There’s no script for what comes next.
At her husband’s memorial service, one woman finds herself with a new role to play: widow.
The trouble is, no one gave her the script.
Looking for direction, she turns to the great widows of black-and-white cinema—women who seemed to know exactly how to mourn, how to carry on and, most importantly, how a widow was supposed to behave. As she tries their roles on for size, memory and movie fantasy collide with the complicated realities of a thirty-year marriage.
Funny, sharp and deeply personal, The Black-and-White Widow plays with the distance between the stories we inherit and the lives we actually live—and what happens when an unfamiliar role calls for a rewrite.
MEET THE ARTISTS
Laura King is a playwright and dramaturg. She holds an MFA in playwriting from the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University and a master’s in English from Northwestern University. Her one-act play Driving in Circles was the 2026 Jax State Southern Playwrights Competition winner. Her play Merritt Anne and the Mighty Oak is a 2025 AATE Distinguished Play Award winner and was developed through the 2019 Write Now conference (ChildsPlay) and the 2019 Purple Crayon Players Festival of New Work (Northwestern University). Her play The Cayuga Canal Girls was a 2020 American Association of Community Theatre NewPlayFest winner. Her play Independence Day at Happy Meadows was the winner of the 2016 SETC/Stage Rights Ready to Publish Award. Her work has been published by Concord Theatricals, Dramatic Publishing, Pioneer Drama Service, YouthPLAYS, Applause Books, and Smith & Kraus. For more information, see laurakingplaywright.com.
