The Feminist Spectator

The Descendants

2012-01-28T08:05:00.000-08:00

Woodley, Clooney, Miller, and Krause, on the beach in The Descendants

Writer-director Alexander Payne’s films—if About Schmidt, Sideways, and now TheDescendants are any indication—are sensitive, expressive investigationsinto white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity. George Clooney, recently nominated for anAcademy Award for his role, for which he already won a Golden Globe, plays MattKing, a real estate lawyer in Hawai’i whose life falls apart when his wife’sinjury in a boating accident leaves her in an irreversible coma. In the voiceover that frames much of thefilm, Matt admits that he’s always been the back-up parent to his twodaughters, and can’t quite fathom what to do with his family when he’s left incharge.

As his wife lies in a hospital bed kept alive by aventilator and IV fluids, Matt is called to his 10-year-old daughter Scottie’selementary school to apologize for the photographs the girl took of herindisposed mother, which she pasted into an album to share at show and tell. Then he has to bring Scottie (Amara Miller)to a classmate’s house to apologize for more of her indiscretions. The kid is foul-mouthed and unpredictable; asMatt talks on the phone, he sees her throwing deck chairs into the familypool. So he wrangles Scotty onto a planeand goes off to the Big Island to collect her 17-year-old sister, Alexandra (ShaileneWoodley), hoping she can help out.

Instead, Matt finds Alex drinking with a friend,out past her curfew on the grounds of the private school at which sheboards. When he and Scottie bring Alex home,she’s hostile and impertinent. At herlast visit home, she fought with her mom, and doesn’t hesitate to inform Mattthat his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) was having an affair. Matt knows he’s been an inattentive husbandand an absent father, but this news unravels what he thought was his safe,secure world.

Woodley as Alex informing Matt about her mom's affair

Clooney is a subtle actor, with an admirablewillingness to push beyond his handsome, action-star reputation. (He’s also very good as a corruptpresidential candidate in The Ides ofMarch.) Matt’s face and bearingchange in small but significant ways when Alex tells him about Elizabeth’sinfidelity. He changes from a smoothpublic operator to a man humiliated by what he didn’t know about the most intimateaspects of his own life.

This new knowledge unmans him, but it also (ofcourse) humanizes him, and sends him careening toward his own redemption. In his more feminized role as a cuckold, Mattalso gets a handle on his parenting. Heand Alex form a bond over their determination to track down and confront BrianSpeer (Matthew Lillard), the realtor who was Elizabeth’s other man.

Once the story focuses on finding Brian Speer, The Descendants becomes a kind ofintra-Hawai’i road movie, except that Matt and his family fly among the islandsto track Brian down. [Spoiler alert, though nothing in the film is really a surprise.] They’re accompanied by Sid (Nick Krause), Alex’sthe hapless guy friend, whose presence she insists will help her be more civilto her father and her family. While atfirst Sid seems a thoughtless, insensitive child—he laughs at her grandmother’sAlzheimer’s and doesn’t seem very sympathetic to Matt’s plight—it turns outthat he recently lost his father and proves more emotionally acute than Payneat first lets on. The foursome slowly,carefully reconstitutes a semblance of family by replacing their grief over Elizabeth’simpending death with their wrath about Brian Speer.

Julie and Brian Speer (Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard)

When they find him on Kaua’i, and it turns out Speerhas a wife and two small kids. Theirrage dissipates into irritated sorrow, as Matt understands that the man he’s picturedas a mythic monster is really just an ordinary person who made a mistake. In their climactic confrontation, Mattinsists things happen for a reason, but Speer argues that, to the contrary, sometimesthings just happen. Living within thatcapriciousness is part of Matt’s life lesson, and forgiveness becomes the film’srather pat, too comfortable denouement.

Elizabeth dies after they remove the ventilator—inaccord with her living will. Matt andhis daughters sprinkle her ashes off a canoe they row out to sea, encirclingthe dissolving ash with their leis as the huge hotels of the Oahu shore loom inthe background. In the film’s last shot,Matt, Alex, and Scottie lounge silently but companionably on the family couch,watching March of the Penguinstogether as they eat ice cream. With thestationary camera set in a medium shot, we watch them make room for oneanother, sharing a blanket and their dessert as they listen to Sydney Poitiernarrate the epic story of penguin families and their journey. The analogy couldn’t be clearer.

The final shot, family united, no mother

Payne contrives the plot to serve Matt’s characterdevelopment. As in Sideways, all that really happens in The Descendants is that a man weathers a mid-life crisis and comesout on the other side, knowing himself a little better and becoming moreforgiving of himself and his circumstances. Matt, mind you, has a very good life—his last name, after all, is“King,” and his family owns a large parcel of land on Oahu, the sale of whichthe whole state is apparently tracking.

When it turns out that the Brian Speer (whose nameis also perhaps too symbolic) stands to profit from the sale, Matt waxessentimental about being Hawaiian (his great-grandmother was an island native). Against the wishes of his (mostly male)cousins, Matt decides to keep the land (and a beautiful stretch of gorgeousblue-green ocean and pristine sand and dunes it is, too—the film makes Hawai’i looklike paradise).

Matt and his daughters observing the King family land

Clooney’s performance is open and moving. He abandons his movie star glamor to play aman who wears short-sleeved Hawai’in shirts and pastel pants with high-ridingwaists. His hair is streaked with grayand his face is lined and worn. He’s deceivedby a man who’s clearly not his kind or dignified equal. But Speer’s very inadequacies secure Matt’sessential goodness. His emotions movefrom rage to forgiveness. He kisses his unconsciouswife’s cracked lips when he tearfully says good-bye, using the occasion of herloss to accept his own failings and become a better man.

Matt and Alex find their new and better selves overElizabeth’s inert body, talking to her as she lies immobile and unhearing. Alex, too, rises to the occasion of hermother’s death, guiding her little sister and supporting her dad. Woodley is terrific as Alex, playing a girlthrust into adulthood perhaps a bit too quickly without a trace ofsentimentality. She’s smart, thoughtful,and always seems in control, registering Alex’s emotion without wallowing. She matches Clooney scene for scene.

Clooney and Woodley

But as in Payne’s Sideways, women are the agents of the men’s transformation in The Descendants. Clooney makes Matt King appealing enough thatthe film is a pleasure to watch, but I preferred him in Up in the Air, which reversed gender stereotypes by makingClooney’s character the naïve romantic with unfounded expectations of the womanwith whom he’s having an affair.

Too many contemporary films rely on the old (oftendead) woman-as-agent-of-man’s-self-knowledge-and-redemption trope. Just in the recent crop of 2011 fall andChristmas movies, for only two among many examples, Ryan Gosling’s character inThe Ides of March has his epiphanywhen the beautiful, young, naïve Evan Rachel Wood character commits suicideover her affair with Clooney’s presidential candidate-senator.

And in the critically touted Iranian film The Separation (nominated for a BestForeign Film Academy Award), the wife who insists on divorcing her husband isblamed for the subsequent family tragedies and indirectly for the miscarriageof the woman whom he hires to replace his wife’s domestic labor. The considerably less privileged woman isalso portrayed as immoral, while her husband—despite his tendency towardviolence—is redeemed by his grief over his unborn child’s loss. The pattern persists.

TheDescendants is well-written, beautifully photographed, and wonderfullyacted, but the story it tells is tired and familiar. And the woman, once again, has to take itlying down.

The Feminist Spectator

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2012-01-27T04:22:00.000-08:00

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander

David Fincher’s tense, moody film adaptation ofthe popular Stieg Larsson book actually improves on the readingexperience. Where the book offered agreat story with plodding prose, Fincher’s film cuts the narrative to the bonewhile staying faithful to Larsson’s plot and characters. The film’s visual style makes it a pleasureto watch, evoking both the cosmopolitanism and gritty urbanism of Stockholm andthe frozen, snow-blown north Sweden countryside where much of the centralmystery unravels.

For a film that’s in large part about an ace computerhacker, Fincher both downplays and makes visually interesting LisbethSalander’s notorious skills, intercutting shots of her snub-nailed fingersflying over her keyboard with those of her intense gray eyes, replete witheyebrow-piercings, peering intensely at the screen. Only sparingly does Fincher use screen shotsthat indicate she’s reading other people’s email.

The film is a huge improvement over the Swedish versionreleased a few years ago and starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth, which I found amore literal, bloodless adaptation. Fincher’s slick Hollywood idioms turn the story into a stylish,fast-paced thriller. In the openingcredits (as other critics have noted), the director nods both musically andvisually to the iconic James Bond films, a nice intertextual reference, sinceFincher’s Mikael Blomkvist is played by Daniel Craig, the latest Bond.

Fincher also judiciously uses atmospheric, nearlyTechnicolor flashbacks to the Vanger family’s 1960s history, when the familypatriarch’s treasured niece, Harriet, mysteriously disappeared. Fincher makes the American adaptation ofLarsson’s story more vivid, lending cinematic appeal to the narrative while he movesit smoothly through its paces.

Thereal revelation in Fincher’s Girl withthe Dragon Tattoo is Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander. Nominated for a Golden Globe (which she lostto Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady)and now for a Best Actress Academy Award, Mara deserves the accolades heaped onher performance. Her Lisbeth is slightbut fierce; Mara seems both smaller and steelier than Rapace was in the role,more emotionally fragile but more physically and psychically determined.

Inher early scenes in her kindly employer Dragan Armansky’s office (Goran Kisnjic,in a small but empathetic supporting role) and in her first meeting with NilsBjurman (Vorick van Wageningen), herevil new guardian, Lisbeth refuses to make eye contact.

Butwhen she does shift her gaze to look directly and defiantly at herinterlocutors, you see a young woman who’s absolutely in control of her traumaticpast (about which we learn very little in this first film of the trilogy). She’s taught herself a kind of discipline thatkeeps her highly functioning while letting her passion for vengeance simmerjust underneath the surface of her skin. Those gray eyes become the swing door to a boiler room of the soul,where her rage is stoked by knowing that the social corruptions—most of themgendered—that have kept her a ward of the state since she was twelve continueto structure Swedish life.

Onthe other hand, if you don’t know her backstory, Lisbeth doesn’t necessarily seemmotivated by revenge. My intrepidfilm-going companion, Feminist Spectator 2, hasn’t read any of the Larsson books,and found Lisbeth even more fierce and fascinating because she appearsbrilliant, scary, and tough without being psychologized.

Dragon Tattoo is, of course, just thefirst in what will be a new trilogy of films based on Larsson’s story. In this one, all we hear of Lisbeth’s past iswhat she mutters to Blomkvist when he’s finally gained her trust. When he asks her why she’s still a ward ofthe state, Lisbeth admits matter-of-factly that she’s considered criminallyinsane because she set her father on fire and burned 80 percent of hisbody. But since even this tiny, teasingrevelation comes relatively late in the film, FS2 says spectators have alreadycome to admire her without needing this justification.

Lisbeth’ssordid history will be fully explicated in the next two films. Mara, however, plays her with full knowledgeof the character’s past and her journey into her vexed present. Mara’s achievement is to make Salander afierce, even feminist, character without creating her as a monster. Sure, all her Goth accoutrements are in place,from her jet-black Mohawk to her kohl-lined eyes to her multiple facial andbody piercings, along with her leather jacket, knapsack, boots, and greencanvas cargo pants.

Lisbethsmokes like a tough, holding her cigarettes between her thumb and herforefinger and squinting at the ubiquitous smoke. She wears ratty black t-shirts andsweatshirts with hoods she pulls up to hide beneath. When Blomkvist barges in on Lisbeth and aone-night-stand she’s picked up at a lesbian bar, her tattered t-shirt reads“Fuck Off You Fucking Fuck” in faded stenciling. (But he’s undeterred.) Her neck is adorned with heavy chains andrazor blades, the jewelry of a woman who refuses to submit.

Lisbeth, hooded

[If you haven’t read Larsson’s books or seenthe Swedish film trilogy or Fincher’s adaptation,spoilers follow.]

AlthoughLisbeth is a force to contend with, her new guardian decides he can use hispower over her for his own nefarious sexual purposes. Bjurman forces her head into his lap at theirfirst meeting, threatening to commit her to an institution if she doesn’tcomply. When she sees him again,required to ask him for money since he’s taken control of her affairs, he rapesher brutally, sadistically enjoying the pain and humiliation he inflicts. But it doesn’t take long for Lisbeth to exacther revenge, forever reducing her rapist to a quaking eunuch.

Lisbeth threatens Bjurman in an elevator

ToFincher’s credit, the film doesn’t sensationalize Lisbeth. The other characters don’t react to her asthough she’s a spectacle, undercutting what might be spectators’ expectationsthat she’ll create a stir simply by how she looks. Instead, lawyer, Dirch Frode (StevenBerkoff), dispatched by the wealthy Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), treatsLisbeth respectfully, aware of her talent as a researcher and overlooking heropen hostility.

Likewise,when Blomkvist peremptorily visits her apartment after he learns that she’shacked into his computer, he, too, is unfazed by her unkempt appearance andaggressive demeanor. Instead, he insists that she drink the coffeeand eat the breakfast he fixes for her while he persuades her to help him findHarriet Vanger’s murderer.

AsFS2 points out, that the film’s “good” men react generously to Lisbeth directsspectators to see her magnanimously, too. On the other hand, FS2 continues, Mara is a beautiful young woman, andthe camera exploits her small, perfect features, her flawless skin, and herclear gray eyes. That is, despite allher bravado and her frightening accessories, Fincher takes care to on somelevel glamorize Lisbeth, to keep her safe from the audience’s, as well as theother characters’, antipathy.

Eventhe police officers she approaches while she’s doing her work seem to findnothing remiss in Lisbeth’s outfit or her bearing. They worry that the information she wantswill upset her or they’re annoyed because she expects unusual access anddemands too much time. But they obviouslydon’t see her as a freak.

Nonetheless,she rides a mean motorcycle and wears a fearsome helmet. Lisbeth’s heroism comes from her charactermore than it does from her actions. Whenshe forces the villainous Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgard) off the bridge on hisfamily’s island, causing his car to overturn and catch fire as he stares out,doomed and helpless in the driver’s seat, Lisbeth watches without remorse.

Andwhat a nice switch to see her rescue Blomkvist from certain death instead ofvice versa. Too often in suspense filmslike Dragon Tattoo, it’s thewoman—however intrepid and smart—who is saved at the end by the man when shefinds herself unwittingly trapped in the villain’s house. In DragTattoo, on the contrary, at the film’s climactic moment it’s Craig/Bond/Blomkvistwho is trussed up like a bird waiting to be plucked, and it’s Lisbeth whoseeleventh hour appearance, wielding a nasty golf club, saves his life.

Lisbethand Blomkvist simultaneously solve the central mystery of who has beenmurdering women—all gruesomely raped and slaughtered with references to Bibleverses—around the time Harriet Vanger disappeared. But it’s Lisbeth who tracks the killer to hislair after Blomkvist falls into his trap, and Lisbeth who, once the demon isdispatched, goes on to vindicate Blomkvist’s wrongful slander conviction in theWennerstrom corporate corruption case that sets Larsson’s plot in motion.

The Wennerstromrevenge subplot of Dragon Tattoo isnearly campy, as Lisbeth sheds her signature style for a Dolce and Gabbana lookthat one critic rightly called “drag.” She dons a blond wig and outsized sunglasses, a form-fitting dress andstiletto heels, to move some funds around various off-shore banks, creating atrail of financial malfeasance that bankrupts Wennerstrom, exonerates Blomkvist,and secures Lisbeth’s independent future.

Mara as Lisbeth in drag

Inher drag scenes, Mara beautifully performs Lisbeth’s disdain for her temporary performanceof conventional femininity. When hermasquerade is over, she tosses her earrings down an airport sink and throws herwig out the window of a train. Thesequence is a wonderful illustration of Lisbeth’s skill as an operative, but aneven better demonstration of her utter aversion for traditional femininecostumes and behavior.

I wasactually surprised that Fincher’s film leaves Lisbeth’s feminism so intact. I found Fincher’s representations of women inhis film, The Social Network, misogynist. Those who disagreed with me often pointed toMara’s character in that film; she plays Mark Zuckerberg’s smart and cutting butquickly dismissed and ultimately irrelevant girlfriend.

Butwhile women were incidental sexual playthings in The Social Network, Dragon Tattoo is very much Lisbeth’s film. She’s its moral and narrative center and itskeen social observer. Watch Mara’s earsand eyes perk up when Blomkvist invites her to help him find “a man who killswomen” (which was apparently the title Larsson preferred for his first book).

Lisbethis also the film’s most interesting character study, not because of how shelooks and dresses but because of how she reacts to the world around her andthen acts. Mara has little dialogue, but her expressiveface and her physical commitment to Lisbeth make her fascinating. Watch her exit from the elevator where sheexcoriates the reprehensible Bjurman and leaves him terrified as the doorsclose behind her. Just turning her backon her guardian is a moment of utter command, clarity, and complexity.

Lisbeth/Maraalso brings Dragon Tattoo asurprising sense of humor. When shebegins working with Blomkvist, the couple hunch over his laptop in the coldcabin Henrik Vanger has provided for him. She rolls her eyes as Blomkvist slowly pecks at the keys to bring upscreen images. It’s a small buthilarious moment, as Mara gives Lisbeth an interior life lets her drolly,wordlessly comment on her male partner’s technological inadequacies withoutneeding to perform her superiority.

Lisbethis firmly in control of their relationship. She initiates their first sexual encounter; she demands that he stoptalking until she has her orgasm; she saves him from certain death; and shedelivers the goods on Blomkvist’s nemesis, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom (Ulf Friberg),which restores Blomkvist’s reputation.

