Jeanmarie Simpson

On April 15, 1912, social activist Margaret Tobin Brown addresses a room of donors and recounts how she and roughly two dozen others survived in Lifeboat Six as the Titanic foundered. Rejecting the press-made myth of the “Unsinkable Molly Brown,” she offers a spare account built on work: set a rhythm, assign jobs, keep breathing. With Quartermaster Robert Hichens at the tiller and Lookout Frederick Fleet on an oar (by Lightoller’s order), Brown countermanded panic by putting women to the oars—among them Helen Churchill Candee, rowing on an injured ankle—and accepting Major Arthur Peuchen for his seamanship. The boat debates turning back to the cries and reckons with the forty-odd empty places they carry. When a young Third-Class passenger, Philip Zenni, is discovered hiding under a bench, Brown chooses protection over punishment and quietly puts him to work. By the time the Carpathia arrives near dawn, the lesson is clear: survival was made, not granted—an act of competence and communal care. The speech ends where it begins, in a fundraiser, asking the audience to turn witness into aid.

A fractured mirror of Don Quixote, Caleidoscopio is a lyrical, genre-defying audio theatre adaptation that explores identity, exile, and the act of dreaming in defiance of reality. We follow Alonso Quijano — who renames himself Don Quixote — as he embarks on a mythic journey not to escape the world, but to remake it. Alongside his loyal, weary squire Sancho Panza, Quixote confronts windmills, lions, aristocrats, and the quiet ache of disillusionment.

Threaded throughout is the Narrator — a playwright haunted by lineage, gender, and belonging — who steps in and out of the story, refracting their own nonbinary Afro-Latinx experience through the lens of Cervantes' knight. In this kaleidoscope of memory, fantasy, and resistance, storytelling becomes both sanctuary and battlefield.

Blending Afro-Caribbean oral traditions, Catholic iconography, and poetic realism, Caleidoscopio asks: In a world that punishes wonder, what does it mean to believe anyway?

Themes: Identity, Madness, Trans/Nonbinary Experience, Storytelling as Resistance, Legacy, Afro-Latinx Culture

Development: Commissioned by Arizona Theatre Matters
Language: Available in English (translated from Spanish)

Great Divide is a poetic, haunting, and deeply human portrait of Clara Barton — nurse, teacher, and founder of the American Red Cross. Woven together through dual voices — Clara herself and a symbolic Narrator/Girl by the River — the play moves fluidly between biography, memory, and metaphor, stitching together the fragments of one woman’s extraordinary life with the turbulent birth of a nation.

Act I – Origins

The story begins with childhood: Clara’s recurring dream of a river that both destroys and carries remnants of life becomes the central metaphor of the play. When her brother David is gravely injured, Clara discovers her calling in tending the wounded. She later becomes a teacher and builds the first free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey — only to be pushed aside by a man once her work gains success. Meanwhile, the Narrator tells of the girl’s basket of found objects (bones, buttons, cloth, a tooth) left behind by floods, foreshadowing the way memory and grief accumulate across generations.

Act II – War

The Civil War erupts. Clara throws herself into battlefield nursing at places like Antietam and Fredericksburg, where she becomes known as the “Angel of the Battlefield.” Her voice describes blood-soaked fields, desperate boys, and the relentless work of saving lives without regard for which side they fought on. She insists mercy belongs to all. The Narrator’s river fragments mirror Clara’s burden — a cracked mirror, a nameless letter, a bundle of bone — symbols of America’s fractured self. Clara later establishes the Office of Missing Soldiers, answering over 41,000 letters from families searching for loved ones. Her mantra: “You don’t build a country by forgetting the fallen. You build it by naming them.”

Act III – Legacy

After the war, Clara learns of the Geneva Convention and imports the idea of neutral humanitarian relief to America. Against resistance from presidents and politicians, she founds the American Red Cross at age 59, leading it through floods, fires, epidemics, and the Galveston hurricane of 1900, where she still labors at 78. The Narrator continues to speak of the river and the basket — symbols of memory, loss, and the duty to carry forward what others cannot. In the epilogue, Clara reflects on her life, dismissing the legend others made of her: “I wasn’t brave. I just didn’t stop.”

The final image blends Clara with the girl by the river. She steps into a waiting boat, leaving the basket behind, as the hymn “America the Beautiful” rises in minor key. The play closes not on glory, but on the endurance of service, memory, and mercy — the true foundations of America.

Themes

Memory & Inheritance: The Narrator’s river and basket symbolize how memory, grief, and responsibility pass through generations.

Duty & Service: Clara’s life is portrayed as relentless commitment to others, grounded in action rather than ideology.

America’s Identity: The play wrestles with the paradox of America as both dream and wound — beautiful and broken, held together by ordinary people doing extraordinary acts of care.

