television

A Terrible Silence focuses on five of the 41 women who were blacklisted in television in 1950. The play tells something of their lives, their dreams, their prolific talents and their silencers. 

At the end of World War II, anti-communists—including powerful organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the American Legion, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Catholic Church, Chambers of Commerce around the country, and many other institutions and organizations—initiated an apocalyptic battle over their definition of Americanism.

In New York City, then the center of broadcast production, in the years between the two world wars, diverse groups of women had taken advantage of economic and political instabilities to carve out toeholds in media industries. To be a woman who wanted to change the treatment of women on and off-screen in the 1930s and 1940s was to struggle constantly against incredibly rigid and powerful institutions.