My quibbleswith Fincher’s representation of Lisbeth are minor. For example, after she’s raped by Bjurman,she stumbles home for the de rigueur victim-in-the-shower scene, where we seeher bruises and the blood running from her body into the tub. (I guess it’s difficult to signify pain in afilm without these iconic signs. Although Mara does an excellent job screaming Lisbeth’s rage as shestruggles against Bjurman’s restraints.) The next time we see her, Lisbeth is in alesbian bar, where she picks up the (beautiful) woman who Blomkvist findssharing her bed the next morning.

The dragon tattoo and Lisbeth in pain

Thejuxtaposition of the rape and the lesbian bar scene makes it seem as though malesexual violence has propelled Lisbeth toward sex with women. Instead, in the book, she has an on-goingrelationship with a woman that mirrors Blomkvist’s relationship with hiscolleague, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), and clarifies that one of Lisbeth’scharms is her assertive bisexuality.

Likewise,Dragon Tattoo’s last several scenesfocus too much on Lisbeth’s unexpected affection for Mikael. She tells her beloved former guardian, HolmerPalmgren (Bengt CW Carlsson), who’s in a nursing home recovering from a stroke,that she’s made a friend. She buys Blomkvistan expensive leather jacket and she rides off to deliver it to him.

Despiteher strength of character and insight, Lisbeth is emotionally immature, andhasn’t picked up Blomkvist’s cues. Soshe’s devastated when she arrives at the Millenniummagazine offices to find the flirtatious Mikael going off in a taxi with Erika. The film ends on Lisbeth’s romanticdisappointment, which undercuts her earlier rejections of heterosexual femininity,especially for those spectators who haven’t read or seen the earlier version ofthe trilogy and don’t understand—as they say—where she’s coming from.

Butstill, Fincher and Mara make Lisbeth complicated enough. That final moment could be read as a strongwoman realizing she was about to succumb to sentiment and abruptly choosing notto. (Well, maybe that’s a stretch). And Lisbeth does seem young. In comparison, Fincher portrays Blomkvist as squarelymiddle-aged, and steers Craig far from his Bond action hero routine. The actor sports an unshaven, grizzledsalt-and-pepper chin throughout the film, and rather than leaping tallbuildings and consulting cool gadgets, he’s often physically compromised.

Forexample, when he creeps around Martin’s glass-walled lair in the film’s climax,he’s the one who takes a kitchen knife from the counter, intending to defendhimself as ineffectually as a typical female victim in a horror film. Blomkvist is the one who falls when he tries torun from Martin’s house and who is lured back in to the man’s trap. As Martin boasts with a sneer, people’sdesire not to offend often trumps their instincts for self-preservation. (Skarsgard plays the villain with the perfectmix of unctuous obsequiousness and arrogant pride.)

Blomkvistis the first man who’s demonstrated this self-defeating instinct to Martin. Blomkvist is a metrosexual intellectual, anot quite effete representative of the fourth estate, and Craig plays him withintelligent bemusement and horror at the grisly murders his researchuncovers. His black-rimmed glasses hangcrookedly off his ears instead of over his head, and he pulls them onto hisface to peer into documents and computer screens. Using eyeglasses to signify intelligence is atired cliché, but Craig at least makes the gesture convincing.

Blomkvist (Craig) and Erika (Wright) at the magazine offices

Wrightplays Blomkvist’s long-time friend and sometime bed-mate Erika as hisintellectual and political companion. Wright’sbeauty is only enhanced by the lines on her face. The middle-aged couple has a lived-inrelationship, even though she remains married to her husband. Blomkvist and Erika are comfortably establishedin their lives, in contrast to Lisbeth, who’s still struggling with the tangledtendrils of her past.

Lisbeth’srelationship with Blomkvist might be a turning point. A scene in which they work together on thebed in a hotel room, with him in a white terry robe and her in her Goth outfit,is a nice moment of intimacy across clear differences. But she’s still testing new contours for herlife, while his are indisputably firm.

It’sa shame, then, that the film’s ending makes Lisbeth seem a jilted lover, whenher character is otherwise so compelling, strong and competent.

Onelast note: I’m surprised that criticsand spectators refer so often to what they consider the film’s extreme violenceand sexuality. While the rape scene is certainlyhorrific, Dragon Tattoo didn’t strikeme as significantly more brutal than any other shoot-‘em up, set-‘em-on-fireaction flick.

Doesthis film seem more extreme because its hero is a woman? Because Lisbeth neutralizes Bjurman with a stungun and then tattoos “I am a rapist pig” across his naked stomach? Because it’s Martin, the male killer of women,who dies in a ball of fire? Or becauseit’s Daniel Craig who’s victimized and saved by a woman in the end? Just wondering.

TheFeminist Spectator

George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, 2010-2011

2012-01-26T03:48:00.000-08:00

Just a note to say that The Feminist Spectatorblog won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for2010-2011. I’m delighted by thishonor. The Feminist Spectator is thefirst blog ever to receive the award in its 56 year history, and I’m only theseventh woman to win in the history of the award. The last woman so honored was my friend andcolleague Alisa Solomon, who won for her book Re-dressing the Canon: Essays onGender and Theatre in 1998. Iattended Alisa’s celebration party at PS122 that year, and remember the pride Ifelt in her accomplishment. I’m thrilledto be joining her and so many other critics and writers I admire in thisdistinguished company.

Other recent award winners include CharlesMcNulty (chief theatre critic at the LATimes), Marc Robinson (for his book TheAmerican Play), Randy Gener (for his writing at American Theatre), H. Scott McMillin (for his book The Musical as Drama), and Ray Knapp(for his book The American Musical andthe Formation of National Identity). The prize is adjudicated by the chairs of the English Departments atCornell, Yale, and Princeton, though Cornell administers the award.

Karen Fricker wrote a lovely post in her theatre blog at The Guardian about thesignificance of my award, noting that Nathan award's history of gender imbalance “mightreflect the field’s demographics, [but] it does nonetheless prompt questioningabout why criticism is still largely perceived and practiced as a man’s game,when the accomplishments of Dolan and other leaders in the field . . . provethat turning out incisive, engaging critical prose about what happens on astage does not require a Y chromosome.”

The significance of the Nathan award going to ablog has also been remarked by various commentators. London-based theatre critic Mark Shenton, onhis blog Shenton’s View, suggests that “the web can also usefully provide aforum for critics to do their work away from the commercial and spacerestraints that typically operate in newspapers.” Shenton discusses the recent firing oflong-time Village Voice film criticJ. Hoberman as an example of the sad state of contemporary arts criticism, and saysthat Hoberman has responded to his ouster by announcing that he’ll start ablog. Shenton also notes that HowardKissel, who once wrote for the New YorkDaily News, now regularly contributes his criticism to the onlineHuffington Post.

Clearly, there’s a lot to say about the state oftheatre and arts criticism. I’m hopingto sponsor a panel discussion about gender and criticism, and about blogging asa forum for criticism, as part of my Nathan award celebration. Save Saturday,April 28, tentatively planned as the date for an event herein Princeton. Details forthcoming.

Meanwhile, I want to take the opportunity of theaward to thank those of you who read this blog. When I first started writing The Feminist Spectator (seven years agothis August), I felt like I was sending words out in the void, happy to seethem move off my private screen but unsure where and with whom they mightland. Learning that so many of you readthe blog, and engaging your comments and quarrels, gives me great pleasure, andencourages me about people’s desire to engage long-form, generative arts criticism.

I’m so grateful for the critical community yourreading creates for my writing.

The Feminist Spectator

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same

2012-01-10T18:21:00.000-08:00

Film poster; Suzan Ziegler and Lisa Haas

I had the pleasure of seeing Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same at the Galway Film Festival in Ireland last summer. It's now playing through January 12 at ReRunGastropub Theatre in DUMBO (more info below).

The film, written and directed by Madeleine Olnek, is a lovely, quirky, comic fantasia, with a beautifully understated performance by Lisa Haas as the sweetly codependent lesbian who's fallen in love with a space alien. Filmed in a sort of Ed Wood, low-budget camp sci-fi style, Codependent offers a fun queer evening at the movies.

Olnek was a regular at the WOW Café in the 1980s, when the underground lesbianperformance space was breaking rules about theatre and poaching from popularculture to rewrite what we understood of gender and sexuality norms. The film is based on her play of the same title, which will soon be published in acollection of work from WOW that Holly Hughes and Alina Troyano (CarmelitaTropicana) are co-editing for the University of Michigan Press. Olnek made the play into an indie feature film that’s now making the rounds on the festivalcircuit. I caught the showing on thefirst night of the Galway Film Festival at Town Hall last July.

In true WOW style, thefilm both quotes and breaks the genre conventions on which it’s based. Jane (Haas) is a desperately shy, lonelylesbian clerk at a greeting card store, who finds a note dropped seemingly outof the blue in which a lesbian space alien asks if they can be friends. As Jane’s therapist (the wry Rae C. Wright)tries to help Jane puzzle through her emotions while persuading her that shehasn’t really been contacted byaliens, the planet Zots suffers an environmentalcrisis. They believe their ozone layeris being destroyed by “big feelings,” and resolve to send to Earth any of theircitizens whose love affairs are damaging their planet. On Earth, the reasoning goes, the aliens’hearts will be broken, and they’ll return to Zots cured of their commitment tolove.

And so begins a tale ofaliens-on-another-planet, in which the sexual and cultural mores of Earth clashwith the otherworldly style of the citizens of Zots. Beaming down into Jane’s world, Zoinx (thehandsome, square-jawed Susan Ziegler) targets the shy lesbian for herexperiment in Earth-bound relationships. Despite her monotone, high-tech, echoing voice and her utter lack ofhuman affect, Jane finds Zoinx charming.

Part of the film’s joke is that Jane never acknowledges Zoinx’sstrangeness, accepting the alien’s bald head, her never-removed large,Elizabethan-style collar, which nearly encircles her starkly prominent pate,and her strange way of expressing affection (she puts her hand against Jane’snose in an awkward gesture whenever she’s feeling intimate). Jane is so delighted by Zoinx’s company thatshe happily engages her alien customs and generously teaches Zoinx the equallystrange ways of Earth.

Two other aliens havebeen sent to Earth to participate in Zots’ project. Bar (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (JackieMonahan) have the misfortune of having “big feelings” for one another, but tryto find earthlings who might cure them of their mutual affliction.

Olnek includes hilarious scenes in whichvarious local lesbians respond to Zylar’s personal ad (written and videoed),and find themselves incapable of understanding or accepting what looks to themlike weird role-playing. In theirone-note delivery, Bar and Zylar’s declarations of desperate love both undercutand underline the typical (or is it stereotypical?) excess of lesbianattachments with truly funny, sweet knowingness.

Two “men in black,”federal agents of some sort who track the aliens’ activity on Earth, shadowJane and Zoinx, trying to figure out the place from which the aliens enter andleave the country. Their scenes arefilmed almost entirely in a parked suburban van, where the senior agent (DennisDavis) complains that he’s always passed up for promotion, watching those he’strained leapfrog over him professionally. His junior partner (Alex Karpovsky) asks him probing questions,inquiring, for instance, whether his wife, Debbie, is a “transman,” to the guy’sutter perplexity.

The two men’s deadpanhumor offers a terrific counterbalance to Jane and the aliens’shenanigans. Their surveillanceactivities also allow Olnek to feed them anthropological lines about lesbianrelationships, as their ridiculous comments about whether these romances last (for one example) provide both a dominant cultural voice and an eye that lets them peer into themargins with a rather friendly, liberal curiosity.

Davis and Karpovsky play their scenes with alovely improvisational tone and Davis, in particular, comments as much onconventional masculinity as Jane and the aliens comment on lesbianrelationships.

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien is filmed with an intentionallylow-budget gestalt reminiscent of Ed Woods’ opus and the science fictionmovies of the 1950s. Olnek uses low-techspecial effects to represent the aliens’ space ship, and the film’s black andwhite stock lets her use fun ‘50s-style titles and images of galaxies swirlingin space.

The music, too, quotes ‘50s melodramaticfilm conventions to over-emphasize emotions and to help announce Olnek’saffectionate parodies not only of sci-fi but of stereotypes of contemporarylesbian relationships.

Watching actorsdressed as aliens walking robotically through real New York East and WestVillage locations while no one on the streets blinks an eye is also a hoot. Codependentsends up being a sweet, funny love story in which two deeply “different” womentriumph over their odds.

At a public discussion after theshowing in Galway, Olnek described how she researched the genre and understandsits roots in Cold War paranoia. Aliens,she pointed out, where often portrayed as they are in her film (that is, bald and homogeneous in appearance) torepresent Americans’ fear of the uniformity a Soviet take-over might impose. Likewise, Olnek suggested, their monotonespeaking voices borrow from those ‘50s sci-fi movies, in which the aliens’voices, too, were leeched of individual character and affect.

Putting thesecharacteristics in a lesbian context, however, makes them sweet andhilarious. Jane takes Zoinx out for adrink at the Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, where Jane whispersthat the clientele tends to be unfriendly. When Zoinx asks Jane to dance, she happily complies, trying to turn herembarrassment into a kind of pride when Zoinx's moves prove anything butconventional. The reaction shots arehysterical.

Go; you'll have fun.

The Feminist Spectator

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, through January 12, ReRunGastropub, DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Once, the musical

2011-12-19T16:03:00.000-08:00

The stars and supporting cast on the pub-style stage

When youenter New York Theatre Workshop’s space on E. 4th St. to see Once, the musical adaptation of the 2007Irish indiefilm (see my 2007 blog post on the film), the well-worn theatre suddenly feels like a party hall. The stage has been transformed into a bar,replete with distressed old mirrors and sconce lights, and a low counter thatserves double-duty as a place for spectators to get a pint before the playproper starts and as a secondary acting platform for the considerable talentsof this musically distinguished and emotionally empathetic cast.

In Irishplaywright Enda Walsh’s faithful adaptation, the Dublincommunity onwhich the story focuses is bound by its music making. The cast is small by musical theatrestandards, since the "community here," usually represented by dozens ofsupernumeraries, is the close-knit one of Dublin street buskers and musicianswho remain soulfully devoted to music as an expression of their pining spirits.

Steve Kazee plays “the guy,” a recentlyjilted, emotionally and artistically ambivalent singer/song-writer who at the show’sbeginning, after a wrenching solo, has decided to abandon his battered guitar on the street as a kind of remnant of his own lost soul.

But “the girl”(like “the guy,” also nameless, an odd conceit borrowed from the film)overhears his ballad and brings him emphatically back to his music and to hislife. Played by the lovely, energetic CristinMilioti (last seen at NYTW in Ivo Van Hove’s Little Foxes), she drags him to a music store where she borrows apiano on which to accompany him in her resonant, equally soulful style. Through sheer will and a bit of artfully withheldromance, she encourages him to resume his music-making in America, where he canreconnect with his departed girlfriend and have a wonderful life.

As in thefilm, music expresses the duo's personalities and their yearnings. The musical's loveliest and most hauntingnumber remains the Academy Award-winning “Falling Slowly,” written andperformed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the original guy and girl whoremain credited for the music and lyrics of this adaptation. The ballad grows as a duet between the two,whose voices blend perfectly as their separate instruments play a kind ofsyncopated, already sad flirtation.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the original "guy" and "girl"

Although the pairfall in love as soon as they begin harmonizing together, the musical keeps themapart rather than uniting this typically central heterosexual couple as moreconventional musical stories are wont to do. In fact, one of the pleasures of Onceis watching it resist the stereotypical formula. The community that typically mirrors thecentral couple's initial opposition—like the cowboys and the farmers who shouldbe friends in Oklahoma—here arealready united.

Walshmanufactures some humorous initial conflict between Billy (Paul Whitty), themusic store owner, and the bank manager (Andy Taylor) to whom the girl and guyturn for a loan to make their album. When the banker turns out to be a closeted musician (and anot-so-closeted gay man), he gives the couple the money and joins the band,overcoming Billy’s suspicion of capitalists to become part of the singing andplaying ensemble.

In fact, thatband of sympathetic brothers and sisters is one of the sweetest things aboutthis very sweet show. Director JohnTiffany (Black Watch) keeps hisinstrument-playing and singing cast on stage throughout Once, John Doyle-style. Heguides them toward saloon-style chairs that line the wide proscenium stage inbetween numbers. From there, they watchthe action intently and provide the occasional musical punctuation orundertone.

The severalacoustic guitars, an electric bass, a banjo, an accordion, a ukulele, a bass,and two violins, as well as a drum set employed in the climactic studiorecording scene, compose the orchestra, all played by members of the cast. The mournful ballads underscore the fatedlove story, and the musicians provide pre-show and intermission Irish pub musicto persuade the audience into the Dublin world of Once.

And theaudience loves it. They approach the baron stage willingly before the show and during the intermission, where cast andcrew pull pints of Guinness and other beers. Several spectators the night I attended danced with the musicians who sangtogether center stage, stomping their feet Riverdance-style and making thatparticularly Irish sort of merry before the central story got underway.

The pre-showparty is a fun theatrical choice, shaking up, as it does, the conventionalseparation between performer and spectator. The choice to create a pub-style environment that lets the show be smalland intimate, signals from the start that Onceis not aspiring to more typical musical spectacle that would mock the more personal commitments at the film’s heart.

The poster for the original film

The guy liveswith his father (David Patrick Kelly), a crusty old Dubliner named “Da,” abovethe vacuum repair shop they run together. When the girl finds the guy losing heart on the street, she asks him tofix her Hoover, insisting that he make the machine “suck.” Because she’s Czech—and Walsh gets a fairamount of mileage from her Eastern European seriousness—she soberly sets aboutthe task of re-inspiring the guy toward his own talents.

