The Light and the Dark

Artemisia Gentileschi Paints Her Rage in Blood and Oil

Primary Stages, NYC

You don’t walk into a Kate Hamill play expecting subtlety. You walk in expecting a feminist middle finger in corset form—and The Light and the Dark, her newest venture at Primary Stages, delivers it with brushstrokes dipped in venom and vermilion.

This time, Hamill trades Austen and Alcott for Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century painter who was gaslit, dismissed, and literally tortured by a legal system designed to protect her rapist. In lesser hands, this would become trauma porn. In Hamill’s, it becomes an act of theatrical revenge: a bloodied canvas flung back at the patriarchy.

Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s didactic. And yes, I’m still thinking about it a week later.

Let’s talk about Hamill as Artemisia: she’s volatile, sharp-edged, devastating. There’s no saintly suffering here. Her Artemisia is furious, brilliant, and—in one particularly juicy monologue—so sick of men painting women as weeping virgins that she screams into the void like a Renaissance banshee. It’s glorious.

The play is meta and nonlinear. Sometimes we’re in a courtroom. Sometimes inside a painting. Sometimes we’re watching Artemisia argue with her own legacy. There are projections of her work—real, luminous, brutal—splashed across the set like holy graffiti. The lighting (Seth Reiser, take a bow) literally chiaroscuros the hell out of everything, casting shadows that feel like ghosts of forgotten women.

The rest of the cast pulls triple duty—sometimes literally—as fathers, priests, judges, lovers. Joey Parsons is a standout, slipping between characters with knife-like precision. Matthew Saldivar’s Tassi, the predator at the center of Artemisia’s rape trial, is appropriately repugnant, though written perhaps a little too flat. But then again, do we really need another nuanced rapist onstage? I think not.

There are moments when the script leans so far into exposition that it buckles. Artemisia practically gives an AP Art History lecture in the first five minutes. But stay with it. Because soon the play peels back its dusty narrative layers to reveal something raw: a woman fighting not just for justice, but for authorship—over her story, her body, her art.

It’s not a polite play. It’s not a balanced play. It’s an angry one. And thank god.

Because for every Caravaggio bro with a podcast and a favorite Scorsese monologue, there’s an Artemisia screaming from beneath centuries of cracked varnish: “I was here. I saw it. I painted it. And I survived.”

Verdict:
A feral howl of a play—brutal, baroque, and blisteringly feminist. Not for the faint of heart or the defenders of “historical accuracy.” For the rest of us: bring wine, bring tissues, bring your rage.