Theatre Circle Event - Notes to the Forgotten She-Wolves @ The Globe Theatre

Who are the voices that should have been heard louder before now? What do we want to say to them?

This winter, The Globe invited 20 writers to remember, rediscover and bring out into the light women and non-binary people who have been undervalued or misrepresented by time, people on whom history has imposed a story that doesn’t adequately reflect who they were and how they lived.

For our Theatre Circle Evening, the monologues to be performed include a "letter to Grace Hopper" by Amy Ng ('YC '96 ),.  In 2017, after years of protest and activism, Yale University finally bowed to public pressure and announced that Calhoun College would be renamed Grace Hopper College. John C. Calhoun, former US Vice-President, white supremacist and one of the leading defenders of slavery, simply did not represent Yale’s ‘mission and values.’ Grace Hopper, on the other hand, a Yale Ph.D. from the thirties, and a leading computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the US Navy, was an inspiring female pioneer whose name would provide closure on Yale’s inglorious history of race and gender relations. But who was Grace Hopper? Does she exemplify Yale’s ‘mission and values’? Is renaming a college after her a genuine step forward for Yale, or ‘gyne-washing’ of the sins of the past? These are the questions posed in Amy's monologue/letter to Grace. 

Also on the programme for the evening are monologues from other female playwrights. Emma Frankland will perform her own piece, written in honour of an anonymous trans woman in the 1960s. Eve Leigh’s subject is Ed Gein’s mother, asking why we are so ready to mother-blame when it comes to the crimes of young men, and Stephanie Martin writes to the Bible’s Bathsheba, in a monologue that movingly restates the stakes of that story.

Following the performance, Amy will lead a Q&A for those who would like to discuss the questions posed in her piece.