As a part of the UCI Department of Drama’s main stage season for the 2024-25 school year, the workshop play “Quit Bitchin’” made its debut on Feb. 28, exploring the many different forms of female rage until its final run on March 15.
Written by UCI third-year Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) student Anna Marjorie Fitzgerald, “Quit Bitchin’” is a play based on the mythical stories of three very rageful women. The modern-day Medea, Maddie (Zoe Nauman), explores her motherhood journey and the tribulations of losing one’s selfhood to her children. Tig (Lourdes Castillo), the modern-day Antigone, struggles with progressing her career while balancing the responsibilities of her family and the expectations of marriage. The modern-day Jael, Jules (Jiayi Zhao), is burdened by the stress of constantly running around for her boss.
The young women meet in a laundromat and interact with an older woman, Chrys (Doshima Iyorlu), who had her own trio of friends at their age. Together, the six women learn to explore the rage they feel as women, the reasons behind it and finally come to terms with it.
When first beginning the writing process for this play, Marjorie Fitzgerald created the play from looking at three different sources, ranging from her own life experiences to ancient literature.
“The first place it came from was my own exploration as an actor with rage, and I had a really hard time expressing fully embodied rage as an actor, and it made me wonder why,” Marjorie Fitzgerald said in an interview with New University. “I was like, I can access grief so easily and I can access fear so easily — what is up with rage? And it led me on an exploration into female rage. What does that mean? What does it mean if women have a harder time expressing rage than men?”
The play itself was a work of art, with a powerful message behind female rage and the different reasons it manifests. The writing was compelling and intriguing as the play moved from one group of women to the other seamlessly, able to tell their stories in tandem. Watching the play, viewers felt as if they could step inside the world these women lived in and relate to their emotions and struggles. There were several interludes with red lighting and loud sounds, showing the six women speaking together about their feelings and physically expressing their struggle with their rage.
As a play about female rage, the performance held a lot of emotion and vulnerability. Many moments talked about depression, grief, stress, the loss of one’s identity and other feelings that come with being a woman. There are countless ways in which female rage can emerge, and Marjorie Fitzgerald wanted to make sure they were all covered in some way.
“I really used the ancient texts as a map of some kind to say that OK, there is going to be rage towards children or about children there’s going to be rage at a work situation with a misogynistic boss and there’s going to be rage about the way women are seen and treated differently as wives and mothers. So it was sort of the trifecta that I wanted to cover,” Marjorie Fitzgerald said.
The other side of female rage that was explored was more career-based — how women are treated throughout their work life, from school to their jobs. From this angle, Marjorie Fitzgerald pulled from her own experiences as a graduate student and being treated differently as a woman.
“It’s not any individual man’s fault, which is also an important aspect of this play — sometimes it is — but it’s really like the patriarchal structure does not set women up for success,” she said.
For Fitzgerald, the play means a lot — as a graduate student, an actor and a writer — and what it has allowed her to accomplish over the past year.
“So in terms of meaningfulness, to be able to do this in my final year here as a graduate student, that is so deeply meaningful — to be seen as a writer and to be seen as an actor,” she said. “I just finished ‘Gloria’ three weeks ago, and to be recognized like, ‘Oh you were Gloria and oh, you were the playwright.’ That’s such a cool experience for me because I kind of proved to myself that I could do both, and do both hopefully well — or at least with integrity and with passion and all those things.”
Beyond the impact on her career, the play felt like a passion project for Marjorie Fitzgerald, as she was able to include aspects of her own life in the work. Creating personal art takes a lot of courage, as it requires vulnerability in exposing deep emotions to the criticism of the audience. Viewers don’t always know what is going on behind the scenes and can only guess what the writer is truly going through or intending.
“This play for me was processing a lot of things that happened in my life, and a lot of the conversations that I have with my close, close friends and a lot of the conversations I have with my mom, my aunts and my grandmother,” said Marjorie Fitzgerald. “That is hard, but I think the art I am interested in making is honest. I want to make honest art, and if I am honest, that is what I am working through. So it’s meaningful in that way — to be honest and learning what that means.”
Even though this is the play’s second workshop, this run acted as the main stage debut over the winter quarter. “‘Quit Bitchin’” is a fairly young play, having been written in January 2024, and has undergone extensive development since then. Despite the work it has gone through, the play is still in its early stages and just beginning its journey.
“A lot of plays take five years before they’re done, and I certainly feel like I am in the first year of this play’s life — like it feels young — and I am excited after this workshop to absorb a lot of the feedback,” Marjorie Fitzgerald said.
For all it has accomplished, “Quit Bitchin’” is a truly extraordinary play — from the vulnerability and truth within the story to the compelling performances by the actors. Anyone who has seen it can recognize the work, love and passion that have been poured into it over the past year. Female rage isn’t something that is often discussed, but this play brings the topic to light and shows what it really is.
Jocelyn Cosgrove is an Arts & Entertainment Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at jmcosgro@uci.edu.
Edited by Alaina Retodo and Jaheem Conley