YELLOW WALLPAPER 2.0-2020 to Close Great Barrington Public Theater's Summer Season

Great Barrington Public Theater will wrap up their 2026 Summer Season with, Yellow Wallpaper 2.0-2020. This play takes us down the rabbit hole of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's profound short story The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1892, but re-imagined here in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An overwhelmed adjunct professor, newly a mother, struggles to make sense of their suddenly chaotic reality, her postpartum depression and the mysteries hidden inside their inherited "prewar-6” apartment on the Upper West Side.  With humor, social critique and the quivering bones of a horror story, Jennifer Maisel's wonderful play will sweep you down the rabbit hole with our heroine, T, and bring you face to face with her deep- 2020 dilemmas, passions and choices.

Director Judy Braha elaborates, “In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as an exposé from within an illness. She sought to reveal how the male medical establishment of the time was wrongly treating women suffering from Postpartum Depression for “Hysteria”. The result: erasing them as active, vital participants in the world. Gillman's short story was a personal quest to awaken society and subsequently fueled the first wave of feminism, fifty years later. Three more waves of Feminism later, Jennifer Maisel transposes this story into the early days of the Pandemic, a time where mothers were crashing and burning. 'Covid took a crowbar into gender gaps and pried them open,' said Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan. (NYT, 2/7/21)”.

Playwright Jennifer Maisel explains how she came to the story originally and how it transformed for her during the pandemic, “I was introduced to Charlotte Perkins Gilman – as many were – in a college women's studies class with her novel, Herland, but I soon found The Yellow Wallpaper on my own. Just a story, I thought, diving in, but its gloriously captivating structure lured me into the un-reality her protagonist faced with such mastery that at the end I had no idea how I got there. The turn of the century, a woman being treated for hysteria and postpartum depression with a rest cure that confined her to a room where the strangely patterned yellow wallpaper took on a life of its own. As her stay progresses, so does our woman's insanity, believing there is another woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper who must get out. I read it again and again.

When the pandemic hit, and the shelter-in-place orders went into effect, my mind kept returning to The Yellow Wallpaper. I dwelled on the unique situation women faced during COVID, when their emotional burdens and domestic workloads expanded exponentially, to the point of great distress. And T came to me - a mother living in 2020, in the middle of the shut-down, quarantined for COVID in one small room in her apartment with her demanding husband and toddler just outside the door.”

Yellow Wallpaper 2.0-2020 will be performed from August 20th-September 6th in Great Barrington Public's newly configured black box theater in the Great Hall at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, MA. Featuring Cloteal Horne as the play's heroine, T., and Matt Neely as her husband, John. There will be a series of 5 post-show conversations focused on subjects like mothering during the pandemic, Postpartum Depression, and the historic diagnosis of Hysteria as a woman's illness. Each will have a special guest speaker who is an expert in the subject of discussion. 

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