Thrive or What You Will at Watters Theater

This epic, contemporary tale asks who Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, was. As an 18th-century herb woman, she yearns to see beyond the fields of rural France. The prospect of an adventure emerges, so begins an 11-year voyage across lands and seas. To even set foot aboard the ship, the Étoile, Jeanne must become ‘Jean’. 

The sacrifice of identity and legacy were no match to the power of wonder for Baret. Nearly everything known about Baret and this historic journey comes to us through the journals of men aboard the Étoile. This play invites everyone to question the sources of what we know as history and when it’s time to re-write it.

Thrive or What You Will blends style and the language of our past and present to interrogate the nature of "discovery" and its legacy of (mis)categorizing the world. It addresses species and survival, status and privilege, gender and identity, and the subjective nature of both history and self. Funny, gripping, poignant and wild, Thrive mourns the loss of Jeanne's perspective and tries to imagine possibilities of what it may have been.

Come on this voyage across lands and seas that is part love story, part Latin taxonomy, part feminist wrestling with historiography, and part theatrical celebration of awe and the human need to thrive.