Jenny S. Lee in The Silent Sky, at Central Square Theater (Photo: Central Square Theater)
Years ago, Chris Anderson observed that when cable television first arrived—disrupting the era of three networks—it unleashed a flood of banal, derivative programming. Yet only by passing through that unruly torrent did we arrive at transformative works like The Wire and The Sopranos. Innovation often begins in excess and mediocrity before recalibrating toward mastery. The pattern is archetypal: the glut of Victorian melodramas before Ibsen and Chekhov; the endless knockoffs of Abstract Expressionism before the true ruptures of Rauschenberg and Johns; Broadway’s commercial spectacles clearing space for Robert Wilson’s austerity or Suzan-Lori Parks’s ferocity. Thomas Kuhn described it as paradigm shift; Darwin saw it as evolution—variation, mostly maladaptive, until something enduring takes form. Culture metabolizes in just this way, across studios, rehearsal rooms, and canvases, as artists push into darkness until something wholly new emerges.
In a season when headlines announce renewed assaults on women’s rights and autonomy, Boston’s theaters are offering a quiet resistance: a stage filled with women’s stories. Four current productions—Lauren Gunderson’s Silent Sky at Central Square Theater, Joy Behar’s My First Ex-Husband at the Huntington/Calderwood, Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California at the Huntington, and Mfoniso Udofia’s The Ceremony presented by Chuang Stage at Boston University’s Booth Theatre—insist that women’s experiences, in all their contradictions, are central, not marginal.
Gunderson’s Silent Sky resurrects Henrietta Leavitt, the Harvard astronomer whose work made modern cosmology possible. Critics accuse Gunderson of softening her feminist edge with sentimentality, and this production is not immune—some dialogue drifts into cliché. Yet its value is undeniable: restoring visibility to a forgotten woman of science and making her struggles legible to a contemporary audience. (Leavitt is also the subject of local artist Anna Von Mertens’s recent book, Attention Is Discovery.)
Behar’s My First Ex-Husband is an oddity—a stand-up comic’s leap into playwriting. Its tart one-liners land, but the play itself feels more like a string of jokes than a fully realized drama. Still, its premise is rare: a woman of a certain age narrating marriage, divorce, and selfhood with unflinching wit. If it risks frivolity, it also makes space for a demographic often erased from theater.
Butterworth’s The Hills of California, though written by a man, centers on sisters revisiting old wounds in their mother’s home. The form is familiar—the family drama with a buried secret—but here men are marginal, and women’s interior lives claim the epic scale usually reserved for male stories. At times the male gaze shapes the narrative, aestheticizing trauma, but the production nonetheless insists that daughters and mothers deserve the gravity of myth.
Udofia’s The Ceremony is the most daring of the four. Rooted in Nigerian ritual and family tradition, it stages female identity at the crossroads of grief, heritage, and generational continuity. The work can be opaque, even unwieldy, but it burns with originality and ferocity. It reminds us that women’s stories are not monolithic: they can bear the weight of myth, ritual, and cultural transmission. The production also showcases the vigor of Chuang Stage, a pan-Asian company that pairs professional artistry with community engagement. Their “Pay-As-You-Are, Starting from $0” ticket model underscores their commitment to access and equity.
Taken together, these productions show what theater can do in dark times. Representation here is not tokenism but cultural survival. To watch Leavitt chart the stars, to hear Behar dissect divorce, to see Butterworth’s sisters wrestle with memory, to enter Udofia’s ceremonial world—each testifies that women’s lives are not secondary but essential to how we understand history, science, intimacy, ritual, and art.
At a moment when reactionary forces would narrow women’s possibilities, Boston’s stages are doing the opposite. The result is not just a season of female-centric stories but a reminder of theater’s purpose: to hold a mirror to lives that are flawed, brilliant, complicated, and necessary.