SETTING
Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley, Downtown, etc.)Late 1946 / early 1947
CAST
6 Women, 2 Men

SYNOPSIS: It is just after World War 2, and Sian and her husband Joe love each other, but each has been changed by their wartime experiences. For Sian, working in an aircraft factory was the beginning of an evolution of consciousness. At first, however, she can only act on her feelings for her tempting next-door neighbor, Katrina, in a Film Noir fantasy where Sian is the detective and Katrina is the femme fatale. Meanwhile Joe struggles with both PTSD and survivor guilt. Sian eventually finds the courage to accept her sexuality and risk everything in real life

GENESIS OF THE PLAY:
the initial inspiration of the play derived from recognition that my older play “A Shadowed Cross” was imbalanced by the number of men in its cast which didn’t really work in the modern era. So, I experimented with casting women in the major roles for a reading in Safehouse – my writers’ group. It didn’t work but it set my imagination going and a few pages from “A Shadowed Cross” did end up in modified form in “A Wife in the Shadows”.

The rest however derived from my imagination, but grounded emotionally by my own life and, factually, by research. Specifically, regarding my own life, I’m obviously not a lesbian but I was Best Man at a lesbian wedding for someone I’ve been friends with for over 45 years and have been around all of her friends during these many years. Furthermore, I was raised Catholic so that covers more of the characters’ backstories, and my father was in the navy in World War II on USS Saratoga. I know firsthand that he experienced trauma and had difficulty expressing it.

Finally, to ground the play factually, I did a great deal of research on lesbian life in the 1940s, Los Angeles history, the kamikaze attack on the Saratoga, pulp magazines, big band music, lesbian literature and newsletters, vibrators, cigarette ads, etc. (See the picture gallery below for this source material)