I’m so happy to share that my play Little Heart is having her world premiere at the Jewel Theatre in Santa Cruz (opening January 27 , 2023) The cast is terrific, the director superb, and this professional Equity house has done a wonderful job. I conducted dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of primary research to create this play and am deeply gratified it has found such a supportive home to emerge in three dimensions. A bit more about the play:
Little Heart is based on the life of Corita Kent, a serigraph artist who gained international fame in the sixties. Her works grace the permanent collections of over 40 major museums including MOMA, the Met, the National Gallery, theVictoria and Albert in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
An artist of remarkable range, she created the largest single copyrighted artwork (the 150-foot tall Bostongas Tank outside Boston) and a tiny 2” x 3” image which became the most popular postage stamp in history: the “Love” stamp. Her flower- and-banner-filled celebrations prefigured the first Haight-Ashbury “Be-ins” by three years. Her most astonishing creation by far was her rich and turbulent life, which embodied both the aspirations and contradictions of the sixties.
This shy Immaculate Heart nun who taught elementary-school became a world-famous artist, a college teacher and department chair, an advisor to presidents and a creative voice for change within the Catholic church.
In Little Heart we see the cost. Corita and her fellow sisters battle arch-conservative Cardinal MacIntyre, first for their right to update religious life as mandated by Vatican II, then for their very survival as a religious order—making international headlines. But it is Corita’s private struggles—with fellow sisters, students, with her own feelings for a famous priest, and the torture of her spiritual doubt that convey the aching humanity of this fascinating, complex woman. The play is illuminated with projections of dozens of her brilliant, timely images.
