Women on the Edge of Democracy

Women on the Edge of Democracy comes to the High Low Reading Room in Grand Center, where five St. Louis theater companies are teaming up for a night of short plays about the state of U.S. democracy. It's a script-in-hand reading, so the local actors will be reading from the page rather than performing fully staged pieces, and the evening includes discussion and socializing afterward.

The five female-led companies involved are That Uppity Theatre Company, A Call to Conscience, Bread and Roses Missouri, Moonstone Theatre Company, and Subversive Theatricals. Together they've put together a program of ten-minute plays, all written by women, centered on the current state of American democracy. The plays are drawn from a pool of 34 works newly written for the project by women and non-binary writers, many of whom have won or been finalists for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

This is part of a much larger picture. Women on the Edge of Democracy is a nationwide initiative commissioned by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in partnership with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which invited communities across the country and beyond to stage short plays about democracy ahead of the midterms. The hub event took place in Burlington, Vermont, on October 24, where all 34 commissioned plays and monologues were performed together in a single day. Similar events have since been staged in 40 states, as well as in Canada, Scotland, and Australia.

In St. Louis, the five companies are taking a selection of those scripts and bringing them to the High Low Reading Room. It's free to attend, and the night is built around the readings, the conversation that follows, and the chance to hang out with the people who put it together.