He’s grudgingat first, floundering on the shoals of lost love and confusion about his ownambitions. But she’s insistent. In the first act, in fact, she’s a bit toosingle-minded in her intention to repair his heart, and appears the stereotypicalgirl in the service of a guy’s future rather than her own.

But Walshgives the character more nuances in the second act. She has a child and a husband who’s on hisway back to Dublin from a trial separation. And although she’s drawn to the guy, she has a stalwart ethic thatrequires her to try to make her marriage work. That the guy and the girl clearly love one another but don’t becomelovers is a refreshing tactic for a musical. Their attraction shimmers around the show, and their sad but somehowright failure to consummate their love makes Once wistful and somehow true about those complicated affairs ofthe heart.

Bob Crowley’sevocative set and costumes are lit beautifully by Natasha Katz, who gilds theactors with the kind of romantic, introspective warmth that seems to deepen theiremotional complexity. Many of the show’sscenes take place in squares of light that mark off the space, carving it intointimate encounters between pairs of characters--the guy and his father; theguy and the girl; Billy and his date. Once, as a result, is an intimate,surprisingly quiet affair, in which between the numbers, the characters spendtime simply talking to one another about their desires, hopes, and dreams.

The Czechbackground of the girl and her extended family—her mother, daughter, andcousins figure heavily into her Dublin life—is played for laughs. The cousins, of all the musical’s characters,are cardboard stereotypes meant to elicit the national confusions and languagehumor that comes from immigrants navigating new worlds.

Walsh andTiffany handle the film’s international flair with supertitles which, in acreative twist, project the English dialogue into the characters’ nativetongues. That is, the audience sees thegirl’s exchanges with her family projected in Czech, and some of the Dubliner’sdialogue projected in Irish. The actorsspeak in English with various degrees of Eastern European and Irish accents, noneof which are pronounced enough to get in the way of comprehension.

The show’s choreographyis light and unobtrusive, but occasionally inspired, as when the girl and theguy, in separate images, seem to sculpt the air with their arms, providing circlesof warmth and intimacy into which one of the other performers walks. For instance, the girl, downstage center,curves her arm out in front of her, and one of the other women moves into herembrace, leaning her back into the girl’s chest and circling her arm around herwaist so that the girl can lay her chin on the other woman’s shoulder.

In anotherlight but poignant dance moment, when the girl listens to the guy’s music on apair of large headphones, the two other young women in the cast (both of whomplay the violin) mirror her as she moves about the stage, their handsoutstretched into the air with the exhilaration of listening to sounds you love.

Once isa charming production, currently selling out at NYTW and poised to move to Broadwayin February. The show’s investorspremiered the production at Diana Paulus’s American Repertory Theatre in Cambridgebefore the move to NYTW; they apparently have always planned on a Broadway run.

When the showmoves to the Bernard Jacobs Theatre, I only hope it finds a way to retain theintimacy of its appeal for a larger audience. It would be a shame to sacrifice the pub-like atmosphere of the theatre,and the quiet simplicity of the acting and the singing, or to make the show whollybigger for a Broadway crowd.

The appeal ofOnce comes from the appropriate scale of its ambitions—to tell a story through lovely ballads,sung from broken, yearning young hearts.

The FeministSpectator

Once,New York Theatre Workshop, December 16, 2011.

Queen of the Mist

2011-12-18T12:34:00.000-08:00

Mary Testa and the ensemble in Queen of the Mist

Queen of the Mist is a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa (Marie Christine, The Wild Party), whichthe Transport Group produced at the Judson Gym in the West Village lastmonth. Starring the fiercely charismaticMary Testa, the musical tells the story of Anna “Annie” Edson Taylor (1838 – 1921), the first person to go over Niagara Falls ina barrel and survive—and on her 63^rd birthday (in 1901), at that.

The musicalis significant for placing a middle-aged woman squarely at the center of itsnarrative. In fact, only one otherperformer has a stable character part—Andrew Samonsky as Annie’s drunken,rough-hewn, opportunistic manager, Frank Russell. The rest of the cast is a quintet of terrificactor/singers who cycle through a number of subsidiary roles, all written tosupport the journey of the central character.

Testa morethan meets the challenges of a role that requires her to be a stalwart,pragmatic single woman in an age when women were much more often domesticatedin heterosexual nuclear families. Annieis a dreamer, a woman who insists, in one of the show’s best songs, “I havegreatness in me.” How often do we see musicalsabout older, single women determined to actualize their dreams?

The show’sstructure, as well as its story, makes it unique. This is not a typical “opposites attract,”heterosexual love story that resolves the relationships and the musical world’smetaphorical social divisions by the performance’s end. Instead, Queenof the Mist keeps Annie alone throughout, and her relationship with Russellone of affection and grudging love, but not romance. This makes Annie a remarkably originalcharacter even by present-day standards, let alone for an actual historicalwoman who came of age in the 19^th century.

Before heridea to ride over the falls coalesces, Annie tries and fails to make economic endsmeet through various schemes. Queen of the Mist’s book cleverly introducesus to her through long monologues of cunning and manipulation meant to distracther landlords and buy her time to pay her rent. In one scene after another, she’s evicted from her lodgings.

Annie tellsstories about once having been married, though she never was. She lies about her age, moving herself nicely(over the course of a scene or a song or two) from 47, through her 50s, to 63,her actual age when she did what she called her “deed.”

Her sister, Jane, who lived with her husband and children in Auburn, NewYork, provides Annie’s gender foil. Ensemble-memberTheresa McCarthy is wonderful as the pinched, submissive woman, who was happyto be a mother and wife, with no ambitions but to make her home. Annie wanted much more than that. Her outsized expectations chafed at herbrother-in-law, who insisted Annie leave his house on the one occasion Janerescued her sister from indigence.

Annie’s single-mindedpassion to distinguish herself and to make “the green” (as she calls money)keeps her from intimacy with her family or her few friends. She carefully planned out her ride down thefalls, ordering a specially constructed, scientifically designed barrel andattending to the details of the stunt’s public relations as much as to therudimentary technology that she hoped would save her life.

Annie Edson and her specially designed barrel

Anniepersuades Russell to be her manager so that he can carry out her plan for howher stunt will appear to the public. Russell is an alcoholic accustomed to exploiting his clients, but he’sfascinated by Annie’s work ethic. Hissurprising affection for this unusual woman is quite moving in Samonsky's subtle rendition. He can’t emulate her strict morality; in fact,he steals her barrel after her successful trip down the falls, and employs animpersonator to play Annie in a seedy burlesque about her deed.

The raw spaceof the Judson Gym was designed for Queenof the Mist to evoke the banks of the river that runs into the rushingwaters of Niagara Falls. The divided audiencesat on risers facing each other across the narrow playing space, with twosmaller playing spaces at either end. The intimacy of the stage meant that Testa could easily project Annie’smajesty into the audience.

Testainhabited fully a role that seems to have been written for her. Her carriage perfectly erect, her hands quietat her sides, she used her face and her eyes and her large eloquent voice tocommand the stage, communicating the power and determination of a woman who hadto live by her wits in an age when women had few opportunities for agency.

Queen of the Mist underlines how unseemly it was for women toseek public attention at the turn of the 20^th century. Nevertheless, Annie did go down in history asthe first person to survive the plunge down Niagara Falls.

But after sheaccomplishes her dream, Annie becomes strangely distanced from herself and heradoring but finally impatient public. Queen of the Mist’s second act quietsher down a bit and the show loses some of its focus and verve.

A quieter Annie after her "deed" is done

It’s notquite clear whether Annie is supposed to be disappointed about the reception toher stunt and how quickly she passes from the public eye, or if something elsehas suddenly drawn the wind from her considerable sails. She also begins to lose her eyesight. LaChiusa seems uncertain whether this is meantto be metaphorical or simply factual.

Finally,then, despite its considerable charms, Queenof the Mist seems a bit unsure what it’s about. Is it a FloydCollins-style indictment of the press and the way that it did or didn’t makeheroes of people? The press badgersAnnie for years to share the specifics of what she felt in that barrel as shemoved down the river toward the falls. But Annie believes the fact that she did the deed should have beenenough. In the show’s 11^th hourrevelation scene, after much prompting and suspense, Annie finally confesseswhat she felt during her ride down the falls. She bares her heart as she describes herterror and her love for all those she feared she might never see again.

But Queen of the Mist doesn’t explain whyshe was reluctant to share these details all along, and what her hesitancymeans for the story’s larger implications. Does the show mean to suggest that Annie should have been moreemotionally available in her life? Thata kind of emotional hubris was her downfall?

Or does theshow respect Annie for refusing to pander to sensationalism by describing heremotions and the terrifying sensation of plummeting over the falls, in thedark, with pounding water pummeling the thin wooden membrane between your bodyand your death?

Hard tosay. In a talk-back after theperformance we saw, Testa and director Jack Cummings III said that Annie wantedto “own” her story, and felt that the factof her deed was enough. We weren’t quite sure, however, that the show itself madethat clear.

Nonetheless, Queen of the Mist has wonderfulpotential and a terrific cast who spoke eloquently about the project. Here’s hoping Annie Edson Taylor gets anotherchance at fame.

The FeministSpectator

Queen of the Mist, Judson Gym, December 1, 2011.

More on Hung . . .

2011-12-07T10:15:00.001-08:00

Jane Adams and Thomas Jane as Tanya and Ray on Hung

After I posted on Hung, I watched a few more episodes, catching up with a recentstory-line (Episode 27, “What’s Going on Downstairs or Don’t Eat Prince Eric“)about Ray’s encounters with Kyla (Jamie Clayton), the transgender client Lenoreintroduces to his services without telling Ray that Kyla, who presents as awoman, is “actually” a man.

The debate about Kyla is set in the context ofRay’s apparent aversion to having sex with men, which Tanya’s new worker, thehappily omi-sexual Jason, is willing to do. When Charlie, Tanya's erstwhile lover and fellow pimp, suggests that joining forces with Jasonand his wife, Sandy, will allow Tanya and Ray to expand their services, Raygrudgingly agrees to bring the much younger man on board.

Later in the episode, the revelation that Kyla is transgenderedturns the tables on Ray and forces him to examine his narrow-mindedness.

The story-line presents a rather lame, liberalexcursion into transgendered experience. Ray’s dismay when he learns that Kyla is trans seems calculated toaddress mainstream viewers’ presumed discomfort.

But when Ray accompanies Kyla to her high schoolreunion—and paid handsomely, even though he insists that sex is out of thequestion—he sees his date through her former classmates’ eyes and realizes his bigotry.

At the affair, Kyla aims to pass as a woman, andsuccessfully mystifies former friends who have no idea who she is. Then, in a double reveal, just as a tablefull of men recognizes Ray as a local if faded basketball hero, they alsorecognize Kyla as Dan, an old classmate they remember with derision andrighteous ridicule for his new gender performance.

Kyla is humiliated and plans to flee, but Raycomes to her rescue, chivalrously suggesting that they dance as the othersleer. Kyla is appeased andcomforted. Ray’s voiceover suggests thathe’s become too old not to let himself and others be what they are, whatever thatmay be, securing the liberal message of tolerance for the episode’s end.

Obviously, this isn’t the treatment transgenderpeople deserve from a show that otherwise takes a more progressive view ofwomen’s sexuality. Given how much theproducers seem to know about feminism, I’d expect them to present a more complicatedstory about the show’s first trans client. Because the story proceeds from Ray’s perspective, his anxiety abouthomosex determines his reaction to Kyla, and steers the viewers’ response.

At the same time, the episode is one of the firstin the series to underscore that Tanya and Ray are middle-aged. Charlie reminds Ray that however large his dick, it won’t last forever, startlingRay with this foreshadowing of his inevitable loss of potency.

And when Tanya and Ray try to work with Jason andSandy, they’re both chagrined that they can’t follow the younger couple’s popculture references. The show’s attentionto their ages increased my affection for the characters. After all, how often do explicitly middle-agedcharacters talk about generational issues on television?

On the next episode (#28, “I, Sandee or This Sex. Which Is. Not One.”), Jessica (Anne Heche) continues to find herself excited byTanya’s instruction at the Wellness Center. Although her presence there throws Tanya and Ray into fits of anxiety,because they continue to think they can hide Ray’s sexual activities from hisformer wife, Jessica is taken with the theory and the practice of embracing herown sexuality.

She enters Tanya’s office clutching a book,breathlessly trying to say the author’s name, which Tanya explains is “Irigaray.” The book is the famous French feminist’s This Sex Which is Not One. I think this is the first time I’ve seenFrench feminist theory happily referenced on television (let alone used tosuggest how women might sexually empower themselves). Jessica can’t quite follow Irigaray’s ideas,but Tanya is delighted by her enthusiasm and eagerness. The two women bond over the book, hugging oneanother thankfully.

This level of insight into the post-structuralistcritique of sexuality and gender should have allowed the producers to handlethe trans story-line more gracefully. But I continue to revel in Tanya’s feminist sex pedagogy and herintellectual savvy, which more than outweighs her dismal business acumen.

Argue with its lapses, but do watch Hung.

The Feminist Spectator

Godspell

2011-11-30T14:18:00.001-08:00

The ensemble plays in the water in the show's opening

Composer Stephen Schwartz and director John-Michael Tebelak conceived and wrote Godspell as Carnegie-Mellon University students in the early 1970s (almost all the lyrics are taken verbatim from the Gospels).

When it opened Off Broadway at LaMama in 1971, the Viet Nam War still raged; Charles Manson and his followers were being sentenced for the murder of Sharon Tate; Army Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of the My Lai massacres; the New York Times had just begun publishing the Pentagon Papers; President Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs”; Gloria Steinem addressed the women of America for one of her first times; Camden, New Jersey erupted in racial strife; and Walt Disney World opened in Orlando.

In other words, the U.S. was quite a different place, even though some of the intractable social issues roiling the nation then—like racism and sexism—continue to hound us now. Given its historical moment, this simple, sincere, ensemble musical must have seemed to respond to national crises with a subtle, quiet demonstration of faith in the power of community to offer comfort and support.

Meanwhile, American experimental theatre in the 1960s and ‘70s focused on ensemble physical interactions, using transformational acting techniques inspired by Viola Spolin’s theatre games that encouraged the actors to create all the stage images and set pieces with their bodies. Story-telling, direct address to the audience, a lack of psychology, a rejection of realism, and a determination to break the "fourth wall" between performers and spectators provided the aesthetic and political ethos of the day. (Feminist Spectator 2, Stacy Wolf, has an excellent chapter on 1970s musical theatre influenced by Spolin-style theatre games in her book, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical.)

Those theatre experiments (and, for that matter, 1971’s social cataclysms) have long been naturalized and incorporated into American political and theatre history. But here’s Godspell back on Broadway, in its first Broadway revival since it debuted there post-LaMama in 1976.

Because contemporary audiences haven’t seen much unadulterated, old-style transformational theatre on Broadway recently, the actors’ ability to create the environment with their bodies seems strangely new, even if it's embellished now with fancy tricks of stage technology and sophisticated lighting techniques.

The production retains the late-1960s earnestness that marked it originally. But the revival gilds the show with wry, sarcastic patter and references to current events that seem at odds with the eager industriousness of the basic show, which hasn’t been significantly changed.

Godspell’s book remains structured around the parables Jesus tells his disciplines, who act them out with wit and sincerity, learning how to treat one another respectfully as they go. Played by the perky, blond, and glowing Hunter Parrish, Jesus is a beautiful and beatific white guy whose halo can practically be seen floating around his head.

By custom, John the Baptist/Judas Iscariot is played by a black man (here the terrific, specific, and sad Wallace Smith). This production conforms to a choice that maintains the typical dyad of white=good and black=bad/betrayer. In a production that tries so hard to update itself, with references to everything from the death of Steve Jobs and to Occupy Wall Street, it seems odd that director Daniel Goldstein and choreographer Christopher Gattelli would hang on to that tired racial binary.

Hunter Parrish (back) as Jesus and Wallace Smith as John/Judas.

Then again, other aspects of the production do seem refreshingly new, including a resolutely multiracial ensemble cast. Uzo Aduba, one of the show's two African American female performers, even performs with a healthy dollop of masculinity, striking poses that show off her sculpted biceps, and bringing to “By My Side,” her signature song, a lovely sense of strength and compassion. Aduba was a pleasure to watch.

Likewise, the other four women in the 10-person cast performed their bits with equal vim, vigor, and charisma. Godspell would fall absolutely flat without performers who can sell the show’s good-humored, gentle fun and romantic singing.

All the characters remain types: The slightly blowsy Latina woman (Lindsay Mendez) who's warm and earthy; the plus-size African American woman who measures her pulse rate after a particularly energetic number on little trampolines buried in the stage floor (Celisse Henderson); the rather slight white woman who nonetheless does a powerful “Turn Back O Man” (Morgan James); and the small, lithe Asian American woman (Anna Maria Perez de Tagle) who's sweet and charming.

Celisse Henderson

The men, too, are cut from familiar cloth. Telly Leung is terrific as the piano-playing Asian American male joker; Nick Blaemire is an intelligent, sweet presence as the white, Jewish-looking guy; and George Salazar fits in nicely as the burly, huggable bear of a Latino man. They’re all still physical and to a certain extent racial stereotypes, and as characters, they’re nothing but ciphers. But the ensemble works their performances to be appealing and very easy to watch.

This version of Godspell combines old, participatory 1960s-style experimental theatre tricks with the more recent trend to Blue Man Group-style theatrics and the participation ethos of reality TV. Audience members sitting close to the stage-in-the-round are hauled up to play characters (one man played Lazarus in one of the parables), or to play Pictionary (first published as a game in 1985), or to play Charades, in little vignettes that do little more than make other spectators wonder if they’ll be chosen to go up next.

