Video of "On Account of Sex" recorded live at the Kansas City Fringe Festival in July, 2023.
"On Account of Sex" Video
Hollywood 2023 Vacation Video
A video of my recent trip to California going from Sacramento to Hollywood.
"On Account of Sex" Available for Production
The cast requires four women. The running time is approximately 75 minutes, but can be trimmed to 60 minutes. Suitable for all ages, and ideal for middle/high school audiences. Performance royalties are negotiable.
Download the script
Meet the women who persisted for over seventy years to add four words to the Constitution: “On Account of Sex.” Seven leaders of the women’s suffrage movement relate their struggles, failures, and triumphs, beginning with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and ending with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, when women won the right to vote. This unconventional exploration of women’s history is filled with humor, inspiration, and songs of the 19th and early 20th century.
The 19th Amendment states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” It took seventy years of constant and challenging activism to give women the right to vote throughout the United States.
The play follows seven leading figures in the suffrage movement: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Alice Paul. These women traversed the country and led national campaigns to win voting rights in the states, and the play highlights their efforts to win legal battles, challenge naysayers, and pass the torch to the next generation. When they ultimately confront the president of the United States, they are faced with abuse, imprisonment, and forced feedings until they are finally triumphant in passing an amendment.
Throughout the play there are period songs that bring the era to life, many of them popular tunes of the day with lyrics tailored to the suffrage cause, and many of them quite humorous. These include “The March of the Women,” “Let Us All Speak Our Minds,” “Daughters of Freedom,” “Keep Women in Her Sphere,” and “Song of the Harassed Man Voter.”
“On Account of Sex.” was originally intended to be produced in 2020 for the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but the live Fringe Festival was canceled due to the pandemic. An online reading of the play was recorded for the August 18, 2020 anniversary of the amendment, and we’re excited to finally be able to produce the full production live on stage as intended.
"On Account of Sex." Review by Chris McCoy for KC Fringe
“On Account of Sex” is perhaps one of the most well-researched and cleverly written Fringe shows I have ever seen. Taking its title from the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote, the performance is a feminist history lesson delivered as postmodern vaudeville. Four performers accompanied by keyboard and tuba relay the trials and tribulations of the early Suffragettes in the long and arduous passage of this amendment through innovative staging, crafty character creation, and an elan for political entertainment.
The show is performed in the style of Agitprop (agitation propaganda), a form of political theatre popularized in the 1960s by groups such as San Francisco Mime Troupe, Free Southern Theatre, and El Teatro Campesino. The style uses allegorical characters to deliver political messages with little spectacle through silly, melodramatic acting. While you don't need to know that history to enjoy the production, it helps in understanding this approach to the subject.
The four actresses are from different decades of their life, which powerfully reminds us of the historic progress that women fought for on behalf of future generations. The only set is a clothesline, and all the props are items traditionally associated with women’s work in the home (sewing, cooking, cleaning, etc.). Costumes are t-shirts with the image and name of each character, which proves doubly useful as the actresses play different roles throughout. Characters include Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cody Stanton, Frederick Douglas, among many others.
The score is composed of "Suffrage Songs of the Era." While the performance style is intended to be broad, there could have been a bit more cohesion in the acting and directing to really allow the ingenious writing to be clearly understood. Overall, I found the show revelatory and smiling ear to ear until the well-deserved standing ovation. This show is suitable for middle school audiences and up and especially of interest to history buffs. You will heartily laugh (and learn) throughout.
Chris McCoy
"On Account of Sex." Review in KC Studio
At KC Fringe, “On Account of Sex” Is a Charming (and Infuriating) Musical Retelling of American History
Vivian Kane
July 24, 2023
Politics, generally speaking, often walks the exasperating line of being both extremely important and infuriatingly tedious. That dichotomy is the entire foundation of On Account of Sex, which traces the seventy-year-long fight to gain women the right to vote.
No one could possibly deny that this battle was of the utmost importance—least of all the women at its center. The musical from Fourth Wave Theater, currently running at the KC Fringe Festival, features a small cast of four actors (Claudia Copping, Caroline Dawson, Rita Hanch, and Dianna Royer) playing famous suffragists of the early 20th century—largely well-known names including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Lucy Stone. These women dedicated their lives to their cause, risking alienation, personal safety, and so much more.
At the same time, we can share the frustration at the tedious bureaucracy they were up against. The women are forced to deal with nit-picking semantics and political practices (lobbying, votes, and the like) that move at an extreme crawl. The timeline of their fight to add four maddeningly simple words to the constitution is also represented visually onstage via a literal clothesline—just one of many inventive set design elements mixing women’s domestic lives with their political battles—that serves to let the audience know throughout just how very far there is left to go in this fight.