Even Unto Death unfolds in the kitchen of Joan of Arc’s family home in the days following her execution, as her absence reshapes the lives of those she left behind. Set entirely in the dramatic present and told without Joan ever appearing onstage, the play follows Isabelle Romée, her husband, and their children as they struggle to eat, speak, remember, and survive under the weight of grief and scrutiny. Within the domestic sphere, truth is unstable: women bear witness through memory and refusal, while men negotiate fear, silence, and accommodation with power. Rumor intrudes, testimony fractures, and love itself becomes a risk. As institutions transform Joan’s death into doctrine and myth, the family must decide what can be spoken aloud and what must be carried quietly. Even Unto Death is a rigorously feminist meditation on family, gendered endurance, historical erasure, and the moral courage required to hold fast to the truth of a woman who is no longer allowed to speak for herself.

Lear: A Solo Adaptation is a one-actor reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set entirely within the king’s mind in his final hour. Time collapses. Memory fractures. Characters blur. We are not in Dover or a storm—we are inside Lear’s fading consciousness.

The text is composed entirely of Shakespeare’s original language, restructured and distilled to follow a psychological and emotional arc rather than a traditional plot. Lear moves between clarity and confusion, rage and tenderness, facing the weight of power, betrayal, and the unbearable grief of loss.

This is not a retelling—it is a descent. A hallucinated unraveling. A ritual act of remembering, spoken aloud in the final darkness.

The house is dark. The stage is bare. An actor returns—not to perform, but to sort through the fragments of a life spent in costume and light. Surrounded by relics of past roles and illuminated only by the ghostlight, he speaks aloud what was never said, revisit the moments that shaped him, and asks what remains when the curtain truly falls.

Ghosts of the Gilded Stage is a lyrical solo play about memory, queerness, aging, and legacy. With humor, tenderness, and precision, it explores the blurred line between performance and identity, and invites the audience to sit quietly in the truth that theatre sometimes hides—and sometimes reveals.

It's Maria Montessori's 70th birthday. She is on house arrest at the Theosophical Society compound in Madras (now Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India. As an Italian citizen, she is considered an "enemy" of the British colonial government. Her assistant, Githa, takes notes as Maria remembers the early days when she was in medical school and when she began her practice as a doctor and her research with "deficient" children that led to her revolutionary educational approach. The play exposes Maria's most intimate thoughts and the secret she carried with her for seventy years.

The story of Maria Montessori is a microcosm of many of the factors that shaped women's experiences in Victorian Europe. Further, her tireless work continues to challenge commonly-held notions about childhood, learning and education to this day.

All the dead Hamlet characters have graduated from Limbo to Purgatory. Seems there’s been a bit of a backlog. Hamlet Senior is ancient and over it. Polonius is befuddled, as ever. Rosencrantz feels like a nit wit, Guildenstern blames Rosencrantz. Ophelia is innocent and furious, Gertrude is spitting mad. Claudius is contrite to the point that you want to smack him. When Churchyards Yawn asks the question - will all these fatally flawed characters ever make it to Heaven?

It's the day of the biggest political demonstration in Los Angeles history. A million people are marching from Venice to downtown. Grace is putting the finishing touches on the sabbath meal as Rebecca and Ash, a photojournalist and reporter, arrive from the march. Ash is bleeding, Rebecca is exasperated, and Grace is excited to see her niece again. A classic Kitchen Table play, THE JEWISH QUESTION confronts, examines and embraces age-old misunderstandings, stereotypes, and culture. Plus, there's red wine and homemade bread.

Drenching rain pummels Nimipuu County as Helen, an idealistic middle-aged American History educator, sits alone in her kitchen recovering from a double mastectomy and looking at a pile of bills and an employment termination letter. What makes more sense than suicide? Newly retired social worker and rookie crisis hotline volunteer, AJ sits alone in the office desperate to save Helen from herself. As Helen slips between the worlds after eating a huge assortment of pills, Elizabeth “Betsy” Pennington greets Helen and takes her on a journey designed to convince her to return and invent a new kind of educational model. Pineapple and Other Options braids the stories of three women into a – literally – constructive theatrical experience.

A powerful, dramatic and timely play about the funny, brilliant, warm, irascible, scrappy woman who voted against both World Wars — in Congress. Tens of thousands have seen the play in theatres, meeting halls and living rooms throughout the world. ENSEMBLE VERSION

The play takes place in the last moments of the life of Quaker Mary Dyer, "Mother of the First Amendment," executed by the Puritan Church/State Government in 1660 Boston. The play is honest, painfully graphic and uncompromising in its storytelling. Reviews are uniformly raves and audiences love it.