Upcoming with Theatre Wellesley

Spring Show “Blood Relations” by Sharon Pollock - SHOW IS SOLD OUT!

Theatre Wellesley invites you to take a look behind the story told in the 130-year-old playground rhyme and into the dark history of the Borden family of Fall River, Massachusetts, where on a sweltering August day in 1892 Lizzie Borden’s parents were murdered with a hatchet.

Lizzie was a 32-year-old spinster who lived with her father and step-mother, along with her sister Emma and their Irish maid, Bridget. Lizzie’s open animosity toward her stepmother and her distrust of her uncle’s meddling in her wealthy father’s affairs, along with her unconventional behaviour within the tightly-structured society of the day, made her the prime suspect in a murder case and trial that captured the imagination of the entire nation.

Thrust into the media spotlight in one of the United States’ first sensational show trials, Lizzie was eventually acquitted and lived on her family’s wealth as a quasi-celebrity in the years after, despite the lingering public consensus that she was the murderer.

Award-winning Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock’s “Blood Relations” opens in 1902, with Lizzie entertaining a visit from a prominent Boston actress who uses their special friendship to convince Lizzie to tell her the story of what might have happened that fateful day. What unfolds is not so much a possible recounting of a murder as it is an exposé of the expectations, constraints and burdens placed on women in 19th century Bostonian society and the life that Lizzie lashed out at to escape.

More details click HERE