NEW YORK – The inspiration for Kate Hamill’s latest play came from across centuries and the planet.
The actor-playwright was honeymooning in Italy in 2020 when she walked into the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and spotted a painting by pioneering Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi created around 1620. The art immediately stirred more art.
“I was standing in front of this painting, just like crying and shaking for like 20 minutes. And then I was like, ‘I’m going to write a play about this woman,’” she says.
The result is “The Light and the Dark” — a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theatres — which looks at the hard but inspiring life of Gentileschi, who created bold works despite a society keen on keeping her down. Hamill calls the play a “feminist primal scream.”
“I am disheartened by how extremely relevant this play is right now,” Hamill says. “Much of the same things that Artemisia Gentileschi was dealing with then are still true now.”
A symbol for courageous women
Gentileschi rebelled against the male-dominated art world — even using herself as a nude model — and has lately become a symbol of courageous women for testifying in court, even while being tortured, against a prominent painter who raped her. “Please don’t let her give up — she is a survivor,” Hamill writes in the play’s notes.
Hamill — consistently among the most produced playwrights in America — not only wrote the work, but she also stars as Gentileschi, nightly reliving the traumas and the betrayals but also the triumphs of her sister-in-art.
“It was important to me as a female artist to put my own body in the line of the service of a female artist who used the power of her body to say something,” she says.
“I felt like if what I need to do to get survivors’ stories heard is take off all my clothes and scream in the middle of off-Broadway, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Painting of Judith influences play’s final speech
The painting in Italy that stirred so much in Hamill was Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, which depicts the Biblical story of Judith, who saved her people by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes.
It came at a time when Hamill was disheartened by #MeToo stories at home and wondered how — or even if — she could continue as a feminist playwright.
“I swear to you, I felt this woman reach through time and reach into that room and slap me up across the face and go ‘Snap out of it! You have a voice. You have privilege. You’re going to let those guys beat you? Get louder, get bolder!’”
Hamill’s husband, actor-director Jason O’Connell, recalls seeing her transfixed in front of the painting. “It was like she was seized,” he says, adding that her stillness and the light on her face made her look like a painting herself. “I just watched her commune with it for a while and it was very moving.” (Hamill soon ordered more than a dozen books about Gentileschi that were waiting for her on her return home.)
The painting depicts Gentileschi and her maid plunging a sword into their enemy, inspiring the play’s final powerful speech: “Every daughter of mothers who ever sees this work/Will know she is not alone/She will see what it means/To survive, despite the hands at your throat.”
The play has plenty of signature Hamill touches — strong women, humor and an encouragement to mix in modern elements despite whatever period the play is set. “The Light and the Dark” has actors in jeans beneath Renaissance silhouettes, and Hamill kept her piercings in.
“We wanted it to feel like we are gesturing at a time that is both back then and now, because I’m going to argue all of this story could happen now,” she says.
Envisioning a more egalitarian future
Hamill has built a reputation as a foremost adapter of novels to the stage, including dust-blowing-off versions of “Vanity Fair,” “Mansfield Park,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Little Women” and “Pride and Prejudice.” In her “Sense and Sensibility,” she added a Greek chorus of gossips to represent social pressures.
“I come at adaptation from a sort of a new play lens,” she says. “So, I think of it as a collaboration between myself and an author who’s often currently dead. So, in a way, it’s sort of the same muscle.”
O’Connell, who often acts alongside his wife, has two roles in the new play — an art appraiser who testifies against Gentileschi and a court officer who tortures her. “I betray her two different ways in one scene,” he says, turning to his wife: “The play is just so her. Her voice is so strong.”
Hamill says she is tapping into the same thing Gentileschi tapped into — extreme dissatisfaction with how the world is and this feeling that the world could be different.
“Feminist stories are about envisioning a future that’s more egalitarian for women and men and people who do not identify on that binary. I think there is a healthy proportion of people who really want to live in that world or who want to see the ways in which our current world is not like that world.”