Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artist Kate Hamill performs as Artemisia Gentileschi during a dress rehearsal of her play The Light and The Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi), which has its world premiere today in Bratton Theater.
In Chautauqua Theater Company’s world premiere production of Kate Hamill’s The Light and The Dark, the stage becomes a canvas — and a full portrait of the life of legendary Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi comes to life.
The play, starring Hamill as the celebrated 17th-century Italian female painter with Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll serving as director, captures how one revolutionary woman shattered stereotypes, amplified her voice through art and continues to resonate with modern audiences.
A sold-out public reading with CTC last summer led to a private reading in partnership with the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center last December in New York City. Now, as a finishing commission that closes the 2024 mainstage season, The Light and The Dark will travel to Primary Stages this winter.
It officially opens at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater.
As part of CTC’s partnership with The Drama League, the leading New York City-based theater development association and TheaterWorksUSA, FutureNow Directing Fellow Britt Berke serves as the associate director for The Light and The Dark, and said it is inspiring to see Hamill and Carroll’s visions for the play merge together.
“All of Kate’s plays do two things amazingly, which is to honor the original text and time period, but also play with anachronisms that make the play feel really startlingly relevant,” she said.
Hamill has adapted numerous classic works for contemporary stages, including Vanity Fair and Little Women, along with Dracula (a feminist revenge fantasy). She’s also put spins on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Pride and Prejudice, which CTC staged — also under Carroll’s direction — to open its 2023 mainstage season.
A native of Long Island who graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University, Berke has been involved in theater since the age of 4. As an artist who has always loved the process of rehearsing, she found herself wanting to be a part of the magic without being directly in the spotlight — naturally leading her to directing.
This season, she has been associate directing plays alongside Carroll, such as the first New Play Workshop, C.A. Johnson’s Tell Me You’re Dying, and she directed María Irene Fornés’ Springtime for A Night of One Acts earlier this month. The three Directing Fellows, Karl Michael Iglesias, Stefan Dezil and Berke, were each selected to be the associate director of a CTC mainstage production — and Berke said she feels privileged to collaborate on this world premiere.
When she first read the script, she felt drawn to the “contrasting trauma and comedy” of telling Artemisia’s story, and she said Hamill’s writing declares the leading character as an artist first and foremost — not as a victim of what she endured.
“It’s not about what happened to her; it’s about her actual being and autonomy, and that’s really amazing,” she said. “Historically, people see her as a woman that something bad happened to, and I think Kate has gone out of her way to make her a woman in her own right who is really brilliant, talented and strong.”
Gentileschi’s talent and art, which featured women from mythology and Biblical texts as individuals of courage and power, became overshadowed by the story of painter Agostino Tassi raping her in 1612 and the trial that followed. Hamill’s play strives to tell Artemisia’s life as a story of strength, and giving voice to women, past and present, who have felt silenced.
Berke sees her role as associate director as a “complement” to Carroll’s directing, and has spent much of the rehearsal process understanding Carroll’s directorial vision, diving into Gentileschi’s life and the Baroque era of the 1600s, and compiling research to help the cast and creative team’s understanding of the story.
Apart from Hamill’s extensive research about the time period and Artemisia, and dramaturg Kristin Leahey’s knowledge and collaboration to shape the play and characters, Carroll also spent time investing in the culture and characters — creating what Berke called a “trifecta” of knowledge to the show’s direction.
In the rehearsal room, Berke created a wall of information plastered with notes and drawings like 17th-century poems, paintings of the famous Baroque female painter and artists she was inspired by, and even sketches of Rome, which she said helped fuel creativity.
Getting to witness both Hamill and Carroll’s passion for telling the story has been motivating, she said, and so has watching the duality of Hamill’s roles of playwright and lead actor.
“It’s amazing watching Kate put on the playwright hat and put on the actor hat, and be able to operate through these two different personas,” Berke said. “She really knows when she needs to make a change that’s good for the play, and when she needs to make a change that helps her performance.”
In one of the most pivotal moments of The Light and The Dark, Artemisia recounts the trauma she experienced at the hands of Tassi and how it forever altered her as a person and artist. While the renowned artist has been historically remembered largely for this incident, the play allows Gentileschi to have full control over her story.
“The way it’s written gives Artemisia a lot of autonomy, because this is her narrative and her story,” Berke said. “It’s written in a way where she doesn’t have to relive the assault, which I think is the most important thing to (the audience) — that she doesn’t have to physically experience the horrors of being violated. Instead, she gets to actually speak directly to the audience about what it was like, about how it felt and how it changed her.”
With Brittany Vasta’s scenic designs and S. Katy Tucker’s projections, Berke said these elements help support and honor the character’s emotional journey.
As audiences travel through this tale of a trailblazing female painter and her path to finding her voice, Berke said she hopes they reflect on the continued efforts of women to feel seen and heard in society.
“I want people to feel empathy for artists and women who are fighting against society and the people around them,” she said. “I want people to feel inspired to fight really hard for what they love and believe in — that’s what Artemisia did.”
