Had it not been for Interlochen Center for the Arts, Katherine Norman might never have pursued a career in playwriting and arts education. This weekend, she’ll celebrate a full-circle moment for both career strands, as Interlochen Arts Academy stages the world premiere of Viragos, an original play Norman wrote about a little-known corner of history.

Norman is no stranger to Interlochen. She’s spent 11 summers as part of the theatre faculty for Interlochen Arts Camp, most recently at the helm of the junior theatre program. She’s also an Interlochen alumna herself, having set foot on campus for the first time 19 years ago as part of a three-week musical theatre program in 2007.

Even considering all that history, Viragos marks a major milestone for Norman. Though junior theatre campers performed a Norman-penned play last summer – an aged-down Shakespeare adaptation called Romeo & Juliet & Many Other Friends – this weekend will be the first time one of her original works has been staged at the institution she calls her “home base.”

“My adult life has been really transient,” Norman explains. “I've lived a lot of places, and I do a lot of contract work that takes me all over, so having this home base that I can go away from and then come back to has been really wonderful.”

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Norman had never heard of Interlochen until one day, at her brother’s baseball game, her mother struck up a conversation with another baseball mom.

“One of this woman’s kids was a music major at Interlochen, and she said, ‘I know your daughter is into theatre; you should look into this place,’” Norman recalls.

At the time, Norman was most interested in performance, having found her way from childhood ballet lessons to musical theatre. Ironically, it was participating in Interlochen’s musical theatre workshop program in 2007 that illuminated the career path she actually ended up pursuing.

“That camp session was the first time I ever got to take an acting class, and I immediately realized, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do musical theatre, I want to do acting,’” Norman laughs.

Norman went on to get a bachelor of fine arts in acting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and spent several years touring as part of traveling productions. Along the way, she “got really interested in psychology and neuroscience” – a left turn she describes as “my brain trying to understand what my acting teachers were teaching me.”

Between working at Interlochen in the summers – something Norman has been doing “on and off” since 2009 – and teaching other youth theatre programs across the country, Norman became enraptured with “the impact I saw theatre having on young kids in really rural areas.”

That new passion led to more schooling – including a master of arts in interdisciplinary theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and both a master’s degree and a Ph. D in educational psychology from the same school. It also led, eventually, to Viragos.

“I am motivated to create dramatic worlds that enable young people to practice really positive, joyful, and brave ways of being – especially young women,” Norman tells The Ticker. “There are so few plays for teenage girls; they are a missing demographic in a lot of contemporary playwriting.”

Norman found an ideal vehicle for young women’s theatre in one of her grad school courses.

“We were studying the development of English-language theatre, and we learned about the dissolution of the monasteries,” she says. That moment of history, which occurred when King Henry VIII cleaved England from the Catholic Church, “had a massive impact” on theatre, Norman explains, because most English theatre prior had been liturgical work “rooted in Catholicism” and performed in places of worship.

“When Catholicism was banned in England and the monasteries were disbanded, that center of theatre dissolved. That made way for the professional theatre in London in the early modern era, which is where we get Shakespeare,” Norman says. “But I started wondering, ‘What happened to the convents? What happened to the nuns?’ I found that a lot of them moved to Europe, which is where I discovered the story of Mary Ward.”

According to a description on the Interlochen website, Viragos dramatizes that story, following “a group of young Englishwomen as they rehearse a play at The Institute – Mary Ward’s school for girls founded in France, 1609. Through their rehearsals, the girls test the boundaries of art, science, love, and politics, as the shadow of the Inquisition looms.”

Ward was eventually arrested by the Inquisition and excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Her story – and her impact on theatre at a time when women were no longer allowed to act in plays in England – was subsequently buried.

“A lot of the documents about Ward’s life were literally sealed in archives by the Vatican, and they were only released to the public due to massive protests from contemporary nuns in about 2008,” Norman says. “The idea that this woman was so significant and so impactful that they literally locked away her story for hundreds of years, it fascinated me.”

It also fascinated Bill Church, Interlochen’s theatre department director.

“Set in a very specific time in history, this true story of strong young women pursuing their intellectual passions resonates deeply in today's society,” Church says of the play. “At a time when curriculum is being challenged and the government has threatened to control what we can study in the classroom, this powerful story serves to inspire and empower us all through the art form of theatre.”

Viragos will run for three performances this weekend.

Pictured: Norman (left) and the all-female cast of Viragos (right)