able to have a space where we were able to fully express ourselves."
"This classroom has consistently been a safe space for us to have open discussions," added senior Katie Upton. "Feminism manifests in our lives all the time, but in different ways, because there are so many of us and we're all very different. To see how feminism manifests into so many different styles of performing ... Everyone kind of has their own little bit that they get to bring to it. This space is so special."
Work on the project, which is now in its third iteration (the second was an early casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020) launched earlier this semester, when a cohort of juniors and seniors sprawled out across one of ECA's classrooms with markers, pens and butcher block paper and began to tease apart their own notions of feminism.
Some made lists, from the divinity of women-run spaces to the self-consciousness of seeking out male attention. They wrote through their feelings on TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists, most notorious among them J.K. Rowling) and teased out their own Afro-Caribbean hair stories. They looked at how legislation made without women’s voices hurts women. They reflected on their own mothers and sisters and aunts and girlfriends, each of whom have taught them a different lesson about feminism.
Meanwhile—and with Schaeffer and Daingerfield's prompting—they also dove into the world of feminist history, writing, and theater, from the groundbreaking work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange to Lucas Hnath's A Doll's House, Part II. The class had "feminists of the week," a list that has grown to include Emily Mann, Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, Kathleen Hanna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Wilma Mankiller, Dolores Huerta, bell hooks and Marsha P. Johnson among others.
Many of those women have graced New Haven during their lives, including Ginsburg in 2012 and Huerta as recently as 2022 (the late Sylvia Rivera, a trans activist who joined Johnson in the Stonewall Riot and pushed for greater LGBTQ+ visibility in her life, visited the then-nascent New Haven Pride Center in 2000). Many more, including Alice Walker and Kimberlé Crenshaw, seem to have informed student writings that embrace and explore womanism and intersectionality.
Originally, the plan was to stage existing work alongside students' devised pieces. But as students discussed and debated the feminist canon, both Schaeffer and Daingerfield realized that there wouldn't be enough room for both. "The students’ passion for their own work and what they needed to say in our current world was something we needed to honor and uphold, and so we did," she said in an email after a recent rehearsal.
The result is a sweepingly cross-disciplinary work, with input and assistance from movement coach and choreographer Angharad Davies, musician Robert Bergner (or as he is known fondly among students, “King Bob,” said senior Alice McGill), and vocal coach Carolyn Ladd. In over an hour of performance, they weave together a work that both defies genre and uses feminism and its absence as a common thread, anchoring each scene in a shared reality.
Upton and Harrell in Alice McGill's "Mother-Daughter-Mars."
In Upton's "Pieces of Her," for instance, male members of the class gravitate toward their female classmates, approaching them as objects rather than distinct human beings. They seem hungry, curious, almost anthropological in their approach. On one side of the room, Raul Saucedo runs his hands over the outline of a fellow student’s curves, palms extended in midair. Another plays his peer as if her body is a cello, remarking that "her strings are too tight.” A third, Rowan Simonelli, lifts the corners of McGill’s mount into a prim, tight smile. In the moment she is pliant, obedient, as if she is made of clay.
All the while, the women—limbs akimbo, some laid out on the floor—speak one by one about orange trees and the sweet, round and fragrant fruit they bear. The parallel is as effective as it is affecting; “what a privilege it is to be that fruit,” senior Lucy Gardner remarks, and there is a sharp edge beneath her words. When the women announce “I’m tired/ I’m tired/I’m tired/I’m ready,” one by one, it seems like it couldn’t be any other way. Of course they are exhausted; have you tried living as a woman in this world?
So too in “Mother-Daughter-Mars” (that’s a working title), in which McGill uses life on Mars—and a flippant, blunt sense of humor—to spotlight the kind of arguments mothers and daughters have every day, sometimes for years on end. In the middle of the stage, Upton and senior Kaylin Harrell represent two generations, and two waves of feminism, at a querulous impasse. As they spar, it has so much more to do with how they see the world than whether the Red Planet is actually a good place to raise children.
