The Hoehl Gallery, on the ground floor of the Given Complex at 89 Beaumont Avenue, is not a theater. It is a medical school building, a place of whiteboards and fluorescent light and the particular hush of people studying for exams. On the evening of Thursday, October 29, 2026, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., four short plays will be performed there anyway.
The occasion is a selection from Women+ On The Edge of Democracy, an initiative of the Flynn, Burlington's nearly century-old performing arts center, in partnership with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The project commissioned 36 women+ and female-identifying playwrights from around the world to write ten-minute plays and monologues answering two questions: What is the current state of democracy in America? And what can history, global context, or futurism offer us in this pivotal moment?
The playwrights are not emerging writers hoping for a break. They are finalists and winners of the Blackburn Prize, which is the largest and oldest international playwriting prize recognizing women+ playwrights writing for the English-speaking theater. The commissioned list includes Jane Anderson, Leslie Ayvazian, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Moira Buffini, Lucy Caldwell, Bridget Carpenter, Paula Cizmar, Migdalia Cruz, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Elizabeth Diggs, Hannah Doran, Stella Feehily and Lauren M. Gunderson, among others. The organizers note that Pulitzer, Tony and Emmy winners and Olivier and Oscar nominees are among the contributors.
The anthology has a physical life as well. Theatre Communications Group, the publisher of American Theatre, will release the collection in book form on November 3, 2026, with pre-orders opening in September. The cover and the project's visual identity were designed by Paula Scher of Pentagram, whose hand-drawn typography, in the studio's words, captures "the urgency and collective spirit of the project." TCG's co-executive director Alisha Tonsic called the plays "an extraordinary group of playwrights doing exactly what theatre has always done, wrestling with the most urgent questions of our time."
The full collection gets its world premiere at the Flynn's Main Stage in October 2026, when a company of actors performs all 36 works back to back across an entire day. It is the first time the plays will be performed together. The Flynn's lobby will stay open throughout as a place to sit and talk.
But the Flynn did not design this project to end on its own stage. Organizers describe it as "a nationwide act of listening, one community at a time," and they built a participation model to match. Communities across the country and beyond are invited to stage the plays between October 23 and November 3, 2026, in the run-up to the midterm elections. The rules are deliberately loose. Choose one play, several, or all of them. Read them around a table, bring them into a classroom, put them onstage, or fold them into a community gathering. No theater experience is required, and no staging is required. There are no licensing or participation fees as long as admission is free. Schools, libraries, colleges, museums, faith communities, book clubs, retirement communities and groups of friends are all explicitly welcome. Organizers say they hope to see gatherings in all fifty states.
That is how four plays end up in a medical school gallery. The Arts@Larner Committee, which programs arts events for the Larner College of Medicine community, and the American Medical Women's Association Student Interest Group at Larner are presenting the evening. The choice of host is not as incongruous as it first appears. The AMWA student group exists to support women in medicine, and the Blackburn Prize exists to support women writing for the stage; both are in the business of making room for people who have historically had to argue for the room. Medical training also has its own long argument with civic life, about who gets care, who gets heard, and what a society owes the people in front of it.
The format is simple and old: actors perform, then everyone talks. Four ten-minute plays run roughly forty minutes, leaving time for the informal discussion that follows. The event is free and open to the Larner community, with no ticketing or capacity barrier described.
What the four selections are has not been announced. The anthology holds more than thirty plays, and the Flynn has not published a list of which ones the Larner group chose. That is part of the appeal of the format the organizers designed: the same collection can be assembled a hundred different ways in a hundred different rooms, and each assembly says something about the people doing the assembling. A medical school will almost certainly choose differently than a library or a church basement.
What is known is the shape of the thing. Thirty-six playwrights were asked to look at a country in doubt and describe what they saw, in ten minutes each. The results are being performed in a theater in Burlington, published as a book, and staged in galleries and classrooms and community centers across the country in the ten days before an election. On a Thursday evening in late October, a few dozen people will file into the Hoehl Gallery, sit down, and listen to four of them.
More information is available through the UVM events calendar.