Arizona Theatre Matters
Heretic – The Mary Dyer Story Study Guide
A study guide for audiences, students, educators, and community groups preparing to
experience Heretic – The Mary Dyer Story, a powerful solo play about conscience, motherhood, religious freedom, trauma, colonial violence, and the cost of refusing obedience.
What does a person owe to truth when truth places them in direct conflict with family,
government, church, and even their own desire to live?
On This Page
- About the Production
- Big Ideas to Listen For
- Context and Background
- Structure and Performance
- Synopsis
- Key Figures and Forces
- Themes and Big Ideas
- Language, Memory, and Voice
- Vocabulary
- Before You Experience the Production
- During the Experience
- After You Experience the Production
- Activities and Writing Prompts
- Teacher and Group Discussion Notes
- About Arizona Theatre Matters
About the Production
Heretic – The Mary Dyer Story is a solo play set in a Boston jail cell on June 1, 1660, the day Mary Dyer expects either execution or release. From that cell, she recounts her marriage, childbirths, losses, friendship with Anne Hutchinson, exile from Puritan Boston, discovery of the
Quaker movement in England, return to New England, and final decision to risk death rather than renounce her beliefs
The play is not merely a historical biography. Mary speaks from a body marked by childbirth, grief, imprisonment, spiritual conviction, and political clarity. The result is both intimate and expansive: a one-person performance that contains marriage, theology, colonization, madness, friendship, motherhood, rebellion, and martyrdom.
This script is especially striking because it refuses to simplify Mary Dyer into a saintly symbol. She is intelligent, funny, sensual, ashamed, ecstatic, uncertain, traumatized, loving, and fierce. The play honors her courage while also forcing audiences to reckon with the pain her choices caused
the people who loved her most.
and conscience at once — and what happens when those loyalties can no longer be reconciled.
Big Ideas to Listen For
What makes someone a heretic?
The play asks whether heresy is truly spiritual error, or whether it is often a political label
used to punish those who challenge authority.
What does Mary choose — and why?
Mary’s final decision is not presented as a whim. The play explores it as a deliberate act of witness,
sacrifice, and refusal.
How are motherhood and freedom connected?
The script repeatedly links childbirth, loss, nursing, children’s futures, and women’s spiritual authority.
Mary’s political choices cannot be separated from her life as a mother.
What is the cost of religious certainty?
Puritan Boston speaks in the language of righteousness while practicing cruelty, surveillance, and punishment.
The play asks what happens when faith becomes law.
How does trauma shape belief?
Mary’s losses — infant death, stillbirth, public shaming, friendship severed by violence, mental collapse —
deepen the play’s spiritual and emotional stakes.
What does a woman’s martyrdom mean?
Mary herself argues that the execution of a mother will make a mark in history differently than the execution
of a man. The play takes that claim seriously.
Context and Background
The script situates Mary Dyer inside the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Puritans who had fled
persecution in Europe established a rigid religious society of their own. In the play’s world, the colony claims spiritual purity while enforcing conformity through banishment, imprisonment, whipping, mutilation, and death
for dissenters
Mary’s early awakening comes through Anne Hutchinson, who leads gatherings centered on direct spiritual understanding, grace, and the idea that ordinary people — including women — can approach God without clerical mediation. That belief threatens the Puritan leadership not only theologically, but socially and politically. In the play,
women’s thinking, women’s speech, and women’s spiritual authority are treated as profound threats to patriarchal order.
The script also places Mary in relation to Roger Williams, Rhode Island, Indigenous communities, and later the
Quaker movement in England under George Fox. This matters because the play is not only about one woman’s private faith. It is about alternate ways of building community: coercive hierarchy versus inward light, law by force versus mutual spiritual dignity.
One of the most important dimensions of the play is its treatment of women’s suffering in the seventeenth century.
Mary endures repeated pregnancies, infant death, a devastating anomalous birth, postpartum mental crisis, maternal shame, and public defamation. The script does not treat these as background details. They shape her mind, theology, and understanding of the world.
