A new comic play about the Brontës is now performed in St.Louis (and no, the title is not a mistake... at least of ours):
Written by Courtney Bailey
Directed by Keating
Design by Bess Moynihan and Liz Henning
With Rachel Tibbetts, Maggie Conroy. Cassidy Flynn, Joel Moses, Bess Moynihan, Vicky Chen, LaWanda Jackson, Zeck Schultz
The Chapel, 6238 Alexander Drive, St Louis
August 17-27, 2022
The Brontë sisters of Victorian literary fame (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) are trapped in a purgatorial time loop where they must throw a fabulous house party every night for eternity. Only when they reach The Point of Celebratory Reverence, the highest point of celebration that a party can achieve, will they be released. An absurd, feminist revisionist tribute to all the women artists who’ve created under pressure and still had it in them to throw a good party.
Like quite a few artistic works these days, “Brontë Sister House Party” is a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, [Courtney] Bailey says.
“I got the idea for this play because I spent so much of the pandemic in my own home, feeling very isolated,” she says. “And feeling this pressure to make use of all of the time that the pandemic gave us. It felt like every
day of the lockdown phase was the same thing, over and over and over again.”
That experience inspired Bailey to write a play that “tapped into that tyranny of repetition. Something that explored how we can still be creative in the midst of repetition.”
And the Brontë sisters struck her as ideal for such a scenario. The three, she says, “had these hugely imaginative lives — and this very imaginative literary output. And yet they lived very quiet lives, and it’s interesting to think of those types of individuals having a party. Or being compelled to host a house party.”
“Brontë Sister House Party” is “definitely a nontraditional play,” Bailey says.
“It doesn’t have a plot,” she says. “Instead, it’s leaning into this idea of a play as an event. A play as a party. A party doesn’t necessarily have a plot.
“A party is a series of interesting happenings that occur over the course of an evening. And I want people o feel like their two hours spent at our ‘House Party’ is a joyful time.”
Shouldn’t the title be “Brontë Sisters House Party,” with an added “s”? Perhaps a stickler for language would insist on it, but Bailey says she just likes the way “Brontë Sister” sounds.
“I know it’s maybe not grammatically correct,” she says. (Calvin Wilson)
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