The spectators who took the stage were all good-natured (and the Charade-player, at the matinee I saw, was remarkably talented). The cast, to the production’s credit, wasn’t bent on humiliating them. In fact, the actors basically whispered in each performing spectator’s ear, apparently telling them exactly what to do. Far from making anyone uncomfortable or embarrassed, the whole audience seemed buoyed by these invitations.

At another moment, spectators sitting on pillows right near the stage floor were instructed to hold up their decorated cushions for all to see. Those on one side of the house boasted images of heaven, those on the other, images of hell. Everyone seemed to think this was quite fun.

I admit I found it all a bit twee. But then, I was engrossed in my own reveries, as each song recalled for me some moment in my youth when I first heard and learned the music to Godspell. Our high school chorus (Peabody High, Pittsburgh, Class of ’75) performed a concert version of the score, in which, if I recall, I played the guitar and sang “By My Side” in a duet with another student. And I remember that an African American classmate who did “Turn Back O Man” got the vamping just right.

My own sentimentality about forty-year old memories preoccupied me throughout Godspell. But then again, I never found the musical’s book to be its most compelling aspect.

In fact, when I did find myself listening to Jesus and his parables at the Broadway revival, I was a bit concerned. Now that religion has become such a controversial touchstone in American politics, it’s hard to listen to a book and lyrics about Jesus and God and not think about evangelical Christianity and how hegemonic it’s become since the show debuted in 1971. Even though Godspell’s Jesus preaches tolerance, turning the other cheek, and loving one another, and although the ensemble warmly performs those friendly values, the show is still very much about the Judeo-Christian god in a way that made me uncomfortable.

Some of the theatre effects might have resonated more religiously than perhaps the producers intended. At the end, for example, a horizontal rod is lowered from the flies, onto which Hunter Parrish is lashed at the wrists. He crosses his ankles and tilts back his head in the iconic Jesus-on-the-crucifix pose. The rod rotates, so that the audience-in-the round can see this representation of his sacrificial pain.

At the finale , the cast releases him from the cross, lifting Parrish’s limp body in their arms and carrying him up the aisles, into the theatre lobby, which beckons with bright, heavenly light as they climb the theatre stairs. The day I saw Godspell, a few spectators along the way stood up in respect as the cast passed with their burden, in what seemed to me a cringe-worthy confusion of theatre and reality.

Perhaps no one ever really cared about Godspell’s religiosity, especially not when the music was so good and the stories were already rather bland. Godspell is carried by its songs, by its "poor theatre" theatricality, and by the stage presence of the collectively committed cast. In the original production, the show was also sold by Susan Tsu’s clown-like, playful costumes, which have set the show’s tone ever since.

The revival's ensemble and their colorful costumes.

But I do wonder what the producers were thinking when they decided to revive the show for Broadway now, when the extreme Right is forcing religion on this country as if it’s the only path to political, let alone spiritual, salvation.

I still love Godspell’s music, and the nice moments of fellow-feeling it inspires among its cast and its audiences. When Jesus hugs each of his disciplines good-bye towards the end, Parrish and the others communicate a moving measure of love and regret. The whole cast seems bonded, whether they’re performing playfully or sorrowfully.

The production uses stage technology and the tricks of theatricality to evoke its moments beautifully. At the show’s beginning, the stage floor opens onto channels of water, into which the actors jump and bathe in a proto-baptismal moment. A neat visual trick allows Jesus to appear to be walking on water, which gets an appropriate laugh.

At the end, the cast reopens those channels and, in unison, pours a powder into the water that makes it foam and steam, as though they’re sitting by the rushing rapids of a much larger river. These simple choices, of course, cost a lot of money, and are much fancier than the sawhorses and wood planks that were used to evoke locations and scenes in the original production. But still, the revival’s stagecraft produced visually and emotionally resonant images.

Feminist Spectator 2 tells me that Godspell’s score sounded like it was re-orchestrated, and that more electric music was added for this revival. Although my less formally schooled ears couldn’t quite pick up what was different, I missed the more acoustic guitar riffs.

The six-person band was spread out on small individual platforms around the house, while the conductor sat on the stage at a piano that became part of the action. Because the band was, of course, amplified, I was at times confused about where the music was coming from; it took me a moment to pick out all the musicians at their various stages (or stations? of the cross?) in the house.

I enjoyed my afternoon at Godspell, which Stacy and I saw with two of our 12-year-old nieces and with my sisters- and brother-in-law and my mother-in-law. We had fun. All of the adults indulged their many memories of earlier productions as spectators and performers. And the girls, who didn't know the show, said it was “good,” noncommittally, though they were happy to wait for cast autographs afterwards.

One of our nieces did notice that the actors were close to the audience and actually looked at us, unlike, in her example, Wicked, in which the “actors were so far away and there is a dividing line between the show and the audience.” Seems that audience participation, direct address, and theatre-in-the-round do make an impression . . .

But what does Godspell mean, now? That we should live by Jesus’s teachings? That we should love one another the way he preached? That we should be a rainbow of difference and create community among us? What kind of difference or community does this revival have in mind, exactly? I left the theatre not at all sure what the production wanted us to do, besides humming the wonderful songs, thinking about the performances, and watching the actors come out to sign programs.

I have a feeling Godspell meant a bit more than that in 1971, at LaMama, and even in 1976, when it debuted on Broadway.

I wish it meant more now.

The Feminist Spectator

Godspell, Circle in the Square Theatre, Sunday matinee, November 14, 2011.

Homeland

2011-11-27T01:00:00.000-08:00

Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison

Showtime’s Homelanddebuted on the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. The series stars Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison,a CIA operative who’s learned that an American soldier in the Middle East hasbeen “turned” and now works for an Al Qaeda cell. When Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (DamianLewis) is found after eight years in captivity and returns to a hero’s welcome,Carrie is certain he’s the double agent.

Since she can’t persuade her dubious CIA superiorsto follow her instincts, Carrie goes rogue, setting up an illegal surveillanceon Brody’s house and then engineering a personal relationship with him thatlets her follow her own course.

The series plays the country’s paranoia for all it’sworth, constantly turning the plot to keep viewers and characters offguard. The performers hold theircharacters’ secrets close; they’re as difficult for us to read as they are forone another to truly understand, even though viewers are given key bits ofinformation early.

For instance, Carrie’s surveillance cameras can’tpick up the inside of Brody’s garage, where we know well before Carrie that heretreats regularly for Muslim prayers. Hearing his chanting and seeing him perform the rituals seems chilling,but it later appears that the show’s producers have played on mainstreamviewers’ stereotypes about Islam to enhance our sense of foreboding.

In a later episode, Brody explains to Carrie thathe adopted Islam because he needed religion—any religion—to survive the ordealof his captivity. Because Lewis playsBrody so convincingly, it’s difficult not to be persuaded and even moved by hisexplanation. But the most recent episode’splot twist once again upends our understandings, playing both with and againstviewers’ presumptions.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible for a series aboutterrorism not to trade on knee-jerk expectations of which characters will begood and which bad. The Arabic-accented,Middle Eastern-appearing men are instantly marked as villains. The only thing that makes Brody trulyinteresting is that he’s a red-haired, archetypally American soldier who might,in fact, be working for the enemy.

Damian Lewis as Brody, after he's rescued

but before he's returned to his all-American hero image

And in a subplot that hasn’t yet been consistentlydeveloped, a young Middle Eastern professor and his blonde American wife havemoved into a neighborhood that puts them within shooting range of a U.S. militarylanding strip. The CIA believes the manmight be Brody’s Al Qaeda contact, but it turns out that it’s his wife, Aileen (playedby the always wonderful Marin Ireland), who is the mysterious operation’sarchitect. Her back-story gives herample reasons to love the Middle East and to despise the United States, but hercentrality to the series’ plot has so far been tenuous.

Homeland’s producers, then, try to keep twistingthe plot so that the binary of American/good, Middle Eastern/bad won’tmaintain. But its visual scenario tellsa different story. Middle Eastern male characters are constantlybeaten, attacked, or killed by white military or intelligence officers. The guard who confined Brody for all thoseyears, whom Brody beats when he asks to visit the captured man in prison, subsequentlyslits his wrists with a razor blade somehow smuggled in to him. Aileen’s husband is killed when CIA operativescatch up to him and Aileen and blast automatic rifle fire through the walls oftheir motel room. (She escapes.)

Even the henchman of Abu Nazir—the archenemy whoCarrie suspects is the mastermind behind a new plot to attack America—is nearlystrangled when Brody breaks into his house to confront him about his presumeddead comrade, Tom Walker. Homeland invites viewers to watch with akind of vengeful pleasure as these brown men endure violence meted out byrighteous white men. Although the serieswants to disrupt our assumptions, its images nonetheless secure conventional ideologyabout the Middle East as the dangerous, obvious locus of terrorist threats.

Danes plays Carrie, the smart, difficult, unrulyoperative who receives the intelligence that a soldier has been turned andrests her suspicions on Brody. Danesdoes a wonderful job communicating the obsessions of someone high up in the CIA’sranks who takes it as her personal responsibility not to let 9/11 happen again. In fact, in Danes’ voiceover on the show’scredits, Carrie insists that she should have caught the clues, that she shouldhave seen the 9/11 attacks coming and been able to prevent them. The weight of personal guilt for a national tragedyfuels Carrie’s passion and her mania.

Homelandsuggests that only enormous ego or narcissism could explain one solitary CIA agent’ssingle-minded pursuit of justice and her insistence that 9/11 was in some wayher fault. At the same time, the show proposesthat another terrorist event might in fact be foiled by a single agent.

The show seesaws between these two differentdesires. It appeases our yearning for ahero who can stop speeding bullets with his or her bare hands (like KieferSutherland as Jack Bauer in 24, onwhich some of Homeland’s producerspreviously worked). But it also underlinesthat national security is a complicated priority that takes way more than avillage, let alone any individual.

Homelandmostly resists 24’s fantasy that one man could save usall. In fact, Homeland’s hero is a woman. While the show admires Carrie for her superior intelligence and herwillingness to dedicate her life to her job, it also burdens her with anunnamed but determining psychological problem. Carrie can’t tell the agency about hercondition or she’d be fired from her high-level security clearance position. She pilfers drugs from her impatient, unsympatheticpharmaceutical rep sister to self-medicate and keep herself even.

By explaining Carrie’s obsessions as at leastpartly the result of her illness, Homelandcuts the character off at the knees. We’renever sure if her paranoia is justified or chemical, and none of her reactionscan be trusted because we don’t know what really fuels her obsession.

Her superiors don’t know Carrie’s medical history;they find her difficult because she breaks rules and resists censure. She is a loose cannon in a carefullyregulated world. In fact, Carrie’svigilantism is one of the least believable aspects of an otherwise smart show. Certainly, an agent who bugged the home of areturning war hero without authorization would be summarily fired. And certainly, an agent who initiated asexual relationship with that war hero would be denounced. (But then again, indiscretions like these didn’thamper Jack Bauer, either.)

Instead, Carrie confesses her misdeeds to SaulBerenson (Mandy Patinkin), her father-figure mentor. He scolds her, knits his thick eyebrowstogether in deep disapproval, and then absolves her, hugging her tightly inunderstanding parental embraces that free her to go on drawing outside thelines of agency protocol. Saul, you see,is also emotionally haunted. His obviousthough unnamed Jewishness—inescapable in any character Patinkin plays—emphasizeshis moral ambivalence.

Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson

Like Carrie, Saul’s obsession with his job compromiseshis emotional and domestic life. In fact,his South Asian wife has decided to leave him after 25 years of marriage toreturn to her family in Delhi because he’s emotionally and physicallyinaccessible. Their scenes togetherallow Patinkin to indulge his hang-dog, maudlin side. The producers haven’t quite figured out how tobring more nuances to a character caught between his righteous ambitions andhis sincere love for his wife. Their costlycommitments to their jobs make Saul and Carrie the show’s real soul-mates.

Damian Lewis performs Sergeant Brody as atime-bomb set to detonate, controlled by unknown forces on an unknown schedule. Brody was isolated for eight years beforebeing rescued by an American SWAT team. Lewis clarifies the force of will required to survive captivity, andnever shies from inhabiting Brody’s vulnerabilities. He makes palpable the depth of Brody’s needfor connection while he remained in captivity, after he was released from extendedsolitary confinement and torture.

After sustaining himself by making unimaginable moralchoices, Brody returns to a domestic life that’s moved on without him. Brody finds that his wife, Jessica (MorenaBaccarin), has been sleeping with his best friend, Mike (DiegoKlattenhoff). But after being told thatBrody was presumed dead, how long was she supposed to keep her life on hold?

Likewise, Brody’s friend and fellow captive,Sergeant Tom Walker, whom Brody is lead to believe he killed with his barehands, left behind a wife who’s since remarried. Both couples have kids who barely know theirfathers. One of Homeland’s conversations, then, also concerns the place of biologicalfathers in families that survive without them. The series implicitly asks whether men like Brody have any right to walkback into their patriarchal roles without acknowledging how their domesticspheres have closed around their absences.

The patriarch returns

Baccarin, as Jessica, plays Brody’s conflictedwife with emotional depth and precision. She’s given little to do—wouldn’t a soldier’s wife have to work for aliving when he was presumed dead?—and she mostly reacts to Brody’spresence. But Baccarin communicates thecomplicated feelings of a woman who has to pick up a marriage that wassuspended and presumed ended for eight years. Her struggle to play the dutiful, faithful wife makes Jessica moreinteresting in Baccarin’s performance than she is in the show’s dialogue.

Homeland’slatest twists (Episode 9) stretch the credulity of an already somewhat confusingstory. (I’ve noticed the on-line concernthat the show might go the way of The Killing,last season’s atmospheric new series that finally irritated viewers with itscliff-hangers and unlikely plot turns.) But I’ll keep watching to see how Danes continues to bring depth andcomplexity to one of the more interesting roles for women on series television,and to see how the writers unravel the current host of secrets andcomplications and set us up for more in season two.

The Feminist Spectator

Homeland,Showtime, Sundays, 10 p.m., ET/PT

Hung

2011-11-25T11:38:00.001-08:00

HBO's advertisement for the series

With NurseJackie and The Big C on hiatusfor now, I’ve returned to Hung onHBO, which is enjoying its third season of social observation through thefoibles of a male prostitute and his female pimp. I’ve also been watching Homeland on Showtime, to see how it unravels its post-9/11 tale of paranoidintrigue. My viewing is selective, butit does seem that subscription television offers more nuanced women characters thanmany of those in mainstream films (Bridesmaidsaside). The women in these two series actuallygrow and change over time, taking advantage of the more capacious narrativepotential of episodic TV (see my next post for a discussion of Homeland).

Hungcontinues to follow the unlikely pairing of Tanya Skagle (Jane Adams) and RayDrecker (Thomas Jane), a pimp and her prostitute, who use his impressive physicalprowess to make a common living. AlthoughI missed much of Hung’s secondseason, which is now out on DVD, I’m reminded what fun it is to watch Adam’s haplessbut deeply feminist Tanya make her way through the illegal and sexual thicketsof pimping out her man to middle-class, middle-aged, and (unfortunately) white women (except for current guest star Ana Ortiz).

Tanya has established a Wellness Center for womenwhere she instructs her acolytes in the fine art of reclaiming theirsexuality. Tanya calls herself a “happinessconsultant.” Rehearsing the “our bodies,ourselves” mantras of 1970s feminist self-help, Tanya invites her students to “knowyour vulva,” encouraging them toward embracing the power of their sexualidentities.

Tanya's Wellness Center brochure

Much of the show’s humor comes from its admixtureof feminist sexual activism with capitalist entrepreneurship. After all, Tanya’s goal is to make a livingfor herself and Ray, and she’s the first to admit that she’s often out of herleague. But she’s ambitious enough toseek advice from a middle-aged African American male pimp who also becomes herlover.

Hung’spedigree includes executive producers Alexander Payne (the writer/director of Sideways and the just-released film The Descendants) and Angela Robinson (directoralum of The L Word and of the terrificlesbian spy spoof, D.E.B.S.), whohelp secure its insights into middle-aged men and middle-aged, feminism-informedwomen. Created by Dmitry Lipkin andCollette Burson, the show engages the economic dilemmas of middle-class andmarginalized people desperate to make ends meet and creative enough to brookconvention and taboo.

The show is set in Detroit, although it’sobviously white, suburban Detroit, not the economically devastated, raciallydiverse, struggling inner city. But theworking class history of the area allows its producers to contemplate the shrinkingprofessional horizons of ordinary people who nonetheless boast a sharp analysisabout their right to reap the promised rewards of lauded American enterprise.

Tanya, for example, has an MFA in poetry, and Ray is ahigh school basketball coach. That Tanyais also the businesswoman who takes advantage of Ray’s extraordinarily largepenis lends the show its feminist angle and much of its humor. Her face shiny with sweat and anxiety, herhair floating in frantic frizz around her face, Tanya is a smart if inchoatebundle of determination. In recentepisodes, she and Ray face competition from Lenore (Rebecca Creskoff), Tanya's former would-be business partner, who’sfound her own well-endowed stud, Jason (Stephen Amell), and intends to intrudeon Tanya’s territory.

And Ray is burdened by the role-playingexpectations of Lydia, one of his johns (or would it be janes?), a woman whoinsists on meeting him in unlikely situations in which she plays cop to hisrobber. When it turns out Lydia (Ortiz, lateof Ugly Betty) really is a policeofficer, Tanya and Ray’s business is threatened. In the last episode I watched, the comedy wasacute, but the explanation for Lydia’s outsized desires felt toopsychologically lame for a show that’s best when it’s parodic.

Who cares that Lydia’s police officer husband is abrute who regularly frequents his own stable of prostitutes? Instead of leveling the gendered playingfield by suggesting women can be as physically desirous and emotionallydetached about sex as men, the episode attributed Lydia’s appetites to a bad relationship. And Ray freed himself and Tanya frompotential arrest by offering Lydia an emotionally sustaining freebie.

