Abstract
Brendan Pelsue’s Wellesley Girl, which premiered in the midst of the 2016 U. S. Presidential election, depicts American democracy – as an institution, a mythology, and a practice – as a fundamentally flawed utopian framework that is susceptible to dystopian failure. In this post-apocalyptic community in which every adult is a member of Congress, it becomes clear that American democracy was systematically designed to exclude emotional reasoning – with a few notable, destructive, exceptions – and it therefore enforces performances of reason that tend to exclude women and produce a cognitive dissonance between politics and reality. Wellesley Girl merges its audience’s present with a recognizable dystopian future and implicates them in the decision-making processes of that future in order to render visible the real world consequences of that dissonance – consequences which are already manifest in our collective ecological crisis.
Works Cited
Bandes, Susan A. “Emotion and Deliberations: The Autonomous Citizen in the Social World.” Nomos 53 (2013): 189–211. Web.10.18574/nyu/9780814760147.003.0006Search in Google Scholar
Barry, Kate. “BWW Review: Wellesley Girl at the Humana Festival.” Broadway World: Louisville. Broadway World, 23 Mar. 2016. Web. 21 Aug. 2019.Search in Google Scholar
“Casting Call: Wellesley Girl.” Backstage.com. Backstage, 5 Dec. 2015. Web. 5 May 2019.Search in Google Scholar
Chipman, Melissa. “Wellesley Girl Presents a Dystopian Future where Nothing and Everything has Changed.” Insider Louisville 21 Mar. 2016. Web. 5 May 2019. Search in Google Scholar
Claeys, Gregory. “The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley, and Orwell.” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Ed. Gregory Claeys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 107–132. Print. 10.1017/CCOL9780521886659Search in Google Scholar
Jaggar, Alison M. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar. New York: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. 378–391. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Kramer, Elizabeth. “Review: Fraught Future in Wellesley Girl.” The Courier Journal 22 Mar. 2016. Web. 5 May 2019.Search in Google Scholar
Marcus, George E. The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Pelsue, Brendan. “Wellesley Girl.” Humana Festival 2016: The Complete Plays. Ed. Amy Wegener and Jenni Page-White. New York: Playscripts, 2017. 215–283. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Vieira, Fátima. “The Concept of Utopia.” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Ed. Gregory Claeys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 3–27. Print.10.1017/CCOL9780521886659.001Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
