A new play in development by Garry Williams
Just before COVID, I was invited to musically direct the musical Witches by Danny Ashkenasi and Peter Lund. When I was researching famous witch trials, I learned about Helena Scheuberin, who was able to stand up against her accuser and win her life and freedom. Her accuser was reprimanded for poor procedure and asked to leave Innsbruck. Her accuser was none other than Heinrich Kramer, the Dominican monk and inquisitor who was to write the handbook for witch persecution Malleus Maleficarum.
The story fascinated me. Who was Helena Scheuberin? How do you live in the aftermath of public and institutional persecution? And most intriguingly, perhaps, how might this trial and Kramer’s defeat have inspired him to write his hateful treatise?
It is easy to draw parallels to current events. Public figures whose mad rantings are censured, yet find acclaim and support. Their victims. Men in positions of power. Women suffering harm at their hands. Witch hunts, cancel culture, new technologies, and radicalization.
I began writing the play in 2020 as a one-act, exploring these themes. It was commissioned and produced by Logan Robins for the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company. In the summer and fall of 2024, I added five scenes and completed a first full draft. We held a public reading as part of DaPoPo Theatre’s Live-In Festival, a grassroots arts festival in Halifax, NS, with support from the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre.
In the winter of 2024, I visited Innsbruck, Helena’s hometown where the trial took place in 1485, as the late middle ages were spilling over into the renaissance. I visited the state library and am now in touch with Dr. Hansjörg Rabanser, one of the leading scholars in the history of witches in that region.
I am excited to develop this play as a four-hander, exploring themes of misogyny, religious extremism, queerness, disability, and the psychology of mania and persecution. Helena’s trial marks a halfway point between the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press (1440) and Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (1515), as the printed word was made accessible and literacy skyrocketed and the Church began to splinter and reform, as the people of Europe began to reimagine themselves in a quickly changing world.
DaPoPo Theatre is currently seeking partners and/or funding to develop the script and, with any luck, move towards presentation in foreseeable future.
– Garry Williams, December 2024
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