Echo Theatre’s ‘Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper’ digs deep into feminist author’s life

Cast brings chemistry to premiere production of Ann Timmons’ emotionally resonant play about 19th-century writer-activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Dallas Morning News
by Manuel Mendoza
May 16, 2024

You may know Charlotte Perkins Gilman for The Yellow Wallpaper. An early example of the gothic horror genre it helped invent, her 1892 short story has long been a staple of high school and college literature courses. The details of her remarkable life are probably less familiar.

A new biographical play commissioned by Dallas’ Echo Theatre, making its premiere run in a first-rate production at the Bath House Cultural Center, rectifies that gap. The writer of Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper, Ann Timmons, knows her subject well. For 16 years, she toured in a one-woman show about Gilman. It shows.

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Dallas’ Echo Theatre presents the world premiere of a new play about early feminist author and reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Collin-Denton Spotlighter
Brett Grega
May 15, 2024

Dallas’ Echo Theatre has added another chapter to its “Herstory Canon” with the debut of a new play about the life and works of early feminist author and reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper” by Ann Timmons. The show, commissioned by Echo Theatre made its world premiere May 10 and runs through May 25 at the Bath House Cultural Center.

Gilman is perhaps best known for her 1892 story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a semi-autobiographical tale of a woman who’s forced to undergo a “rest cure” after experiencing postpartum depression. The so-called treatment plan confined women to the isolation of bare bedrooms for weeks or months at a time. Gilman’s critique of the practice and broader themes of the oppressive patriarchal society of her time made “The Yellow Wallpaper” just one of many influential works of early feminist literature she wrote.

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‘Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper’ @ Echo Theatre

Onstage NTX
by Ramona Harper
May 19, 2024

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s dark, semi-autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first published in 1892, explores the female mind and mental illness, castigating the misdiagnoses and ill-treatment of women by the patriarchal medical community of the day. Echo Theatre beautifully expands its ongoing ‘Herstory’ series with Ann Timmons’ world premiere of Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper, a riveting dramatic narration on Gilman’s life and 19th century society’s oppressive constriction of women’s freedom. Gilman is quoted saying “I’ve got out at last…and you can’t put me back.”

By sheer force of will, Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman—a prolific writer, poet, and social critic—became a revolutionary voice for women’s rights. Toward the end of her life, she’s known to have asked, “Who will set the record straight after I’m gone?” Who better than playwright and actor Ann Timmons…

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