Freddie: A Girl Turns a True Resistance Story into Gripping Theatre

Taffety Punk Theatre Company is closing out the summer with the world premiere of Freddie: A Girl, a new play by company member Kelsey Mesa running through September 19, 2026 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Mesa, whose award-winning debut La Salpêtriere played Taffety Punk in 2023, has once again reached into a little-known corner of women's history and come back with something both harrowing and unexpectedly funny.

The play tells the true story of Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, two sisters who joined the Dutch Resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands at just 15 and 17 years old. Raised in poverty by a single mother who instilled a fierce sense of justice in both girls, the sisters were recruited into the underground and handed increasingly dangerous assignments, growing from wide-eyed novices into spies, saboteurs, and assassins. They were soon joined by Hannie Schaft, a slightly older young woman who became a close friend and the third member of a formidable team. Because the occupying forces could not imagine teenage girls posing any threat, the three were able to move freely on their bicycles through Nazi-held territory, gathering intelligence, escorting refugees, planting explosives, and luring targets to their deaths.

Mesa centers the story on Freddie, the youngest, and the play follows her from the opening recruitment scene, where a suspicious resistance leader tests the sisters' nerve in a scuffle that turns comic, through a series of missions that grow steadily more costly. The tone moves nimbly between the giggly, affectionate banter of two sisters who still act like kids and the deadly seriousness of the work they've taken on. Humor surfaces throughout, and it never undercuts the stakes. The war takes friends and loved ones from the girls, most devastatingly Hannie Schaft, who was executed just weeks before liberation. In the final stretch, the play jumps forward several decades to the home of Freddie Dekker, the married name of the woman whose teenage years we've just watched, as a journalist presses her to recount what she did. What follows is a searching monologue about what it actually costs a person to take a life, even a deserving one, and how those moments never leave you.

Tia Shearer Bassett plays young Freddie as a scrappy, expressive live wire, with Sadie O'Conor as the steadier older sister Truus. Hana Clarice brings a grounded presence to Hannie Schaft, and Dan Crane takes on a rotating gallery of men including the resistance recruiter Frans van der Wiel, a waiter, an SS officer, and the journalist. Tonya Beckman appears in several supporting roles before stepping into the spotlight as the older Freddie in the closing scene, a performance that has been singled out as the emotional peak of the evening.

Lise Bruneau directs with a brisk pace and fluid physical staging. Jessica Moretti's abstract set surrounds the actors with black walls and floors streaked in colorful swirls and bicycle spokes, with a few multipurpose pieces standing in for trees, gardens, and cafes. Elizabeth Morton's period costumes anchor the action in wartime Holland, while Lee Martinez Cruz's sound design layers gunfire, warplanes, and piano music beneath Katie McCreary's lighting to carry the story from scene to scene. Shearer Bassett also composed the melody for a story-song Freddie sings, with lyrics by Mesa.

Freddie: A Girl runs about one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission. Performances continue through September 19, 2026 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 7th Street SE, Washington, DC.