Benevolent, the latest work from playwright Sophie McIntosh (Macbitches), tells the story of four young women at Inwood’s Benevolent Home—a reformatory house for fallen and friendless girls—in 1917. Directed by McIntosh’s longtime collaborator Nina Goodheart, the play’s action unfolds in a basement laundry room, where the wards endlessly scrub at the most sickeningly soiled sheets on their washboards, with more laundry coming down the chute, located at center stage, at regular intervals.
The four residents have found themselves in the Benevolent Home for different reasons. There is the spoiled, 17-year-old Abby (Livvy Marcus), the youngest; the far more mature Emma (Mia Fowler), a Black sex worker at a “50-cent joint”; the brash Margaret (Chani Reese), whose whiteness has afforded her work at some of the more lucrative $10 brothels; and Sarah (Rachel Ravel), the most buoyant of the bunch, who has been panhandling on the Coney Island Boardwalk (or “Sodom by the Sea,” as Abby has heard her father refer to it). Over the course of the play, we see the women confront challenging truths about themselves and each other, bridging the gaps in their ages and experience.
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Photo: Nina Goodheart
McIntosh and Goodheart cofounded Good Apples Collective, a theater incubator that focuses on stories about hierarchy, complicity, power, and abuse from queer and gender-marginalized storytellers. “Even more than that, I think the most defining feature is the idea that you can make high-quality art without treating people badly,” McIntosh explains. “We are really just trying to make art with people we love in a way that is mutually supportive and sustainable.”
A few days after Benevolent’s opening night, Vogue spoke to McIntosh about New York’s real reformatory homes, why she still believes in content warnings, and what it means for a play to be “political.”
Vogue: I wanted to begin asking you about when you started writing this play. How did you learn about the New York reformatory homes? What was the development process like?
Sophie McIntosh: I started writing this play in the fall of 2024. It was my thesis project at grad school. We did a round-table reading of the first draft of it and it was a very different play. To backtrack a little bit, I first heard about the institutions that were the basis for this play from a local historian named Cole Thompson who lives up in Inwood. He works in real estate and also has a very strong passion for local history and he has blog articles on the Magdalen Benevolent Society, later renamed Inwood House, and the House of Mercy. They were similar institutions in Inwood starting in the late 1800s through the 1910s.