Written by Bryan Colley and Tara Varney and directed by Varney, On Account of Sex is a competent and largely engaging retelling of a momentous part of history, aided by some jaunty songs—mostly period music (arranged by Tim Gillespie, performed live onstage by Gillespie and Sandy Weidman) with relevant, often humorous lyrics reflecting the women’s fervor and their frustrations.
My biggest fear going in was that the show would erase the more complicated, less heroic elements of the suffragist movement—namely, the ways in which it frequently found itself in opposition to the abolitionist movement. To its credit, the show did not that. It did not gloss over the ways in which the country’s ur-white feminists were largely in direct conflict with Black Americans, but rather discussed the conflict at some length.
Still, the actual Black women involved in this movement are mostly relegated to a footnote via an end-of-show shout-out. Legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass makes a few appearances, played by one of the core white (or white-presenting) actresses, which is an odd enough choice to make one wonder if it would have been best to leave him out entirely. (I think it’s clear that neither option is ideal, and that the cast—and cast of characters depicted—is simply in deep need of some diversity.)
Ultimately, there’s a lot of fun, drama, and historical information to be gleaned from this show for all Fringe audiences but On Account of Sex seems best designed for—and has the potential to be extremely successful as—a school tour. There is a rudimentariness to the story and structure (including having the audience read constitutional amendments aloud in unison) that young children would likely appreciate and absorb well, to the point that it makes me wish the Fringe Festival had more matinee showings for younger audiences.
“On Account of Sex,” part of the KC Fringe Festival, runs at The Center for Spiritual Living (1014 E 39th Street) through July 29. For more information, visit kcfringe.org.
"The Life of Bryan" at KC Fringe's Visual Art Gallery in Union Station
Check out my new art exhibit "The Life of Bryan" at the KC Fringe Festival in the grand hall of Union Station, or download free pdfs of my scrapbooks online. The exhibit ends Saturday, July 30.
My pandemic response was to become introspective. Stuck at home trying to organize my life, with the help of a film scanner to digitize the past, this exhibit goes back to my youth and tries to find a narrative for the last fifty years. It’s a personal endeavor, but since so much of my life has been as a playwright and producer, especially at the Fringe, it’s a public one as well. So come in and have a look at what I’ve been up to my whole life and see if it makes any sense.
"On Account of Sex." Interview with KKFI
Tara Varney and Dianna Royer interviewed on KKFI's Arts Magazine with Michael Hogge (the interview starts at 34 minutes)
https://kkfi.org/program-episodes/arts-magazine-show-kc-fringe-week/
"On Account of Sex." interview with the Martin City Telegraph
Local playwrights to present “On Account of Sex” at Fringe Fest
Martin City Telegraph / July 20, 2023
The production follows seven leaders of the women’s suffrage movement.
By Tyler Schneider
Tara Varney, a theater teacher at the Kansas City Academy, and Bryan Colley, a graphic designer with the American Academy of Family Physicians, have been writing and producing theatrical productions under their Fourth Wave Theatre company for the Kansas City Fringe Fest since 2008.
Their latest, On Account of Sex—a musical about the women’s suffrage movement—will premiere at Fringe Fest 2023 starting with a 9 p.m. opener on July 21, 2023. Its run will encompass five total showings, all taking place at the Center for Spiritual Living (1014 W 39th St.), with the latter four scheduled for Saturday, July 22 (6 p.m.), Sunday, July 23 (3 p.m.), Thursday, July 27 (9 p.m.), and Sunday, July 29 (7:30 p.m.).
Directed by Varney, the work features music performed by Tim Gillespie and stars Claudia Copping, Caroline Dawson, Rita Hanch, and Dianna Royer. The story follows seven leading figures in the suffrage movement: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Alice Paul.
“Those four actors will play the seven different women, and then they play multiple other characters, most of whom we call ‘naysayers’, who are all the people that are trying to prevent them [from gaining the right to vote],” Varney said.
The musical lineup includes hits from the time period the play covers, beginning with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and ending with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Some of these titles, which may be adjusted to fit the theme, include “The March of the Women,” “Let Us All Speak Our Minds,” “Daughters of Freedom,” “Keep Women in Her Sphere,” and “Song of the Harassed Man Voter.”
“I probably listened to over 100 different songs from the period trying to find ones that were relevant to the story we were telling and entertaining,” Colley said, in addition to the countless hours the duo had spent brushing up on historical texts.
Varney describes the play’s structure as something of a “TED Talk” from these leading women.
