Featuring Noah Brody, Paul L. Coffey, Andy Grotelueschen, Miriam Silverman, Ben Steinfeld, Aubrey Lace Taylor, Paco Tolson, Emily Young
The Verge is generously sponsored by Paul Blackman.
by SUSAN GLASPELL
directed by JESSIE AUSTRIAN
featuring Tony Winner Miriam Silverman
Monday, April 8th, 2024 | 6:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m.
Steinhardt Conservatory, Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Enter Brooklyn Botanic Garden via 990 Washington Avenue (map)
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; performance begins at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $45; reserved seating: $65, guarantees a spot in the first three rows
All tickets include complimentary wine and self-guided tours of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Conservatory before the performance.
Classic Stage Company and Fiasco Theater join forces with Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre’s Expand the Canon to celebrate an undersung American classic: The Verge by Susan Glaspell. The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (and founder of the Provincetown Players) goes deeper and darker into questions of otherness, womanhood, and life’s driving force in this play about madness, love, and trying to breed a new plant.
Susan Glaspell’s 1921 play The Verge is a post-war portrait of a woman created and creating through destruction. Claire Archer attempts to transcend the constraints of modern life through the breeding of new plants, despite a literal Tom, Dick, and Harry trying to stop her. As the blossoming of her latest creation approaches, her sanity is called into question and tensions around her unique way of life explode. A piece that is by turns devastating philosophical portraiture, droll farce, and scathing feminist cry, The Verge comes together in a pressure cooker analysis of prescribed womanhood.
Planning to view the Solar Eclipse? Spend the afternoon at Brooklyn Botanic Garden with an Eclipse and a Show!
Join us on the Garden’s lawns to marvel at the sky as the moon passes between the Earth and sun during the solar eclipse. The eclipse will last from 2:10 to 4:36 p.m., peaking at 3:25 p.m.
Then perhaps enjoy a later afternoon snack or an early dinner at a nearby restaurant, then come back to the Garden for The Verge. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. and tickets include complimentary wine and self-guided tours of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Conservatory before the performance.
Local Restaurants
Cheryl’s
Ix Restaurant
Slowloris
Amy’s Thai
Chavela’s
Cent’anni
Bonafini
Risbo
About Susan Glaspell
Susan Keating Glaspell (1876-1947) got a degree in philosophy, then began her career as a reporter and columnist. She joined a radical social group, The Monists, and met her future husband, George Cram Cook, while protesting a book banning with them. They became prominent artists in Greenwich Village, and started The Provincetown Players. The company featured the talents of Edna St. Vincent Milay, Louisa Bryant, and Sinclair Lewis, and launched the career of Eugene O’Neill. Glaspell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Alison’s House, and briefly directed the midwest bureau for the Federal Theatre Project.
About Expand the Canon
Expand the Canon is a curated list of classic plays by women & underrepresented genders – and a call to action to produce them. The list is an annual guide that makes slotting classic plays by women and underrepresented genders into your season and syllabi easy. See titles, producing information, and scripts below.
Why Expand the Canon?
Because by re-casting the past, we can re-shape the future. So long as the only stories revered as classics are by men, we will continue to prioritize the male lens and point of view culturally. Women’s perspectives will always secondary. By insisting that excellent works by a diverse group of women playwrights be regarded as classics, we can redefine theatre’s values. And by staging these stories in our communities, we can shift culture.
What is the list?
The list is an annual guide that makes slotting classic plays by women and underrepresented genders into your season and syllabi easy. Both a celebration and a call to action, Expand the Canon demands space in the classical canon for more diverse women playwrights, many of whom were underproduced or utterly un-produced in their lifetimes. We call upon our national and international theater community to expand its definition of classical theater and include these brilliant writers and artists in their production seasons, publications, classrooms, and beyond.
