Carolyn Nur Wistrand

Dramatist
Lecturer in Dept. of Africana Studies

Carolyn Nur Wistrand was educated at Texas Southern University, The University of Michigan-Flint, and Maui Community College in Kahului, Maui, Hawaii. She has been actively involved in the theatre as a playwright, director, community activist, and formed her own multicultural women’s touring company, 1990 MIRAJ.

Her works have been performed at The Harold Clurman Theatre, Nat Horne Theatre, OPEN EYES: New Stagings, and with Playwrights Preview Productions in New York City. In educational theater, her works have been performed at The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, The University of Michigan-Flint, The University of Indiana-Bloomington, Marion College in Indiana, Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, Beecher Community School District in Flint, Michigan, Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso, Texas and Maui Community College in Kahului, Maui, Hawaii.

As a community activist her works have been performed at The Gospel Workshop in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Elmhurst Residential Treatment Center in Detroit, Job Corps, Local 242, International Institute of Flint, Masonic Temple in Detroit, Phoenix Civic Plaza, Phoenix, Arizona, Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit Bahá’í Center, Toronto Bahá’í Center, Louis Gregory Bahá’í School in Hemingway, South Carolina, Louhelen Retreat and Conference Center and numerous churches and community centers in South Carolina, Texas, and Michigan.

Playwriting awards include: National League of American Pen Women, Washington, D.C., Michigan Woman Finalist, Playwriting, 1995&1998, Deep Southern Writers Conference, Lafayette, Louisiana, Full-length Script Award-1997, Love Creek Productions, New York City, National One-Act Play Festival, Finalist, 1992, Arizona State Theatre, National Hispanic Playwriting Competition, Finalist-1995, Western Great Lakes Playwriting Competition, South Bend Civic Theatre, South Bend, Indiana, Finalist-1994, and Open Door Women’s Playwriting Competition, Chicago, Finalist-2001.

She is also the playwright for the Beecher Community School District. All of her works are concerned with spiritual, racial, and feminine themes of transcendence.

She is published with Contemporary Drama Service, Before the Spanish Came, 1995, and her book of religious drama based on the Babí and Bahá’í Revelations, BIRTH OF WOMAN’S SPIRIT, Táhirih and Other Plays is forthcoming in October of 2002.

BIRTH OF WOMAN’S SPIRIT
TÁHIRIH & OTHER PLAYS
by Carolyn Nur Wistrand

The four plays in this collection are linked by their concern with spiritual themes of transcendence for women.

Táhirih

“You can kill me whenever you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women”-Táhirih

Famed Persian Poetess, Táhirih was the forerunner for women’s rights throughout the world. This drama in 3 Acts is based on the 19th century mystic who was an outspoken advocate for the education and rights of women. Her story is set against the fanatical Shi’ah Muslim world of Persia at a time when women were considered as little more than chattel, and in many circles thought to not possess souls. That she would cast aside her chadar (veil) in an assemblage of men, discarding all accepted orthodoxy of time honoured traditions, calling aloud the Advent of a New Day is the dramatic reality of this beauty. Táhirih transcended her own reality as a poet who sought truth to become a saint who sought martyrdom for the emancipation of women. She was executed in Tihrán, Persia in 1852 at age 36 for her views.

Lua

“Oh Midnight! June will be knocking upon the door of Time and I wonder whether with her the world will dance and be glad, or weep and be sad.”- Lua Moore Getsinger

Taken from the personal letters and diary of Louisa Aurora Moore Getsinger the play moves swiftly through major events in the life of a young woman who abandoned her dreams of becoming an actress to promote a new world religion. Two women portray this Victorian world traveller. Louisa represents the beautiful, vivacious young woman, charged with spirit, yet carrying herself with impeccable elegance. Lua represents the mature woman, who reflects on her life as she begins to transcend this world, at the moment of her death. She died a martyr’s death in Cairo, Egypt in 1917 at the age of 43, homeless, penniless, without husband or family.

Second Coming

A single act character study in racism that spans 150 years. All of the action takes place in the parlour of a once grand, but now, faded South Carolina plantation home belonging to the Welsh family. The four characters are Welsh women, but with decidedly different points of view on the nature of their heritage. Through the four women, an examination of racist attitudes in the South, spanning the years 1844-1969 is dramatized for the stage.

An Invitation to Tea

A play in two acts that dramatizes the introduction of Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, wife of Senator George Hearst and Robert Turner, her African American personal butler, to the Bahá’í Faith in 1898, by Dr. Edward Getsinger and his wife, Lua Moore Getsinger. The historic importance of the meeting is twofold, the financing, by Mrs. Hearst, of the first Western pilgrimage to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in the prison city of Akká, in December of 1898, and the distinction Robert Turner holds as the first Bahá’í of African descent in the United States.

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