But most of the time, Hung keeps its balance and doesn’t fall into sentimentality. For example, Ray’s ex-wife, Jessica (AnneHeche), has divorced her second husband. Though she has no apparent work skills, shedesperately needs a job, and finds one working for a pompous, self-importantdoctor with whom she and Ray used to socialize.

When the doctor seduces her, their sex scene showshim moving way too slowly on top of her while crooning lyrics from musicaltheatre. Heche’s pitch-perfect reactionsto her sexual and emotional boredom fill the screen. When the doctor unexpectedly visits her at home to reassure her that their liaison won’t jeopardize her job, Heche’s incredulityregisters how even men who are sexually and romantically inept still maintainmore social and professional power than the women they lord it over.

Likewise, Lenore pressures Jason into working forher and tries to thwart his engagement, which she assumes will be an obstacle. But when she confronts his fiancée, she’s farfrom shocked by her future husband’s sexual adventures. Instead, the young woman bargains with Lenorefor the spoils from his extra-curricular work.

Sex, Hungpoints out, can be a negotiable, even exploitable business relationship insteadof a prize kept on the rarefied pedestal of marriage or romance. This is a plank straight out of feminist sexworkers’ platforms; see, for only one example, the activist ideologies ofCOYOTE, a sex workers’ rights group founded in 1973 by the prostitute Margo St.James.

The small moments that upend stereotypical expectationsabout sex and sexuality make Hung aseries worth watching. It’s full ofsmart and funny social observations about the economic and political, as wellas the emotional, tolls of gendered sexual interactions. The casts’ rich performances and theproducers’ excellent writing keep it consistently engaging.

Although it’s Ray’s anatomy that keeps theirbusiness going, it’s Tanya’s understanding of women’s desires that sells theirproduct. And the women who buy Ray’sservices are somehow always proactive, powerfully in charge of their encounters. Ray is a goodguy in Hung, but he’s objectified inways that limit his masculine privilege to the power of his member. He spends much of the series befuddled andbossed around; happily, though he might be a stud, he’s not a patriarch.

Hung triesto do new things with old gender roles. Takea look.

The Feminist Spectator

Chinglish

2011-11-08T16:14:00.000-08:00

Miscommunication in action in the opening scene . . .

David Henry Hwang has long chronicled thecomplications of Asian and western cultures clashing with mostly deleteriouseffects. His play M. Butterfly, which premiered on Broadway in 1988, famouslynarrated the story of a western diplomat who lived in China and fell in lovewith a communist spy he thought was a woman. With deft comedy and captivating theatricality, Hwang illustrated the Orientalismendemic to the west, as white people persistently project their fantasies ofthe “Other” onto those unlike themselves. The production made a star of B.D. Wong, who played Song Liling andmarked one of the stage highlights of Jon Lithgow’s long and distinguishedcareer.

In his latest play, Chinglish, in a very funny, smart Broadway production directed byLeigh Silverman after a successful run at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre last summer,Hwang once again addresses mismatched cultures from the perspective of a whitebusinessman, this time from Cleveland, who’s taken himself to China to stir upbusiness for his family’s failing signage company. Daniel (Gary Wilmes) hires Peter (StephenPucci), an Englishman who’s lived in China for nearly 20 years, as a local“consultant” to help him translate not just the Chinese language, but also thecomplicated mores of the local culture, on which successful business dealsdepend. But as the Chinese officialswith whom Daniel would do business bring along their own native translator,differences of meaning and failures of communication abound.

With most of the Chinese characters speakingMandarin, the English translation is projected for the theatre audience as supertitlesand most of the humor lodges in our syncopated reading of the translations asthey’re posed against their intended meanings. The very problem Daniel offers to solve—the poorly translated signs innewly built cultural institutions meant to impress western audiences (ahandicapped bathroom sign reads “Deformed Man Toilet”)—hobbles his businessdealings, as the Chinese translator sitting in on his first meeting with localbureaucrats ineptly delivers his proposal.

Peter isn’t much better at greasing the wheels ofbusiness, caught up as he is in the “backstage” dealings that seed capitalistrelationships in the communist state. The Englishman plans to succeed by relying on an exchange of favors thatpromptly backfires, stranding him and his American friend without a dealprospect.

But from behind the scenes comes Xi Yan (JenniferLim), the Chinese second-in-command who sits mostly silent and stern at the initialmeeting, while her bumbling male boss performs the obsequious fawning that’smeant to flatter the American while not providing Daniel any truesatisfaction. When Xi Yan offers to meetwith Daniel over a meal, she dismisses Peter and proceeds to reveal the“backstage” story in halting English that brings its own set of hilariousmisunderstandings.

Jennifer Lim as Xi Yan and Gary Wilmes as Daniel

But unlike her superior, Xi Yan is no fool. She’s a sharp businesswoman who understandsthe complex equation of Chinese business acumen with an ethical system ofchecks and balances that requires compromise to protect private honor. When she and Daniel begin an affair, her sameunsentimental, sophisticated analysis of global power dynamics infuses hertryst. Silverman directs Lim toliterally let down her hair in her bedroom scenes with Daniel, but instead of atypical transformation into a simpering sex kitten (the stereotype thatunderlies the stern business woman or worse, “librarian” figure), Xi Yanretains her agency. She’s afterpleasure, not a relationship, and soundly rejects Daniel’s belief that sexleads to love and then to marriage.

The gender politics of the play are as interestinghere as they were in M. Butterfly,though these many years later, Hwang allows an actual woman to deliver thecritique of American Orientalism. Enjoying their passionate affair, Daniel begins to get carried away withromance, suggesting that he and Xi Yan leave their respective marriages to betogether, as people in love are supposed to do, according to his American fantasies.

But Xi Yan is horrified by this idea,protesting that if he leaves his wife, he’ll threaten her own marriage, whichis built not on some western notion of eternal sentimental love, but on a muchmore pragmatic understanding of partnership and mutual public benefit. In fact, Xi Yan’s business machinations withDaniel increase the political standing of her husband, Xu Geming (Johnny Wu), ajudge who is subsequently promoted to mayor. That Xi Yan can keep squarely separate public politics from privatepleasure makes her the more powerful of the couple. At the end, Daniel can only ruefully go onwith his life and enjoy the successful business contract his relationship withXi Yan enabled.

The play is full of wry and pointed observationsabout gender, as well as nationality and race. Played by Wilmes with hapless magnetism and bemused patience, Daniel isa sweet nebbish of a guy, desperate to succeed in an environment about which heknows virtually nothing. He’smiddle-aged, handsome in a regular sort of way, and not particularly sexy,though the more elegant and sophisticated Xi Yan thinks him compatible. Lim performs Xi Yan with precise comiccontrol, never sacrificing the character’s dignity to get a laugh, and infusingher sexuality with the perfect balance of desire and agency. Hers is a terrific performance of a role thatcould easily sink into cardboard stereotype.

Daniel finds his erotic and corporate quotientsurprisingly elevated when he admits that he worked for Enron; he becomes aminor celebrity in a Chinese context in which crooks like Kenneth Lay and JeffreySkilling are seen as heroes. The Chinesemake grand assumptions about Daniel’s proximity to the company’s powerstructure, which establishes more credibility than he has or probably deserves.

But with such a counter-misunderstanding, Hwangthis time around evens the playing field. In M. Butterfly, theplaywright’s excoriating critique showed up western men’s projections ofotherness and eroticism onto Asian women, seeing them as wounded butterflies inneed of white male protection. That SongLiling turned out to be quite a virile young man instead of a helpless womanonly underlined Hwang’s critique of the west’s insistent feminization ofeastern cultures.

In Chinglish,the cultural misapprehensions are mutual, allowing Hwang to portray aninternational scene in which both countries share responsibility forperpetuating their own miscommunications. At the same time, Hwang clarifies that the fledgling capitalism in Chinaneeds western-style business and vice versa, that their transactions are amatter of mutual survival.

The cast is uniformly terrific. Many play multiple roles, from Partyapparatchiks to local officials. Silverman keeps the tone even and light throughout, allowing the play’shumor to sound without sacrificing Hwang’s more serious underlying intent. The evening moves smoothly—the set(beautifully designed by David Korins) folds into and out of itself intovarious locations, from the lobby of a swanky hotel to one of its rooms, to thebureaucrats’ office and back again, using the actors to help punctuate andenliven the frequent transitions.

Chinglishultimately isn’t as transformational a play as M. Butterfly¸ whose intense theatricality alone made itmemorable. Chinglish remains realist throughout, and banks on the humor of itsmistranslations to strike home its points. But the evening succeeds in making amused spectators think aboutnational and cultural differences and how we traverse them, along with thesocial complications of navigating global capitalism in an increasinglyinterconnected world.

The Feminist Spectator

Chinglish,by David Henry Hwang, directed by Leigh Silverman, Longacre Theatre, October29, 2011.

Cries and Whispers

2011-11-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

Her sisters and her nurse minister to Agnes

It’s been 30+ years since I’ve seen theBergman movie on which Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep Amsterdam production isbased, but in any case, this production’s searing theatricality provides thesame story in a medium so utterly different, reference to the original seemsunnecessary. Charles Isherwood, in his New York Times’ review, called thisproduction “clinical.” I can't imaginewhat he was smoking before he saw it, if he missed the passionate and powerfulemotion of this investigation into death and dying.

Perhaps his blindness to the import of genderin theatre once again mislead him, because the production analyzes in minutedetail the physical and emotional costs of suffering a death, and the ways inwhich, much as women might desire physical and emotional connection, it remainsso impossibly difficult to open ourselves to one another.

With post-modernist scenography by JanVersweyveld, the stage is built as an environment connected by flesh and bloodhuman beings as well as by their live video-feed images. Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) begins the performanceon a hospital bed center stage, with a close-up of her vomit-caked lips and thegreen-yellow spit-up coloring the pillow where she lays projected on a screen aboveher. When she gets up, the rest of Agnes’sbody is stained with feces and other bodily fluids.

Evidence of her body’s loss of control frequentlyrecur in the play, making the performance very much about what feministphilosopher Elizabeth Grosz called the “volatile” female body, one whoseleakages reject boundaries and containment in ways that offend and threaten aconventional patriarchal order. (Nowonder Isherwood couldn’t stomach the piece.)

Agnes is dying, under the ambivalent ministrationsof her two sisters—Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Halina Reign)—and the morecompassionate care of her nurse and the family’s maid, Anna (Karina Smulders). While in Bergman’s film, the relationshipsare detailed through the intimacy of extreme close-up in a film that moves glaciallythrough its record of primary emotions, van Hove makes of his live production amore quotidian record of the intimacies of death.

Because the play moves back and forth throughtime—from Agnes's death mid-way through to an earlier moment in her illness,then back to the post-funeral familial aftermath—the linear story isn’t asimportant as how these characters react, often in wordless scenarios ofinteraction that clarify the complexity of their emotions.

Performed in Dutch, the dialogue proceedsas supertitles projected on two suspended flats above the set. Canvas walls, too, hang over the proceedings, like the art work Agnes createsand refers to throughout. But the projected wordsand the actors' intonations are much less important than the physical pictures van Hove andhis performers create.

While Agnesdescribes her unbearable pain, and reminisces in between bouts of agony abouther parents and their various relationships to her and her sisters, the othersobserve the progress of her dying. Mariaand Karin tend to her fitfully and reluctantly, their hesitations communicatedby the distance they keep from Agnes's soiled bed and from the cautious,unwilling ways they touch their sister. Maria, the more immature and impetuous of the two, brings little toysand children’s books to the bed to entertain Agnes. The dying woman appreciates the distractions,but surprise also registers on her face, that her sister thinks these childishobjects will stand up against the profundity of her pain.

Maria with her books and toys, distracting Agnes, with Anna and Karin

Maria also flirts with the doctor (RoelandFernhout) whose impersonal ministrations to her sister can’t begin to ease herway into death. Maria and the doctorhave had an affair, we learn in the play’s second half, when the two act out amoment in their relationship when he tries to resist her and she throws herselfat him. The scene is notable for how theFernhout morphs halfway through from the doctor into Maria’s husband,Joachim. As the doctor and Maria prepareto have sex, she pushes him onto the long wooden tables that have replaced Agnes’shospital bed at the center of the set. As she rips off his shirt and prepares to undo his pants, he flingshimself up and they wrestle with a new costume, redressing him as violently ashe was undressed the moment before.

Ashe brutally shrugs himself into a sport coat, the doctor’s brusque and violentmanner is replaced by the taciturn, remote affect of Maria’s husband, whoproceeds to sit back down to a meal at the table and eat over his newspaper,barely grunting in response to her entreaties. The transformation is powerful and apt—that the same man could be thevessel for passion and lovelessness demonstrates van Hove’s point about theunpredictability and even the impossibility of real human connection.

But when Joachim leaves the table, heclutches Maria to his chest wordlessly, exiting only to return shortly afterwith his chest covered in blood, holding a knife before him that drips with thetacky cells of his self-immolation. Theimage is shocking and effective. VanHove’s refusal to respect the differences between reality and fantasy make forpowerful theatrical metaphors, in which actors’ bodies, the stage effects(never meant to be convincing, only allegorical), and the performances arepressed into service to communicate physically what can’t be said or expressedotherwise. The actors’ bodies wear theplay’s subtext. That none of the othercharacters comment on Joachim’s gaping wound, for instance, illustrates thechilling consequences of our inability to communicate our deepest, truestemotions.

Likewise, Agnes’s death scene is abeautiful, fierce theatrical metaphor for excruciating pain and a soul’sresistance to leaving its body. Nietvelt, as Agnes, rolls out a stage-wide piece of glossy white paperon which she centers herself. Then sheproceeds to pour blue paint over her head, after which she rolls around on thepaper, body-painting in a corporeal representation of her agony. She moves her arms back and forth as thoughshe’s making a snow angel (an image that returns beautifully at the production’send), and flings herself across the paper until she's covered in vibrant bluefrom head to toe.

Agnes's death scene

Agnes uncovers a large industrial bucketnear the stage of her dying and pours from it a brown fluid that mixes with theblue blood, a searing representation of the body’s failure at death, as fecesand body fluids co-mingle to overflow its borders. Just before she dies, Anna approaches Agnes,lifting the dying woman’s arms to wrap them around her neck. The image of the two sitting together, Agnesexhausted by her death throes, her blue face as elongated and sorrowful as a womanin a Modigliani painting, offers a moving, pieta-like portrait of the final moments ofsomeone who’s railed against death but finally can’t escape its arrival.

In fact, one of the production’s mostmournful reminders is of the loneliness of death. Agnes is surrounded by women who sit vigilwith her, but that moment of pain on the white paper illustrates that death isa territory the dying walk alone. Andalthough her sisters and Anna live on, van Hove suggests that their living,too, is solitary and unobserved. Forexample, when Karin and her husband have a loveless exchange that echoes Maria’swith Joachim, Karin breaks a wine glass and uses one of its shards to cut hervagina, dripping her own blood between her legs and staining her slip. Once again, none of the other charactersnotice, and she continues on with her actions as though the wound is invisible.

InCries and Whispers’ final moments, Agnesspeaks to us from someplace after her death, touring us through her art worklike a guide through what had been heaven before illness made her life hell. The canvas-cubed walls of the set descend tothe stage floor, so that projections of Agnes art work can light up thescreens. Close-ups of body parts wavingon the snow slowly pull out to reveal winter-wear-clad people lying on theground, making the angels that Agnes echoed at her death.

As the camera moves back farther and farther,the group of people makes a singular geometric shape in the snow, all movingdifferent parts of the whole. Agnesnotes wryly that she used to think that she make art to understand life. Now, she understands that art is made to stave off death.

With Cries and Whispers, van Hove does both.

TheFeminist Spectator

Cries and Whispers, directed by Ivovan Hove, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2011 Next Wave Festival, October 28, 2011.

Completeness and Sweet and Sad

2011-10-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

Karl Miller and Aubrey Dollar in Completeness

Seeing thesetwo plays back to back made me think a lot about content and style in realistdramas. Both Itamar Moses’s Completeness and Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad concern relationships, in more or less domesticsettings. Completenessis about young people, just starting out in their lives; Sweet and Sad is about a middle-aged family whose lives have beenrocked in different ways by loss. Bothdramas are structured around story-telling and long monologues to which othercharacters listen carefully; neither are plot-driven or full of action or evenconflict. And yet Sweet and Sad ends by being about so much more than it appears tobe, while Completeness, though in its own way sweet and sad, windsup being about so much less.

The Mosesplay, at Playwrights Horizons, fits nicely into the theatre’s menu ofbeautifully presented, consistently satisfying work by “new” (usually young)playwrights. With simple but elegantproductions, lovely, subtle direction, and top-notch acting, I’m rarelydisappointed by what I see at Playwrights. But Completeness made me think a bit harder about what exactlythis bill of fare delivers.

Thefour-hander concerns graduate students in computer science and molecularbiology making their way into new thought in their respective fields. Elliot (the baggy-eyed, appealing KarlMiller) is working hard on an algorithm that will break a long-vexed problem ofpredictive data management in computer science, but in his spare time, he’sbreaking up with his girlfriend, a colleague in his department, to pursue a newattraction to Molly (Aubrey Dollar), a graduate student working on yeastcultures and cell division in molecular biology. Elliot and Molly’s various former partnersand co-workers move in and out of their lives, as the couple dance around oneanother, too entangled in their own emotional histories to really make acommitment.