“They’re sort of telling the audience how it goes, but they’re also presenting it as it happened at the time,” Varney said. “So it’s not like a dramatization of these characters, but more like a presentation of the history. A part of it is a lecture to the audience, and then part of it is scenes, stories—and those play off each other.”
The play was originally intended to be released in 2020 in conjunction with the centennial anniversary of American women gaining the right to vote. COVID put a damper on those prospects, but the final product has been polished even further since then.
“We also took a trip to DC, a month or so ago, where we saw a lot of American history, museum artifacts. One of the things that really actually made a very profound impact on me—which I did not expect—was that they had the actual drafting table that Elizabeth Cady Stanton used to write up her Declaration of Sentiments,” Varney said.
These trailblazing feminists faced even greater scrutiny than many may know. While a number of them, dubbed the Silent Sentinels, had peacefully protested outside of Woodrow Wilson’s White House for years, the opposition often employed baseless propaganda—or much worse— to belittle the suffragist cause.
Some critics at the time thought voting would “masculinize” women, and, somehow, demasculinize men.
“They had this idea that suffragists are ugly, that they needed a man. And that if they don’t get mad and get married, everything would be fine,” Varney said. “I feel like I’m relatively well versed in women’s history. But once we started researching this, it was far uglier than I ever thought. I thought that people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who were giving speeches and all this kind of stuff, were mostly made fun of or ignored, but they were actively beaten.”
Some were even jailed, where peaceful employment of hunger strikes would be countered by jailers who would put a tube up the nose of a dissenting female prisoner to force feed them a mix of gruel synthesized from milk and raw eggs in order to keep them alive.
“We talk a lot about how many of these things still apply today,” Varney said. “I think one of the big points of the play is that anytime someone comes up with an idea and wants to do something, somebody else is just going to try to stop them. And they have no reason. They just got to stop them. They can’t let other people do what they want.”
Created to push “a radical feminist agenda” with provocative plays about women’s equality, empowerment, and intersectionality, Fourth Wave Theatre has produced such works as Khaaaaan! The Musical, Sexing Hitler, Red Death, Voyage to Voyager, and Fringeprov.
“I think politically active women, women interested in history are definitely going to be interested in this play. But I think the story we’re telling is one that probably needs to be heard by men specifically as well,” Varney said.
"On Account of Sex." interview with the Pitch
On Account of Sex shows the 70+ year fight it took to get four words added to the constitution
KC Fringe Festival veterans bring the long struggle for women's suffrage to the festival stage.
Emma Hilboldt
Bryan Colley and Tara Varney have been writing and producing shows for KC Fringe Festival since 2008. Their most recent production for this year’s festival On Account of Sex is a heartfelt comedy that takes you through the 72-year fight that it took to get women the right to vote.
Originally supposed to be produced in 2020, On Account of Sex follows multiple women who joined the fight for women’s suffrage. Colley and Varney wanted to chronicle the work that women did during this time period with spotlights on some of the most key players.
Bryan Colley describes the show as women passing the torch to the next generation throughout the years. “The overarching storyline is the first generation of activists passing along the torch to the next generation since some of the activists passed before the amendment was passed,” Colley says.
Tara Varney, the originator of the plot, likes to describe the show as a sort of time-bending TED talk. “Not all the characters were alive at the same time so they overlap a lot. It’s a little time-bendy and geography-bendy,” explains Varney. “They’re telling the story to the audience and they’re also telling the story to each other.”
Varney was raised by committed feminists and when talking about this movement in particular she gets emotional, as many of the women who started the fight for suffrage died before they saw it come to fruition. “Arguably the most notable figures in this movement are Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who fought their whole lives for this movement and died before they could see their hard work pay off,” Varney says. “I just can’t imagine how heartbreaking it must have been to have died thinking that you failed at the one thing you committed your life to.”
One thing that Colley and Varney want people to know before going into this show is that it is, at its heart, a comedy. While it does touch on the seriousness of the topic, there are plenty of funny moments and songs taken straight out of the time periods.
On Account of Sex is open July 21-29 at the Center for Spiritual Living. You can find specific showtimes and purchase your tickets here. You can also purchase your tickets at the box office ahead of the show.
https://www.thepitchkc.com/on-account-of-sex-shows-the-70-year-fight-it-took-to-get-four-words-added-to-the-constitution/
"I Can See My House From Here" at KC Fringe
Fringe is here, folks!
Not only can you go see my new musical On Account of Sex. at the Center for Spiritual Living, but you can also watch my short film I Can See My House From Here as part of the Kansas City Screenwriters' Shortstravaganza! at the Stray Cat Film Center at 8:30pm Sunday, July 16. Tickets are $12 with your $5 Fringe Button.
