Who: Jocelyn Kuritsky, Kate MacCluggage, Jake Hart, Colleen Werthmann, Cecil Baldwin, Carl Raymond
What: Special live radio play presentation of A Simple Herstory
Where: The Tank, 312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.; after-party at Torn Page, 435 West Twenty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: Sunday, June 7, radio play $28, 3:00, after-party free (suggested donation $13), 6:00
Why: In its award-winning inaugural season, actor, creator, producer, host/interviewer, and occasional designer Jocelyn Kuritsky’s audio fiction podcast, A Simple Herstory, explored the life and career of Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist who was the first woman to run for president, in 1872, representing the Equal Rights Party, battling incumbent commander in chief Ulysses S. Grant and newspaper editor and publisher Horace Greeley.
The upcoming second season turns its attention to Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith, who served in the House from 1940 to 1949 and in the Senate from 1949 to 1973. She ran for president in 1964 in the Republican primary, which was won by Barry Goldwater. Smith is most well remembered for her June 1, 1950, fifteen-minute speech delivered on the Senate floor that concluded with “A Declaration of Conscience,” a five-point message aimed at Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt but still rings true today. “It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom,” she said, supported by six other senators.
On June 7 at 3:00, a segment from season two of A Simple Herstory will be performed live at the Tank, featuring Kuritsky (Woodshed Collective), Kate MacCluggage (Left on Tenth), Jake Hart (Big George), Colleen Werthmann (Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play), and Cecil Baldwin (Welcome to Night Vale), directed by Meghan Finn (A Trojan Woman, Mahinerator) and written and developed by Jonathan A. Goldberg (Real Dead Ghosts, Deus Machina Ex or Eleanor Roosevelt vs. the God Machine). Don’t worry about the serious, and relevant, subject matter; Kuritsky promises “a fast, funny, inventive recounting of history that refracts the complexity and tension of politics through a live radio play experience.”
The show, being held in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tribeca Festival, will be followed by an after-party at Torn Page, where the creative team will discuss the project with moderator Carl Raymond, creator and host of the podcast The Gilded Gentleman.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]