Jameson White stands in the middle of Studio 308’s backroom directing a small group of actors through a scene soundtracked by a golden oldie. She chews on a fingernail and watches as they move across the room. White suggests a slight timing change, and they go again. She smiles — she likes what she sees.
Soon another practice has ended, meaning they’re one day closer to when White’s play “Ahead of Their Time” makes its regional premiere Sept. 10-13 at the Liddy Doenges Theatre inside Tulsa Performing Arts Center. Tickets for the production, presented by El Jay Productions and Edison Foundation, are available here.
Load-in at the PAC is on Labor Day, so the cast has a few practices remaining to work out the blocking and flow, and the crew has some time to finish acquiring all the props and costumes.
“This is probably the hardest week as far as all of the tasks,” White said. “There’s not a lot that can change once we go in there, so I think just finding that sweet spot, and we’re close, too. It’s a bundle of emotions about it all.”
“Ahead of Their Time” is a 90-minute play based on the true story of four generations of women in her family, spanning from 1893 to 2002. It tells the stories of their hardships, loves, losses and their mutual struggles to take power in a world that doesn’t want them to have it.
The play was a decade in the making, from the concept she developed as a 14-year-old to its current iteration.
“It was originally as a play, but then it sort of transformed, and I really started working on it during college, and then that’s when I did the first production,” said the 24-year-old. “I like to say, it’s existed as long as the people it’s about have existed. I’m just the messenger, truly.”
White lost her grandparents by the time she was a teenager, so she relied on stories from her mom, Diane. The more she heard, the more White felt compelled to write the script.
“It’s a true story, so I got the easy part of just making it palatable and creating the voices of these people that I have known in many ways, but the ways in which they’re presented, I guess I didn’t know,” White said. “A lot of it I wasn’t alive for, so I relied on the encyclopedia of my mother, who is the reason I know any of this.”
Beginning in high school, White did sessions with an internal family systems therapist, “which is all about digging back to see what things you could be carrying that necessarily aren’t yours,” she said. “I love stories about families and seeing, ‘well, this thing happened to these people, so their kids are going to be like this.’”
She credits fellow Tulsa playwright Tracy Letts’ “August Osage County” as a major inspiration for her first original production. Her work has also been informed by Ann Patchett’s novel “Commonwealth” and the works of Lena Dunham, especially “Girls.”
White examines love and addiction in her play. A big component of “Ahead of Their Time” is about how “we haven’t really gotten that far past when women genuinely needed to be married to survive in society.”
“I have always said I have no interest in writing anything that’s not centered around women and women’s stories,” White said. “We have enough of everything else. There are like 12 characters in it, but really, it’s just these four main women that kind of pass the torch to one another and carry these stories.”
White fell in love with being on stage as a second grader at Eliot Elementary, when she was cast as Ladybug in “The Bugz Play.” She continued acting through high school at Edison Preparatory, then in college at New York’s Molloy University, where she graduated in 2025 with a bachelor’s in musical theatre.
The semester she graduated, the playwright premiered “Ahead of Their Time” on campus. It also had a run in January at the New York Theater Festival.
“A lot of my parents’ friends did get to see it in New York, and a lot of them were like, ‘you know, we just wanted to support you, but this was actually really, really good,’” said White, who has resided in Brooklyn for six years. “That’s kind of been the theme is like getting validation from people who are hard to get validation from. Then I’m like, ‘OK, I’m doing something correct.’”
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