Kate Hamill started putting pen to paper as part of a bet. After serial-auditioning for roles not limited to ‘Girl in Bikini’ and ‘30-year-old MILF’, Hamill and Andrus Nichols (co-founder of Bedlam) put their feet down and decided that if Hamill managed to write a stage adaptation for Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, she would be owed $100 by Nichols. As Hamill says, the bet was a great incentive, especially when trying to pave your way in the early stages of an acting career. Not only did Hamill finish writing the play, but it has since been performed over 265 times off-Broadway and has won numerous accolades. Perhaps we all just need to experience a couple of demeaning auditions and be promised $100 to become prolific feminist playwrights.
Now, Hamill trades pen for paintbrush as she assumes the role of Artemisia Gentileschi in her new production of The Light and The Dark at 59E59 Theatres. The Light and The Dark: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi is a Primary Stages production, directed by Jade King Carroll and in association with Chautauqua Theatre Company and Jamie Deroy. Primary Stages is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, continuing its championing of the art of playwriting and new play development initiatives. Hamill is no stranger to Primary Stages; beginning this month, Hamill embarks on her fourth piece of work with the company.
At some point in our lives, we’ve all sat comfortably in the audience and thought to ourselves that what we were about to see is merely entertainment. When it comes to classics, we often see them as archaic stories that really have nothing to do with us at all. If you’ve seen a Kate Hamill play, you likely won’t leave the theatre thinking what you did when you first came in. Although you probably can’t relate to the experience of being shoved onto the 19th Century British marriage market, Hamill proves to her audience that the past is actually very much in dialogue with the present.
The Light and The Dark is slightly different to Hamill’s collection of previous works. A departure from the Austen canon and the 19th Century, yes, but not from the feminist retelling. Paint this picture: you are a Roman teenage girl. You are an accomplished artist – you have been since the age of 15. You fight for your right to sit in the studio. You are the first woman to become a member of L’Accademia di Arte del Disegno. A man tries to tell you that what you have created is rightfully his, just as he tries to tell you that you are rightfully his. When a flame is held to your canvas, how can you make yourself heard? How loud will you become?
Hamill’s own voice is gorgeously loud. Indeed, gorgeously loud female voices are exactly what she seeks to amplify. For Hamill, the purpose of her work lies in taking classic narratives in which the female characters serve a very specific purpose: to be a shining example of femininity, or The Angel in the House. It would make sense for Hamill to focus on Austen when writing her adaptations as most of them, particularly Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice, are commentaries on the hypocrisies of polite society – comedies of manners. In the Hamill adaptations of the Austen novels, Little Women, and Vanity Fair, the women are portrayed as women are. The women of the plays become the women that you know: the raucous women, the funny women, the strong women, the human women. This is largely what modernises the stories for us. It is through the representation of female characters as people that we can truly recognise, that we begin to see how these classical works do really apply to us right now.
Leaping even further back in time to 17th Century Italy, Hamill reintroduces us to Artemisia through the lens of the female gaze. For centuries, history has really been about the study of great men. When you think about famous Italian painters, names like Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, or Raphael quickly spring to mind. How quickly does a female name spring to mind? In all honesty, before seeing Hamill’s play, I had barely heard of any female 17th century artists – this is perhaps as a result of my own ignorance, but for the most part, the important female names of this time seem to be absent from common knowledge. That is, unless you have properly studied art history. But why should you have to study art history to find out about the worthy women? Why don’t they come to mind as quickly as the men do?
Artemisia’s works are, in many ways, representative of Hamill’s own. Although their mediums may be different, the two artists depict classical female figures in an unconventional manner. In Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Judith is a slender, timid, and sensualised figure who is egged on by her unnerving-looking maidservant as she raises the sword towards the drunken Holofernes’ neck. At the end of The Light and the Dark, we see Gentileschi’s version of the same scene except this time, Judith isn’t sexualised, but is depicted as a heroine – boldly swinging the sword in order to save her city. Gentileschi paints Judith and her maidservant as muscular, determined, and unafraid. In the same way, Hamill doesn’t portray Gentileschi as a damaged woman who has been forced into timidity and subservience as a result of what has been done to her. After being raped and manipulated by her father’s friend and own teacher, Agostino Tassi, Gentileschi became involved in one of the most early well-known court trials for theft and assault. Hamill’s adaptation of the story demonstrates Gentileschi’s absolute resolve to put her case forward and make herself heard, even if it means pushing her body past its limits. The piece itself is even prefaced by Hamill as a play “for survivors”. Gentileschi’s story doesn’t end melancholically – although it could have. Hamill pointedly proves that Gentileschi cannot plainly be named a victim but that rather, she should be recognised as a survivor. It is not Gentileschi who is defined by the act of rape, but the very man who carried it out. Hamill powerfully displays a narrative in which trauma is transcended, rather than shoved away with shame. We see a woman who is not destroyed by her story, but one who uses it to create art that continues to say f*** you to the society within which she lived.
The Light and The Dark tell us exactly the reason why we do not recognise Artemisia’s work in the same light as her male counterparts. The reason is not that her art was incomparable in terms of magnitude or quality. It certainly was comparable. The reason why her name, as well as the names of similarly accomplished female artists, have been overshadowed is simply because they were women.
The Light and The Dark is a play that involves nudity onstage, much like the nudity we see in a plethora of 17th century art. The point of the nudity is not to be an object of attraction, not to serve as added spectacle, but to make a fierce point. The removal of the actors’ clothing is intended to feel like an act of honesty – a demonstration of vulnerability and the shameless ownership of one’s own body (despite the fact that the female body actually legally belonged to men at the time). Artemisia does not remove her clothing in an attempt to be seductive – nor does the painters’ model, Maria. Hamill and Carroll very clearly place the moments of nudity at precise and careful points in the play. For me, it was one of the first times I had seen a production that didn’t use the naked body for the purpose of erotic spectacle or even plain exhibitionism, but to make a lasting argument.
With The Light and The Dark, Hamill doesn’t just bring Artemisia’s voice to the stage—she bridges the centuries between 17th-century Italy and today’s conversations about power, patriarchy, trauma, and artistic freedom. By resurrecting Gentileschi’s story, Hamill encourages her audience to confront the many ways in which women have historically been denied recognition, not for a lack of talent, but because their work was seen as secondary to that of men. Hamill’s work consistently challenges the conventions of classical narratives, flipping familiar stories on their heads through comedy, honesty, and artistry to hold a mirror up to her audience. Whether it’s a razor-sharp adaptation of an Austen, Thackeray or Alcott novel, Hamill reveals how deeply and universally these stories still resonate when reframed successfully. For Kate Hamill, the stage is more than a space for spectacle; it’s a platform for rewriting history, reclaiming agency, and redefining how we see women in both art and life.
Also – Hamill is still waiting for her $100 (watch your back, Andrus Nichols, we think Kate has more than earned it).
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