Introduction
Three years ago, a friend of playwright Emily Mann came across a crossword puzzle clue she couldn’t solve. The solution was a woman’s name: Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard. Curious, she looked up the name on the internet. What she found was a true life story so dramatic and inspiring that she called Emily and told her she might just have found the subject for Emily’s next play. She was right.
Early in the morning of June 18, 1860, Reverend Theophilus Packard had his wife, Elizabeth, forcibly removed from their home and committed to the state-run insane asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois. A conservative Calvinist minister of the Old School, Reverend Packard strongly disagreed with his wife’s liberal thinking and feared she endangered the spiritual welfare of their six children. The grounds for Elizabeth’s incarceration rested solely on her husband’s declaration of her insanity, and not on a public hearing—such were the laws in Illinois (and many other states) at that time. Elizabeth remained true to her principles in the face of intense hardship, including separation from her beloved children.
McCarter Artistic Director Emily Mann has made a career of giving voice to the voiceless. Drawing from trial transcripts, Packard’s own writing and her extensive research, as well as her own imagination, Mann has created a dynamic piece of theater that speaks to our times, while reflecting our past.
