New Perspectives Theatre Company

in association with the New School for Drama

invite you to join us the next ON HER SHOULDERS event

How Far Have We Come?
In an historic election year, OHS offers two Dualogues and one Monologue that let us look back  at a century of “progress” for women.

Come for the Dualogues and Stay for the Dialogue! 

Melody Brooks, Director/Dramaturg

Melissa Attebery, Producer

RSVP: newper37@gmail.com

HARRIET LOUISA CHILDE-PEMBERTON (c1853-1922) was an English author best known for her modernized fairy tales and children’s books promoting Christian ideals.. Shattered Nerves is part of a collection Twenty Minutes!: Drawing Room Duologues, published c1900 in which she offers a surprising view of modern womanhood, particularly with the inclusion of a female MD offering common sense “therapy” in Shattered Nerves.

EVELYN GLOVER (1874-c1941) began her writing career by with one-act plays demonstrating the relevance of the suffrage movement to working-class women. In Miss Appleyard’s Awakening  Mrs. Crabtree visits a fellow anti-suffragist and manages, through her views that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman”, to convert Miss Appleyard―but not in the way she intended!

MARIE JENNEY HOWE (1870-1934) wrote her Antisuffrage Monologue for the drama group of the New York Woman’s Suffrage Party . In it, she parodied anti-suffragist arguments that relied on stereotypes of female dependence, irrationality, and delicacy even as they also warned that women voters would exert too much power. Howe, a Unitarian minister, later founded Heterodoxy, a group of women intellectuals and radicals in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

ON HER SHOULDERS was founded in 2012 to present rehearsed, staged readings of plays by women from across the spectrum of time, with contemporary dramaturgs contextualizing–and in some cases adapting–them for modern audiences. The program seeks to make it impossible to deny or ignore the 1,000-year great tradition and value of women’s contribution to the theatrical canon. OHS became a program of NPTC in August 2013 and is currently produced by Melissa Attebery and Melody Brooks.

The Play in Context, the dramaturgical and scholarly presentation component to the program, is sponsored in part by the League of Professional Theatre Women, a non-profit organization promoting visibility and increasing opportunities for women in theatre since 1982.