Assisted by playwright and actor Honor Ford-Smith, the Collective performed their first play, Downpression Get a Blow, for a 1977 national worker's festival.
[1] Ford-Smith served as the Collective's first artistic director,[3] but other founding members include: Vivette Lewis, Cerene Stephenson, Lana Finikin, Pauline Crawford, Beverley Hanson, Jasmine Smith, Lorna Burrell Haslam, Beverley Elliot, Jerline Todd, Lillian Foster, May Thompson, Rebecca Knowles, and Barbara Gayles.
[2][4] Some of their most important thematic interests include: unemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, harassment in the workplace, poverty and class oppression, racism, imperialism, sexism and women's social roles, and child-rearing and pregnancy.
[5] Inspired by Caribbean playwrights and artists like Dennis Scott, the Collective utilizes songs, games, rituals, folklore, African stories, reggae, and other elements of Jamaican popular culture in their plays.
[4] Inspired in part by Louise Bennett, the Collective uses the rhythms, patterns, and structures of everyday speech to address popular audiences apart from typical middle-class theatre-goers.
[1] However, as the Collective developed, they began incorporating more outside sources, including archival material and interviews with women who had experienced the situations being dramatized in the plays.
One important aspect of the Sistren Theatre Collective's process is that they take the working script back to the community where the play is being set to gather input from those whose stories are being told.
"Witnessing", or listening to personal testimony, is an important element of Jamaican culture and has influenced both Sistren's production process and their dramaturgy.
The name QPH comes from the specific focus on characters Queenie, Pearlie, and Hopie, who are impoverished despite lifetimes of trying to survive economically as independent women.