In a Sprawling Theater Project, 34 Playwrights Turn Democracy Into Drama

Heidi Schreck was about to perform her play What the Constitution Means to Me on Broadway one night when her mother called. Apparently the Tony‑nominated work—which examines gender bias in the Constitution through the stories of women in Schreck’s family—had overlooked an important historical figure: a hotel maid named Elsie Parrish. By then the show had been locked and was about to be filmed, but Parrish’s long fight for fairer wages stayed with Schreck and eventually became the basis for a new play, Searching for Elsie Parrish, which will be published this month in Women+ on the Edge of Democracy.

The anthology Women+ on the Edge of Democracy was commissioned by the Flynn, a performing arts center in Burlington, Vermont, in partnership with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It features pieces by playwrights from 42 states who responded to two prompts: What is the current state of democracy in America? What can history, global context, or futurism offer us in this pivotal moment?

Jay Wahl, the Flynn’s executive director, describes the anthology as a reaction to a particularly turbulent period in American political history. “I spent a long time teaching and thinking and producing all sorts of different performance work in public spaces and thinking about how performance can rewrite the cultural memory of a place,” he says. He envisioned an art project that took on “the negotiation of this public space known as democracy.”

When Wahl began reaching out to playwrights he wanted involved, he expected six or seven would agree. The final anthology includes 34 writers, among them Schreck, Tony nominee and two‑time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, Tony and Pulitzer nominee Sarah Ruhl, and two‑time National Endowment for the Arts fellow Migdalia Cruz.

Leslie Swackhamer, executive director of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, said, “It feels like we just touched a trigger point.” She added, “Women’s writing has had a big shift into fearlessness—embracing new forms. I think that writers of color just unleashed themselves. If I’m looking at them now, since when Trump was elected, you can see more political stuff. The bodies that are on stage are not what people are used to seeing—they’re aging, queer, nonbinary people. How these people support each other—that’s political.”

The decision to feature only women+ playwrights is itself political. Wahl said, “If you want to talk about democracy, I say, ‘Let’s start with women’s voices.’” He considers it “a privilege” to be “uplifting these women’s voices at a time when women’s voices are often unheard or silenced or intentionally left out in all sorts of ways.”

The release of Women+ follows All the Rage, a performance of works by more than 70 female and nonbinary writers responding to the Jeffrey Epstein files. Staged in June 2026 at an insurance building in London, All the Rage was coordinated by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who wrote the film She Said, and included image installations as well as performance art.

Lynn Nottage, whose work has long centered politics by exploring the struggles of working‑class characters, was a natural fit for the project. Her Tony‑nominated and Pulitzer Prize‑winning play Sweat, which chronicles the unraveling of the social fabric in Reading, Pennsylvania—one of the poorest cities in America—has often been credited with anticipating President Trump’s 2016 victory. Her Tony‑nominated play Clyde’s takes place in a sandwich shop staffed by formerly incarcerated people who discuss the challenges of reentering society and the workforce.

Nottage told Vogue, “I’m really in a place in my life right now where I feel a bit under siege, particularly as a Black woman, and so I really welcome the opportunity to be in conversation on a larger scale about this democracy that we’re living in.” She continued, “When I received this invitation to write a piece about women and democracy, I felt it was really aligned with many of the concerns I’ve had about the ways in which our democracy is eroding.”

Heidi Schreck said her motivation comes from the same impulse. “I think that’s why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Elsie Parrish,” she said. “It is, she feels, important to remember ‘that some of the biggest changes are made—particularly if you look at constitutional history—by people who simply decided to take action, who were