In the summer of 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln (the President’s widow) resides in an insane asylum, sent there by her only living son. Her progressive friend Myra Bradwell (America’s first woman lawyer) arrives to help Mary gain her release by exposing the injustices of her trial. But Myra’s motives and Mary’s sanity are both up for debate, as they grapple with their pasts and their perceptions of freedom and womanhood.
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"But playwright Catherine Filloux hangs plenty of flesh on the thin bones of the public record. To her credit, she renders Mary Todd a creature of contradiction, at once petulant and impossible, demanding and clear-eyed, unable to contain the sharp tongue that so offends her thin-skinned eldest child. Myra Bradwell is equally complex."
- Dolores Whiskeyman, Curtain Up
"Mary and Myra takes the audience hostage…a kind of séance, a spellbinding recreation of lives that come toward us like torches lighting the future."
- Ethan Fischer, The Shepherdstown Chronicle
"Mary and Myra needs no special treatment to be a major theater piece. The writing is so exact that it is hard to imagine actors failing when reading the script. The success is in a tight script with every line on target."
- Grave Cavalieri, The Morgan Messenger
"Another American icon, Mary Todd Lincoln, is brought to roaring life in Miss Filloux’s Mary and Myra. A talky, well-made play about one woman damned by her reputation who is saved by a woman who was damned into obscurity."
- Jayne M. Blanchard, The Washington Times
EYES OF THE HEART
SELECTED PLAYS BY CATHERINE FILLOUX
published by University of Hawai'i Press can be purchased here
Eyes of the Heart collects six plays by Catherine Filloux: Silence of God, Selma '65, Mary and Myra, Kidnap Road, Lemkin's House, and Eyes of The Heart. These powerful works take up issues of civil and human rights, genocide, and the determination of women and men to retain their dignity and humanity in times of darkness and violence.