In the spirit of the 19th century Saturday Club — which met at the historic Parker House beginning in 1855 — School Street Sessions is back with an exciting new program.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT for OUR OCTOBER 24 EVENT
Terry Byrne has spent her career covering the Boston arts scene, first at the Boston Herald, then for WGBH TV’s “Greater Boston,” and currently at the Boston Globe. Her theater criticism has been featured in a segment on ABC-TV’s 20/20. She earned her MFA in Playwriting from Boston University in 2010, where she received a Robert Pinsky Global Travel Fellowship. Her play, “Rivals in the Clay,” was selected as a semi-finalist for the O’Neill Theater Conference in 2016. She researched the women featured in “Rivals”; while a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
ABOUT THE PLAY, “RIVALS IN THE CLAY”
On Feb. 18, 1876, internationally renowned Boston-born actress Charlotte Cushman died in the Parker House. Age 59, she had lived a life full of adventure – theatrical and otherwise. One rarely mentioned episode is her time in Rome a decade earlier, where she met her life partner, sculptor Emma Stebbins (Bethesda Fountain, Central Park) and served as a patron and muse for a group of American women sculptors.
“Rivals in the Clay” captures a moment when, in the shadow of the Spanish Steps, these women shared studios, models, patrons, and lovers, risking exposing their own secrets in their quest for recognition at any cost. Cushman’s “harem-scarem” includes Harriet Hosmer, an irrepressible young sculptor from Watertown, Mass; M. Edmonia Lewis, an African-American and Native-American woman suspiciously silent about her past; Emma Stebbins, a privileged New Yorker accused of being an artistic dilettante. Cushman presents herself as mother hen, but after years in the spotlight, can she be content in the shadows?
In Rome’s competitive, expatriate artist community, these women defy expectations, finding commercial success with their distinctly female perspective in an art world with little respect for the female artist.
Location: The Kennedy Room, Omni Parker House
Date: Saturday, October 24, 2026
Time: 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Admission: Free
Registration Required: RSVP to [email protected]
Libations: Enjoy socializing at the Last Hurrah after the presentation (a few steps across the lobby hallway from the Kennedy Room).
How to Get There: MBTA State Street Station (Blue or Orange Line) is a two-minute walk to the Omni Parker House. Park Street station (Red or Green Line) is a four-minute walk. Government Station stop is a four-minute walk.