Playwright Anna Ziegler, top left, talks with actors from Chautauqua Theater Company during a table read of the New Play Workshop Celebrating Sixty-Five Years of the Ladies Journal of Cambridge, Massachusetts! Wednesday in the Jane A. Gross Opera Center.
Throughout American history, magazines have served as an outlet for women to connect and cultivate a sense of community, and award-winning playwright and screenwriter Anna Ziegler is highlighting that with Celebrating Sixty-Five Years of the Ladies Journal of Cambridge, Massachusetts!
Ziegler, left, and director David Auburn discuss a scene during a table read of Celebrating Sixty-Five Years of the Ladies Journal of Cambridge, Massachusetts!
The second New Play Workshop of Chautauqua Theater Company’s season, supported by the Roe Green Foundation, Ladies Journal traces the evolution of a women’s magazine across three time periods. The NPW will have performances at 7:30 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater with more performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Beginning in the 1950s, four faculty wives, all in different stages of their lives, share feelings of social isolation and “professional dissatisfaction.” Forging their own bond, they launch a women’s magazine to amplify their voices.
As time flashes by into the 1970s, the same actors portray the women’s husbands, gender-bending to embody and present a flipped perspective. When the show marches into the present, four women — feeling confined to their office — navigate working for an online magazine on the brink of collapse.
“This is a fun play to work on because all the characters are very different from me,” Ziegler said. “They’re all, in some ways, defined by the time and place in which they live, and it was especially fun to write the male professors that I knew would be embodied by female actors.”
This is Ziegler’s third play to be performed at Chautauqua; her works Variations on a Theme and An Incident were NPWs in 2008 and 2010, respectively.
Her idea for Ladies Journal was sparked while working on two different plays — one about the downfall of a local newspaper in Wisconsin and the other about “dissatisfied faculty wives” at Harvard in the 1950s.
“Eventually, I fused the two stories and came up with this idea of a ladies’ journal as a way to connect the stories and carry us through time,” she said.
Commissioned by the Geffen Playhouse, Ladies Journal was originally created in 2018. Ziegler said it was less inspired by particular women’s magazines, and more influenced by the idea of women aching for feelings of belonging.
“Magazines were one way that women could reach out into the void and feel less alone,” she said. “I think the magazine stands in for that need for community and to find like-minded people who are going through similar things”
Playwright David Auburn, whose play Proof won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is directing this NPW. He and Zielger have collaborated before, and he said he’s long admired her work.
As both a playwright and a director, he said a director’s job is to know the playwright’s intention and help signal that message to the audience.
“You try to understand, interpret and serve the playwright’s vision for what’s happening and to communicate that to the actors and, ultimately, communicate to the audience,” he said. “It’s always about serving the playwright’s text as best as you understand it.”
When he first read Ziegler’s play, her funny and “witty” style immediately jumped out at him, and he said his directorial vision is based heavily on the importance of verbal communication and language.
“She uses the magazine and the evolution and the birth, growth, and ultimately the death of the magazine as a way to trace conversations about being a woman in America, about feminism, about marriages and about relationships between the sexes,” he said.
As Chautauquans experience a time-traveling journey of highs and lows across a multigenerational arc, Ziegler hopes they understand that setbacks throughout history are normal — and they’re a reminder to always keep going.
“No matter how much progress we make in feminism or any social issue, there will always be steps back because we’re flawed human beings, so we always need to start again and create more connection and more community,” Ziegler said. “That need never stops.”
