An Untethered Woman by Cynthia Webb
Produced/Directed by Jackie Vetter
Stage Management by Kai Jackman
Cast includes David Coleman Sr, Lynn Solomon. and Matthew Yetter.
Bighorn Bottle Shop and Wine Bar
114 Main St. Anaconda, MT
February 18th, 2024 at 6:30 pm
Doors open at 6:00 pm
$10 tickets | Seating is Limited
Food and Beverage will be for sale!
Advance tickets recommended!
A woman struggles to adjust to a solitary life as she packs her husband's belongings.
A one act play about grief that is also available as a short screenplay.
I am thrilled to announce one of my plays will be produced this season in multiple theaters. Anaconda Ensemble Theater in February. Rocky Mountain College Theater Arts in Billings with dates as yet to be announced.
The play is titled, THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID. It is a short one act with five female characters.
The genesis of this one goes like this –
A couple millennials I know were enamored for a while of that double entendre joke – that’s what she said.
It won’t fit.
That’s what she said.
It’s too big.
That’s what she said.
Etc.
It was all the rage at the time and by that I mean, annoying.
Since when I was their age we were still struggling to be heard,* I thought surely she has more to talk about than the size of someone’s dick and where it went or should go. So, I decided to see what else she had to say and spent an enjoyable few hours searching famous sayings by notable women and something else occurred to me.**
Sometimes, women don’t support other women. Whether this is an evolutionary artifact or social construct, who knows? Adding to that, the fact that each generation seems to look askance at every other generation and there we are. A big mess.
The 60s old hippie generation says – we stopped a war. We burned our bras and fought for reproductive freedom and equal pay, just so you girls can stroll into management positions.
The millennial generation says – put your bra back on grandma, you have no idea what the job market is like now or what we have to endure and what was that about reproductive freedom and equal pay?
They are both right.
Fast moving technological changes, pandemic losses, social upheaval and political unrest have created a world no one expected. And there’s still protests going on. #Timesup and #MeToo show it is still possible to move the needle on popular opinion and there’s a new generation doing just that.
But it might not hurt to acknowledge some of us stood across from police lines and got beaten bloody for our trouble or maybe just kept voting and writing and talking until we couldn’t help but be heard.
My daughter is committed to recycling. Once in a while I tell her, I was at the FIRST EARTH DAY and if it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t be fussing at me about plastic water bottles now.
So I wrote a play with generations of smart, brave women watching over my shoulder and now she’s going to town.
Told through the words of women of renown, THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID is a one act play that moves female discourse from a double entendre joke to multi-generational discussion on what it means to be female in America when much of the country wants her to sit down and shush.
*has anything changed? Alas.
**the very best bit of being a writer, when the muse stoops to whisper – here’s a story.
Sometimes a writer is lucky enough to be at the confluence where ideas bang into each other and a story is born. Driver’s Ed is one of those projects.
I wondered as I moved from my college idealism into the real world of paying taxes, making do, and getting by, how would that idealism fare when I had the opportunity to send a fresh soul into the community? If I prepared my child for the world that should be; you know that world where equal pay exists for equal work, and if one acts like a lady one is treated as such. Will the world that exists defeat her? This caused the odd situation that sometimes when I knew exactly what I was supposed to say as a parent, what I really wanted to say was something completely different.
Then in child-rearing, there’s that eternal letting go. From the time the doc cuts the cord to when you release the back of that two-wheel bicycle the first time to the moment you’re in the passenger seat and they’re behind the wheel, parents live through years of just waving bye.
And then it comes down to sex. If it’s not splashed across the headlines as some politician’s misbehavior, it spills out of a health class textbook where denial and death deal the facts. Someone may still dream about romance, but that first talk is always mechanics.
Idealism, driving and sex bumped together to make a story about a Mom who learns it’s okay to be her true self while she’s teaching her teenage daughter to drive, resist peer pressure and become her own best person.
Driver’s Ed is a three scene, one act play for four women.
We’re going for a ride.
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