In their recent feature on Hindsight 2020, the Santa Cruz Sentinel describes the virtual production as “a virtual time capsule of last year – clearly a year that defies categorization.” Hindsight 2020, which runs online from April 9th-April 17th, is a co-production from Those Women Production, and our first venture working with co-collaborators Rebecca Haley Clark and Cree Noble.

Due to its virtual format, Hindsight 2020 was able to feature artists from across the globe, who used their experience of 2020 to create unique performance pieces spanning a variety of disciplines. As Joanne Engelhardt writes, “Clark explains that 2020’s global pandemic, as well as the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, the economic downturn, wildfires, and social and political unrest all combined to form the catalyst for the creation of this production.”

“‘As artists we wanted to provide a space for contemplation and healing, and we realized it could be found by repeating the stories we’ve been telling one another over the past year.'”

-Rebecca Haley Clark, from Joanne Engelhartd’s piece in the Santa Cruz Sentinel

“Some of those stories are major and traumatic like isolation, the economic crisis, the U.S. election, and the advent of the vaccine. Others are small, yet they, too, have meaning: Learning to make a sourdough starter, plant parenting, discovering how to look and speak on a Zoom call.”

-Joanne Engelhartd, the Santa Cruz Sentinel

Our co-producers for Hindsight 2020, Rebecca Haley Clark and Cree Noble appeared on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show on April 7th to promote this virtual production, which airs only from April 9th-April 17th. Wanda’s Picks is a Black arts and culture site, “exploring the African Diaspora via the writing, performance, both musical and theatrical (film and stage), as well as the visual arts of Africans in the Diaspora and those influenced by these aesthetic forms of expression.” Host Wanda Sabir writes of the show, “It is my claim that the artists are the true revolutionaries, their work honest and filled with raw unedited passion.”

To listen to the segment on Hindsight 2020, please go to the 1hr35min mark of the recording.

“It was really important for us to include some part of reflection, and not prescribe for people what they took away from it…but also looking back to the past to see how other generations have dealt with major health crises like these.”

-Rebecca Haley Clark, on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show

In 48 Hills‘s feature on Hindsight 2020, Emily Wilson describes Those Women Productions’ latest virtual co-production as “a ‘devised multimedia time capsule’ [that] addresses what we’ll take with us from all of this.” This show, which runs online from April 9th-April 17th, is in partnership with co-collaborators Rebecca Haley Clark and Cree Noble. Clark and Noble approached the show with goal of reflecting on the year of 2020 – which included the start of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires in California and abroad, and protests around the world in solidarity with Black Lives Matter – and, ultimately, answering the question “What parts of 2020 will you leave behind or bring with you?”

With assistant director Cree Noble, Clark put together a list of prompts as the basis for show including: How did you find joy in 2020? What would like to leave behind? What would you tell someone from a different generation about this time?

-Emily Wilson, 48 Hills

In their “Focus on Theater” coverage of Hindsight 2020, East Bay Express writer Janis Hashe comments, “Except for the very young, no one who lived through 2020 is likely to forget it.” She describes the show, a co-production by Those Women Productions and collaborators Rebecca Haley Clark and Cree Noble that reflects on the titular “‘year that defies all categorization.'” In its final format, Hindsight 2020 is a virtual, hybrid piece including pre-recorded segments, featuring artists from all over the globe performing in disciplines that include, but also go beyond traditional theater.

“‘As I started to bring more people into the piece—diverse, international voices—they reflected on their own experiences of 2020,’ Clark said. Those experiences included the more than 60 countries’ protests in support of BLM, the pandemic, economic crises, wildfires and a hugely consequential election.”

– Janis Hashe, East Bay Express

“Hindsight 2020 audiences can take away the message ‘not to give up hope,’ Clark said. ‘And to be open to the possibility that a new world is on the horizon. We are just starting the journey.'”

-Janis Hashe, East Bay Express

In Theatrius‘s review of “The Lady Scribblers,” writer Lynne Stevens notes, “My friend and I thoroughly enjoyed “The Lady Scribblers” and I think any woman who has felt inhibited in her work will enjoy the comedy, too.”

The review praises the Neo-Restoration farce, co-produced by Custom Made Theatre Company and Those Women Productions, for its ability to seamlessly capture the conventions of the genre, and its fitting jabs “at the expense of over-bearing theater owners and vacillating men in power.”

“The Lady Scribblers,” directed by Tracy Ward and written by Berkeley playwright Michaela Goldhaber, made its world premiere at Custom Made Theatre Company in SF and enjoyed a successful partial March 2020 run, prior to a forced closure due to COVID-19. The comedy tells the story of Catherine Trotters, Delarivier “Delia” Manley, and Mary Pix, three aspiring female playwrights in late 17th century England who continue the legacy of Aphra Behn – their country’s first working female playwright – following her death. As they work to ensure their own plays reach the stage, they’re joined by a group of disgruntled actors, and together the group hatches a plot to combat the overblown, spectacle-based United Company theatre group, led by the domineering Christopher Rich.

