Film of ‘Boston Four’ Mary Dyer
A one-woman play by about a seventeenth century Quaker woman is being made into a film
The seventeenth century Quaker Mary Dyer is the subject of a new film based on a one-woman play that is being performed at Spring Friends Meeting House in the United States.
Actor-playwright Jeanmarie Simpson’s film version of her play Heretic: The Mary Dyer story will be created from live performances at the Meeting house in September. The goal is to reach a far broader audience, especially in classrooms, to tell the story of the English Friend who was hanged in Boston for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony.
Jeanmarie Simpson said the story of Mary Dyer, and the issues of freedom of speech, are still very relevant today. ‘The American First Amendment had everything to do with Mary Dyer being hanged more than a century before it was drafted. Speaking very personally, her life – the choices she made, the way she kept going – has helped me find the ambition to get up many a morning… Even hard things, even being executed, when it’s our choice, is a liberation. I think about that every day now, and it’s a gift Mary gave to me.’
The play started life ten years ago and features a dress that Jeanmarie Simpson commissioned the designer Virginia Vogel to create, to reflect what the seventeenth-century Quaker would have worn before she went to the gallows.
The film will be posted on no-cost platforms such as YouTube and subtitled in hundreds of languages.
