Doc Holliday's Woman
Kate, The Woman of Many Names
Doc Holliday's Woman, Kate, The Woman of Many Names, was written by Terry Earp, and is set in a cemetery in Dos Cabezas, Arizona in 1930, Doc Holliday's woman; Mary Katherine Haroney Cummings (Big Nose Kate) reveals her true identity to the ghost of John J. Howard, the man with whom she has shared the last years of her life with as Mary Cummings. Kate completes the story of the turbulent lives of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, disclosing things they would or could never say about themselves. Kate also speaks about the circumstances that plunged her life from that of a lady with an upper-class background into a life of Prostitution and how she survived.
Often the truth and the fact of ones existence are not necessarily the same thing. The challenge of writing accurate historical drama is telling the truth about the characters while staying faithful to the facts. I wanted to show Kate as a real person who is so much more than their legends tend to portray. To this end, whenever possible, I have used Kate's own language in order to give audiences a clearer sense of who she really was.
Most of the material used in this play is from an article written by Dr. A. W. Bork and Glenn G. Boyer. Dr. Bork interviewed Kate in 1935 while she was living at the Arizona Pioneer Home in Prescott Arizona. Additional material came from an autobiographical letter from Kate to her niece Lillian. Mary Katherine Haroney Cummings died on November 2, 1940 and buried under the name of Mary K. Cummings in the Prescott, Arizona, Pioneer Cemetery.
Contact Wyatt Earp by email at:
wyatt@wyattearp.biz