(**This project is currently being developed as part of the Orchard Project Greenhouse.)

Against Women & Music! is an absurdist-horror Victorian chamber piece by Kate Douglas and Grace McLean. Celine is a widow emerging from a year of mourning. She spends her days maintaining her husband’s wunderkammer – the objects he collected using her family’s fortune. Although Celine has a clean bill of health to resume social engagements, the Doctor believes Celine’s daughter Geneva is still struggling with melancholia. He prescribes piano lessons to help “finesse her emotional intelligence.” Geneva, newly smitten with a gentleman caller (who in turn, is smitten with the collection), pleads with Celine to allow the lessons so she can fit in.

As Geneva begins the regiment, Celine discovers a sinister presence is possessing her daughter with the cult of femininity. She spends her days cooking, cleaning, sewing – and physically injuring herself in the process. As Celine sinks deeper into a well of paranoia about her daughter’s well-being and her place in society, she believes she is the only one who can save her daughter.