The Girl Play Era by Maddie Schumacher

I spent most of my teenage years looking for what we called in conservatory a "2G scene": a scene with two girls. The premise was deceptively simple. 

A 2G scene was almost impossible to find. I mean, how many times could we do Proof or The Children's Hour? 

I was sixteen playing forty-five (and then, inevitably, told I lacked the life experience to play her convincingly). It was a fraught assignment: find a scene that captured the girlhood you were actually living when the canon insisted you skip straight to middle age. Maybe Shakespeare’s Nurse and Juliet scene was your only option.

But alas, I don't have a Nurse, and I'm not in love with Romeo.

I am telling you all of this because young girlhood wasn't a fixture of my childhood on stage. I grew up surrounded by stories about women, but very few about girls. Before I was old enough to legally drink, I was playing characters navigating divorce, motherhood, and midlife regret. Meanwhile, the emotional landscape I actually knew—the intensity of friendships, the politics of sleepovers, the terror of going bra shopping with your mother—was largely absent. It was as if girlhood was only interesting once it was over.

But things are changing. 

First, The Wolves. Dance Nation. Dryland. Pink. Slut. 

Now, John Proctor is the Villain. All Nighter. Dilaria. Dad Don't Read This. Meet Me in Five. (And the list keeps growing.) 

The tide is turning, and I am prematurely calling it “the girl play era.” 

For perhaps the first time in a long time, we're allowing girls to exist onstage as girls—not future women, not someone's daughter, not someone's love interest, but people in the middle of becoming. They have tampons in their backpacks. They fail chemistry tests. They flirt with the wrong boys. They Google things they don't want their parents to see. They obsess over friendship, bodies, ambition, shame, and the terrifying possibility that things may get worse before they get better. 

And audiences are showing up for them. 

Last year, Sadie Sink danced every night at The Booth Theatre to Lorde’s “Green Light.” Watching the impact of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain is like watching the industry finally catch up to something many of us already know: stories about teenage girls are not niche. They capture the single moment you realize the world you've inherited isn't the one you thought it was. The play was nominated for Tonys and extended again and again. All the young adults of New York City had mutuals on Broadway. Things couldn't have been better! 

Until, somehow, they got even better.

Our friends at Dad Don't Read This (a new play by Eliya Smith) opened their fabulous “girl play” this past May. Dad Don't Read This follows four high school girls' weekly sleepovers. With a deep attachment to the world of Sims and gossip, the girls blew me away. I knew them. I was them. And I wasn't the only one. Their May premiere quickly turned to a June and July extension. I found myself texting my dear friend and producer on the project, Blaise Hewlett, weekly. I kept checking in with the fictional characters. How did the girls feel tonight? The girls felt like my friends. 

And now, a new girl play is stepping in for the fall season. Becca Carter Freeman's Meet Me in Five follows five roommates navigating their junior year of college, picking up where so many coming-of-age stories leave off. I'll admit I'm biased—I get to be part of this one—but Meet Me in Five feels like a love letter to the girls from the plays I've been talking about, asking what happens after they graduate high school and step into adulthood. For our cast—Lilia Buckingham, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Kaci Walfall, Isa Barrett, and myself—that journey feels especially personal. We're playing college students just months after leaving college ourselves, blurring the line between the lives we're living and the ones we're bringing to the stage. I find myself in all five of the girls. The girls at their very best. And of course, the girls at their very worst.

You'll hear from playwright Becca Carter Freeman next month. For now, I'll leave you with this: her play is triumphant. It's physically a marathon and emotionally relentless. Finding this project at twenty-three feels ridiculously well-timed. I'm playing some version of some girl I knew not so long ago. And I think I can speak for every girl when I say there's something extraordinary about getting to revisit the people we once were. What's cooler? I get to do it in front of an audience. 

I can now picture the next generation of high school actresses flipping through scene books, searching for something true. They're looking for a girl who sounds like them, who worries about the things they worry about, who names the feelings they haven't learned to articulate yet. This time, they're inheriting a myriad of girls. And what a world that'll be.