How much of this is real and how much is made up? It’s a delicate balance.
I chose to set it in “Newtown” in an undisclosed year to stay away from any real trials. Witch hunts happened all over the world over a span of hundreds of years, and those weren’t funny at all.
I wanted to retell the stories of people who were wrongfully killed in a way that people would process and digest, but also not make light of tragedy. I did this by setting it in a fictional town with fictional characters while tapping into some of the real history.
Most of the accusations you hear are from legal records of witch trials: Slamming a church door, vomiting up knives and scissors, having a strange look about her, etc. (nationalarchives.gov.uk)
A lot of what you see in this play is actually educational in its own weird way. It is not an “us vs. them” thing; it’s not women vs. men or even Christians vs. Pagans. The “bad guy” is the abuse of power by those who manipulate the rules and hurt others to benefit themselves.
Witch pricking was real, mostly in Scotland. If “the devil’s mark” was found on a person’s body, the witch hunters would prick it with a needle to see if it bled. Witch hunters were paid for this service. Blunt and retractable prickers have been found, by the way. (wikipedia.org)
I wanted to challenge a lot of assumptions we make about the witch hunts. Suds isn’t a woman because it wasn’t only women who were accused of witchcraft. In the Icelandic witch hunts, it was mostly men who were prosecuted. Charity, meanwhile, represents the women who threw others into the flames to save their own skins.
I use comedy to approach hard subjects to make them easier to digest, talk about, and hopefully learn from.
This is a story to remind us that the odds were never in our favor. We’ve experienced so much injustice and power imbalances all throughout history. We’ve gotten through them by rescuing each other and being brave enough to do the right thing when the time comes. The witch hunts ended when the people in power began to push back against what they knew to be wrong. Judges stopped ruling in favor of the madness and hysteria, and that finally led to witch hunting being outlawed.
There is always hope, even when it’s really hard to see.
How did this happen? What, pray tell, would be the motivation?
The influence for “Witches” came from a few places: It starts with the famous scene in Monty Python and The Holy Grail: “How do you know she is a witch?” That movie was my earliest comedy training wheels and I always wanted that particular scene to go on.
I grew up in fantasy universes like Lord of The Rings, Doctor Who and Marvel, trying to find the strong and interesting women characters, and they were usually minimal and either love interests or support for the male leads. Sometimes we get a gender-swapped lead and the fandoms riot. So I wondered: Why don’t women have their own fantasy universe? I want to make it easier for the next generations to find characters to look up to.
Next was playing Abigail in “The Crucible,” wondering why the show was so centered around the stories of the men. That was the origin of the trial scene in which the witches take the narrative back from the accusers.
Then I met author Terry Pratchett’s take on witches, magic, and reality in general. Just… read his books.
The final element came from grad school research. While writing about Shakespeare’s Macbeth, I dove more deeply into King James VI/I’s Daemonologie and actually laughed out loud at how stupid so much of it really was. There was a part about keeping witches from teleporting to other locations on the back of the devil. How could people have believed this, especially when it was impossible to have actually witnessed it? That’s when the line hit: “If they really were witches, wouldn’t they just cast a spell to get away?” Why would they sit around in a jail to be tortured and abused?
I also give a sarcastic nod to the format of the famous witch texts like Daemonologie and The Discovery of Witches. The writer created a pretend dialogue between two fictional characters; one is a “wise, magnanimous” voice, presumably of the author’s, and the other one is the “every man” asking dumb questions– but now we know the questions are actually quite reasonable and valid. It’s so silly. You get that in Peter and Willy’s conversations.