This may get me in trouble, but you should know, I wasn’t a huge fan of the Brontës before reading this play. Of course, I appreciated their work and understood their role in history and women’s literature. But I can’t even say that I had read more than two Brontë novels in their entirety before starting this journey. They lived in my mind as these mundane pasty-faced writers who had become untouchable celebrities in death, their inner lives a complete mystery. However, I have grown closer to them with every rehearsal. In exploring their triumphs and failures, I’ve witnessed these celebrities fight for their place in the world. In a place where we are constantly asking: what do we owe the world as payment for existing? This play gives us the opportunity to re-imagine the Brontës, to take them off their pedestals and be introduced to their humanity, their dreams, their obstacles, their fears and faults.  

I love this play because it does not attempt to accomplish the impossible, it doesn’t pretend to be history. Polly Teale is very clear that this is no endeavor at finding out the “truth”, but instead discovering what our truth is through the lens of story. In her foreword, she writes: “In the end, though, this is a response to the Brontë story, not a piece of biography. That’s the reason I begin the piece in modern dress. I didn’t want to pretend this was real. I wanted us to look at it through the filter of time, to know that we are playing a kind of game: dressing up, trying to imagine, putting ourselves in their shoes, joining all those before us who have done the same. After all, this is a story of make-believe, of the power of the imagination to transcend time and place, to take us to places we cannot otherwise go”. There is something incredibly provocative and quite freeing about a playwright that acknowledges the fiction in a piece called Brontë.

The Brontës have willingly (or in some cases, unwillingly) given us everything they had to offer. We have their letters, their parsonage, their clothing, their underwear… and the most telling of all, we have their writing. On top of that, hundreds of books, essays, and biographies have been written about the Brontës, scholars have dedicated their professional careers to researching this family, and yet we are continuously drawn back to them, we continue to pry and shape their existence into meaning for ourselves. Their names have been carved into the history of modernity. We feel such ties to them that it would be unfathomable to try and understand who we’d be without them. In the spirit of re-imagining and challenging our relationship to history, this production asks: what more could we want from them? What do they teach us? How do they help us? Who are the Brontës of today?

Perhaps this isn’t your first time meeting this family and their work. You may have a favorite sister, a beloved book, a juicy conspiracy theory… While I hope you find joy in the familiarity of the characters and the text pulled from the novels, this play is equally about now as it is about then. Knowing the Brontës is not a prerequisite here. This production is about you, and me, and the artists that have filled these legendary plain faces with so much heart and resilience. I cannot wait for you to meet them.

Thank you for supporting live theatre.

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-Amanda Goldberg