What music are you listening to lately (bonus points for tracks with women vocalists or songwriters)?
I’m listening to the news and lots of it: Nina Totenberg, Mara Liasson, Cokie Roberts, and Steve Inskeep are my jam right now. Music might be better for my mental health.
What is the first theatre project you ever did?
In an early instance of cross-gender casting, I played a particularly enthusiastic Francis Scott Key when I was seven.
Why should people come to see Mere Trifles?
This is emphatically not the Lifetime Victim of the Week exploration of domestic violence. These are four diverse stories of women across the past century discovering their agency and quite literally realizing the power of their voices in moments of crisis. That seems valuable at this utterly unprecedented cultural moment.
Mere Trifles celebrates the 100th anniversary of Susan Glaspell’s famous one-act play “Trifles.” Glaspell was a Pulitzer-winning writer and very influential in her day, but few people nowadays have heard of her. Tell us about a woman who you think people should know about (but probably don’t!).
There are so many women who have been lost in the historical shuffle that I want to share with people now; I’ll start with Rachel Crothers. She was a prolific playwright and director in the early 20th Century and remains the most produced woman playwright in the history of Broadway, and she was deeply committed to locating women at the center of the narrative (“Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”) but we’ve forgotten her almost entirely.
Kate Powers directs Mere Trifles. Kate has directed at theatres large, small & out-of-doors in New York City; Memphis, TN; central Ohio; dusty Utah; on the coast of Maine; in the Blue Ridge Mountains; and across the UK She’s been a teacher, facilitator and director at Sing Sing Correctional Facility for nearly a decade. Kate has been a Drama League Directing Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar in Shakespeare; she has taught at Drew University, SUNY Purchase, the U of MN, and the Juilliard School. Kate’s fancied herself a Shakespearean smarty-pants since she earned her M.A. with Distinction at the Shakespeare Institute. She loves pie.
Get tickets to Mere Trifles here.