NPX Weekly Round-Up: Wonderland by Kate Douglas

An experimental speculative piece about women's anger, plus three more plays to read this week.

Jan 27, 2025

Hello lovely readers! The play I am discussing today has the following content warnings: physical violence, overt emotional control and other “cult-ish” experiences, and descriptions of animal violence. If any of those things bother you, I wouldn’t add this script to your NPX library. I do not overtly discuss the animal violence in this piece, but do analyze the use of physical and emotional control. As always, take care of yourself— I can always see you next week!

Exactly a week ago, on January 20th, two things happened:

I turned 29!
Inauguration Day 2025

I bet you can guess which of those I was moderately excited about and which one I spent the entire day trying to forget was occurring!

But unfortunately, once the birthday part of the day was over, I had to face facts: awful things were happening around me (just look at the executive orders that have already occurred) and there wasn’t all that much I could do to stop them. The only thing I, and a lot of others, have is a voice. So, if you have managed to find me somewhere else on the internet, you’ve seen countless PSAs on every terrible White House happening, articles, and mutual aid posts. If I’ve learned anything from reading On Tyranny by Timothy D. Snyder too many times, it’s that we should not obey in advance. So I’m being loudly non-compliant, in between taking mental health breaks to preserve my very sanity.

It’s the first thing he says for a reason!

As an artist, I believe we have a very important job in times like these— to write, support, create, and view art that defies fascism, in whatever way you do that best. Whether that’s writing (or supporting) satire, speculative, sci-fi, period pieces, avant garde…whatever you like. Post-reading this week’s play, I upgraded my NPX account so I can now search by tag as well as further specifics in order to continue supporting work that I feel defies the blatant anti-intellectualism, fascism, and hatred of anybody that isn’t a white cis straight Christian man that people across the world are experiencing.

With that said, this week’s piece is called Wonderland by Kate Douglas, a speculative play that examines woman’s anger within patriarchy, which I found particularly fitting for me personally at this current moment.

Here is the summary from NPX:

Wonderland explores the anguish and ecstasy of women's anger in two parts. Part One is set in a dystopian 'anger management' rehab for women to help heal them of their rage and "get control of their lives." Part Two is set in an outlandishly monied suburb where omnipresent violence is entirely normalized.

The first half of this piece could’ve taken place in Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale, except for the absence of religious speak and iconography. A group of women are “recommended” to this facility in which they are forced to comply with a rigorous methodology strictly enforcing gender roles and emotional suppression. For example, they must have two “appropriate” hobbies (such as gardening or reading self-help books), purchase things daily from a catalogue (which they are required to talk about with each other like they are reading off ads), and must stay on a strict “low carb, sugar free, vegetarian, and calorie-conscious” diet supposedly to maintain their appearance. And this is only the beginning. Emotional outbursts of frustration, anger, or sadness are punished via physical and emotional abuse from their “handler”, Rosie.

One of the characters, Billie, figures out how to play the game. By agreeing with pretty much everything Rosie says, refusing confrontation of any kind, and buying the most expensive things from the catalogue, she is able to rise quickly through the arbitrary “levels” the center assigns to the women. This creates many different feelings and reactions in the other characters— in fact, it leads to a screaming outburst from a character, Nina, who up until that point was pretty much a model patient. I took this to be a cold example that no matter how perfect you are under patriarchy, modeling gender roles and acting exactly how is “required” of you, it will never truly be enough. Billie may have risen to level 4 and is being allowed to leave the inpatient facility, but we know from the other characters that there are seemingly infinite levels, and true acceptance is an illusion.

The second half of the play takes place in an almost Stepford-Wives-style technicolor suburban backyard where a group of neighborhood women are getting together for a fundraiser. Honestly, I took it to be the same world, just perhaps in the outside with characters who either have not been recommended to this facility or are graduates of it already. It opens with two of the women discussing an awful event that I won’t recount here in detail where a neighbor’s dog is hit by a car. The women seem fascinated by the over the top violence of the event, speculating who could have hit the dog, relishing in the idea that it might’ve been said neighbor’s ex-husband.

The topic of divorce is treated as taboo in both sections of this piece, but especially in the second. The divorced neighbor, Tracy, is treated with both pity and a creepy obsession as the other characters try to question her about her ex-husband and the dog situation. This greatly annoys Kendra, who is hosting the event. The entire time, from the first conversation onward, the women are passive-aggressive to each other about their looks, financial status, marriages, and more. Tracy seems to be the only one who doesn’t participate. This also seems to annoy the crap out of Kendra.

As the fundraiser continues, the women purchase more and more tickets to win prizes that hold a lot of violent weight within them— electric knives, knife sharpeners, a chainsaw— until finally the tension breaks when Tracy wins the most coveted prize: a flesh-suit called “The Perfect Body”. Tracy thanks the group and immediately offers to give the prize to whoever can tell her who killed her dog. One of the characters immediately breaks and reveals that Molly, the uptight and smug community chairwoman, is the culprit. Tracy immediately stabs her to death.

The other women essentially ignore this event and continue prattling on, finishing up the fundraising event. Tracy leaves, and the others clean up Molly’s body like it’s just another piece of party garbage.

I think this play speaks to the inherent violence women experience under patriarchy; the physical and emotional violence they do to themselves, to each other, and what is done to them by outside forces (men, society, etc). This play just turns it all up to eleven in order to see everything a little more clearly. The patriarchy tells women that things such as anger and frustration, saying no, and standing up for oneself are “unladylike”, when really it’s because those things threaten patriarchy’s existence. If they can just keep women down, thinking that they are either worthless or somehow content, then the cycle of abuse continues.

I think it’s important to point out here that in this play, some of the characters are veeeery complicit in the implementation of patriarchal standards. It is not only men who keep misogynistic societal conventions going— in fact, a lot of women participate in this. Whether it’s to gain validation, feel like they are “better” than other women, or something else entirely, a lot of women are complicit in upholding patriarchy. This is something the play approaches head on, and I appreciated that.

This play made me want to get back into more speculative writing. I think when reality itself feels a little too ridiculous, too cruel to be true, one of the best ways to address it is to show a warped or different reality in art. To dissect our reality through the way it effects us emotionally instead of the way it exists physically can help us to get a clearer picture not only of what is exactly going on, but how exactly we feel about it. Maybe I just like heightened, weird plots and allegories too much, but hey, that’s my style for you. I think it might be time to use that sensibility, even in my more “realistic” work.

Here is my official recommendation from NPX:

A wonderfully terrifying speculative piece examining just how women’s anger, sadness, and frustration is silenced and made “dirty” by patriarchy. I took a lot of delight in the heightened stakes created by the threats of this internal violence being taken outwards to effect the characters in a more imminent way. As a theater artist, I was really excited by all the visual possibilities a script like this provides to designers and the room for play given to the actors. Would love to see it staged!

Did you read this play? Do you want to? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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