Why this matters now
The play speaks to current questions about religious nationalism, bodily autonomy, women’s authority,
criminalization of dissent, mental health, and the moral meaning of civil disobedience.
Why this is more than a history lesson
Mary’s struggle is not trapped in the seventeenth century. The play asks who is still punished today
for thought, speech, conscience, or refusal to comply with unjust power.
makes a woman’s conscience into a capital crime?”
Structure and Performance
Heretic is a solo play, but it does not feel small. Mary is written as a natural mimic, and she moves fluidly in and out of the voices of husband, governor, preacher, friend, jailer, and son. This means the performance depends on vocal precision, tonal shift, and the actor’s ability to let multiple lives pass through one body without losing Mary as the central consciousness.
The setting is stark: a Boston jail cell. But from that confined space the play opens into marriages, meetings, childbirth, the Atlantic voyage, meadows, kitchens, orchards, gallows, and memory. The structure is nonlinear. Mary moves by association, emotion, and recollection rather than by strict chronology. This gives the play the feeling of a mind working urgently toward decision.
Lighting, music, and sound are crucial in the script. Drums, rain, birds, ocean, childbirth sounds, and silence all shape atmosphere. The world of the play is built not through scenery but through embodiment, sound, and spoken image.
That makes it especially potent in performance rooted in listening and imaginative access.
Synopsis
The play begins in Mary Dyer’s jail cell in Boston on the morning she expects to hang. She wakes from troubled sleep,
cleans herself as best she can, and declares her stark choice: execution or a return home under terms she cannot accept.
From there, memory begins to unfold.
Mary recalls her marriage to William Dyer, their early happiness, and the death of their first child. She then describes the hopes that brought them to Boston, where they expected religious renewal but instead found cruelty, rigid hierarchy, and punitive theology. Her intellectual and spiritual awakening begins when she meets Anne Hutchinson, whose gatherings center on grace, direct knowledge of God, and the spiritual equality of women.
The play’s emotional center deepens around Mary’s pregnancies and maternal losses. She recounts the birth and death of her daughter Joy, born with severe abnormalities, and the public humiliation that followed when Puritan leaders used that tragedy as evidence of her supposed wickedness. The trial and banishment of Anne Hutchinson mark a turning point, as does Anne’s later murder in retaliatory frontier violence.
Mary’s grief and inner collapse grow. She speaks openly of postpartum horror, emotional distance from her children,
and suicidal and infanticidal thoughts she is ashamed even to name. Eventually she leaves for England, where she encounters the Seekers and later George Fox and the emerging Quaker movement. There she discovers a spiritual framework rooted in inward light, equality, and truth.
When Mary returns to New England, she is arrested, released through her husband’s intervention, and ordered never to re-enter Massachusetts. But increasing persecution of Quakers compels her to return again. She is sentenced to hang alongside male Friends, briefly reprieved, and finally jailed once more. In the last movement of the play, after a searing encounter with her son Will, Mary determines that to accept safety now would be to betray truth. She chooses the gallows, convinced that the state killing of a mother for speech and conscience will leave a mark history cannot ignore.
Key Figures and Forces
Mary Dyer
The central figure: a wife, mother, seeker, Quaker minister, exile, survivor, and political witness.
The play allows her to be courageous, unstable, loving, furious, ashamed, ecstatic, and deeply human.
William Dyer
Mary’s husband. Loving, devoted, practical, and pained. He is neither villain nor simple obstacle.
His desire to save Mary collides with her deeper commitment to conscience.
Anne Hutchinson
Mary’s mentor, spiritual sister, and intellectual catalyst. Through Anne, the play explores grace,
women’s leadership, scriptural interpretation, and the threat women pose to patriarchal authority.
George Fox
Founder of the Quaker movement in England. He helps Mary find a religious language for what she already
senses: that all people carry divine light and that spiritual authority cannot be monopolized by institutions.
Roger Williams
An early dissenter whose critique of Puritan authority and relationship with Indigenous communities opens the possibility of a different colonial society.
