The Ballad of Madelyne and Therese takes place in 1940 but asks the fundamental question: What makes you feel most alive? And: What are you willing to risk in order to be ALIVE while you are alive? 

I started thinking about queer women who were alive in 1940. I knew very little about them because their stories aren’t told all that often. But I wondered: what must it have been like to be queer in the 1940s? How might a woman have expressed this? Where are the stories that focus on the experience of navigating queerness - the actual humanness of it, not just the obstacles?

Many of us have been conditioned to see female desire as dangerous and disruptive instead of gorgeous and uplifting. Why is this? I wanted to make something that aspires to disrupt that conditioning. I wanted to explore characters who don’t just fall in love but who fall into aliveness. And then lose touch with their aliveness. And then long to have it back. At its core, The Ballad is a story about longing. While it presents as a love story, the actual longing is for something deeper than love or connection; the longing is to feel alive.

— Rachel Garlin, Writer & Lead Performer