How do we talk about race, history, aging, friendship, loss– and trees?

Three old friends come to a cabin in the woods.

They find a box of dolls.

What do the dolls say?

    Language of Dolls is an original collaborative theater piece by veteran downtown performers Lizzie Olesker, Peggy Pettitt and Louise Smith. After forty-plus years of knowing each other, they embarked on a series of intentionally candid and at times, difficult conversations about their identities as one Black woman and two white women. Now in their seventies, they wanted to unravel the subtle and overt ways that systemic racism has entered their lives and most intimate relationships. They recorded and transcribed these conversations which revealed more than they knew or expected of each other.     

     A visit to the exhibit Black Dolls at The New York Historical Society profoundly affected the direction and focus of their collaborative exploration. The Black dolls they witnessed, made in the 19th and early 20th century, spoke to them in their haunting, silent presence. The dolls’ hidden histories inspired them to create their own “soul dolls” from found materials, discovering how each one possessed a language of poetic possibility– a Language of Dolls.