Preview: Atlanta native Hannah Mitchell clowns the tradwife at React Theatre

For Hannah Mitchell, bringing her solo show TRAD to Atlanta is a homecoming. Though the performer has lived in Brooklyn for about 12 years, she was born and raised in Atlanta and hasn’t performed here since high school.

Now, Mitchell is returning with a blonde wig and a character named Loren Wright, a tradwife who invites audiences into a seminar about her supposedly perfect life.

“I think a really cool byproduct of coming to Atlanta is just getting to have this homecoming,” Mitchell says. “I’m curious to see how people react, to hear what their touchpoints are with it.”

Presented at React Theatre on November 20, TRAD is a solo clown and bouffon performance sending up the tradwife phenomenon: the online ideal of a devoted homemaker whose identity centers on traditional gender roles, domesticity and submission to her husband.

Mitchell’s character leads a fictional seminar for paying customers, drawing the audience into her performance of domestic devotion. With audience participation (“obviously with consent,” Mitchell says), the show initially plays like an exaggerated lesson on how to live the perfect, traditional life.

Then something shifts midway through. Mitchell describes it as “a state of emergency” as the performance takes on a darker, sharper tone.

The character of Loren Wright began taking shape in 2024 while Mitchell was studying with a bouffon teacher at a workshop in Maine. She found a cheap blonde wig and started exploring an impulse to interrogate the “barefoot and pregnant” ideal. Her material grew through performances and audience responses, eventually becoming her touring solo show.

Mitchell drew inspiration from tradwife influencers, including Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, as well as from contradictions she sees in the lifestyle’s public presentation. Influencers may describe themselves as devoted homemakers who don’t work outside the home, she says, while simultaneously building lucrative online businesses.

“They’re actually the breadwinners,” Mitchell says. “And they’re performing all of this labor to support their families.”

For Mitchell, that tension is central to the piece. The character’s polished performance of contentment is a mask, one that allows Mitchell to explore what might happen when the mask comes off.

The show’s personal origins are more layered than a straightforward parody of social media personalities. Mitchell recalls a phrase she heard spoken by a conservative mother in her family’s orbit: “Listen and obey.” The words stayed with her. They prompted her to examine obedience, religious teachings and the expectations placed on women, including the story of Eve and the cultural weight attached to female disobedience. Those ideas became central to the material she developed onstage.

Mitchell’s bouffon framework uses the grotesque and the abject to expose structures of power. The form gives her permission to push Loren beyond a recognizable caricature of a tradwife and toward something more monstrous: a figure who can expose the anger and contradictions hidden beneath her polished performance. “I think women don’t get to be seen as monsters,” Mitchell says. “Bouffon is all about allowing those monster parts to be seen.”

The target, she suggests, is not limited to people who identify with tradwife culture; audiences outside of it may recognize their own contradictions, too. Mitchell wants the person being parodied to be able to laugh along before recognizing something of themselves in the character. “The person that you’re parodying is sitting in the audience,” she says. “And they’re laughing right along with it — until they finally realize that it’s them.”

Mitchell is especially curious about what Atlanta audiences will recognize in Loren. The character may draw on a particular version of Southern or small-town culture, but Mitchell isn’t assuming local audiences will respond in any one way. After all, she wants to hear what the material brings up for people. 

While TRAD takes aim at an idealized version of domestic life, Mitchell’s interest is less in delivering a simple takedown than in revealing what the performance conceals: the labor beneath the ease, the power beneath the sweetness and the anger beneath the smile.

Where and When 

TRAD is on stage at React Theatre on November 20. The double bill includes Julia VanderVeen’s DENTATA. Tickets, $20.
572 Edgewood Ave. SE, Suite 116.

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Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer, editor and arts journalist. A longtime contributor and former senior editor at ArtsATL, his work appears regularly in local, regional and national publications, covering theater, visual art, music, film, dance, literature and the artists and institutions shaping Atlanta’s cultural landscape.