Living Little Women
A 40-minute One-act Play
From the Letters and Writings of Louisa May Alcott
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Louisa May Alcott: Living Little Women A 40-minute One-act Play From the Letters and Writings of Louisa May Alcott |
As good as they come!--Michael Bauman, Executive Director, Missouri Humanities Council
Living Little Women is the true story of Louisa May Alcott's growing up with a brilliant, eccentric mother; a Transcendentalist philosopher father; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as friends and neighbors. It is a much more tortured, much more dramatic story of love, tenacity, and courage than the idealized story Alcott offers in Little Women. Louisa May Alcott was a woman whose sacrifices for success were many and hard won. Her best known book,Little Women, mirrors only one facet of her character.In my portrayal of Louisa May Alcott, I emphasize the contribution Alcott made to American letters as well as the example of independence she set for American women. Many aspects of Alcott are completely unknown to the general public. Thus, in addition to readings from Little Women, the performance includes brief passages from her juvenile plays and "lurid" writings, from "Hospital Sketches," from her letters, and from her journals with their often feminist comments.
Growing up as she did within the heart of the Transcendental Movement, Alcott associated daily with the finest minds in America. At the same time, as one familiar with Transcendentalist ideas and as a supporter of Woman's Rights in practice as well as in print, she demonstrated with her own life how limiting are abstract ideas that are not put to practical use.As a woman, she was required to find in herself the most extraordinary courage, fortitude, and perseverance. She pulled not only herself out of the grinding poverty bequeathed to her by her genius father, but took on as well the masculine role of provider and sole support for all six members of her family. She did this by dedicating herself completely to the goal of paying the family debts, yet at the same time stifling her artistic vision and personal self-fulfillment. Her life is exemplary in its single-mindedness, yet a single-mindedness accompanied by a generosity of spirit, great wit, and integrity.
The difficulties Alcott faced in the nineteenth century were many, first, simply because she was a woman and, later, a woman who by choice remained a spinster. Years of hard work were involved before Alcott became a writer skilled enough to sell her stories. Her success is the story of success and its price.
WHAT OUT AUDIENCES SAY IN 2005
FROM: Westover School, Middlebury, Connecticut - January 25, 2005
On Friday evening, November 26th, we at Westover School had the pleasure of