Governor Winthrop and the Puritan Magistrates
Representatives of legal-religious power. In the play they embody spiritual arrogance, institutional fear,
and the violence of enforcing conformity.
Will
Mary’s son, whose confrontation with her late in the play is one of its most painful scenes.
He voices the claims of family, grief, and the children Mary will leave behind.
Joy
Mary’s lost daughter, never present as an ordinary stage character but central to the emotional and spiritual
architecture of the play. Joy becomes grief, shame, memory, and revelation.
The Cell, the Drum, and the Gallows
More than setting details, these become recurring forces: confinement, state power, public spectacle, and the
physical fact of execution.
Themes and Big Ideas
Conscience Versus Authority
The central conflict of the play is between inward conviction and imposed rule. Mary refuses to recognize the state’s claim over thought and belief, and the play asks what a society reveals about itself when it criminalizes conscience.
Women, Speech, and Power
Again and again, the play shows that women’s religious speech is treated as dangerous. Anne Hutchinson’s gatherings, Mary’s ministry, and women’s interpretive authority all threaten a patriarchal society built on obedience and control.
Motherhood, Loss, and Moral Imagination
Mary’s status as mother is not sentimentalized. The play explores childbirth, infant death, postpartum suffering,
divided attachment, and the burden of being judged as a mother by a brutal society. Motherhood becomes both wound and source of power.
Grace Versus Theocracy
Mary’s spiritual path moves from punitive doctrine toward grace, inward light, and tenderness. The play repeatedly contrasts a religion of fear and punishment with a faith grounded in direct encounter, compassion, and equality.
Trauma and Spiritual Transformation
The script refuses to separate Mary’s faith from her suffering. Loss, exile, madness, shame, and grief are part of what drive her toward a radically different understanding of God, self, and duty.
Colonial Violence and Moral Hypocrisy
The play does not romanticize settler society. It acknowledges Puritan cruelty, frontier retaliation, and the violence settlers directed toward Indigenous communities while still depending on Indigenous knowledge for survival.
Marriage, Love, and Irreconcilable Loyalty
Mary and William love each other deeply. That love is real. But the play insists that love does not erase conflict when one person is called toward safety and the other toward sacrifice.
Martyrdom and History
Mary decides that her death as a mother will matter politically. The play examines martyrdom not as abstraction, but as strategy, testimony, and irreversible bodily risk.
Language, Memory, and Voice
The language of Heretic moves between direct speech, recollection, mimicry, confession, argument, and vision.
Mary’s voice can be lyrical, sarcastic, ecstatic, intimate, fractured, maternal, or razor-sharp. This gives the play
tremendous range even within a bare stage and one performer.
The script’s memory structure matters. Mary does not simply tell her life in neat order. She circles back, relives scenes,
imitates other voices, and revisits certain losses with different emotional weight. This mirrors the way trauma and conviction
coexist: the past is not over, because it is still active in the present decision.
The play also uses contrast very effectively. A joke about coveting a mule can sit beside descriptions of torture.
A tender memory of marriage can be followed by postpartum dread. A moment of luminous spiritual awakening can shift into the sound of a drum approaching execution. These tonal turns keep the play alive and human.
Vocabulary
- Heretic: A person accused of holding beliefs contrary to official religious doctrine.
- Quaker / Friend: A member of the Religious Society of Friends, a movement emphasizing inward light, spiritual equality, and direct relationship with God.
- Puritan: A member of a Protestant movement seeking to purify the Church of England; in New England, Puritan leadership often enforced strict social and religious conformity.
- Covenant of Grace: A theological idea emphasizing salvation through divine grace rather than human effort or strict legal obedience.
- Excommunication: Formal exclusion from participation in a religious community.
- Banishment: Official expulsion from a place or society.
- Martyrdom: Suffering or death accepted for a principle, cause, or faith.
- Theocracy: Government in which religious authority and civil authority are fused.
- Inward Light: In Quaker thought, the divine presence or truth within every person.
