A powerful, dramatic and timely play about the funny, brilliant, warm, irascible, scrappy woman who voted against both World Wars - in Congress. The WWI vote landed on her in her first 6 days in 1917. The first vote was taken on Good Friday, "the anniversary of the most notorious murder in history," as Jeannette Rankin pointed out while she tried to delay the vote in order to get people to be more discerning. Working with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Europe, Jeannette railed against the Treaty of Versailles as it would "create a monster" by punishing Germany. In the US, she led a Peace Parade at the Republican convention in Chicago in 1932 with the National Congress of Jewish Women and church groups, and recent Nobel Peace prize-winner Jane Addams. They were calling for Peace Planks to outlaw war forever (urging Democrats to do the same). As founding Vice President of the ACLU, she urged President Roosevelt to rescue Jews/religious and political prisoners from Europe in 1933 and onwards. The ACLU effort was shamefully rebuffed. A major suffragist since 1910, Jeannette Rankin was the first woman in Congress, voted in from Montana in 1916, four years before women even had the vote nationally (1920). In fact, she was the first woman elected to the legislature of any western democracy. Jeannette Rankin fought for equal pay and an 8-hour day for women, child labor laws, the rights of Native and African Americans, and rights of immigrants, including the first bill for immigrant women's rights to citizenship independent of their husbands. Gerrymandered out of her district in Montana, she lived in her own dirt floor house and worked in Georgia among poor people for a system of direct representation in presidential elections. During those decades she devised a multi-candidate system for a broader spectrum of Congressional representation. After fighting against the Korean War in her 70s, at 88 she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade of 5000 women on the US Capitol against the Vietnam war and demanded unilateral disarmament, nuclear and otherwise. She spoke out against the corporate take-over of America. She left funds in her will for educational aid for poor women over the age of 35. In A Single Woman, the reader bears witness as Rankin is reviled by the public and flirted with by heads of government. "Although coming from a very WASP state, Montana, Jeannette made it a practice to sit next to Blacks or Jews attending suffrage meetings to counteract prejudice in the suffrage movement. She was also strongly pro-labor. I've been going to plays for 70 years, in NYC, here (SF Bay Area), London, and Moscow. Jeanmarie Simpson ranks with the best I've seen anywhere." Bill Mandel, 37 year KPFA Commentator. Leonard Nimoy introduced the play when it was performed at North Tahoe Hebrew Congregation to 200 people. Tens of thousands have seen the play in theatres, meeting halls and living rooms throughout the world.
About the Author: Jeanmarie (Simpson) Bishop was born in rural Arizona in 1959. Her family moved to Toronto in 1970 and she fell in love with the theatre after seeing, with her 7th grade class, the legendary production of Godspell (featuring Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy and Martin Short) at the Bayview Playhouse. She performed dozens of roles in regional theatre and stock in the US and Canada and began directing while still in her teens. Jeanmarie is Founding Artistic Director of the Nevada Shakespeare Company (NSC), from which she retired in 2008. With NSC she directed many projects, wrote original works and played myriad parts including Maude Gonne in Sailing to Byzantium, Gertrude in Hamlet, Lady M in Macbeth and Elsa in The Road to Mecca, directed by Zakes Mokae. Jeanmarie wrote and performed 263 times (including a run Off-Broadway) the play A Single Woman, about the life of first US Congresswoman and lifelong pacifist, Jeannette Rankin. She also starred in the film version that featured Judd Nelson, the voices of Martin Sheen and Patricia Arquette and the music of Joni Mitchell. In 2007, she appeared at the historic Beverly Hills Theatre 40 in the American premiere of the solo tour-de-force Shakespeare's Will, produced by Leonard Nimoy. Jeanmarie is a birthright practicing Catholic, a Quaker and lifetime member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). While attending a December 2008 meeting of WILPF's Tucson branch, she met Shannon Cain, co-editor of the anthology Powder: writing by women in the ranks from Vietnam to Iraq. The two quickly agreed that the book would make a terrific theatre piece, and Coming In Hot was conceived. Following an adaptation and rehearsal period of nine months, the play opened at Tucson's Rhythm Industry Performance Factory. Simpson began an international tour of Coming In Hot in March of 2010, taking it throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Jeanmarie was commissioned by the Be the Change project to create a piece based on interviews with Dreamers - Liberty's Children premiered at the Potentialist Workshop in Reno Nevada in March 2014. She toured with Mary's Joy from 2011-2014. She was denied entry at England's Heathrowe airport on Friday the 13th of February 2015, after which she took a hiatus from theatre for 18 months. She now performs the play, under the new title, The Joy, for anyone who'll sit still and receive it. She lives with her husband, Dan, in a cottage with a garden in Glendale Arizona.