Director Marie Raynard, of ProvPlayers at Providence College sent me a note about their production of The Four Hags of the Apocalypse Eat Salad at their General Meeting. I’m a huge fan of the ‘What if” question. For this play, my question was, if the Four Horsemen represent destructive forces, what might those destructive forces be for women and their bodies? So we have Starve, Devour, Purge, Image.
Marie wrote: “We have just completed our successful run which included four
showings of Four Hags. We performed to high school audiences primarily (grades 9-12), but one audience included adults (a church group). Over 400 students saw the show. The church we performed at was Mitchell Community Fellowship (Mitchell,MB). There were approximately 50 people in attendance, from toddler to retiree.
The high schools responded well to the piece (generally – in one interesting talk-back a student asked us “what was your business meeting about?”). The teachers loved it – they had lots of good questions /comments and told us that they plan to talk more with their students about it.
At the church, one man came to us afterwards, thanked us, and said that his daughter is currently struggling with anorexia. He expressed frustration as a parent with not knowing what to do, how to help. He said he was glad we were taking a play like this to high school students, but exhorted us to include a note of hope – these ideas and societal forces are strong, but not as strong as the human spirit.”
Thanks Marie for sharing!
