The cast of Hilary Bettis’ falcon girls runs through a scene during rehearsal Thursday in Turner Community Center. The play will be performed as a staged reading at 7:30 p.m. tonight and 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Bratton Theater.
In the last New Play Workshop of the season, Chautauqua Theater Company is bringing Hilary Bettis’ true story full of family, friendships and horses to the stage.
A playwright, TV writer and filmmaker, Bettis has produced plays across the United States and in Mexico. In 2019, she won the Writers Guild of America Award for her work on the Emmy Award-winning FX series “The Americans,” and she has also written for the Emmy-nominated Hulu miniseries “The Dropout.”
In falcon girls, she tells the story of her life growing up in Falcon, Colorado, during the 1990s, her teenage group of friends, and how the girls’ experiences on the National FFA Organization horse judging team at their school — and their love of horses — changed the course of their lives.
For two days only, the new play will be performed as a staged reading at 7:30 p.m. tonight and 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Bratton Theater. Following the Chautauqua workshop, supported by the Roe Green Foundation, Bettis will mount the show as a full production during its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in the fall.
“I always love a play that takes you into a world you know nothing about and lets you spend time there, and this certainly does that with horse judging,” said Liz Frankel, the play’s dramaturg.
Frankel holds a B.A. in performing arts and English from Colby College in Maine. When she moved to New York after college and began pursuing journalism, she wanted to become a theater journalist — until discovering she wanted to be more involved in the art form altogether.
Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artists Jacqui Guillen, left, and Mia Sinclair Jenness perform a scene during the rehearsal.
After working in commercial theater and serving as the literary manager at The Public Theater for nine years, she moved to Houston in 2015 to serve as the director of new work at Alley Theatre. There, she discovered Bettis’ play, Queen of Basel, and featured it in the Alley All New Festival in 2018.
The theater also produced a workshop of Bettis’s 72 Miles to Go… the following year, and in June 2023, it staged a four-week workshop of falcon girls, then called Untitled Horse Play.
Alley is where Frankel met Lily Wolff, who serves as director of CTC’s staged reading, and hired her as the theater’s literary manager. A Texas-based, British-American director, producer and dramaturg, Wolff declared herself a “new play fangirl” after receiving her master’s degree from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
As a director, she said it’s vital to take care of a play in the growth process while leading the cast and creative team. In most productions, she said she is mostly worried about meeting the needs of actors and the creative team to help its storytelling; for falcon girls, her first priority is Bettis and making sure her needs are met during the workshopping stage of the play’s lifespan.
“We’re working on a very compressed timeline, so it’s incredibly helpful having her in the room to get us where we need to be by the end of our week together for this really quite large, epic play,” Wolff said.
When she first read the script, she said she was captivated by how Bettis’ writing captured the girls’ strong bond with the horses they interacted with on their team.
“(The horses) are almost like these mythical creatures that capture this freedom (the teenagers) long for in their lives that they don’t have,” she said. “I really connect with this idea of animals and the symbolic nature of horses as the girls relate to them.”
Frankel said the role of a dramaturg for any new play is to reflect the writing and storytelling in the script back to the playwright and make sure it matches with their goals. After talking through scenes and dialogue with playwrights, she said it makes it easier for a playwright to make revisions, catch inconsistencies in scripts and evaluate the tone or emotionality.
“I’m not trying to think about what the play could be if I wrote it as much as thinking about what the playwright is trying to do, if the play is doing that and if the audience is going to follow,” she said.
Because of the shortened rehearsal period, she created a dramaturgy packet for the actors with background information for the show, including a glossary of horse-related terms, to help the cast feel better-equipped to tell the story.
As Chautauquans experience the final New Play Workshop of the season, Wolff said she hopes audiences feel “seen” in Bettis’ personal story, and that they embrace themselves — and each other — for who they are.
“The gift theater gives people in its most successful version of itself is that it can make people feel seen,” she said. “Of course, it can open your mind to new experiences, but it can also make you feel seen in ways you didn’t even realize you needed to be seen.”
