KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA
is In Collaboration with New Georges!
Kara wakes up to find her husband and children missing. Twenty-year-old Emma runs away with a married man. Barbara’s ex-lover breaks into her home in the middle of the night. And the pipes in Miranda’s house burst. KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA follows the journey of four women whose major life crises collide on Christmas Eve, leading them to accidentally help each other find a way out.
The Tank, a home for emerging artists
presents
KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA
by Ariel Stess
directed by Meghan Finn
with
Kallan Dana
Megan Emery Gaffney*
Paul Ketchum
Zoë Geltman
Colleen Werthmann*
Production Designer: Pete Betcher
Production Stage Manager: Carson Robles
Line Producer: Stephen Simalchik
KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA is presented In Collaboration with New Georges, an artist service program and active partnership with artists in which New Georges helps steward artist-driven independent productions of new works we love.
*These actors are appearing courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association. This production is an Equity approved showcase.
IN PROCESS Ariel Stess, responding to a question from a.m. New York: “Growing up, I was obsessed with the TV show Peep Show by Jesse Armstrong. It was about two hapless men in their twenties in London and the episodes are told through the internal monologues of these guys. We hear everything they’re thinking to themselves as they navigate dating, working, and (attempting) self-actualization.
A few years ago, I realized that the media I imbibed growing up, not just Peep Show, but so many of my favorite TV shows gave me access to a diversity of male characters’ perspectives. I feel I learned to see the world first through a male perspective, and secondly, through my own. So I realized I wanted to write a Peep Show but for women, and for the stage, where we see into the internal lives and worlds of funny, hapless women characters on stage. Where we get a glimpse of the good, the bad, and the ugly of what they go through in both mundane and high-stakes situations.
While working on this play, I was excited about creating a novel-play! I was thinking a lot about how intimate a novel can be and how distanced a play can feel. That is, when I’m reading a novel I’m in my bed, maybe I’m in my pajamas, quiet and sleepy, and what I’m reading can start to feel like it’s a part of me or it’s really touching on things deep within me — emotions, physical sensations, memories. When I’m watching a play, and especially since the pandemic, I feel very aware of how far away the actors are from me. And how much space there is between me and the characters in the play.
For this work, I wanted to experiment with making a play that attempts to create the same kind of intimacy one can feel with a novel, but between the audience and the story in a live theatre. I wanted to bring the experience of these women, what they feel in their bodies, how they look at the world, what they say to themselves in their head, what they mutter to themselves under their breath, closer to the audience. And see how a play can move us if it gets closer, while still remaining physically separated from us, as we are in our seats, and the play is on the stage.
I hope audiences take from this show a feeling of being seen, especially for women who may feel like certain parts of their lives or relationships are shameful and should be hidden. I want audiences to see that the women in the show save each other by opening up. And that no matter how excruciating it can be to show people your most vulnerable, most needy, most silenced parts, sharing those parts with one another brings each of us inner strength, power, and clarity.”
She also says: KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA is a play that investigates the male gaze and its impact on four generations of women. The play offers a rebuttal to the, often, reductive categories our American culture has historically attributed to women by giving the women in the play the power to narrate everything about their present-moment experience. In contrast, the men are only able to speak through dialogue. In making space for women to speak their inner experiences and have those experiences be unmediated by their male counterparts, the play attempts to undermine patterns of perception in terms of how we, as a culture, tend to hear stories about women and how we understand their agency. Power dynamics due to gender roles that are insidious and hard to pinpoint are isolated and emphasized through the narrative of the play.
MEET THE LEAD ARTISTS
Ariel Stess