Current Activities
Simpson is a founding board member of the Israeli-Palestinian Confederation.
As of June 2011, she resided in Tucson, Arizona. On July 4th, 2012, Simpson presented at the University of Rhode Island a reading of Mary's Joy, about the life of Mary Dyer, a Quaker hanged in Boston in 1660. The solo-performance work, written by Simpson, subsequently went into production with a scheduled opening in April 2013.
On September 16, 2012, a story was published in the Arizona Daily Star, featuring quotes by Simpson. The article focused on an art exhibit that was to have been presented at the Quaker Meeting house in Tucson. The artist was Danny Jones, a death-row inmate in Arizona. Among other things, Simpson was quoted saying, "We want to illuminate the fact that he is a human being. He is not his crime... He is an artist. He is a man with the ability to see beauty and to create beauty." The show was subsequently canceled, when it was discovered that it was scheduled on the same day as the National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims.
It was announced in October 2012 that Simpson would appear as Louisa "Ouiser" Boudreaux in the Red Barn Theatre's 2013 production of Steel Magnolias in Tucson. In December 2012, Judd Nelson was quoted saying of her, "Simply put (and nothing about her can be put simply), Jeanmarie Simpson is a bright, enthusiastic, and powerful performer and an even more gifted and inspiring writer. Interestingly, those two tenants living side-by-side within her are not natural brethren. Neither of them are given much to supplication, nor have a natural instinct for compromise. But, amazingly, they are able to co-exist within her, because they are secondary to Jeanmarie's elemental conflict: the struggle between her huge heart and her mighty mind, between impression and fact, between situational ethics and absolute truth. You and I, the outsiders, the spectators watching, we are the lucky ones able to receive her wisdom, and courage, and truth, and hope, and grace. Ultimately, I believe Jeanmarie to be one of humanity's invaluable resources."
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