Monthly Archives: November 2019

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A clash of titans— Hawking versus Frost in FALLEN WOMEN

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Categories: character, fallen women, Tags: ,

A major feature of the new Mrs. Hawking play Fallen Women will be the chance to see our hero verbally spar with Mrs. Frost, her greatest foe and childhood friend. In a way this has been a long time in coming. We saw the two of them interact in their youth in Singapore in the flashback sections of Gilded Cages, and the course of the subsequent story Mrs. Frost was all about their adult clashing. But through all that conflict, they remained at a distance, scheming and striking at one another, but without much actual personal interaction.

But since the core of their narrative is that they are enemies who used to be friends, I feel like there is a need to see them interact as adults. There are years of history, whole narratives worth of conflict and betrayal, of which we want to see the fallout. Not to mention the fact that they’ve been established as two brilliant, powerful women, each with their own damage, who are some of the only true rivals and equals they will ever have. So their scenes must be crackling, a clashing of towering intellects and ferocious egos, who are as drawn to each other as much as they are at odds.

A clear frame of reference for the interaction between them is Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, which is useful for quickly getting the audience up to speed. But the nuance for us is the longstanding relationship between them, going all the way back to the childhood. Young Victoria loved her as a sister and respected her intelligence, but always discounted her until she saw, all those years later, just what she was capable of. Frost went from being Hawking’s governess to clawing her way up the social ladder, but the tension of their different class origins has never totally gone away. And of course, there is the lingering resentment of betrayal, of the pain of having the fight to destroy someone you once considered family. This is a recurring theme of the second Hawking trilogy— that you can only be betrayed by a friend.

Our brilliant actresses, Cari Keebaugh as Mrs. Hawking and Arielle Kaplan as Mrs. Frost, bring so much complexity and humanity to these roles, and it is up to them to make you believe in this complicated, dangerous relationship. If we do this right, I think their scenes together, where these two titans finally clash in person, will be like the last creamy sip of the milkshake of this new show.

You’ll have to see it to get a taste.

Catch Mrs. Hawking in MRS. FROST and the all-new FALLEN WOMEN this January at Arisia 2020 in Boston, MA

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FALLEN WOMEN is chickens coming home to roost

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Categories: development, fallen women, themes, Tags: ,

In the writing process for the new Mrs. Hawking show Fallen Women, I joke as we were struggling to settle on a title that it’s The One Where the Chickens Come Home to Roost.

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Mrs. Hawking’s is a story we’ve been telling for a number of years now, and in that time our heroes have been dealing with all kinds of struggles, both plot- and character-driven, both internal and external. Like real people, they have worked to find ways to get along with one another even throughout some fairly serious conflicts. But unresolved tensions can build up over the course of years, and we’ve put these folks through the ringer in the last few. With Fallen Women, I wanted to show real consequences to those experiences, to the story, the characters, and their relationships. Because these experiences mattered, it means our heroes cannot go on unchanged.

Consequences, I would argue, are the essence of drama. When the characters’ choices and actions have profound impacts, that gives them a weight and significance to the storytelling. It can be scary, committing to a major shifting of your narrative’s status quo. A challenge built into serialized storytelling is to establish something of a dynamic equilibrium, where you maintain the premise that draws people to the story in the first place while still allowing the characters real growth and change over time. I think there can be a fear of changing anything too much, for fear of losing the good things about your story. But without it, the narrative stagnates and the events lose significance instead.

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So Fallen Women is all about these long-in-coming consequences. The lingering effects of trauma. The strain put on relationships. The explosion of problems left unresolved for way too long. They weren’t always easy to write about. We’ve come to love these characters over the years, and it can be hard to put them through things this difficult. But we believe the meaning of their stories will be greater if the consequences they go through have serious, lasting impact on their lives— even when those impacts are sad ones.

Catch Mrs. Hawking in MRS. FROST and the all-new FALLEN WOMEN this January at Arisia 2020 in Boston, MA