Thanks toMiller and Dollar (lovely and intelligent as Molly) and to director PamMacKinnon’s unobtrusive but sensitive guidance, Completenessmakes a compelling case for its characters. They speak often about their work, in long paragraphs that delve intosome detail about their various hypotheses and experiments. That these speeches remain interesting,despite the often technical jargon of their fields, is a credit to Miller andDollar, who makes us see their ideas as living, breathing problems that they’reeager to address and solve. The actorsmake Elliot and Molly dreamy with ambition, so that their overlappinginvestigations and their collaboration in science and math become as sexy andpoetic as their romantic moments. Infact, their intellectual exchanges sometimes make for more compellingconversation, since Moses delivers through metaphor the emotional challengesthey face as a couple. Molly insists sheneeds to do more “screens” to prove her ideas; Elliot keeps hitting wallsbecause the choices his algorithm addresses increase exponentially with eachnew addition.

That they’rereally talking about their emotional lives is both elegant writing and somehowa slightly disappointing bait and switch. I enjoy listening to smart characters on stage (especially women, whoare still too rarely given the dignity of real work to address as part of theiraction). Elliot and Molly think together in ways that become as attractive tospectators as it does to them. But oncetheir relationship starts, after a fast sexual encounter that they mutuallymanipulate into happening, Completeness too quicklydevolves into a play that’s about the callow emotions of twenty-somethings,instead of about the excitement of the science at which they work.

Mosescarefully structures their revelations. After they grudgingly admit that their relationship might have a future,both Elliot and Molly feel compelled to confess their flaws. Elliot tends to run from his feelings, oncethe initial excitement of the chase has ended. His speech about wanting to preserve the wonder and mystery of thatfirst flush of love for his new object of affection is beautifully crafted andclear. Likewise, Molly meets hisacknowledgement with one of her own, relating obliquely that she broke anotherman’s heart and in the process, broke her own, in a failed partnership thatcontinues to haunt her. She bemoans herinability to be a “clean slate.”

But whyshould this be Molly’s hubris and not everyone’s? Who is a clean slate, once they’ve reachedtheir mid-twenties? Those two lynchpinspeeches, then, provide an unfortunately misguided emotional turning point forElliot and Molly. While Completeness is notable for the emotional openness andeloquence of its male as well as its female characters, these speeches retreatback into typical gendered norms: Elliotprefers the chase and Molly has baggage. Even the play’s rather oblique ending, which offers Elliot the chance toact against masculine type, remains tentative, leaving us with the sense thatwhile there’s hope, neither character has enough real gumption to break theiralready established emotional patterns.

So what’s itall about, then? Molly says their wholegeneration is damaged, unable to complete the pass of real relationships. The stakes seem too high, yet at the sametime, in the play’s story, they’re also too amorphous. What do either Elliot or Molly really have tolose? They’re both well situated, withfunding for their research, despite Molly’s earlier sexual relationship withher advisor, who proceeds to try to blackmail her professionally. (Happily, Moses lets Molly stand up to thiscreep; she’s clearly a woman with professional courage and clarity.)

These aren’tcharacters in danger. Elliot works withan undergraduate woman (Meredith Forlenza, excellent and distinct in each ofher three subsidiary roles) who’d be happy to start a relationship with him,and Molly’s fellow grad student, Franklin (Brian Avers, also energetic andamusing in his multiple roles), doesn’t hesitate to kiss her as they worktogether, after offering what he admits is too much information about his ownemotional traumas. (Moses’s men aresupposed to be as vulnerable as his women.) Elliot and Molly will be fine; the play shows us that at everyturn. Why, then, should we care aboutwhether or not they choose to be fine together?

Sweet and Sad, on the other hand, concerns a middle-agedfamily of brothers and sisters, their partners, and an elderly uncle trying tolive within their long-standing emotional entanglements against the backdrop ofthe national cataclysm that was 9/11. Nelson is specific about when and where the family's conversationsunfold; the program notes that the play “takes place between approximately 2pmand 4pm on the afternoon of Sunday, September 11, 2011” in the “dining room inBarbara and Marian Apple’s house on Center Street” in Rhinebeck, New York. Through this specificity comes a groundedsense of place and time, in which the characters spin out not just theirfamilial and emotional ties, but their private sense of how their own traumasand histories fit into the memory and present of the more public trauma of9/11.

Jay O. Sanders, John DeVries, and Laila Robins in Sweet and Sad

Nelsondirected his own script for this Public Theatre PublicLab production, a sequelto That Hopey Changey Thing, whichopened on election night, November 2, 2010. I didn't see the first installment in what Nelson promises is a series,which I regret, having found Sweet andSad a lovely, important example of how theatre can participate in publicdialogue. Although it might be calledintense realism, conducted as it is through quotidian conversations, in oneset, against the backdrop of a family meal in preparation for an evening out, Sweet and Sad speaks so resonantly intoa notable public moment (the 10^th anniversary of 9/11) that it seemsalmost Brechtian in its appeal to a thinking spectator caught in the inevitablechanges wrought by history.

Nelsonaddresses private and public loss. Marian (Laila Robins) has moved back into the family home with hersister, Barbara (Maryann Plunkett). Bothare public school teachers. But Marian'sdaughter has recently committed suicide, for reasons Nelson doesn’tclarify. The motivation for the youngwoman’s death isn’t as important as the effects of her loss on Barbara and therest of the family. Barbara tries tosoldier on in her life, but her spirit is broken. When she disappears from the family diningtable, overcome by grief, her family whispers about how they might helpher. Her mourning is a problem, in a Brechtianlehrstuck sort of way—how might we address socially what seems only private?

Analogous toBarbara's mourning is the national grief recalled by the 10th anniversary of9/11. Around these two parallel griefs,the family talks about their lives and their choices. Richard (the compassionate, articulate Jay O.Sanders, whose acting makes subtle nuances in a character who could be boorishand unlikable) is a wealthy Manhattan lawyer; his third sister, Jane (J.Smith-Cameron, lovely in the role of a woman who’s arch and competitive butcontinues to grapple with her own personal and public sensitivities), is ajournalist who’s seeing an actor, reviving a long-standing but fallowrelationship after she divorces her husband.

The Applefamily, that is, are adults—successful (for the most part), white, middle-classadults, which makes them representative of only a small part of New Yorksociety. But nonetheless, Nelson makesof their conversation a smart and compelling meditation on how we lead ourlives and how we make our choices, the consequences of personal gestures in thecontext of a public still roiled by a sense of its own vulnerability andconnection to world forces much, much larger than the very tiny units of familyand work in which our lives play out.

Completeness, by ItamarMoses, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Playwrights Horizons, September 24,2011. Closed.

Sweet and Sad, written and directed by Richard Nelson,PublicLab, September 24, 2011. Closed.

Spiderman and Sister Act

2011-10-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

Dangling in front of a balcony at the Foxwoods Theatre

After all the press brouhaha about Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark for thesemany years, and the vituperative reviews from most of the mainstream critics, Iwas surprised to find the show so benign when I finally saw it. Thanks to Jenny Slattery, who’s a stalwartassistant stage manager on Spiderman,I wrangled house seats and a backstage tour on which Jenny generously took meand FS2 after a recent Sunday matinee. We had seats on the aisle, which meant that Spidy landed by us on one ofhis several second act flying feats, and sat close enough to be able to watch theactors work while still taking in the scenery, which is perhaps the show’s mostbreathtaking accomplishment.

But watching Spidermanand, a few weeks later, a Wednesday matinee of the musical adaptation Sister Act prompted me to think again aboutthe differences between film and theatre, since both shows adapt their storiesfrom cinematic (and, of course, for Spiderman,comic book) source material. Spiderman goes to great lengths andhistoric expense to recreate the CGI magic of the movies for a theatreaudience. But inevitably, all the cashspent on all those effects only manages to provide a few moments of theatricalexhilaration.

The flying sequences offer a joyous kind of fun,especially in the climactic battle between Spiderman and the Green Goblin, whofly above and beneath and around one another in a fast, dizzying, carefully choreographedscene of high-flying almost-interaction. Jenny told us that in addition to the physical prowess required to pulloff the moments, the performer playing the flying Spiderman had to demonstratethat he’s having fun in the air. And itshows. In an otherwise earthbound production, the flying scenes literally soar, and meet the promiseof all the advanced hype.

What exactly is it that’s so much fun about thosescenes? Without green-screen technologyto erase the fly lines, what we’re watching is a too human man hooked to a complicatedharness. The apparatus propels him above the audience and lets him land up on the balconyand then fly back to the stage, where he perches on platforms that lead him offinto the wings. Hiding the fly lines isimpossible; in fact, it’s what the audience has come to see.

We’re not enticed by the magic of pretending—althoughin a way, I suppose we are. We’re moreattracted, I think, to the notion that no matter how fleshy our bodies,imagination and stage technology can still make them seem to fly. Perhaps we’re thereto practice the sometimes archaic suspension of disbelief that movies have madetoo easy for us. Perhaps we’re there to seesomething as old-fashioned as an actor flying through an actual theatre toremind ourselves that live performance still relies on a delightfully quotidian sleight ofhand to make its claims on our joy.

The rest of Spiderman,however, is mired in an unimaginative, predictable story about power gone awryand the young innocent whose ethics are sullied in his quest to rightwrongs. Since the audience is givenlittle to think about—the dialogue is wooden and the songs, asreported, unmemorable—we just watch instead. The inventive costumes and the cinematically styled set provide enougheye candy to entertain for the show’s short while.

But until those flyingsequences, underneath all that comic book armature, it’s difficult forthe actors to engage enough to project any charisma or spark. Even the inventive, compelling masks designedby Julie Taymor (the show’s original director) don’t integrate into the storywell enough to give their wearers anything to act.

That’s what makes the flying so much fun. The actor might be tethered to those wires,but he looks so free, it’s impossible not to be breathless with pleasure whilewe watch him. The flying sequences teaseout the limits of theatre while putting them to the test. After all, we’re not watching Spiderman chasethe Green Goblin against a Gotham night sky, but against the backdrop of the FoxwoodsTheatre in Manhattan. And however it’s beenretrofitted to seat as many people as possible, and to provide the scaffolding for those acrobatics, it’s still a mundane Broadway theatre.

As we turned our heads to watch Spiderman fly, wecould also see our fellow spectators registering their delight. In our 360 degree views, what we mostly sawwas one another, faces lit with expectation and pleasure and a little frissonof fear, half expecting the stunts to stop in mid-stream or mid-air, as they’vebeen reported to do so frequently on Spiderman. At our matinee, the flying worked without aproblem.

But the comparison of those few moments with therest of the show seemed almost sad, as though compared to all that soaringabout in the house, what actually happened on stage could only seem clunky andeven faker than it already admits to being. In such a context, even the wig-tape hugging the hair and microphones tothe actors’ foreheads seemed quaint and kind of melancholic, the modern-daygreasepaint that reminds everyone that the wizard really is just a man, andthat some stories are best told in the form in which we’ve grown up lovingthem.

Likewise, in SisterAct, the only thing flying is the occasional musical note, not because thesongs are inspiring, but because the performances sometimes rise above theirmelodies. The cast of thismovie-cum-musical is terrific, making much ado about nothing, really, except apale, three-dimensional but rickety adaptation of an already dated 1992 WhoopiGoldberg vehicle. In fact, Sister Acttakes great care with its lead, Patina Miller (who won a 2011 Tony Award forher performance), to steer her physically and emotionally away from Goldberg’sdown-to-earth, rather hapless if happily sarcastic impersonation of the nightclubsinger, Deloris Van Cartier.

Miller is everything Goldberg isn’t in the original movie. She’s tall and willowy, and possiblybeautiful, although it’s hard to tell underneath the 1970s-style Afro wigs andthe impossibly long fake eye lashes that made her look vaguely cross-eyed fromwhere I was sitting. This production, likeSpiderman, seems all about thewig-tape, which for those in the orchestra proves a constant and distractingreminder that the 70s were then and the 2010s are now.

All of which begs the question—why adapt this filmto the stage? And why, as the famedtheatre historian Oscar Brockett always asked of any production, why now? And why set it in the 1970s, except, perhapsto lend credence to its barely nascent sense of race rights?

Sister Actadmits to its own anachronisms, with its disco balls and its short skirts andpurple suede lace-up boots and gaudy chunky jewelry. But despite a visual motif that wants to keepthe show locked in a comfortable historical remove, the performances—particularlyby Miller and Victoria Clark as the world-weary Mother Superior (in the film’s drollMaggie Smith role)—bring a pleasant but jarring up-to-the-momentnessto the production. And that knowingnessabout the strange historical simultaneity of the project cuts the productiondown at the knees, as especially Clark seems to be winking at its patentedabsurdity.

The production begins promisingly, with a cast ofmostly African American gangsters and cabaret singers gathering in a localmob-controlled dive bar for Deloris Van Cartier (like the jewelry, as shereminds everyone to whom she’s introduced by wiggling her fingers and herwrist) to sing her audition for her boyfriend/cabaret owner Curtis. But Curtis refuses to hire her, and belittlesher by re-gifting to her one of his wife’s old fur coats. When she storms into the bar to confront him,Deloris inadvertently witnesses Curtis kill someone. She goes to the police, where a sweet ifsweaty young Black cop named Eddie Souther protects her by housing her in anear-by convent in an economically failing church. And so begins the plot that’s been a popularculture staple since time immemorial—the fish out of water who makes the localsswim like she does and enjoy it.

Deloris and friends in the cabaret/disco act--check out the purple boots

In this case, though, there’s something unsettlingabout watching Deloris leave what seemed an African American community to gounderground in a resolutely white nun’s enclave. Although eventually, two of the “choir nuns” are performed by the African American actors who first served as Deloris’s back-up singers, theconvent’s whiteness is stark and Deloris’s racial difference not at all funny.

The audience at our Wednesday matinee was mostlywomen, probably half of them African American. I couldn’t help but wonder what they must be thinking, seeing Delorisbecome the butt of the joke for the white nuns. Because even though their sad, off-tune, uninspired singing and theirinnocence in the ways of the world is supposed to provide fodder for Deloris’sworldly ambitions and know-how, the power of dominance twists the image so thatDeloris’s exceptionalism becomes uncomfortably tokenized and disempowered.

Whoopi Goldberg, in Sister Act and much of her film work, became a master at a kind ofsubtly resistant racial commentary, usurping whatever interpretation might havebeen meant by her casting and using it to her own advantage to call out how herbody and face were singular in the scenes in which she appeared. But although Miller’s voice is powerful, herface is surprisingly immobile on stage, which makes the trademark Goldbergdouble-takes and wry asides, which delivered her resistance, fall flat in Miller’sperformance.

Instead, Clark, as Mother Superior, gets all thebest facial expressions, and uses them well to raise herself slightly above theproceedings at hand. She conveys fatigueat the ways of the world as well as the ways of her church in “Haven’t Got aPrayer.” And she rolls her eyes not justat Deloris and her un-worshipful behavior, but at the absurdity of the wholeshebang. And in the process, she nearlysteals the show.

Deloris of course transforms the choir from abunch of dullards into a glitter-clad, disco-balled, A Chorus Line-inspired bunch of Village People, which brightens theproduction and makes it irresistibly fun. And the speed with which this adaptation moves means that it takesDeloris very little time to improve the nuns’ performance and to transmute theminto a crowd-pleasing, money-raising spectacle.

Choir transformed as the waif from Les Mis looks on as "Mary" in the background

Sister Act’sjokes are predictable but still amusing, as is the nuns’ newly invigoratedsinging. Peppered throughout are amusinggay and Jewish jokes (Yiddish, one of the nuns explains to another, is thelanguage of performers; and the couple trying to buy the church are two gay menwho decide to save the order when they fall in love with the singing). SisterAct is a lot like Shrek (the filmand the production); it works on two levels at once, offering a different setof laughs for the queer and Jewish cognoscenti (and we knew who we were by whowas heard hooting when).

The show’s penultimate number is a female duet to “SisterAct,” sung by Deloris and Mother Superior, which makes it seem slightly queer. Ultimately, they’re the couple who reconciles by the musical’s end, instead ofthe straight opposites whom musicals more typically bring together (as StacyWolf—FS2—argues so persuasively in Changedfor Good: A Feminist History of theBroadway Musical).

Likewise, SisterAct’s representations of masculinity are savvier than the tired plot andretread film story would lead you to expect. As Eddie Souther, Chester Gregory plays the self-effacing, aw-shucks DanielBreaker role (Gregory even looks a bit like Breaker). Souther, who knew Deloris in high school,always broke out into a sweat around her (hence his “Sweaty Eddie”moniker). Gregory gets some laughs from drenchedarm pit sight gags, but his performance is sweet as he both comes to Deloris’srescue and manages to be rather hapless about his own authority.

Even the erstwhile villain, Curtis(Kingsley Leggs), is defanged by Deloris’s proud resistance to hisintimidation. Only Demond Green, as TJ,does a weird, rather retrograde turn as Curtis’s stupid-but-good-hearted nephew. Green plays the character as a Tracy Morganknock-off; given Morgan’s recent homophobic remarks, the performance seems lessbenign than it’s meant to be.

Sister Actaims to be a crowd-pleaser, and that it did. Everyone around us was delighted as they stood for the curtain call. (“I haven’t seen anything this good since Jersey Boys,” one woman told us happily.) But still, like Spiderman, Sister Act onstage can only point to its own lumbering liveness. The triumphal song and dance numbers aregreat fun, but the production is filled with furniture and things that move on and off with the revolve center stage. They only serve to remind the audience of howtime-inefficient and laden with stufftheatre like this can be.

On the other hand, in one of the show’s bestmoments, Eddie, in his number “I Could be That Guy,” imagines himselftransformed from the schleppy police officer he is into an African AmericanJohn Travolta in Saturday Night Fever,replete with white suit, high pointed finger, and cocky canted leg. Walking through a sort of Skid Row, Eddie issurrounded by “bums” who, at the appropriate moment, rip off his police uniformto reveal a version of Tony Manaro’s dancing outfit. And then as the dream ends, the bums rip offthat layer to reveal his old police getup underneath. His transformations happen so deftly, they really do look like magic.

