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A contemporary drama exploring the collision of past and present when two newlyweds discover they can communicate with a 19th-century woman inhabiting their ancestral home. As quantum physics and human desire intersect, characters across centuries grapple with identity, autonomy, and the echoes of their choices. This intellectually ambitious play examines how personal struggles transcend time itself, revealing the timeless nature of love, ambition, and the search for self-determination.
A contemporary drama exploring the collision of past and present when two newlyweds discover they can communicate with a 19th-century woman inhabiting their ancestral home. As quantum physics and human desire intersect, characters across centuries grapple with identity, autonomy, and the echoes of their choices. This intellectually ambitious play examines how personal struggles transcend time itself, revealing the timeless nature of love, ambition, and the search for self-determination.

If Now Were Hence

Tess Light

Genre: Drama

Cast size: 4 or 8

Duration: Full Length

Tess Light | Drama | Full-length | 2m 2f OR 4m 4f

Short synopsis

A contemporary drama exploring the collision of past and present when two newlyweds discover they can communicate with a 19th-century woman inhabiting their ancestral home. As quantum physics and human desire intersect, characters across centuries grapple with identity, autonomy, and the echoes of their choices. This intellectually ambitious play examines how personal struggles transcend time itself, revealing the timeless nature of love, ambition, and the search for self-determination.

  • Synopsis
  • Characters
  • Reviews

21st century newlyweds Allie and Maggie have just moved into an old house that's been in the family for generations, where Vesta, a young bride-to-be and frustrated intellectual of the 19th century lives with her parents. Through the quantum vagaries of time, Allie and Vesta become visible to one another, past and future co-existing in a small parlour room.

When Allie’s brother Mikey arrives for a visit, things get complicated: Mikey just wants some quiet time to work on his quantum physics PhD, but Maggie thinks to address her marital issues by asking Mikey father a child for her, upsetting Allie and alarming Mikey. Vesta thinks to address her subordinate role in the world by taking Otto, the family’s gardener, as her lover and calling off her arranged engagement, shocking her mother, not to mention Otto. Multiple souls echo across time, resonating with alternate versions of themselves to blur before with after and cause with effect, while their core natures each continue journeys that cannot be contained in one lifetime or defined by one body.

4m/f preferred - genders flexible
It is preferred that these role pairs are 4 actors double cast but they can be cast separately using 8 actors, as desired.

The intent is that each character-pairing described below represents a kinship between souls across time.  If you like, you can think of the modern versions as reincarnations of the nineteenth century characters - same product, different packaging.

Alison & Milton These characters share a complacent pomposity mixed with kindness. White/largely white.

  • Allison early-30s, a linguistics professor at the University of Minnesota in the present. (f)
  • Milton, mid-50s, a linguistics professor at the University of Minnesota in the 1890s. Father of Vesta, husband of Eugenie. (m)

Mikey & Vesta - These characters are highly intellectual,
and each railing against limitations placed on them. White/largely white.

  • Mikey, male, late 20s, Allie’s brother, a graduate student in physics, on a visit to his sister and her wife’s new home.  He has muscular dystrophy. (m)
  • Vesta 20-ish, a spirited, intellectual young woman from a good family, in 1890s Minnesota, shortly to be married and unhappy about it. She limps due to a club foot. Daughter of Milton and Eugenie. (f)

Jack & Eugenie - These characters are both abrupt and confident with conservative outlooks. White/largely white.

  • Jack, male, late 20s, friend of Mikey, conservative, intelligent but unsophisticated, but willing to learn. White. (m)
  • Eugenie, mid-40s, Vesta’s mother/Milton’s wife, a practical-minded woman of the 19th century. White. (f)

Otto & Maggie - These characters are both highly artistic, proud, and subject to cultural oppression. Black.

  • Otto 20s, Vesta’s preferred lover, a worker on the estate, extremely talented as a gardener. (m)
  • Maggie 30-ish, Allison’s wife, a visual artist who left a successful career in California to follow Allison to her
    new professorship. (f)

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If Now Were Hence

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More information

Staging Notes - The are references to an easel with equations on it.  If desired, the playwright can supply
examples. They recommend: a quadratic equation, solved to show two solutions; a "light cone" diagram emphasizing the unidirectional nature of time or a spacetime cube; the equation for a Fourier transform, partially worked out.

Historical Background - The 1850s saw huge waves of settlers begin to arrive in the Minneapolis area.  Early residents included Emily and Ralph Grey, free blacks, friends of Frederick Douglass, who helped other slaves to freedom. Minnesota is one of a handful of states that never had laws to prohibit interracial marriage. About this
time, Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to be granted a medical degree in the United States (1849), and Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American woman in the U.S. To earn a medical degree, awarded in 1864. The University of Minnesota was
incorporated, and was a co-educational university as early as 1858.  It closed briefly through the civil war but
permanently re-opened in 1869 with 15 students, and graduated its first class in 1873. In the 1860s, settlers from Scandinavia began to arrive in the area, and nationwide the Suffragist movement began to pick up steam.

By the early 1890s, the University had expanded tremendously to include schools for Agriculture, Engineering, Medicine, Law, among others. Also around this time the Suffrage movement expanded as two
large national organizations joined to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Tensions arose, however, as several leaders in the movement (including Stanton) pandered to racial fear in an attempt to frame white women as more deserving of the vote than black males, rather than allying across all the politically disenfranchised.

The city saw huge growth in the 1880s and 1890s, with a nearly four-fold increase in population from about
45,000 to 165,000. Water service was added to the city in 1884, a cable car in 1887, and the luxurious Summit Avenue residential area in St. Paul started being built in 1890. A maternity hospital opened in 1886, for mothers both wed and unwed; this must have been a much- needed service, as the 1870s saw laws enacted to prevent sale or distribution of educational materials (or even descriptions) of contraception.

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