PORT TOWNSEND — A cadre of local women plus a guest are poised to meet for a night of propaganda and satire, all in the name of women’s suffrage.
This Monday is the 99th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment ensuring female U.S. citizens the right to vote.
It’s also the night Key City Public Theatre will stage “Marching to Victory,” a dramatic program at the Key City Playhouse, 419 Washington St.
Seattle performer Barbara Callander and Port Townsend actors Heather Dudley-Nollette, Amanda Steurer-Zamora, Bry Kifolo and Christa Holbrook will appear in the 7 p.m. show.
Advance tickets are $20 — $12 for students — or patrons can arrive at the playhouse 30 minutes before curtain time to pay what they wish for any remaining seats.
To purchase tickets online, visit keycitypublic theatre.org or phone 360-385-5278.
“Marching to Victory” is composed of women’s voices from the long struggle for the right to vote. There were women opposed to this constitutional change, and theatergoers will hear from them along with the suffragettes.
The evening, a mix of short propaganda plays from the early women’s rights movement, includes Callander’s performance of the satirical “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue” written by Marie Jenney Howe in 1913.
“This mock speech ridicules the ‘anti’s’ by repeating their arguments,” said Denise Winter, Key City’s artistic director. It goes into “the woman question” and the terrible disasters Howe believed would befall the country if women became voters.
In her portrayal, Callander “is serious and hilarious,” Winter said.
Callander, a nationally known actor, has created and toured plays about the women’s suffrage movement across and beyond the Pacific Northwest.
On the 19th Amendment’s 75th anniversary, she organized a multicultural festival for which she received a Write Women Back Into History Award from the National Women’s History Project.
This past May, Callander appeared at the grand opening of “Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote,” a new exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. In it, she portrayed Emma Smith DeVoe, who led the fight for the vote in Washington state and continued to work for nationwide women’s suffrage.
The single performance of “Marching to Victory” is an addition to Key City Public Theatre’s 2019 season, which includes the Shakespeare in the Park production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
Performances of the Shakespeare comedy, which Winter has set in the present day, are in Chetzemoka Park, 900 Jackson St.
Show time is 6 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday through this Sunday.
Admission is pay-what-you-wish at the gate while advance tickets and information are available at keycitypublictheatre.org.