The exhilarating, old-fashioned kind of stagemagic, that is. The kind that’s thebest.

The Feminist Spectator

Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, September 25, 2011. Sister Act, October 12, 2011.

Circumstance

2011-10-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

Sarah Kazemy and Nikohl Boosheri in a fantasy sequence in Maryam Keshavarz's Circumstance

Writer/director Maryam Keshavarz’sbeautiful, disturbing film tells the story of two Iranian high schoolgirlfriends in Teheran whose growing attraction and love for one anotherquickly hits the wall of religious interdiction and oppressive patriarchy. Filmed with a grainy realism, Circumstance is haunted by impending doom, even in its frequent moments of whimsical affection and erotic passionate.

The film’s opening scene sets thetone, as Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) stand among theiryoung peers in a school yard, all wearing identical, modesty-imposing skirtsand jackets and hijabs that barely hide the two women’s beauty. Shireen slips an origami bird into Atafeh’shand, a gesture of fondness weighted with the symbolism of impossible flightand escape that comes to define the girls’ relationship and their lives.

Although Circumstance follows the young women’s sexual and emotionalrelationship in the context of the Iranian theocracy, the film more broadlyaddresses the country’s human rights violations against women. A pervasive sense of surveillance quickly becomesthe film’s visual motif. In that firstschoolyard scene, after the headmistress dismisses the girls, we see Atafeh andShireen hail a taxi to leave the school grounds. Keshavarz shoots the action from above ingrainy black and white, as if through the lens of a security camera.

The image conveys the intrusiveintimacy of being so closely watched. Theseimages appear regularly throughout the story, reminding spectators of theomnipresent eye of the religious authorities whose word holds sway, even as thetwo young women seem blissfully unaware of how their every move is observed andcatalogued.

Ata’s brother, Mehran (Reza SixoSafai), serves as the family’s in-house surveyor. He returns to the family fold at the film’sstart, after an unexplained absence. Mehran was a talented musician who’s given up his gift after recoveringfrom a devastating drug addiction that’s left his father suspicious and hismother forgiving. Mehran replaces hispassion for music and drugs with religious fanaticism, surprising his wealthy,secular family with his new commitment to prayer.

Mehran becomes the vehicle throughwhich Iranian theocracy infiltrates the micro-level of the family unit. His post-addiction paranoia translates intoobsessive spying on his sister and the rest of his family. His eye supplements the state’s, as heinstalls cameras around his family’s home through which he observes their everyinteraction.

He also collaborates with themullahs who become his new compatriots. When he begins to understand the physical and emotional reality of Ataand Shireen’s relationship, he engineers a series of confrontations in whichthe morality police round up and harass the two girls. Mehran comes to Shireen’s rescue in a waythat forces her to depend on his manufactured generosity and allows him tomanipulate her into an unwanted marriage.

While Ata’s family is well-off andinitially protected from the authoritative whims of the local mullahs,Shireen’s parents were professors executed as counter-revolutionaries by thetheocratic regime. The beautiful,doleful young woman lives with her uncle and her grandmother, tenuouslyattached to the relatives who tolerate the economic burden of herpresence. Her grandmother adores her; ascene in which they dance together in the kitchen with a kind of joyous freedomis lovely, and contrasts sharply with those of her uncle trying to palm her offon another man by arranging a marriage before Mehran steps in to offer himself.

When Ata and Shireen are arrestedon a fabricated morality charge, the cruel officials accuse Shireen of being awhore. They belittle her and threaten tohang her, just as the state hanged her parents. Ata is fierce on her friend’s behalf, and saved by the sage generosityof her own father, who bails her out by bribing the unctuous, dangerous mullah. But Shireen knows how limited her options arewithout money or a father to rescue her, and becomes trapped by theimpossibility of truly being free as a woman in a deeply patriarchal,religiously driven social order.

Because Shireen’s lineage alreadyputs her at a political disadvantage, Keshavarz establishes visually how themale-embodied state holds power over her very flesh. When Shireen takes a taxi from a party alone,the driver abuses her sexually, using her for his fetishistic pleasures.

Likewise, Mehran’s patriarchalhold over Shireen and his sister begins to leech away Shireen’s sexual desireand control. Watching her degeneratefrom a powerfully erotic young woman who plays with men but clearly loves Atainto a sexually and emotionally subservient wife is one of the film’s manyheart-breaking narrative arcs.

Keshavarz directs her two, freshleading actors with subtly and respect. Boosheri and Kazemy are lovely together as Ata and Shireen,communicating the stark contrast between what their newly matured bodies wantand what their deeply constrictive public culture allows. They convey their love for one another withsmall gestures that Keshavarz captures with simple delicacy—one girl’s fingercurling around the other’s as they stand in line at school or as they walktogether with the men who comprise their social lives; the quick kiss Shireengives Ata when she breaks a car window to steal a shimmering handbag sheadmires; and especially in the way the girls dance together, alone in Ata’sroom, before Mehran intrudes on their pleasure. Their physical freedom, and the obvious eroticism of their bond as they dancetogether with delight while they watch “American Idol,” is at once moving andwrenching.

Ata and Shireen’s palpable attractionto one another provokes anxiety in the film’s spectators, if not in the othercharacters, about their fates. Butalthough Keshavarz keeps the threat of danger flickering around the film, onlythe scenes with the mullah and Mehran actualize the dire circumstances in whichthe women live. Still, their lives are aseries of close calls, each of which underlines the cost of female resistanceand the gender hypocrisy of Iranian culture.

For example, Ata and Shireenfrequent parties in Teheran’s underground, where young people dance to Westernmusic, drink, do drugs, and experiment with sex in ways Keshavarz depicts as normalfor 21^st century young people. But these rites of passage are consigned to private homes, which Ata andShireen enter by pretending they’re going to sewing circles. Their male friends, on the other hand, canrange freely through Iranian society, without the sartorial or behavioralconstraints that confine the young women.

Keshavarz also complicates the film’sgender politics by making Ata and Shireen’s male intimates rather harmless,suggesting that they are constructed into the gendered power of the state,rather than naturally assuming it. Ata’sostensible boyfriend at first seems threatening. When he tries to have sex with Shireen—whosoundly rejects him—he seems fully in command of his sexual power. But he turns out to be innocuous and young.

He and Ata team up with Shireenand Joey (Keon Mohajeri), a young man who’s gone to school in the U.S. and hasprogressive ideas about ideology and politics. Joey idealistically dreams of dubbing Milk, the American biopic, into Arabic, so that Iranians—hebelieves—will be able to see their own situation in the story of gay liberationin America. He wants his people to beinspired to change what he, speaking the film’s title, points to as theirdubious circumstances.

Some of the film’s lightest momentsshow the four friends trying to speak like Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, or tosimulate the film’s gay sex with the right tone of voice. Joey’s faith that his work will meansomething is touching even though the film clarifies that it’s also naïve andfinally, in the end, fatal.

Circumstance is at its best when Keshavarz more indirectly showsthe oppressions of a culture in which binary gender distinctions are sodetermining. When Ata and Shireen joinAta’s family for a day at the beach, the director stages in the backgroundanother family lounging beside their beach blanket, the mother in full blackdress and hijab while her sons and husband wear revealing swim suits. Ata’s father, Firouz (Soheil Parsa), andMehran also enjoy the privilege to inhabit their bodies publically, leavingtheir own women behind with only a small backward glance before they run intothe waves.

Later, whenAta and Shireen find themselves alone by the water as the men are called toprayer, they take advantage of their exclusion from religious ritual to stripto their underwear and swim together. The actors perfectly perform the sensual thrill of floating in your ownskin along the surface of the water with someone you love.

The action inCircumstance is oblique and subtle,as characters’ allegiances gradually shift and their commitments change. After Shireen marries Mehran, breaking Ata’sheart, she creeps into her friend’s room to confess that she wed her brother onlyso that she could be close to Ata. Theirsudden freedom to be together with the legitimate excuse of beingsisters-in-law releases their erotic charge even more publicly. At a family party, Ata and Shireen sit besideone another on a piano bench flirting so seductively, only the culture’sprofound disregard for women’s sexuality would permit anyone to misrecognizetheir relationship.

Even Ata’smother, Azar (Nasrin Pakkho), is complicit in her refusal to see anything butwhat makes her life livable. She’s gladfor her son’s return and unwilling to acknowledge the authoritarian religiouscurrent he brings into her house. GivenAzar’s lack of power, the film suggests she can do little but use herintentional blindness to help her survive.

Only Ata, inthe end, finds her circumstances untenable. She sees that her liberal father will inevitably have to acquiesce to themullahs to retain his economic, if not political, privilege. She notes with horror as her father begins tojoin Mehran’s religious observances.

Ata understandsher world will constrict even further unless she escapes while she can. Following a dream that Shireen first articulated—andunsuccessfully begging her friend to come along—Ata bribes an official to lether travel to Dubai without her father’s permission, freeing herself into alife she imagines will allow her to embody freely the woman she has become.

Circumstance’s ending sounds a few false notes. Perhaps Shireen’s fear of being hanged by thepolice is finally enough to force her to capitulate to husband, but in her finalscene, it seems she has also, inexplicably, developed some feeling for him. And occasionally, Keshavarz paints themullahs and their henchmen as two-dimensional villains, when the subtlety oftheir evil is much more chilling.

Nonetheless,with its artful yet stark eroticism bumping up against scenes that reveal theunadulterated cruelty of an oppressive social system, the film is a powerfulindictment of the disempowerment of Iranian women. Circumstanceprovides a stirring, important picture of the crushing double standard betweenwhat women desire in private and what they’re allowed in public.

The FeministSpectator

The 2011 Emmy Awards Show

2011-09-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

Martha Plimpton, Rob Lowe, and Sofia Vergara crown Melissa McCarthy at the Emmys

[Note to readers: My mother, Cyma Dolan, died on August 19^th,which I share only to explain the radio silence on The Feminist Spectator. I’ve been surprised how grief has seemed tosteal my words, making it hard to write here and elsewhere. My mom loved awards shows; writing about theEmmys seems a good way to find my way back to the blog. In her memory then, now and always.—jd]

Thank goodness for Jane Lynch, the lovely lankylesbian otherwise known as Glee’smisanthropic Sue Sylvester, who proved last Sunday to be one of the few awardsshow hosts in recent memory to be able to get the tone exactly right. Lynch kept her happy, wide-eyed energy up andher gently sarcastic deadpan humor focused, dispatching her duties with justthe right mix of irreverence and, well, glee.

The opening number—happily filmed instead of sung,danced, or acted live, which always seems to trip up performers more accustomedto tape—showed Lynch acting with Mr. President of TV (Leonard Nimoy), revealingthe (fabricated) secrets of the interconnected lives and spaces of those whopopulate our small screens. The conceitmostly worked—when Lynch barged into the living room set of The Big Bang Theory singing and dancing,Jim Parsons, in character, sighed something like, “I hate when musical numbersintrude on our space.” (Parsons went onto win an Emmy for Best Actor in a Comedy later that night.)

Lynch's opening number . . .

Lynch then visited the set of Mad Men to announce to its characters that in the future, womenwill be able to marry one another (though, she conceded, they’ll still have tosleep with men to advance professionally), and that people will watchtelevision on their phones. JohnSlattery, as Roger Sterling, perplexed by her prophecy picked up one of theset’s old-fashioned black telephone receivers to peer into it.

When Lynch ended the number live, in one of theseveral satiny evening gowns she wore all evening, she danced a few stepsbacked by chorus boys, then remarked on how difficult it is to move in tripleSpanx. The crowd gave her a warmstanding ovation, perhaps just for her game and buoyant honesty, which shemanaged to maintain throughout the evening.

Otherwise, the show’s best moment came with theannouncement of the nominees for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. Amy Poehler’s (Parks and Recreation) name was announced first; she left her seatto approach the stage, and actually mounted the apron, as though taking a prematurebow. This was already funny, as sheseemed to be brooking awards show traditions. Then each subsequent nominee joined her, twittering together withexcitement as though they were finalists in a beauty pageant.

Although it might have been belittling, the littlescene instead let these uniformly talented women parody the awards show itself,and work against its sensationalized competition. Only performers like Poehler, McCarthy, EdieFalco (Nurse Jackie), Laura Linney (The Big C), Martha Plimpton (Raising Hope), and Tina Fey (30 Rock, whose SNL sketches the moment resembled in tone and content) could pullthis off with such good-humor and aplomb.

When Melissa McCarthy won the category for herturn in Mike and Molly (after herterrific performance in last summer’s Bridesmaids),she was crowned and given roses as the others applauded. McCarthy wore her kudos gracefully, admittingthat the moment was huge for a woman who grew up in a small town inIllinois. Hers was a moving performance ofthe kind of simple humanity too often missing among the glitterati.

Kyle Chandler finally won for Outstanding Lead Actorin a Drama Series for his beautiful work on FridayNight Lights, one of the best shows ever produced on television. But in his disappointingly muddled acceptancespeech, he neglected to thank his FNL wife,Connie Britton, who lost out to Julianna Margulies for her performance in The Good Wife.

Their Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama categorywas filled with talented women (including Elizabeth Moss, always wonderful in Mad Men, Mariksa Hargitay for what mighthave been her penultimate season in Law& Order: SVU, Mireille Enos forher moody, steely work in The Killing,and Kathy Bates in Harry’s Law, apart originally written for a man). Toobad Friday Night Lights didn’t winOutstanding Drama Series over Mad Men,if only because its run has, sadly, ended.

ModernFamily’s happy win for Outstanding Comedy Series was buttressed by wins forTy Burrell and Julie Bowen as the clueless Dunphy parents. Burrell competed mostly against his cast-mates,all of whom were nominated and any one of whom would have been an appropriatewinner for their wonderful deadpan humor and their willingness to engage theshow’s playful but perspicacious Freudian pseudo-traumas.

Glee’sChris Colfer—the young, out gay actor who plays the show’s young, out gay character,Kurt—was overlooked in a season that gave Kurt a lot of emotional range. Seeing him crowned prom queen beside hisself-hating gay nemesis as prom king was one of the series’ highpoints lastyear.

But so much of this Emmy broadcast was just dumb. I know these evenings are meant for theindustry, but if that’s the case, why broadcast them at all? Why ask millions of viewers to sit throughstupid palaver meant to appeal to no one but the lowest common viewerdenominator? Why embarrass performers likeKerry Washington with such silly patter? Why try to pretend the stakes are so low when they’re really so high?

I don’t think anyone’s taste is corrupt enough tofind funny the snarky voice-over commentary broadcast this year as winnersapproached the stage. And why not askwinners to dig a little deeper, think about the viewer, and say somethingmeaningful when they accept their awards, instead of starring stupidly at theaudience and saying only, “Wow,” before thanking lists of people that meannothing to anyone but their peers?

The schizophrenic evening swung between tediouslyslow acceptance speeches and clips of nominees edited at such a fast andfurious tempo it was hard to distinguish ModernFamily from The Killing. The pace of those clips made the actual work seemsecondary. But it’s only honest to saythat, in fact, it is.

Like all awardsshows, the Emmys are really a showcase for women’s hair and gowns and jewelry,for the secondary market of magazines and tabloids that dine out on the gaffesand the superficial glory. The Miss America take-off with McCarthy et al spoke the truth.

I only wishLynch had hosted in a nice tux instead.

Looking forward to this year’s TV season,

The Feminist Spectator

Talking with Rhodessa Jones, Holly Hughes, and Lenelle Moise

2011-08-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

In May, I participated in the Feminist Performance Festival in Chicago, organized by E. Patrick Johnson and their Northwestern colleagues in performance studies and women's studies. (See my blog post with a description and my remarks.) I'm posting here the transcript of the conversation I moderated with performers Holly Hughes, Rhodessa Jones, and Lenelle Moise on May 20, 2011. After this teaser, the conversation continues in the full transcript on jilldolan.org.

Jill Dolan: Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be here. I want to thank Patrick, Ann and Ramón for the invitation and also for doing this work. It’s important to devote time to feminist performance in this day and age, so I’m really happy to be part of this whole project. . . . There are many different things we can talk about today. I thought we might start with the question of feminism. Do you call yourself a feminist? Is the label meaningful to you in terms of your practice? Are there other labels you prefer? I know a lot of artists prefer not to label their work at all, but I’m curious how you situate yourself around this issue. Anyone want to start?

Rhodessa Jones: The piece I’m going to do Saturday night -- Big Butt Girls, Hardheaded Women -- I made it almost 20-22 years ago. I made the piece because I was inspired by my work with incarcerated women -- which was based on interviews and inspired by Anna Deavere Smith -- talking to women inside and making a piece. I was invited to the Women and Theater Program annual convention in Boston. They wanted to work with women who were working in institutions like jail. I made this piece for that particular event, and then when I returned home, it already had caused a big stir across the country. When I got back to the San Francisco county jails, they already were talking about this piece I had made. Some men from the jail came to me -- the educational facility -- and said, “Would you be willing to show this piece, Big Butt Girls, to the community as a way to introduce yourself in” something I had called “‘living on the outside’“? I was going to be working with men and women from the work-furlough program. I said, “You have to remember it’s a feminist theater piece.” They said, “We’ll remember.”

[Laughter]

For my very first show, they brought me 70 men. 70 men watched Big Butt Girls in a public performance. I said “feminist” because I wanted it understood it was going to be from a woman’s perspective and a woman’s voice, so that was where “feminist” worked. Most of the time I think of myself as a womanist. When my daughter, who is 46, gets upset with me, she says, “Oh, mom, you’re a feminist.” It’s like, That’s supposed to make me understand how I’m a little kooked. “You’re a feminist.”