“The Lady Scribblers” by Michaela Goldhaber, directed by Tracy Ward, by The Custom Made Theatre, co-produced with Those Women Productions, San Francisco, through Sunday, March 29, 2020.  Info: custommade.org

Cast:  Annika Bergman, Emma Curtin, Valerie Fachman, Michael Houston, Oluchi Nwokocha, Dave Sikula, Emily Stone, J.J. Van Name, and Ted Zoldan.

Read the full review here.

In their preview of “The Lady Scribblers,” The Mercury News notes its significance in exploring the legacy of England’s first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn, and the women who continued her legacy as playwrights in the male-dominated London theatre scene. With a world premiere of March 2020, this Restoration-era comedy is our most recent full production to debut pre-COVID-19, and our first co-production with San Francisco-based Custom Made Theatre Company.

“Aphra Behn was famously the first woman to earn a living as a playwright in England, starting in 1670, just 10 years after women were first allowed to act on-stage in that country. But who would even be allowed to follow in her footsteps?

Local playwright Michaela Goldhaber explores that very question in “The Lady Scribblers,”  her new farce making its premiere at San Francisco’s Custom Made Theatre Co. in a co-production with Berkeley’s Those Women Productions.

A fight breaks out at Behn’s funeral in 1689 among other aspiring women playwrights and producers who have had quite enough of these newfangled new voices and want to stick to the gents from here on out.”

Directed by Tracy Ward and written by Michaela Goldhaber, “The Lady Scribblers” had a successful partial run at Custom Made, before being forced to close early due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Read the full preview here.

Lily Janiak cites Witch Hunt as a production that changed Bay Area theatre in 2019, listed alongside shows from companies including Berkeley Rep, Shotgun Players, and San Francisco Playhouse.

The article describes Witch Hunt as part of a conscious shift in Bay Area productions’ approach to historical narratives. Numerous companies, including Those Women Productions reckoned with history’s tendency to be dictated solely by those in power, instead focusing on the historical perspectives that have, as a result, been erased.

“The way we perceive ourselves and others in the world comes in large part from the histories we’ve absorbed, but history’s victors have traditionally shaped those stories to justify their positions. Local theater this year has worked to right that imbalance, mapping the obscure and putting the marginalized at the center of historical narratives.”

“In Those Women Productions’ “Witch Hunt,” the white girls and women of the Salem witch trials took a backseat to Tituba, the Native American woman who was the first accused of witchcraft. A mother to a hero became the protagonist in “Mother of the Maid,” at Marin Theatre Company, and Asian and Asian American stories got told from within in Magic Theatre’s “The Chinese Lady,” and the Marsh’s “The Box Without a Bottom,” instead of from a white gaze, with its tendency to whitewash or exoticize.”

Read the complete story: Moments that defined Bay Area theater in 2019

Lily Janiak spoke with the team of Witch Hunt, including director Elizabeth Vega, playwright Carol S. Lashof, and actor Renee Rogoff for a Datebook feature in the SF Chronicle.

In the article, Lashof describes how the most well-known fictional account of the Salem witch panic, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, served as a “‘source of provocation'” rather than inspiration for Witch Hunt, which explores that same era in American history. Through research, Lashof learned that Miller’s classic admonishment of the McCarthy era grossly misrepresented many of its female characters. From there, she was inspired to tell the story of one of these real-life figures in our nation’s history: Tituba, an Indigenous woman from South America and slave to the Parrish family, who provided the first false confession to witchcraft. Further, Witch Hunt reveals additional layers to the era as one defined by the Purtian community’s rampant distrust and fear of Indians – putting people like Tituba and her husband John at increased risk for persecution and scapegoating.

In bringing Tituba’s story to the stage through Witch Hunt, Lashof, Vega, and Rogoff felt a special responsibility to present her life in a respectful and honest way, as past accounts have consistently failed to do so. For many Americans, the only knowledge they have of Tituba is from The Crucible, which portrays her, as Vega states, as a “‘1950s mammy'” who practiced black magic and intentionally led Puritan girls astray. Instead, “‘Witch Hunt’ gives Tituba hopes and fears, virtues and flaws. It gives her goals, and it makes her strategic in pursuit of them. In short, it makes Tituba a person,” writes Janiak.

Those Women are in the press! Theatrius reviewed Those Women Production’s latest fully staged show, the new drama Witch Hunt, which focuses on the origins and untold stories behind the Salem witch panic.

“The question of how to tell an unrecorded story plagues artists and historians alike. At Salem’s notorious trials, Tituba was the first to confess to practicing witchcraft—but we know little else about her. In Arthur Miller’s classic “The Crucible,” she appears as a victim of the pilgrims’ manipulation, but Lashof portrays her as the master of her own fate.” – Fritz Mad’Laine, Theatrius

“For decades, Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ has defined the Salem Witch Trials. Miller’s 50s play uses accusations of “witchcraft” to fight McCarthyism. But Miller centers his story on John Proctor, a wealthy white landowner. In ‘Witch Hunt,’ Carol Lashof smartly focuses on the actual victims: women, particularly indigenous women.” – Jordan Freed, Theatrius