“Founders, Keepers” is a play written by Webster graduate Aurora Behlke. She began the piece in her sophomore year at Webster for professor Taylor Gruenloh’s playwriting class and hasn’t put it down since.
The passion project tells the story of five girls in 5th grade banding together to rewrite the U.S. Constitution and save the nation. Since its creation, it’s been performed in Texas and Washington with a full production in the works in Scotland.
“I started this in 2020 and it was the first big election that I could really participate in,” Behlke said. “I was, like many, really exhausted from the last presidency and was trying to sort out what my place is in a democracy that feels like it’s falling apart.”
Yet, this alone did not influence the play’s writing. Behlke had a specific view on the issue at hand and the way in which it should be handled.
“The story that I saw that really needed to be told is young people who are feeling grief about the country that they live in,” Behlke said. “They don’t know what that grief means yet, and they’re trying to work through that.”
During her time at Webster Behlke worked with Young Americans Theater Company to edit and workshop her play based on critiques of her work.
“I really got to be in the room a couple of times and make edits on the fly based off of what actors were giving me,” Behlke said.
“Founders, Keepers” was most recently performed as a script reading at Fontbonne University on Feb. 23. It was the first time that the play was performed in the community it was made for.
“I had this realization that this play has been everywhere except for the place that I live,” Behlke said. “I feel like it’s time to see if I can push it into the community a little bit more with the hopes that there will be a production maybe in the next few years that happens in St. Louis.”
The script reading featured a cast of six actors, director Kay Bush and Behlke’s script. Bush and Behlke initially met during the seventh annual Aphra Behn Festival where they both worked on a play titled “Lieblingstante” together.
To get this play performed within the Webster Groves area, Behlke asked Bush for her assistance as a director, and it was an immediate yes.
“It has been a surprisingly easy process directing the show,” Bush said. “I love working with [Aurora]. She is very open to interpretation and loves to bounce ideas off of not only me, but the cast as well.”
The play has gone through many different versions and changes, including critiques that encouraged Behlke to discuss racism’s role in the Constitution.
“The biggest journey that I have had is with the character of Tabitha because I’m a white playwright,” Behlke said. “I don’t want to write about an experience that’s not mine, but also to write about America without addressing civil rights seems to be extremely disingenuous.”
To help bring Tabitha, a Black character, and her experiences to life, Behlke enlisted the help of a friend. These conversations created aspects of Tabitha’s character that may have otherwise been missed.
“And I didn’t know what was going on and [my mom] wouldn’t talk to me until we got home,” Behlke wrote as Tabitha. “I thought I was in trouble. My mom said that people… ‘Some people’, think that other people shouldn’t exist.”
Along with Tabitha, each character has a struggle of their own that they must learn through in a reflection of the current social landscape of the United States. These topics include grief, racism, periods, puberty and friendship.
“Do you ever feel like you’re holding your family’s entire history in your body?” asks Imogen, one of Behlke’s characters.
Behlke also works as a theater teacher and gives fourth graders an opportunity to talk about difficult topics, including conflict and oppression. For her, theater becomes a tool in which such things can be expressed and brought to light.
“My students know that something is not right in the way that we do things, but their vocabulary is not there yet,” Belhke said.
Thanks to the input of audiences and producers around the world, Behlke hopes to create a final version of the script in the coming months. She has created other works including “Thank You Porcupine” and “The Uranium Club,” but “Founders, Keepers” has been her passion project since the pandemic.
“‘Founders, Keepers’ continues to be the most appealing piece that I think I’ve written,” Behlke said. “I think that it’s really relatable for people and I’ve had a lot of people who have been really moved by it who have voiced that to me.”
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