31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #2 - “Speak”

Okay, while yesterday I said I really don’t know much about the upcoming Mrs. Hawking part 9, actually there is one thing I really know I want to do. I had this idea that Mrs. Hawking needs to be approached by people who engage with social issues as systemic issues and encourage her to do the same.

I think this would be interesting for several reasons. One, we’re working in the superhero genre, and an unfortunate limitation of that genre that it is not well-equipped to discuss the effects of systems. Superhero stories come from a fantasy of individual agency— what, if you had the power, WOULD YOU DO? I really hate when writers try to make superheroes symbols or stand ins for systems— like fascism or libertarianism or communism or whatever —since a genre all about individuals doing stuff really can’t effectively represent something so complex. But because of that, superhero stories tend to hand-wave overarching issues baked into the fabric of society and the need for collective, ongoing action to solve them, instead treating problems as matters of individual choices and individual actions, of single heroes standing up to make a difference.

I would like do a little bit of a better job addressing that complexity in our story. So I thought it would be interesting to have someone, basically, challenge Mrs. Hawking to engage more with the truths of systemic problems and collective solutions. All her life, she’s been such a lone wolf— partially because of her nature and her own arrogance in her judgment and abilities, but also from cynicism about the willingness of the rest of the world to change. Characters need to be continually challenged, and a big one for our hero is to learn to work with others to achieve bigger things. So I think it would make a great challenge for her to have to expand her thinking in this way.


Photo by Kathy Lucie Bedard

( Day #2 - Speak )