THE LANGUAGE OF DOLLS

Our play is called THE LANGUAGE OF DOLLS.

We are three very old friends who met when we were young- as students and alumni of Antioch College. Two of us live now in New York City. One of us lives in Yellow Springs. We are close to one another and far away, the same and very different. 

We are one Black woman and two white. We’ve been asking how our own identities were formed and by whom.

In THE LANGUAGE OF DOLLS, we are three women in a cabin for a weekend away together, having conversations about our past and present, but also a possible future. Sometimes, there are no words, only the alchemy of our bodies moving together and apart in space, collectively and singularly. In the cabin we find things that are a kind of inheritance: dolls, books, pieces of clothing. We hear the sounds of loons, of the wind at night, and whispers of the ghosts that haunt us.

Peggy Pettitt writes and performs original plays rooted in the art of African American storytelling.  For 25 years she worked in collaboration with director, Rémy Tissier, to create ten full length plays for which she received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Fulbright fellowships.  She teaches Self-Scripting at New York University and currently performs her solo play, I EXIST-STORIES FOR BLACK LIVES, which explores the roots and impacts of racism on “everyone of every color.” 

Lizzie Olesker makes plays and performances that explore the interplay of history, personal memory and the unexpected poetry of everyday experience. She collaborated on the site-specific performance Every Fold Matters, a documentary theater piece presented in NYC’s neighborhood laundromats. THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018), a hybrid documentary film she co-­‐directed with Lynne Sachs that traveled to many festivals including Punto de Vista (Spain), Encuentros de Otro Cinema (Ecuador), Vancouver Film Festival, Chicago Underground Festival, Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley Art Museum, The National Art Gallery and BAM Cinema Festival. The script of Every Fold Matters and other writings inspired by the project will be in Hand Book: A Manual, forthcoming from punctum press. Lizzie teaches playwriting and documentary theater at Eugene Lang College at the New School and at New York University.

Louise Smith was Associate Professor of Theater and Performance at Antioch College from 1994-2008 and then again from 2014-2020. Her solo play DOROTHY LANE, directed by Lizzie Olesker, premiered at the Foundry Theater in 2018. She collaborated with Peggy Pettitt in 1988 to create PALAVER, a play about two friends in the era of South African apartheid. Louise continues to write and create her own solo plays and appear with the Talking Band in New York City.