On Her Shoulders in association with New Perspectives Theatre Company and the New School for Drama presents

Directed by Kristin Heckler, Dramaturgy by Melody Brooks

The Group: A Farce

by Mercy Otis Warren

On Her Shoulders was pleased to present a staged reading of THE GROUP: A Farce by Mercy Otis Warren, directed by Kristin Heckler, on Wednesday, April 13, 2016. The Play in Context, which situates the script in its historical time and place, kicked off the evening at 6:45pm with an Introduction by dramaturg Melody Brooks. Running time, including a post-performance Q&A was approximately 90 minutes.

“As the great business of the polite world is eager pursuit of amusement, and as the public diversions of the season have been interrupted by the hostile parade in the capital; the exhibition of a new farce may not be unentertaining.”

MERCY OTIS WARREN (1728-1814) was a Massachusetts native, daughter of an outspoken critic of British rule and the wife of a prominent American politician and revolutionary. Warren was personally acquainted with most of the leaders of the Revolution and was continually at or near the centre of events for more than two decades, from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 to the establishment of the federal republic in 1789. Combining her unique vantage point and fervent beliefs with a talent for writing, she then became both a poet and a historian of the Revolutionary era, beginning with a trio of scathingly polemical plays in verse that were published serially (and anonymously) in a Boston newspaper. The Group was the third of these, written in 1775 and sent in pieces to her husband on the battlefield. Apparently never performed, it was widely shared among her husband’s friends and colleagues before being published. In 1790 she published a collection of poems and plays under her own name, and in 1805, published her masterwork, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, one of the earliest accounts of the struggle, and the first authored by a woman.