Spread the Word!

Presented alongside North of Providence as part of a double bill of short plays by Edward Allan Baker, Dolores was recontextualized from 1980s Rhode Island to Sheffield, England, placing two industrial communities shaped by steel—and the political legacies of Reagan and Thatcher—in conversation with one another.

At the center of Dolores is the relationship between two sisters whose lives have taken profoundly different paths. When Dolores unexpectedly arrives at Sandra’s home, their encounter exposes a shared history of family dysfunction, male violence, survival, and the different ways each woman has learned to endure the world around her. Beneath their arguments and humor is an unbreakable bond: the instinct to seek refuge in the person who knows where you came from because she came from there too.

The production approached domestic violence not as an isolated circumstance but within a larger culture of patriarchy and silence. Viewed from the #MeToo era, the play became a reflection on the extraordinary distance women’s voices have travelled—and on the structures of violence and inequality that remain.

The Sheffield setting also situated the sisters within the economic realities surrounding them. As with North of Providence, the private life of the family could not be separated from the political and economic world outside it. Precarity, diminished opportunity, and traditional expectations of gender and class become conditioning forces upon the choices available to these women and the lives they have been able to imagine for themselves.

The play asks what we owe the people we love when love itself may not be enough to save them—and what it means for a woman to continue reaching for safety, dignity, and the possibility of another life.