By SHARON EBERSON
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the brand-new stage version, was put in motion by a fortuitous mistake. Zak Berkman, the leader of People’s Light in Malvern, PA, asked the prolific and popular playwright Lauren Gunderson if he could read her version of the post-Civil War classic.
It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, Gunderson told a Saturday afternoon gathering on the South Side.
Except she hadn’t written such a work. At least, not yet.
The playwright was speaking on November 8, a week before her adaptation of Little Women was to make its Pittsburgh debut at City Theatre. Gunderson was in conversation with Clare Drobot, City’s artistic director, discussing her career as the most-produced living playwright in the United States and her most recent production at City, followed by a Q&A session at the Lillie Theatre.
(Image by Sharon Eberson)
Gunderson is no stranger to City, including The Revolutionists and The Catastrophists. For the past two holiday seasons, her plays that extend the fictional stories of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice characters (Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley and The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley) have occupied City’s Mainstage.
It’s Alcott’s enduring tale of four sisters – Meg, Beth, Amy and headstrong writer Jo – that now occupies that space for the season, with a tale that begins and ends with Christmas scenes.
The Civil War-era novel has seen countless adaptations, including a silent film version in 1918, Greta Gerwig’s 2019 take for Netflix, and a 2005 Broadway musical that starred Sutton Foster.
It made sense that Gunderson would want to tell this story, given her affinity for female protagonists and women playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl.
“Finding the energy to lift off from [those playwrights] into my own space and my own voice, it’s just endlessly interesting,” Gunderson said.
She is often described as a feminist writer, and “I love the mantle of feminism, and I’m happy to wave that flag till I die,” she said, then added a “but.”
“But there are many flavors to it,” she said. “You don’t say ‘a male protagonist’ about Hamlet. Hamlet is universal. … Any one of my main characters, they’re universal, or if they’re not, then that’s the issue that we should talk about.”
It was, however, that mantle of feminism that inspired the initial query about Little Women.
Having heard that such a script did not exist, Berkman went on to partner with City Theatre, Northlight Theatre (Skokie, Illinois) and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, California) on the rolling premiere of four independent productions that started last year in Illinois.
“There’s nothing quite like the joy of receiving an email from Lauren Gunderson that starts with ‘Oooooh I love this idea!’ That was her response when I first reached out about her adapting ‘Little Women,’ ” Berkman told BroadwayWorld. “I am so grateful Lauren leapt at this idea and this coalition of wonderful theaters could gather together to make it a reality.”
In an earlier conversation about the 2025-2026 season, Drobot said Little Women is “a great example of having our cake and eating it, too. Yes, it is this incredibly recognizable title, but it’s also a world premiere, new commission by Lauren Gunderson that four theaters got together, and said ‘Little Women is incredibly relevant.’ It’s a story about what it means to be a woman in our world. And I think the parallels between the limitations and the also innovation that women are pushing forward, both then and now, feels incredibly relevant.”
With different creative teams, performers and venues, no two productions among the four will be alike.
By way of example, at Northlight, in the summer of 2024, “Aunt March was a puppet,” related Drobot.
However, the script incorporates words straight from the novel, said Gunderson, whose job as an adapter is to “activate the novel.”
“I’m here for the [March] sisters, and I want to say I’m here for a love story. I love a love story,” said Gunderson, who said her favorite adaptation leans toward the 1994 movie, notably with Christian Bale as Laurie.
She also spent time getting to know the novelist, who grew up in New England and in the company of other famous writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.
Gunderson’s research included a visit to the author’s Orchard House home, in Concord, Mass. The playwright’s roots are Southern, but she found common ground with Alcott and the novelist’s fictional counterpart, Jo, the influence of having a father in the clergy.
Her obvious fascination with the author, as much as the sisterhood of the book, is evident in her script — Zanny Laird plays Jo March, as well as a character named “Lou.” For Gunderson, or any playwright developing a new work, the opportunity to see four independent productions come into existence is a gift.
In Pittsburgh, the production is directed by Kaja Dunn, an associate professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Purnell School of Drama. The cast includes Laird, Annalisa D’Aguilar, Alex Manalo, Nancy McNulty, Nell Murphy, Brenden Peifer, and Juan Rivera Lebron.
All of the actors have local ties, from Rivera Lebron, chairperson of the Department of Theatre in Point Park University‘s Conservatory of Performing Arts, to Murphy, who appeared in the film Freakier Friday (Beta Girl) and who is a BFA student at CMU (Class of 2026).
Gunderson has been in Pittsburgh not just for her play at City, but she also is the distinguished playwright-in-residence at the CMU Center for New Work Development.
During the conversation with Drobot and the audience, the playwright revealed that she is working on a musical, and not just the libretto, although she says her musical background is limited to being a clarinetist in her school’s band.
“But I do love a mathematical sort of structural thinking, and music is very much that. I’m also fascinated and deeply jealous of music because the emotional capacity to play two chords, and you are in an emotional space instantly, and I have to write three and a half scenes to get anyone close to that,” she said.
She added that the project is “a very small, intimate story, and it’s a little bit more song cycle than musical theater.”
Most of the questions from the audience on Saturday were from aspiring librettists and playwrights.
She was asked about her penchant for historical dramas that included real people, such as The Revolutionists (a 2018 City Theatre production) and Ada and the Engine, about Ada Lovelace, wrote the first computer program and imagined that computers would be able to make music – in 1830.
“I need to make it feel like you’ve got to fall in love with these people,” Gunderson said of her job as a playwright. “And actually, I’ve got to know them. They’ve got to feel like them, whether it’s Ada Lovelace or Shakespeare or any of the characters in Austen. So we have to have that feel fresh, and real, and human.”
A question she is asked often, and was asked on Saturday, was, “Why do you think it is, she was asked, that your work has come to be so broadly produced?”
She said it was a better question for artistic directors such as Drobot, who know their communities, but she has a theory:
“I started in the audience, so I’m writing for the audience. I’m writing for something that I not only want, but I really need. And again, as a pastor’s daughter [talking about theater and church], people go for a similar reason – to be together at a thing that doesn’t feel like a lecture, but feels like something you can apply out in the world, internally and externally, something that guides a kind of ethic, a way to understand the world that we’re in, a way to be reminded of humanity’s connection to each other, and that there is goodness in the world.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is at City Theatre, Mainstage, through December 7, 2025. Tickets: https://citytheatrecompany.org/production/100834/louisa-may-alcotts-little-women or call 412-431-2489.
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