Kate Hamill delivers a 'feminist primal scream' with her new play 'The Light and the Dark'
Entertainment
I’m going to write a play about this woman,’” she says.
NEW YORK (AP) — The inspiration for Kate Hamill’s latest play came from across centuries and the planet.
The actor-playwright was honeymooning in Italy in 2020 when she walked into the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and spotted a painting by pioneering Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi created around 1620. The art immediately stirred more art.
“I was standing in front of this painting, just like crying and shaking for like 20 minutes. And then I was like, ‘I’m going to write a play about this woman,’” she says.
The result is “The Light and the Dark” — a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theatres — which looks at the hard but inspiring life of Gentileschi, who created bold works despite a society keen on keeping her down. Hamill calls the play a “feminist primal scream.”
“I am disheartened by how extremely relevant this play is right now,” Hamill says. “Much of the same things that Artemisia Gentileschi was dealing with then are still true now.”
A symbol for courageous women
Gentileschi rebelled against the male-dominated art world — even using herself as a nude model — and has lately become a symbol of courageous women for testifying in court, even while being tortured, against a prominent painter who raped her. “Please don’t let her give up — she is a survivor,” Hamill writes in the play’s notes.
Hamill — consistently among the most produced playwrights in America — not only wrote the work, but she also stars as Gentileschi, nightly reliving the traumas and the betrayals but also the triumphs of her sister-in-art.
“It was important to me as a female artist to put my own body in the line of the service of a female artist who used the power of her body to say something,” she says.
“I felt like if what I need to do to get survivors’ stories heard is take off all my clothes and scream in the middle of off-Broadway, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Painting of Judith influences play’s final speech
The painting in Italy that stirred so much in Hamill was Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, which depicts the Biblical story of Judith, who saved her people by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes.
It came at a time when Hamill was disheartened by #MeToo stories at home and wondered how — or even if — she could continue as a feminist playwright.
“I swear to you, I felt this woman reach through time and reach into that room and slap me up across the face and go ‘Snap out of it! You have a voice. You have privilege. You’re going to let those guys beat you? Get louder, get bolder!’”