When Harrell says she’s trying to do right by her own kid, the subtext is “But I know you tried.” When Upton announces “When your bio-dome caves in on you, you’re welcome to stay with me!,” she’s really saying “You don’t know what you’re talking about, but I still love you.” It makes a viewer think twice about what they and their own mother may disagree on, and the generational differences that inform so much of how they (and we in the audience) see the world.
Lucy Gardner and Skylar Dunn in "The Moon Is Breaking."
It’s one of several works that cracks something wide open, and invites an audience in. In “Mother Pieces,” students weave together stories of the women who have sustained and supported them, conjuring their mothers on stage one vignette at a time. In Viviana Rodriguez’ “Braids,” class members create a surprising affinity space onstage, braiding each other’s hair as Rodriguez tells the story of her own struggle with Irish-Dominican hair.
In another moving short monologue, Verbatim Rodriguez is center of the stage, telling the story of how he stepped into his name. He remembers his childhood and early adolescence, staring at something in the mirror that he couldn’t quite put a finger on. Only later did “I realize just how much of myself I had buried.” The words feel heavy and immediate, like a ton of bricks slamming into the listener.
But Rodriguez doesn’t go for pity, so much as precision: he is a storyteller laying out facts and timelines, as if he is a doctor calmly explaining why gender-affirming care saves lives. He knows exactly when to take a breath, when to push forward, when to rotate to face a different part of the room.
At a rehearsal last Wednesday, he barreled toward a point of realization, triumphantly announcing “I know who I am!” Daingerfield, sitting just feet away, didn’t miss a beat.
“Stand up on that,” she said, with a kind of force that still managed to be gentle. Rodriguez turned back to the line. “I know who I am!” he repeated, standing up.
Other works, meanwhile, embrace and challenge the chaos of the present. In “The Committee on Women’s Health,” inspired by A Doll’s House, Part II, senior Benya Greenshpun has used sharp, sometimes biting humor as a narrative device, building a world in which men—all played by women wearing old-school, oversized wool blazers—make decisions about the physical and mental healthcare of the women in their lives.
They are, of course, woefully inept: they debate menstrual cycles but blanch at the words, they suggest smiling as a balm for depression, they get completely lost when teasing out a labia from a clitoris. The only woman in the room is their secretary, and she is of course—wait for it—silent by design.
The scene hits painfully close to home: there are dozens of state legislatures where some version of this is playing out in real time, from limits on common reproductive care to a stunning lack of knowledge around women’s bodies. As students rehearsed this month, New York-based OB/GYN Margaret Carpenter faced criminal charges from judges in Louisiana and Texas for prescribing abortion pills—which are safer than pregnancy in this country, especially if you are a Black mother— to minors in states where abortion is no longer legal.
“I think something that stuck out to me was these decisions were being made about women, without women,” Greenshpun said. The men in his scene are everywhere: the kind-of-creepy sports coach you know, the state and federal legislators who don’t understand the use of a D & C after miscarriage, that high school biology teacher who insisted the clitoris was a vestigial organ. In response, Greenshpun has pulled back the curtain on this country, revealing its leaders as the total buffoons they are.
In an interview during the class, several students said that the process has been eye-opening for them, from feeling sticky around the term “feminist” itself to learning about feminists who have made it easier to find a way forward. Gardner, whose piece “The Moon Is Breaking” marries poetry, voiceover, and movement until they feel sublime, noted that she hadn’t thought about feminism that much at all until this semester. Now, she sees its echoes everywhere.
“It kind of felt like when you think of a color of a car that you really like, and then you start to see that car everywhere,” she said to a smattering of laughs from her classmates. “It felt like I was becoming hyper-aware of this smaller world around me, you know? … It was a crazy time to start doing this project, and a beautiful time, and exactly what we needed."
“We want to bring light to it,” added senior Skylar Dunn later in the class. As someone who pays attention to the news—she recently addressed maternal mortality at a Model Congress conference—she’s grateful to have the class, especially in this political and social moment. “The biggest thing we need now is for people who don’t agree with it to come watch it."