And while you're downtown check out my new art exhibit The Life of Bryan in the Grand Hall of Union Station.
"On Account Of Sex." at the 2023 KC Fringe Festival
FOURTH WAVE THEATRE’S "ON ACCOUNT OF SEX." TELLS THE HISTORY OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE
The new musical about the women’s suffrage movement “On Account of Sex.” will premiere at the Kansas City Fringe Festival starting July 21, 2023. Written by Fringe veterans Bryan Colley and Tara Varney, this unconventional exploration of women’s history is filled with humor, inspiration, and songs of the 19th and early 20th century.
Meet the women who persisted for over seventy years to add four words to the Constitution: “On Account of Sex.” Seven leaders of the women’s suffrage movement relate their struggles, triumphs, and failures, beginning with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and ending with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote.
“On Account of Sex.” features music performed by Tim Gillespie, stars Claudia Copping, Caroline Dawson, Rita Hanch, and Dianna Royer, and is directed by Tara Varney. There will be five performances at the Center for Spiritual Living, 1014 W 39th Street, on the following dates:
- 9:00pm Friday, July 21
- 6:00pm Saturday, July 22
- 3:00pm Sunday, July 23
- 9:00pm Thursday, July 27
- 7:30pm Saturday, July 29
Adult tickets are $12.00, children 12 and under are $7.00. A $5.00 Fringe Festival button is required to purchase tickets. Buttons are available at the box office and are free for children. Tickets are also available online at kcfringe.org.
ABOUT THE PLAY
The 19th Amendment states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” It took seventy years of constant and challenging activism to give women the right to vote throughout the United States.
The play follows seven leading figures in the suffrage movement: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Alice Paul. These women traversed the country and led national campaigns to win voting rights in the states, and the play highlights their efforts to win legal battles, challenge naysayers, and pass the torch to the next generation. When they ultimately confront the president of the United States, they are faced with abuse, imprisonment, and forced feedings until they are finally triumphant in passing an amendment.
Throughout the play there are period songs that bring the era to life, many of them popular tunes of the day with lyrics tailored to the suffrage cause, and many of them quite humorous. These include “The March of the Women,” “Let Us All Speak Our Minds,” “Daughters of Freedom,” “Keep Women in Her Sphere,” and “Song of the Harassed Man Voter.”
“On Account of Sex.” was originally intended to be produced in 2020 for the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but the live Fringe Festival was canceled due to the pandemic. An online reading of the play was recorded for the August 18, 2020 anniversary of the amendment, and we’re excited to finally be able to produce the full production live on stage as intended.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS
Bryan Colley and Tara Varney have written and produced multiple plays at the Kansas City Fringe Festival since 2008, including such popular shows as Khaaaaan! The Musical, Sexing Hitler, Red Death, Voyage to Voyager, and most recently Fringeprov. Tara Varney is a theater teacher at the Kansas City Academy. Bryan Colley is a graphic designer with the American Academy of Family Physicians and is on the board of the Midwest Dramatists Center.
ABOUT FOURTH WAVE THEATRE
Fourth Wave Theatre was created to push a “radical feminist agenda” with provocative plays about women’s equality, empowerment, and intersectionality. Their previous productions include the comedy Lingerie Shop at the Kansas City Fringe Festival in 2009.
"There Are No Small Parts" Reading at the IFCKC
Script finalists have been selected for the IFCKC's 2023 Film Lab! Join us at 7:00pm Wednesday May 16, 2023 as the film community comes together for a table read to hear the finalists.
Three scripts have been selected and will be read with local actors. All of these scripts will be considered for the IFCKC 2023 Film Lab. The selected script will be used for the Film Lab and the finished film will be submitted to local festivals.
- There Are No Small Parts by Bryan Colley and Tara Varney
- KC Love Story by Drew G. Smith
- Inside Baseball by Chas Coffman
If you are interested in participating in the Film Lab as a mentor, mentee, or crew member, please check out ifckc.org/filmlab.
Watching Movies 2022
Here are reviews of the 237 movies I saw in 2022
Favorites
- Accidence
- The Adventures of Robin Hood
- Brazil
- The Fall (2006)
- It’s a Wonderful Life
- Lost in London
- The Madness of King George
- A Night to Remember
- Saraband for Dead Lovers
- Soul
- Sunset Boulevard
- War and Peace (1967)
- Westward the Women
Tartuffe by the Kansas City Academy
I edited this online reading of Moliere's Tartuffe by the Kansas City Academy in 2021.
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