Director’s Notes: Two Plays for Lost Souls (The Yellow Paper and The Love Talker) | October 19 - 29, 2017

In the past year, when each morning’s perusal of the headlines finds civil rights rolled back in disturbing measure, I have often asked myself, “What year is it?” Though these plays are set in different years than our own, they possess an ambiguity of time that renders their shared themes especially resonant with ongoing conditions. The women in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Love Talker are repeatedly silenced and infantilized, and with limited agency of their own, become complicit in their own repression in the name of self-preservation—Bun goes to great lengths to prevent herself from exploring what lies beyond the safe confines of her girlhood, and the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper obediently refrains from her only source of creative release, both to violent and destructive ends. They know something is missing but lack the means to express what they long for, grasping instead at what is available to them. When a person’s autonomy is stifled, a forward trajectory may seem the only thing worth hoping for—keep moving and things are bound to change. However, as the current political milieu reminds us, the passage of time in no way guarantees a forward progression. 

Plays that ask tough questions are always worth doing, but I am grateful to Scoundrel & Scamp for producing these plays because many of the questions they ask are specifically female. They remind us of the importance of staging female experiences and making female voices heard, especially at a time when it feels that not even half a million of us in the street can deter those with power away from our bodies and agency. These plays question what it might mean to break free on our own, and in doing so they also ask us what we stand to lose by changing when the conditions for freedom aren’t really available on the other side of the bars. Is transformation never without consequence? Is loss (of innocence, of agency, of self) inevitable? If so, is it worth it? Are these women, if you will, ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t?’ 

— Leah Taylor, Assistant Director