There were female disciples! Luke says so explicitly in the passage this play is based on, though he doesn’t manage to mention them by name again until the very end of his account, when Mary Magdalene and Joanna appear again, there all the while it seems and just waiting for some “woman’s work” to do.
It’s never stated that the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with her hair is Mary Magdalene, but it’s a traditional connection that suited my purposes just fine, and I then went even further by making Susanna the wife of the Pharisee hosting the party, and placing Chuza and Joanna at the party as well. Once I got them all into that house, I used them to explore the varying attitudes that people had toward Jesus, which is a spectrum that often gets reduced to a simple black-and-white picture by the interpretive filters we place over these stories – case in point: not all Pharisees were hard line hypocrites who plotted to destroy Jesus – and finally, to explore the motivations that might have led these pioneering women to take what must have been an even more inconceivable step.