Anne
By Anne Kenner
7:30 p.m. on May 19, 2025; Followed by a Q&A with the Playwright
Who says you can’t rewrite history?
King Henry VIII’s England was no picnic for women. Anne changes all of that, reimagining Tudor England as a comedic romp and scathing political satire, all while taking down one of history’s greatest villains. You are invited to watch Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon call bullshit on the patriarchy and beat the most powerful men in 16th Century Britain at their own game.
Anne Kenner’s writing appears in The Gettysburg Review, The Southwest Review, Boulevard, Salmagundi, Raritan, New Ohio Review, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere, and has been recognized as Notable multiple times in The Best American Essays series. More about the playwright.
From the playwright, Anne Kenner
”In 1969 when I was eleven years old, my best friend and I copped a ride to watch “Anne of The Thousand Days” at the Third Avenue Cinema in San Mateo, California. Watching Anne Boleyn best the poisonously brilliant and powerful men who surrounded her in Tudor England was the most exciting, horizon-expanding experience of my young life. In the film though, as in history, the men won. As I watched the executioner swing his blade at my hero’s neck, I vowed to vindicate Anne Boleyn. Anne is my rendition of how things play out when women give themselves enough credit to grasp and exercise the upper hand.” ed better for Anne Boleyn,” I persuaded myself, “they’d have ended better for all the girls.” So I decided to rewrite her narrative. Anne is a play in four acts about exactly what should have happened if people in the sixteenth century shared my particular perspective on appropriate justice. And by four acts, I mean a really fast, really slant, idiosyncratically vernacularized rendition of how things play out when women give themselves enough credit to grasp and exercise the upper hand. Anne is a clarion call to anyone and everyone who has ever been reluctant to take their moonshot. As a reimagined Anne Boleyn reminds us, “I yet own my own mind and make decisions as I will;” HFY.