Terry Baum’s
Hick: A Love Story,
Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Letters
to Lorena Hickok
In Person at The San Francisco Mainstage
Written by Terry Baum & Pat Bond
Performed by Terry Baum
Developed with Carolyn Myers
Directed by Sarah Albertson & Bill Peters
Photo by Lynn Fried
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance,
and additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
June 9 – July 14, 2024
Sundays at 5pm
Ticket Information
Tickets: $20 – $35 General Seating sliding scale | $50 and $100 Reserved Seating
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance,
and additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
75 Minutes | No Intermission | Ages 12+
Please do not bring infants to the show
Content Advisories
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Health, Safety and COVID-19 Information
Our commitment to our patrons
About the Show
Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Letters to Lorena Hickok, HICK is a Co-Production with Lilith Theater.
When Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady in 1933, she had a lesbian love–Lorena Hickok, the most famous woman journalist of her day. The letters between the patrician First Lady and the charming hard-living butch reporter began in 1932, when they fell in love. Their correspondence only ended with Eleanor’s death in 1962. Hick mentioned and supported Eleanor, who grew to become the greatest American woman of the 20th Century. International solo performer, Terry Baum, brings both women to life as she explores their romance.
HICK opened in San Francisco in 2014, receiving rave reviews and playing to packed houses. At the 2015 New York Fringe Festival, HICK was a Fringe Fave. The 2019 San Francisco Fringe Festival gave HICK a Best of Fringe Award.
Thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt’s estate for giving permission to quote from Mrs. Roosevelt’s letters to Lorena Hickok.
Artist Biographies
Lorena Hickok (1893-1968) was born in 1893 in rural Wisconsin, into desperate poverty. At the age of 14, her mother died, and her father threw her out of the house. She worked as a hired girl, completing high school with the help of an aunt. Her journalism career began at the Battle Creek Journal, in 1913, writing for the women’s page. At the Minneapolis Tribune, starting in 1917, Hickok developed into a successful journalist, known for the humor and humanity of her writing. She eventually became a top reporter for the Associated Press, in New York. She was the nation’s best-known woman journalist by 1932, when our story begins.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was born into the American aristocracy, in a family ravaged by alcoholism. She was the favorite niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She married rising politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1905 and became fully immersed in public service, fighting against injustice and racism and advancing the rights of women. In 1932, when FDR was running for President, she met Lorena Hickok. And that’s where our story begins.
Terry Baum (Playwright & Performer) has been creating theater in San Francisco since 1975, when she founded Lilith, A Women’s Theater. She has had her plays published, produced all over the world, and translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and Swedish. She has toured the world as a solo performer. Most recently, Exit Press published One Dyke’s Theater, an anthology of Baum’s plays edited by Carolyn Myers. Baum and Myers are Lilith Theater.
Carolyn Myers (Development) directed her first play at age 8, idealistically (if misguidedly) produced “A Raisin in the Sun” with an all-Caucasian 8th grade cast in junior high, had her first original play censored in high school, majored in drama at UC Santa Barbara, and has been a founding member of four social action theaters: The Gorilla Theater, The Isla Vista Community Theater, Lilith, the internationally renowned women’s theatre of the 1970’s and 80’s, and Mixed Company Theater (in partnership with Dori Appel) in Ashland, Oregon. For fifteen years, with Cil Stengel, she directed Planned Parenthood’s Teen Theatres in Southern Oregon. Her plays “Girl Talk” and “Hot Flashes” (written with Dori Appel) are published by Samuel French, Inc., and “Dos Lesbos” (with Terry Baum and Alice Thompson) was featured in Rome for EuroPride 2000 and banned by the Pope. Her epic poem “She Bop” was made into an animated film by Joanna Priestley and is performed by vocal artists at cultural events around the globe.
Pat Bond (1925-1990, Playwright) grew up in the Midwest, joined the Women’s Army Corps to meet girls in 1945 and moved to San Francisco in 1947. Word is Out (1978), a landmark documentary about gay people, launched Pat’s career as a monologist and storyteller. She toured the country with her four one-woman shows, often the first out lesbian performer audiences had ever seen.
Sarah Albertson (Co-Director) has worked off-Broadway and with theatre companies in the US and Canada. She has MFA degrees from the Yale School of Drama and the Yale School of Art in film. She has taught theatre workshops in London and Paris. Sarah lives in Santa Cruz CA. where she is on the Theatre Arts faculty at Cabrillo College and directs at the Santa Cruz County Actors’ Theatre in their long-running ten minute play festival, 8-10’s at Eight.
Bill Peters (Co-Director) directing credits include projects at the Manhattan Theatre Club (NYC), The Denver Center, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Jewel Theatre (Santa Cruz), and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Among his more recent directing projects: Doll’s House, Part 2, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Skylight. Bill has adapted and directed Melville’s Moby Dick, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov andThe Possessed, Dickens’s Hard Times, and several short stories by Chekhov.
Lilith Theater, the Bay Area’s internationally renowned women’s theatre was founded in 1974. Continuing through 1985, Lilith produced both collectively created original plays: Lilitheatre, Good Food, Moonlighting, Sacrifices, Exit the Maids, Fetal Positions and Breeding Grounds; and plays by women playwrights: Pizza, by Michele Linfante, Manifesto by Dacia Maraini, Trespasso by Martha Boesing, and The Daughters of Erin, by Carolyn Myers and Elizabeth Roden. A touring company at European and American Theater Festivals, Lilith once gave an impromptu performance during a ferry strike to astonished stranded motorists, and was fatefully caught in the Mt. Saint Helens’ eruption. Lilith rose like a phoenix from the ashes in 2014, with the first production of HICK: A LOVE STORY, which Baum has performed throughout the U.S. HICK was named a Fringe Fave at the NY International Fringe Festival (2015) and Best of the San Francisco Fringe Festival (2019).
Press
“Hick: A Love Story burns with lesbian passion…. Baum portrays Hickock with a passion that speaks volumes about her adulation of this remarkable woman.” –Theatrius
KPOO RADIO INTERVIEW
NBC INTERVIEW