“Who’s the person in the mirror? I don’t know her name.
– Lourds Lane, “Fragmented”

I.

The best moment in Lourds Lane’s SuperYou, receiving its world premiere developmental production with Skylight Music Theatre as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, comes late (if you haven’t yet seen the show and are planning on doing so, you might want to stop reading here and return to this essay after you do; spoilers abound in what follows).

Katie White (the gloriously voiced Kennedy Caughell) has survived a litany of abuse and bullying as well as the tragic death of the older brother she’d idolized and a breakup with a loser boyfriend she’s far better without.

But it’s not clear whether she’ll also survive the self-doubt and accompanying depression that have scotched her promising career as a cartoonist while leaving her disconnected from her best self.

What saves Katie isn’t this production’s high-tech video board or flashing lights, often used to channel how social media facilitates teen bullying as well as our narcissistic obsession with being seen and “liked”; there’s a reason the U.S. Surgeon General just issued a damning indictment of the health hazards posed by social media, especially to young women.

What actually saves Katie is an extraordinarily moving moment in which she fully connects with her younger self, embodied by a heartbreaking Serena Parrish. “You are my superhero,” Parrish’s young Katie tells adult Katie, before the two of them move in for the sort of pinkie shake that little Katie had once shared with her big brother.

It’s a comparatively quiet moment – less Six and more Fun Home, another musical in which a misfit cartoonist looks back on a younger version of herself to discover who she is and how she got there. I’d love to see SuperYou add more dialed-down moments like this one as it undergoes additional revisions en route to London’s West End.

Such moments allow us to hear this musical’s passionately beating heart, reflecting Lane’s spot-on message about being true to yourself so that you can live your truth. And they give the extraordinary Caughell the room she needs to channel her inner Carole King – most beautiful after she learns to ignore the surrounding noise and weave her own distinctive tapestry.

That truth is about being a fully present, multidimensional human being, especially in an era when we’re continually being flattened and homogenized by our screens.

The posse of superheroes surrounding Katie don’t come to life, after all, when we see them on the Skylight video board as cartoons. They live for Katie and us when they step out of the screen and stride onto the stage as actual people, thereby underscoring what live theater can do in ways that other media cannot.

II.

During most of SuperYou, Katie’s struggle to see herself is embodied through thrillingly choreographed battles with Blake Zelesnikar’s Mi Roar, a homophone for the mirror in which Katie sees a monster rather than her true self (choreography as well as direction by JoAnn M. Hunter).

Watching Katie and Mi Roar duel on the Skylight stage, I was taken back to one of the first WPW shows I saw, in early March: Children’s Theater of Madison’s production of Erica Berman’s Finder and the North Star, in which another young girl’s journey toward herself involves the monster she sees – named Smidge in Finder – when she looks into the mirror.

Smidge tells young Finder that her wishes are laughable and she herself “unworthy” of achieving them because she’s “unlovable.” As with Katie, Finder moves on when she learns to see herself, shattering the glass that divides her in two so that she can dream and create a fully imagined and wholly integrated self.

In a cultural and historical moment reflecting a full-on assault against women and their autonomy, it’s no accident that Berman’s Finder and Lane’s SuperYou reflect each other as well as many other WPW shows we’ve seen during the past four months, each of them urging girls and women alike to recognize and own the superpower which is themselves.

In TNW Ensemble Theater’s production of Danielle Dresden’s A Woman Is . . ., one of three one-woman WPW shows, protagonist Kiki Moritsugu eventually breaks out of a framing mirror reflecting a larger-than-life mother as well as the male gaze, both of which have kept her from truly seeing herself.

In Black Arts MKE’s production of Cynthia Cobb, Parrish Collier and Sheri Williams Pannell’s Zuri’s Crown, a young woman must learn to own the untamed beauty that is her natural hair so that she can also embrace her inner truth.

In its wildly inventive Impossible Operas, Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Quasimondo Physical Theatre deconstructed traditional male views of the operatic canon, allowing the misunderstood heroines trapped within to emerge in full-throttled glory.

And in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Nicole Acosta’s Hoops, three global majority actors embody scores of global majority women, proudly reclaiming a cultural heritage through which they celebrate their beauty and share their story.

III.

Like SuperYou, Hoops drives home that in learning to love themselves, women are liberated to create new visions of the world, subverting male mythologies through radically different herstories.

Coming midway through the WPW festival, Forward Theater’s production of Lauren Gunderson’s Artemisia profiled a revolutionary artist offering female-centered versions of biblical stories, freeing Artemisia to also create self-portraits seeing full-bodied women as they actually are rather than as they’ve been distorted through idealized male fantasies.

One week after Artemisia closed in Madison, Milwaukee’s First Stage opened its production of Alice Austen’s The Gracious Sisters, in which a young heroine named Alice radically revises Sophocles’ Eumenides, criticizing sexist Greek gods while also taking shots at the Dobbs decision and non-disclosure agreements meant to silence harassment victims.

