The November People’s Choice Award goes to…

The people have spoken… The November People’s Choice Award goes to Dana Hall for The Woman with the Torch, presented as a staged reading live at The Den and Simulcast on November 2, 2026. Congratulations, Dana!

Courtesy of Dana, we’re pleased to share the first few pages from the award-winning script. Enjoy!

The Woman with the Torch
 by Dana Hall

LIBERTY: Female. Adult. Any age. The Statue of Liberty, though not quite the silent, solemn monument everyone expects.

SYNOPSIS: When a young girl stops to take a photograph with the Statue of Liberty, she gets considerably more than a souvenir. Tired of posing, Liberty breaks her silence to share what more than a century in New York Harbor has taught her about freedom, immigration, and the people history leaves outside the photograph.

HISTORICAL REFERENCES: Through humor and memories of Emma Lazarus, the suffragists who protested her dedication, and the generations who arrived believing in her promise, Liberty reveals the burden of being a symbol of welcome in a country still struggling to decide whom it will welcome.

SETTING: Liberty Island, New York Harbor. The present, with memories reaching back to the nineteenth century.

LIBERTY holds a small work light for a torch and a tablet. LIBERTY stands in her familiar pose. Somewhere below, a young girl is trying to take a photograph with LIBERTY.

LIBERTY
Go ahead take the picture. Everyone does. I’ll give you the usual one.

(She raises the torch and holds the pose.)

There. You have three seconds before my arm becomes a national emergency.

(The photograph is taken. The child asks something.)

What? Why am I so big? That’s your question? Not, why I’m green? Not whether I have a bathroom? Which, I do not. They made me big so people could see me from far away. Funny thing, my arm came to America without me. Then eventually the rest of me arrived in three hundred and fifty pieces.

(The girl asks something.)

Can I see everything from up here? I thought I could. Ships. Thousands of them. People pressed against railings. I could see them arriving. But I never could see what happened after they passed me. And for a long time, I mistook being visible for being able to see. Turns out there’s a big difference. (A beat.) Emma understood that. Emma Lazarus. She’s an old friend of mine. Her family had been here for generations. They were Sephardic Jews. Educated. Comfortable.
Established. She could have stayed in drawing rooms. Written poems. Been admired. Instead, she went to Ward’s Island. There were Jewish refugees there. People fleeing violence and persecution in Russia. Imagine crossing an ocean because the place where you were born has decided you are dangerous simply for existing. Then imagine reaching America and waiting. Waiting for someone behind a desk to decide whether you could enter. Emma sat with them. Talked with them. Helped them. Taught them English. She saw people who had names before someone called them immigrants. (The child has moved closer.) When people asked Emma Lazarus to write something for me, she didn’t really write about me. Not at first. She wrote about them. (LIBERTY examines herself.)

The French had imagined me as Liberty Enlightening the World. Very impressive. Very classical. Very… it’s giving… (She strikes an absurdly heroic pose.) Ooh là là! Liberté! Magnifique! (Her arm begins to tremble. She lowers it.) But Emma looked at this enormous woman and saw something else. Not a conqueror.
Not an emperor. She called me the Mother of Exiles.

(The child asks something.)

What’s an exile? Someone who can’t safely go home. Or someone who has no home left to go to.

TO BE CONTINUED….

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