Two Women, One Ward: An original student play explores 100 years of stigma

It all began with an affinity for the gothic, expressed in an original short story written in Lower School when Eleanor Lawton Flatters ‘26 was just eight years old. Years later, the whisperings of that story have grown and leapt from a collection of notes and pages, to the stage of Friends Academy, and starting Sunday, in a full-fledged performance of “Saint Dymphna's Ward” at the storied Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Aug. 3-8.

Eleanor Lawton Flatters '26 discusses her inspiration for her original play "Saint Dymphna's Ward," performed at Friends Academy and the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Video by Alvin Caal/Friends Academy

Throughout the process, Eleanor, who is the 2025 recipient of the Roger Erickson Humanities Award, has experienced a multitude of roles – from writer to researcher, actor to director, and finally producer, which encompasses its own myriad of hats and learning opportunities. “When I started writing, I did not intend to take it to the Fringe Festival, but had planned to do a production here at Friends,” recalled Eleanor, who after meeting with Director of College Counseling Edward Dugger, explained how her trajectory changed. “It was our first meeting of the school year and he suggested I should take it to Fringe. He shared that we’d had people do it before and that a previous cast had performed theirs in a Meeting House in Edinburgh – which was a potential venue for me,” she said. 

That previous performance was an FA alumni/Upper School cast of “We Didn’t Have Time To Be Scared,” an original musical by Director of Arts Andrew Geha, which chronicled the real-life escape from Nazi-occupied Austria of the mother and sister of a former FA Arts teacher. Originally staged in 2010, the show debuted at the Fringe Festival in 2011 to 5-star reviews. This spring, the play was published for release in professional theatres and schools.

A dual-narrative play, “Saint Dymphna’s Ward” follows two women, a century apart, in two different times of history, and who are both residents in the same psychiatric institution – one willingly, one not. Justine is committed by her husband following the death of their first infant child and struggles against Victorian-era expectations of femininity at Saint Dymphna’s Asylum for the Insane; and Margot, a patient at Saint Dymphna’s Center for Psychiatric Care, finds she is looking for something that she is not yet ready to accept. “They are both fighting against their circumstances and the injustices against them,” explained Eleanor, who started at FA in Pre-K.

Performed on a 6’ X 6’ stage, the play features seven characters – Justine (Charli Zhatila ‘26, FA/Angelina Miller ‘22, Fringe) and Margot (Eleanor Lawton Flatters ‘26), their respective physicians, Dr. Ribière (Kody Mitchell ‘25) and Dr. Frederickson (Eric Ding ‘25, FA/Taylor Fernandez ‘25, Fringe), as well as Oliver (Taylor Fernandez ‘25), a fellow patient of Margot’s; Lucas (Kody Mitchell ‘26), a close friend to Margot; and Vincent (Eric Ding ‘25, FA/Taylor Fernandez ‘25, Fringe), Justine’s husband 

Played out over a span of 100 years, the play reveals similarities and differences, in both societal norms, psychiatric care, and female empowerment. “I feel like today we’ve become a lot more accepting of people seeking out therapy and dealing with somewhat smaller issues,” reflected Eleanor. “But there is still a lot of stigma with patients and their mental health care. I think this could be due to the media, which still perpetuates an outdated narrative (think horror movies and books that are located in psychiatric wards). I’ve always thought it would be interesting to compare someone’s experience in a modern-day psych ward to the creepy, scary Victorian narrative that is still leeching into our modern day,” she continued.

Central to the message of the play is Eleanor’s exploration into the emotional and mental imprisonment of women, at times through the psychiatric field, the societal norms that lend support, and how both have shown willingness to use a part of a woman’s experience in order to minimize it in a way that restricts them. “There’s a line of Dr. Ribère’s, where he says to Justine, ‘Your child died. It was due to your unstable condition that the child perished.’ That one statement gets to the root of the manipulation and gaslighting that was going on a century ago,” said Eleanor.

Research has always been at the backbone of Eleanor’s writing process and especially with regard to “Saint Dymphna’s Ward,” starting with a deep dive into Nellie Bly and her investigative chronicling of her experience at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum  in “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” published in 1887. “I read ‘Ten Days,” and did some more research into Victorian asylums. The madness that Nellie Bly displayed was some slight hysteria and a small headache – which I thought was a low bar,” commented Eleanor. 

That research led Eleanor to the infamous Bedlam Hospital in London last summer, where she was granted access to archival case studies and notes from attending physicians. “Through the surgeon book, case book, and other primary documents, I got to examine how patients were categorized and how women were treated differently. In a female intake, women were asked for their marital status, number of children, and date of their last birth; with men, they just wanted their name and when they were born. You could see that in many of the female cases there was post-partum depression and psychosis; there was one that stuck out to me – it was noted as a hallucination that a female patient could smell her dead child. I started to understand that female hysteria was related to how people thought women’s uteruses could corrupt them.”

A final piece of in-class research contributed to the storyline when Eleanor enrolled in the “Latin, Science, and Law” class at Friends. “I believe it was in my 9th grade year and we had to do a research project on a historical figure or scientist who used Latin or Greek in their work; I and researched Hippocrates and the theory of the Balance of the Four Humours – the bodily fluids of blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Hippocrates and others believed that an imbalance would result in mental illness,” she described. 

With direction and support from Friends Academy Director of Arts Andrew Geha over this past school year, the play debuted in the Helen A. Dolan Center Theater in late May to a full audience, who sat on stage, surrounding the actors. “It has been a really rewarding experience to see something I have written come to life,” shared Eleanor. “A lot of what I write just exists on the page and is static, like poetry. This was such a different process to see my work come alive for the first time and I’ve come full circle,” she added.

For Eleanor, the fact that this project came to fruition in a Quaker school environment is not coincidental. “In a Quaker environment, there is so much value placed on peoples’ ideas from the get-go. From when I was little, all I’ve ever known is teachers who care about what I’m interested in – that I could go to Mr. Geha for advice and feedback; that he was willing to give up his time for three nights to hold dress rehearsals for a show that I wasn’t sure was good – that’s something unique and special about our teachers, and something I don’t hear from friends who attend other schools.”

So, what’s ahead for Eleanor? “Now that I have seen that I have the capability to see something through, I am going to continue to do just that.” 

Photography by Margaret Pegno Schwartz/Friends Academy