- Postpartum: Relating to the time after childbirth; in the play, Mary speaks openly about severe psychological disturbance after birth.
Before You Experience the Production
- What makes civil disobedience morally necessary?
- How should we think about people whose public courage causes private pain to those they love?
- What is the relationship between faith and freedom?
- Why are women’s speech, leadership, and bodily experience so often treated as threatening in patriarchal systems?
- What does a society reveal when it punishes thought and conscience as crimes?
During the Experience
- Notice how Mary shifts between narrating, remembering, reliving, and embodying other people.
- Pay attention to the role of sound: drums, rain, birds, ocean, crowd, silence.
- Listen for when humor appears. What does it relieve, reveal, or protect?
- Notice how the play connects Mary’s spiritual life to her experiences of childbirth, grief, and motherhood.
- Pay attention to how Puritan authority sounds compared with Anne Hutchinson, George Fox, or Mary herself.
- Consider when Mary seems most certain and when she seems split by guilt or sorrow.
- Listen for the final shift when the possibility of survival gives way to chosen witness.
After You Experience the Production
- How did the play complicate your understanding of Mary Dyer?
- Did you experience her final decision as faith, political strategy, sacrifice, selfishness, courage, or some combination of these?
- How did the play handle the conflict between Mary’s conscience and her obligations to her family?
- What role did Anne Hutchinson play in Mary’s development, even after Anne’s death?
- How does the play connect women’s bodily suffering to spiritual and political insight?
- What did the jail cell come to mean by the end: prison, sanctuary, crucible, threshold, or all of these?
- What stayed with you most strongly: a line, a sound, a memory, a confrontation, a silence, or the final choice?
Activities and Writing Prompts
Quick Reflection
Write for five minutes about the moment when you most clearly understood why Mary could not simply go home and stay silent.
Conscience and Cost
Make two lists: what Mary gains by following her conscience, and what she loses. Then discuss whether the play suggests those losses can ever be morally justified.
Discussion Activity
Discuss the statement: Heretic is not about a woman choosing death. It is about a woman refusing someone else’s authority over truth.
Character Perspective
Write a short monologue from William Dyer’s perspective on the morning of Mary’s execution. What does he understand? What can he not accept?
History and Present
Identify one contemporary issue in which speech, belief, bodily autonomy, or conscience is being policed. Compare that situation with the moral questions raised in the play.
Language and Voice Exercise
Choose a short passage where Mary imitates another character’s voice. Read it aloud and study how the shift in voice changes the emotional and political meaning of the moment.
Creative Writing Prompt
Write a scene that takes place just after the play ends, from the perspective of someone in Boston who witnessed Mary’s execution. What, if anything, has changed in that person’s thinking?
Performance Activity
Explore one memory sequence twice: once as straightforward storytelling, and once as if Mary is reliving it physically and emotionally in the present. Reflect on how that changes the audience’s experience.
Teacher and Group Discussion Notes
This play often opens up when audiences discuss it through more than one lens at once. It is historical, spiritual, political,
feminist, psychological, and theatrical all at the same time. Productive discussion often begins by asking not whether Mary was
“right” or “wrong,” but what different kinds of truth the play makes her answer to.
Discussion Lens: Religious Freedom
How does the play define spiritual freedom, and how does that differ from Puritan order?
Discussion Lens: Motherhood
How does the script complicate cultural assumptions about what a “good mother” must do?
Discussion Lens: Trauma
How do grief, postpartum crisis, shame, and exile shape Mary’s emotional world and sense of calling?
Discussion Lens: Performance
What does a solo actor need to do to hold many voices while keeping Mary as the center?
About Arizona Theatre Matters
Arizona Theatre Matters is a theatre company building universally accessible work from the ground up.
Through performance, education, sound, history, and storytelling, the company creates engaging,
thoughtful experiences that invite audiences into theatre in inclusive and imaginative ways.
This guide is designed to support classroom conversation, community engagement, and deeper reflection
before and after experiencing the production.
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