Firelight Theatre Workshop began 2021 — our fourth season — with the eighth installment of We Were Friends. This episodic project is Firelight's creative reimagining of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson's profound friendship -- set in today’s world. Again, we worked to create a new relationship with our audience while still not-gathering.

For both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, letter-writing was a crucial way of holding one's friends close. Throughout Emerson's life, he corresponded with the English essayist Thomas Carlyle, though the two rarely had occasion to meet. In the spring of 1841, Emerson was writing to Carlyle about his reading, his family, and his own recent "feebleness." Firelight imagined Ralph and Margaret drafting a video postcard to Carlyle, an appreciation of their own place meant for a near-stranger, an ocean away.