Off-Broadway’s Gloria: A Life Streams Free for Women’s History Month

Off-Broadway’s Gloria: A Life Streams Free for Women’s History Month

This month, experience playwright Emily Mann’s unique interpretation of feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s life, performed by an all-female cast starring Emmy Award winner Christine Lahti and directed by Tony Award winner Diane Paulus.

The off-Broadway play will be streaming all month long through PBS' Great Performances in celebration of Women's History Month. Broadway play Ann starring Holland Taylor, based on the life of Texas governor Ann Richards, is also streaming this month on PBS. 

Fifty years after Gloria Steinem began advocating for women’s equality and championing the equality rights of others, her vision remains highly relevant.

Starring Academy, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award winner Christine Lahti (Evil, Chicago Hope) as Steinem, the play features an all-women cast playing both male and female roles.

 


 

Act one of Gloria: A Life focuses on Steinem’s life and path to activism. Act two consists of a “talking circle” with the audience to discuss the play’s themes, moderated by Gloria Steinem herself. This unique theatrical format offers a forum for Steinem’s philosophy on the necessity of conversation as a catalyst for change.

The play is now streaming all month long through Great Performances - viewers in the US and Canada can stream the show now through PBS all the way up to March 31, 2023. The play is not currently available in other markets.

“Gloria: A Life” originally ran from October 1, 2018-March 31, 2019 at off-Broadway's Daryl Roth Theater in New York City. The play is staged in the round to heighten the intimacy and personal connection between the actors and the audience.

In her review for Vulture Magazine, Sara Holdren said: "There’s so much we don’t know. About our history, about each other. I left Gloria feeling all sorts of things: heartbroken at the moment we’re living in, a moment of brutal backlash against so many decades of labor and belief; elated by the continued hopefulness of Steinem and of the artists telling her story (such a welcome contrast to the nasty, solipsistic “Everything is fucked” attitude that’s seeped into our daily way of speaking, no matter how progressive we profess to be); and a bit chastened. Why did I not know more of the story I was just told? Why were so many of these women only names and auras to me?"