Neah Lekan’s transfeminine adaptation of Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure will take place on Monday Nov. 17, 2025 at 5pm in the Arellano Theater in Levering Hall. After the play there will be a scholarly talk-back with Julie Crawford (Columbia University) and Sawyer Kemp (CUNY), in the theatre. The Singleton Center supported this, and we hope you will come out to experience scholarship and dramaturgy from a bright star of the English Department’s early modern cohort.

Margaret Cavendish’s 1668 play The Convent of Pleasure has received several reinterpretations by theatre artists in the past five years. This closet drama about a Princess entering a convent of women revealed only to be a Prince in disguise will be staged with an original adaptation with a transfeminine focus. Neah Lekan and Jamie Rawn’s The Convent of Pleasure, Newly Adapted presents a tragicomic reimagining of Cavendish’s original, uniting scholarship and practice to tell a poignant and painfully familiar transfeminine story. Presented in a Dramatic Reading this fall, this project is the first-ever devised artwork to emerge from the growing field of early modern trans studies. The event is supported by the Singleton Center and AGHI.

To register, click this link.