One week after The Gracious Sisters debuted in Milwaukee, Sturgeon Bay’s Third Avenue PlayWorks opened Jennifer Blackmer’s I Carry Your Heart With Me, in which a young stenographer reads between the lines to grasp the hidden meaning of both the Vietnam War and her own life, as a woman losing everything she’d been told she was so that she can find herself.

A similar reclamation of self and history takes place in Idris Goodwin’s adaptation of India Hill Brown’s The Forgotten Girl, which received a WPW reading at First Stage in March (it is slated for a full First Stage production come October).

Drawing parallels between the disappearance and death of one young girl in the past and the microaggressions through which a similarly aged girl is continually “forgotten” by white authority figures in the present, The Forgotten Girl dares to imagine a world in which global majority women need not work twice as hard to get half as far.

IV.

That struggle can leave one sick and tired of being sick and tired; taking on systemic oppression is hard and lonely work that risks distorting and curdling the rebelling self, fighting to be free in a world she never made.

That’s what happens to Margaret of Anjou, who travels one of the longest dramatic arcs of any woman in Shakespeare while being ground down by men resenting her intelligence and courage. Using a Marcella Kearns’ adaptation of Shakespeare that foregrounds Margaret, Illyria Productions gave us a reading measuring the price Margaret pays for standing up for herself.

Five days after watching Illyria’s Margaret in Madison, I watched a reading at Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point of Marcia Jablonski’s The Last Hotel, in which a woman who refuses to play by traditional rules as an artist later winds up on the streets, unhoused and mentally ill.

Watching both of these readings took me back to one of the early WPW plays that still haunts me: Renaissance Theaterworks’ production two months earlier of Kristin Idaszak’s Tidy, in which Cassandra Bissell embodied another artist – a writer, this time – trapped within an oppressive dystopian narrative leaving her little room to forge an alternative story.

“Bissell struck me as lonely, as well as very much alone,” I wrote in a prior WPW Backstage essay reflecting on Tidy. Maybe Bissell’s narrator is so lonely, I mused at the time, because she’s seemingly given up hope that the world grinding her down might ever be reborn and remade. Tired and broken, she just wants to find a way out, making her exit while she still can.

V.

“If we’re going to overcome the darkness lurking at the edge of town,” I mused in this same essay on Tidy, “we can’t go it alone. We need each other, and we need to work in tandem with the world of which we’re a part and which is changed by every action we take – or don’t take. In short, we need to write a collective story.”

That’s the lesson learned by Berman’s Finder, aided on her path by a guiding star as well as people inhabiting and reliving stories from Guatemala to Taiwan.

It’s the lesson learned by the two forlorn women in Milwaukee Rep’s production of Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers; while remembering where they’re from and who they once were, they expand their sense of who they are and might yet be, while morphing from uneasy strangers into new friends who realize they’re not alone if they have each other.

It’s the lesson learned by each of the three women in Hoops, who draw on cultural traditions – ranging from West Africa to Mexico and from Brooklyn to Los Angeles – as they dance their solidarity together.

Dancing together across time and space also unites the two pregnant teens in Strollers Theatre’s production of Sam D. White’s Hush the Waves, in which each teen helps her spiritual sister confront an uncertain future in which men are bullies, absent, or both.

And to return at close to where we began, Hunter’s stirring choreography in SuperYou allows Lane’s Katie White to connect with the superheroes who not only represent what’s best in herself, but also a reminder of how powerful sisterhood can be.

As Lane explained in a recent interview with Skylight, SuperYou was inspired by the “incredible women indie rock musicians and singers” in her band who together forged “a community of rock artists that celebrated women lifting other women.”

Playing together, Lane suggests, women can write new songs, allowing them to own their power and take control of their story.

Playing together, the woman who dreamed WPW into being (Forward Theater’s Jen Uphoff Gray) joined forces with WPW’s nearly all-female leadership team (Milwaukee Rep’s Laura Braza, Northern Sky’s Molly Rhode, Forward’s Julie Swenson, and freelance dramaturg Deanie Vallone), creating a festival ensuring that stories like SuperYou could enjoy a broader platform.

Playing together, numerous WPW productions featuring strong heroines have written a collective narrative underscoring that new work fosters new ways of seeing – in a world where Lane rightly recognizes that every woman is a superhero, shattering those mirrors telling them who they must be so that they might shine their own light in a darkening world.

Playing together, women are freed from the constricting circumstances of their specific time and place so that they might make common cause with the trailblazers who’ve gone before, while inspiring those women yet to be born.

Such a solidarity of women’s voices “must accumulate before a single one can speak,” writes Joanna Biggs in her just-published A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. Among the many enduring legacies of WPW, this solidarity among its many heroines – reminding each of them that they never walk alone – will rightly go down as one of its greatest.

With the exception of SuperYou, all of the productions mentioned in this essay have now closed. Performances of SuperYou continue through June 18, at Skylight Music Theatre, 158 N. Broadway in Milwaukee. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/superyou/.