For Your (Re)Consideration
An ongoing staged reading series, For Your (Re)Consideration explores the works of historically overlooked female writers. Featuring a variety of distinct voices and styles from different historical periods, the readings seek to bring attention to these remarkable women who have been sidelined by history for reasons that had nothing to do with their talent and everything to do with their gender and, in many cases, their race.
Sometimes referred to as the Other Canon, the work of these early female playwrights dates from Hrotsvitha in the 10th Century to Dorothy C. Guinn in the 1920s. Their plays are as much the building blocks of modern theatre as those of their male counterparts. Some good, some great, some successful in their time, some way ahead of their time, these women have found themselves all but erased from history and rarely, if ever, produced today.
2024
Ghostlight, in a co-production with the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, presents Plays for Women!: A collection of overlooked suffrage plays — a reading of short suffrage works to coincide with March as Women’s History Month. The short works are: Something to Vote For by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, An Anti-Suffragist or the Other Side by H.M. Paull, The Mother’s Meeting by Mrs. Harlow Phibbs and Lady Geraldine’s Speech by Beatrice Harraden.
2023
Ghostlight, in a co-production with the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, presents The Shadow of A Doubt, a recently rediscovered play by the novelist Edith Wharton. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, The Shadow of a Doubt, explores the issues surrounding social position, remarriage, the roles of women and euthanasia.
2022
THE WOMAN OF COLOUR
The series returned in 2022 with a new stage adaptation of The Woman of Colour, a novel published anonymously in 1808. Written immediately after the abolition of the British Slave trade, the story follows a biracial heiress on her travels from Jamaica to England to marry as a condition of her father’s will. Like the novel, Ghostlight’s staged reading will explore the interconnections of race, gender and class, as well as examining cultural identity and colonial power.
2021
FOR YOUR (RE)CONSIDERATION
In 2021 Ghostlight Ensemble launched a new ongoing staged reading series, For Your (Re)Consideration, to explore the works of historically overlooked female writers. In its inaguaral year, the series featured six plays in April and May. The plays included: The Convent of Pleasure by Margaret Cavendish, Distinguished Villa by Kate O’Brien, Mine Eyes Have Seen by Alice Dunbar Nelson, War Brides by Marion Craig Wentworth, Warp and Woof by Edith Lyttelton and The Enchantment by Victoria Benedictsson, adapted by Clare Bayley.