Photo by Noli French – French’s Fotos

Presented by Portland Stage
By Maggie Kearnan
Directed by Sally Wood
Featuring: Cynthia Barnett, DeAnna S. Wright, Catherine Buxton, Luz Lopez, Carina Higgins, Jordan Hurley, Kelly Chick

March 4 – March 22, 2026
Wed, Mar 04, 7:30pm* 
Sat, Mar 14, 8:00pm*
Thu, Mar 19, 2:00pm*
(*On sale 12pm until show time, day of show, in person only)
Portland Stage theater
25A Forest Ave 
Portland, ME 04101

Article by Kitty Drexel

RUN TIME approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission.

PORTLAND, ME — Playwright Maggie Kearnan made a splash at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in Nov. 2024 with her political satire, How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos. If you enjoyed that as much as we did, you’ll be tickled pink to know her latest creation, Like Flies, is playing at Maine’s quaint Portland Stage through March 22. Even better, it features a cast heavy with local actors. 

In the fictional town of Navestead (a place not dissimilar to historical Portland, ME), a new midwife has moved in down the road from the morgue. Edna (Cynthia Barnett) has come because she’d heard tell of mothers dying in childbirth. Edna’s move has upset the locals, including the resident midwife, Meg (DeAnna S Wright). After she saves a pregnant mother and her unborn baby, Edna and Meg form a courteous tag team. The women now come to them both for healing. 

Just as Edna and Meg earn the township’s trust, Edna learns of Navestead’s epidemic of domestic violence: Meg’s husband beats her mercilessly; another’s aging husband is a rapist; yet another eyes his daughters unnaturally, it goes on and on and on. The characters tell us that their men weren’t the same when they returned from the war, but some of their men were violent even before the war. Changed or unchanged, Edna won’t watch as her community suffers. She offers Meg a special golden elixir in a small bottle. Soon, more women come to Edna for a bottle of their own. The men start dropping like flies. As one character says to another about this power shift, there were already terrible things happening in Navestead. Now terrible things are happening to everyone.  

Like Flies: A Rage Play was workshopped as part of the 2025 Little Festival of the Unexpected at Portland Stage Company. This is its premiere. Like Flies asks what it means to use violence for personal gain, and what happens to our community when we do. The play is loosely based on the true story of the Angel Makers of Nagyrév, Hungary. 

Kearnan writes about realistic women who discuss realistic men within fantastical circumstances that look uncannily similar to reality. Like Flies discusses domestic abuse and violence, but it doesn’t show us that violence (thereby saving us from more trauma). It is more important that we learn about and from the repercussions of the violence than it is to see it. The instigators aren’t significant in this play, the survivors are.

Kearnan places her characters in women’s social spaces (a kitchen, the laundry line, the playground, etc.) to discuss women’s issues away from the eyes and ears of men. Instead, to show us the characters’ rage, Director Wood and Movement Coach Gwyneth Jones stage the cast in tableaus and flowing circles that represent their characters’ fear and anger. The movement works with the actor’s range of motion and can be shaped by the actor’s characterizations. It effectively communicated the power of female rage without dragging the play to Hell. 

Speaking of Hell, I was hoping to experience a dramatic catharsis at this show. (Rage plays with unhinged vengeance arcs bring me joy.) Like Flies is not that kind of show. The actors steep their characters in empathetic sanity. They don’t want to feel as they do. Their environment has pushed them to violence; they do not revel in it. I expected Lie Flies to be more similar to Kearnan’s other play, How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos. It’s my fault for assuming. If you are familiar with Bezos and this production is of interest to you, I urge you to give Kearnan, Wood, and the cast the deference they deserve to provide something new.  

The play is new, but it wrestles with the timelessness of human nature. The men in Kearnan’s play do bad things, but they aren’t especially despicable. We must remember that they are ordinary men who were taught that they could misuse women without consequences. So they do. Their wives, the characters who take action in this play, are also ordinary women. Some people are born violent and unobservant, and some people learn how to plumb new resources during troubled times. 

The world of Like Flies is a lot like now. Notable exceptions, thanks to intersectional feminism, mean women can wear pants in public, enjoy voting rights (for now), own bank accounts, access incomplete healthcare, and earn as much as $0.80 to a man’s dollar. It’s illegal to beat or neglect us as long as we can prove it. Like Flies appears dramatic – it is a play- but in our post-Roe v. Wade reality, many of us fear a return to the horrors of the past. Laws such as the SAVE Act would prevent many married women from voting. When watching this play, please consider where it is we’d return to if our freedoms were reversed by bad politics and who would benefit. It wouldn’t be the cis, trans, or nonbinary femmes. 

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