EVE, ALIENS, AND REALITY OF BEING A WOMAN: 'Hysteria!' takes a trip through time

What do witch trials, bad doctors, the Garden of Eden, and reality television have in common? Besides sounding like, or being, bad soap operas, they all have something to say about how we treat women.

That’s the territory Hysteria! explores, an original play by Wilmington locals Jesslyn Wilson and Meghan Cook. Part historical fever dream, part dark comedy and part speculative fiction, it spans centuries of women being judged, controlled, and pitted against one another. There are puppets, too. Because apparently, history needed puppets.

Think Kurt Vonnegut meets The Twilight Zone meets Love Is Blind. No, I’m not making that up; it’s basically a quote.

Wilson and Cook began developing the play in late 2023 with an idea about aliens observing Earth throughout history. Then Roe v. Wade was overturned, the state of the world did what the state of the world does, and the writers decided there were more immediate subjects to tackle. Aliens can wait.

The result is a nonlinear journey that begins with Eve and that famously troublesome apple. In this telling, the original sin comes with a pointed question: What happens when a woman is punished for wanting knowledge?

From there, Hysteria! jumps through witch trials, the questionable wisdom of self-proclaimed medical geniuses, and a future where reality television turns beauty and romance into competitive sports. History gets a remix, the present gets a side-eye, and the future looks suspiciously like another season of reality TV.

Beneath the absurdity is a familiar pattern: the ways women have been judged, controlled, and encouraged to compete with one another across generations, even when the centuries between them make the past feel like another planet.

The play swings between broad comedy and sobering moments. A reality-show parody skewers a culture that treats women as commodities; elsewhere, the laughs give way to the consequences of those attitudes. The comedy can turn on a dime, sometimes leaving you wondering whether you should still be laughing. (You probably should. Then think about why.)

Set design, lighting, and an original score carry audiences between eras, while the staging grows increasingly immersive. The puppets are designed and built by Alexandra and Phil Covington, because even a centuries-spanning examination of misogyny deserves a little arts-and-crafts time.

Despite the subtext, Wilson and Cook aren’t interested in making a case that men are evil. Early drafts leaned harder into the anger before the writers stepped back and reconsidered. The point wasn’t to replace one us-versus-them narrative with another, it was to explore what happens when women stop being pitted against one another and start lifting each other up.

That doesn’t mean everyone gets a happy ending. The writers have kept the messy relationships and uncomfortable realities intact. They want audiences to draw their own conclusions, sit with the difficult moments and maybe argue about the play on the ride home. If it’s still rattling around in your head two weeks later, so much the better.

Getting the show to the stage has been its own exercise in perseverance. Wilson and Cook have taken on writing, directing, and producing duties, with Wilson also acting in the show. Two years after a conversation about a cool idea, they’re juggling rehearsals, choreography, music, puppets and the familiar community-theater challenge of making something ambitious happen without a Broadway budget.

It’s a familiar story in Wilmington’s creative community: people with day jobs finding the time, money and energy to make the work they want to see. In this case, that work argues that while we can’t undo the past, we can recognize its patterns, refuse to repeat them and help each other through what comes next.

Eve took the apple. The least we can do is learn something from it. 

The show opens in the North Front Theatre on November 5-15. Tickets and the full cast and crew list are available HERE. 

CONTENT ADVISORY: This play deals with adult themes such as strong language, violence, and sexual assault. It is not intended for children, and viewer discretion is advised.