Holly Hughes: I came to art marking, really, as a feminist. I went to an alternative feminist art school. I can’t believe 30-something years ago the women who ran the Heresies Collective in New York for quite a number of years -- who were artists and scholars and activists and made this amazing magazine -- felt education really was the link between our practice and our political beliefs and donated their time to start The New York Feminist Art Institute. Feminism had such cultural power The New York Feminist Art Institute was featured in all the papers and politicians came to the opening, even though we didn’t have any tables or chairs.

[Laughter]

I was new to New York and I didn’t know the trash was very good. Who needed the store when you had the streets? But, probably, if you had asked me this 20 years ago, I would have been aware of all the problems of feminism, particularly around pornography and the sensorium. I would have been, “Yes,” but with an eye roll. Of course today -- the spectacular week of men behaving badly with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the head of the IMF [Dominique Strauss-Kahn], which I think stands for “I am fucked” --

[Laughter]

and then the story in Psychology Today. Do people know about this story in Psychology Today? The story about some guy who got research funded to have his ratings system of women, so it’s already rating women and their attractiveness, but it’s all stacked to have the idea why, scientifically, African-American women are not as attractive, so that’s bad enough, but then it’s a cover story in Psychology Today. This week I am particularly a feminist.

[Laughter]

Particularly after I got my first adult job at the age of 46 after being a waitress and a temp worker, and then a freelance artist, oddly enough, which allowed me to be a feminist queer person because nobody paid any more attention to me than a person with a real job. Then it was, like, “Oh yeah, this is still going on.”

JD: Lenelle?

Lenelle Moise: I’m comfortable with the word “feminist.” I’m more comfortable with the word “womanist.” I am a poet, so I recognize these are words. I really get frustrated sometimes when I go to a feminist circle or conference and the discussion stops with whether or not young women in the room are calling themselves feminists and honoring the feminists who came before. It seems to be a generational conversation, but it stops there. It’s always, “Why aren’t you calling yourself a feminist?” That’s what makes me uncomfortable because it’s a stagnant point and feminism to me is about doing, so if we’re just talking, that’s a removed, easy, passive discussion. So yes, I’m comfortable with the words, but now what?

JD: Right. That’s a very good point. I’m thinking too from all your remarks about how much this word and what it means has changed over time both for all of us and for the culture. I’m wondering, How at this point does or doesn’t feminism enhance or make possible your larger goals as an artist? What are your larger goals as an artist? How do politics in general inform your goals as an artist? Go ahead, Holly.

HH: Um.

[Laughter]

Yeah, get the solo. One quick thought is in 30 years it’s a lot easier -- in certain circumstances, although not necessarily in the place where I work -- to say, “I’m gay” or “I’m a lesbian” or whatever -- “a fucking dyke” -- whatever it is, depending on my mood ring

[Laughter]

than it is to say, “I’m a feminist.” At the same time, queer politics has gotten bogged down to whether you’re LGBT or you’re gay or do we have enough letters? These are important -- we’re writers -- these are important, but everything stopped there. A political reading of situations is present in every moment of our lives. Like a visual reading -- like readings and interpretations and ways of understanding every other moment -- thinking about gender and sexuality and other political realities is present in our daily actions and to say not also is a political act, so that’s something that’s very present for me.

RJ: I remember the meetings in San Francisco on Valencia Street -- feminist meetings -- and men (crazy, truck-driving, straight, basically white guys) who would hear about a meeting and attempt to disrupt a meeting. I am 62 years old, so I remember. I would say to women, “My brothers are going to come,” because my mother would say to my brothers, “You go in there and get your sister after ten o’clock,” and having women want to argue this was not political with me (my brothers coming to get me). My mother would say, “If them white people going crazy over there, you go in there and get your sister out of there.”

[Laughter]

They said, “He’s your brother, he’s a man and he’s a male figure.” I said, “No, let my brother through,” and then I let my brother, Gus, come. Her is six-five and 300 pounds and nobody can stop him.

[Laughter]

That was one of the first things that really dawned on me about where we were with feminism, who it’s for, who gets to wear it, its flavor, how it fits into my existence and being told there was something wrong with me because I still associated with my brothers. At the same time, Alice Walker introduced the word “womanist.” All women bleed. I remember being in London -- oh, this was 20-25 years ago -- and running through the airport trying to catch my plane. An English woman comes up to me -- an English rose -- and says, “Darling, you have a spot on your skirt.” “Oh, my God, a spot on my skirt.” Which was very feminist to me because she said, “Come, come, come, I’ll help you.” She escorts me into the restroom and I say, “Anybody got a Tampax?” Every woman in the bathroom --

[Laughter]

Pakistani, African, everybody -- had sponge, cotton and twine.

[Laughter]

I thought, This is feminist, this is feminist to me. Nobody said, “Oh, girl, please.” No, it was like, “Oh, darling,” and everybody was willing to help me get the stain out of my skirt, so it’s that basic to me. Even when I talk to incarcerated women, I go there because, as you pointed out, the word “feminist” has been diminished and even in a population like jail don’t nobody want to hear that. That’s slang.

I also remember Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. I’ve still gotten a lot of trouble by saying “vagina” in women’s prisons by other women who take an affront to it. I’m asked not to read “My Angry Vagina.” I remember the first time I read an article in which Eve Ensler was saying she was having trouble with her publicist about using the title The Vagina Monologues. She said, “What do we call it? The Cunt Chronicles?

[Laughter]

The Pussy Papers?” All this stuff is a part of how I engage when I think about feminism, feminist theater and feminist approach, and then I’m right in it. I’m in it. I’m one of the gang.

LM: I notice they call our work “political” when we know we’re human beings. I notice that. So yes, my work is political because I know I’m a human being and I know the people I love and grew up with, and care about and see, are people.

JD: You want to add anything, Holly?

HH: No.

[Full transcript continues on page 6, jilldolan.org.]

The Feminist Spectator

Ruminations for the Next Generation of Feminist Spectators

2011-08-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of also receiving last week a lifetime achievement award from the Women and Theatre Program (WTP) of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). My membership in the WTP goes back to the early 1980s; I served as President in the late 80s/early 90s, following my friend and colleague Vicki Patraka. I was thrilled to be acknowledged by an organization that was so formative to my own career and character.

This keynote is a draft of the new introduction to the reissue of The Feminist Spectator as Critic, my first book, originally published by UMI Research Press in 1988, then by the University of Michigan Press in 1991. The book will be reissued in July 2012. The new introduction-in-process tries to think through what it means to be a feminist spectator in the 21st century, reflecting on what's changed since I wrote the book in the mid- to late-80s, and what's sadly, infuriatingly the same.

I'm happy for comments on this draft, which I'm "teasing" here. The full text is available on my new web site, where I'll archive longer documents that I'd like to share with readers. Check out the full keynote address/intro draft at jilldolan.org.

I’m delighted to be giving this keynote address, and more honored and appreciative than I can say about receiving this Lifetime Achievement Award from WTP. Fifty-four-years-old seems a little young for such an honor, but on the other hand, feminist generations and cycles move so quickly, even in our relatively small field of feminist theatre and performance studies, in many ways I do feel like an elder stateswoman.

I began coming to the WTP pre-conferences in 1982, at the end of my first year as a graduate student in performance studies at NYU. The Women & Theatre Program was a formative site for my thinking then, and thirty years later, remains one of my “homes,” a place to which I return eagerly to see friends and colleagues and to meet new feminist scholars and hear their work. I’m gratified that despite the vagaries of the feminist movement in the intervening years, the WTP continues to exist and to produce scholarship that represents the diversity of our field.

My talk today is drawn from the new introduction I’ve written to my first book, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, which the University of Michigan Press plans to reissue in July 2012. I’m gratified that this book, which was written in the mid-1980s as my NYU dissertation, has what University of Michigan Press editor LeAnn Fields would call “legs,” since it’s remained in print for these last 23 years. I hope the upcoming reissue will continue to make it a useful text for teachers, students, practitioners, critics, and scholars still interested in thinking about performance and theatre through a feminist lens.

I’m sharing this introduction draft with you today as a kind of rumination on the state of feminist criticism—as Heidi Holland said apocryphally in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, where have we been and where are we going? I look forward to your responses, which I’m sure will influence the trajectory of my work—it always has and it always will.

Thinking back over these years since The Feminist Spectator as Critic was first published, I’m amazed at how much has changed in American theatre and performance, as well as in the American academy and in other aspects of culture. In theatre, film, television, and the new media explosion wrought by the internet, even the most prescient feminist spectator couldn’t have foreseen how dramatically the forms and contents through which we imagine our lives might change.

Compared to the cultural landscape of the mid-80s, when women at best played second-banana to male leads on television, or sexy but irrelevant girlfriends in film, or predictable mothers, virgins, or whores in theatre, complicated, central female characters full of quirky agency have now become more and more common. Examples of women’s advances in popular culture are happily too numerous to list.[i] The last three decades’ watershed moments offer heartening signs that gender equity is at least progressing in entertainment and the arts.

Yet as I’ll detail in this talk, we still have a long way to go. Women’s gains and losses in theatre and performance, in particular, are more complicated and perhaps, on the aggregate, less positive. And all these culture changes have occurred within a historical moment that’s oscillated wildly across the political spectrum, from a more progressive pole at one end to a much more dangerously conservative one on the other.

With that context in mind, I’ll do six things in this talk today: I’ll offer a rethinking of “the feminisms” and how I use them in the book; I’ll think again about the question of experience as a narrative of feminism and performance; I’ll discuss liberal feminism in the context of “popular” or mainstream theatre and its possibilities; I’ll revisit the feminist critique of form, content, and context; I’ll check in on “the ideal spectator,” to see how he’s doing; and finally, I’ll end with an argument for feminist performance criticism as a tool of advocacy and activism. Ready?

One of The Feminist Spectator as Critic’s primary original contributions was Chapter One’s explanation of the “discourse of feminisms,” and the book’s insistence that rather than offering a monolithic approach to politics or culture, feminism should be parsed into various sub-strands. I structure the book’s argument, in fact, according to the three different strains of feminism that predominated at the time. This taxonomy gave me a much more precise way to discuss the work accomplished differently by feminist theatre and performance artists and critics who approached gender (as well as sexuality, race, class, and other identity vectors) from diverse and often diverging ideological perspectives.

The distinct strands of liberal, cultural, and materialist feminism were meant to be descriptive and explanatory. And they did, at first, lend precision to the political implications of performance. The feminisms helpfully extended the performance critique, providing language that probed deeply into the apparatus of representation, its modes of production, and how it generated meaning. But over time, the feminisms hardened into prescriptive and judgmental, rather than critically generative, categories. The critique of cultural feminism, especially, became hegemonic, along with post-structuralism’s insistent (and persuasive) analysis of its attendant gender essentialism.[ii]

Cultural feminist values also began to align with a vociferous anti-pornography activism, which some commentators saw as entirely anti-sex and censorious. The division between anti-porn and “pro-sex” feminism helped demonize cultural feminism, especially in the academy, where materialist feminist theorizing was on the rise. As a result, the pleasures of women’s culture became associated with the dogmatism of cultural feminism and were derided as exclusive, predominately white, and politically and aesthetically old-fashioned. “Cultural feminist” became a derogatory label, applied most often by materialist feminists touting sexier, more radical social interventions.

Cultural feminism takes some hard knocks in The Feminist Spectator as Critic. While I stand by my critique of essentialism, my deliberate rejection of cultural feminist theatre and performance came from the historical context in which I wrote. Describing and analyzing work by the Women’s Experimental Theatre and At the Foot of the Mountain, for instance, I accused them of legislating that all women respond to their productions with the same affective and political investments. This might have been a fair assessment of how some cultural feminist theatre exchanges happened.

But much of what I called the works’ “constraining ritual systems” came from an historic need for affirmation and community against the harsh reality of a culture that made no room for women and their histories outside of patriarchal rule. When I wrote this book, “patriarchy” itself was an old-fashioned word, which had been replaced by the more gender-neutral phrase “dominant culture” to mark the axis of social power and ideological control. (It strikes me that now, even that language is a bit quaint.)

The Women’s Experimental Theatre and At the Foot of the Mountain, however, were two of the first feminist theatres to use performance to counter the claims of a society that was openly and arrogantly run by white men. The cultural feminist theatre work of the moment wanted to reach a community of women, to find a common theme within the politics of gender that might provide a site of recognition and further political agitation. The ritual “sacraments” to which I objected in this theatre practice came from a place of real need, it seems to me now, and a desire to honor women and their connections underneath a deeply felt, daily, material oppression. That the differences among and between women were soft-pedaled to privilege gender was a sign of the times, rather than a malicious, intentional white-washing or exclusion.

The critique I launched also came partly from my own experiences feeling excluded by some of these performances’ rigidity. I was then honing my proudly post-structuralist critical perspective and was younger by at least 10 years from many of the women whose cultural feminist theatre work I engaged. I held myself separate from what I perceived as a rather presumptuous bid for community, attaching myself instead to the materialist feminist and post-structuralist instabilities of unknowingness and refusing cultural feminism’s forceful master narrative.

I wasn’t alone in feeling the constraints of a feminism that saw itself as righteous and “true,” or of performances that blindly assumed everyone would feel only positively about their mothers, for example. Cultural feminism at the time tolerated little debate or disagreement, and tended to chastise those incredulous enough to want to argue with its values.

When I criticized those aspects of the work, I neglected to describe its consistent emotional appeal. In fact, I’ve been working on and off for years now on a project called From Flannel to Fleece, which details my own experiences in women’s music production and other aspects of lesbian feminist women’s culture in the mid-1970s. In all the recent academic work on memory, I’m surprised that we haven’t been authorized to remember, fondly, the affective import of women’s culture, which did indeed stem from a kind of cultural feminist impulse.

I still viscerally remember attending my first Holly Near concert on the Harvard campus in Cambridge in the late 70s, and how utterly stirring emotionally and inspiring politically that event was for me. I was hailed by her voice, by her politics, by the community I felt grow around me in the auditorium where she performed. So much of cultural feminist production prompted these affective revelations, which led many of us to fashion politically, sexually, and intellectually progressive identities.

It was only five or so years later that I would learn the critique of a culture in which I had participated so happily. Now, when I’ve presented work-in-progress from this project, I’ve sometimes been accused of valorizing an exclusively white, middle-class, college-educated moment in U.S. lesbian feminism.[iii] This false claim promotes the continual misrecognition of cultural feminism’s contributions to feminist and American progressive culture. Women’s culture in Boston was diverse and a site of continual struggle rather than one of sameness and happy agreement.

In fact, I’m interested, again, in the intersection of experience and politics, art and ideology, in a way that was once also verboten in feminist critical theory. Post-structuralism taught us to be suspicious of claims to authentic experience, but in the process, helped shut down an important aspect of how we understand subject formation and perpetuate our own interventions in knowledge. I’m certainly not interested in returning to some notion of experience as fully “true,” but I am eager to return to a way of narrating the events of our lives that allows us to respect their meanings in our histories.

I’m interested in retelling, for instance, my own early experiences with materialist feminist performances at the WOW Café in New York, as well as my women’s culture days in Boston, in part because these are histories that need to be continually retold. As culture changes and history moves on, we forget that even the tenuous strides we’ve made weren’t always in place. Doesn’t it help to rehearse how it felt not to have numerous cultural avenues for seeing our lives reflected, in however partial and refracted a way?

Or doesn’t it help? Or does it only help, well, me? I dread becoming the finger-wagging lesbian feminist who tells her younger colleagues, “You have no idea what it was like then!” But isn’t the point that if we don’t recall, and learn, and remember then, we can’t truly appreciate or expand or push further with the now? Why is it that every year, gay pride celebrations across the country commemorate the events of Stonewall, but so few public, national, annual events celebrate specifically lesbian or women’s historical watersheds? Is it because this history continues to be quotidian instead of cataclysmic? Isn’t it in the very stuff of the everyday that history also lives?

[Continues on the middle of page 6 at jilldolan.org . . .]

[i] In television, for only two examples, Edie Falco plays a drug-addicted but supremely competent and empathetic ER nurse on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie; Kyra Sedgwick plays the southern-bred chief of a major Los Angeles police crimes squad on The Closer, a TNT network show she also produces. The proliferation of cable channels—including Showtime, HBO, TNT, the CW, and others— in addition to the three traditional television networks means a broader array of outlets with producers looking for fresh ideas. Showtime, in fact, sponsored producer Ilene Chaiken’s lesbian soap opera, The L Word (2004-2009), which broke ground as the first show on television to feature mainly lesbian characters in its on-going storyline. In film, although “rom coms” and buddy movies still dominate the American box office, women filmmakers’ inroads have at least been acknowledged over the last two decades. For only one example, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director Academy Award for The Hurt Locker (2008), a war film that barely featured women at all. Among the 21 women who’ve won Academy Awards for screenwriting since 1929, Diablo Cody won for Juno (2007), Diana Ossana won for Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Sofia Coppola won for Lost in Translation (2003).

[ii] See Echols, Born to be Bad and Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).

[iii] See my From Flannel to Fleece: Lesbian Cultural Production from 1970-1990 for a recuperation of the project of women’s culture (forthcoming).

Outstanding Teacher Award Remarks

2011-08-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

I was honored to receive the 2011 Outstanding Teacher in Higher Education award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) last week at the conference in Chicago. How moved I was to see so many former students and colleagues in the audience, and to be on the podium with so many other wonderful honorees (including Doug Paterson, who won the 2011 ATHE Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement, and Bonnie Marranca, who won the Excellence in Editing--Sustained Achievement award). I was incredibly honored to accept the award. My brief remarks are posted below.--jd

I honestly can’t thank you enough for this honor. I’m not a deeply religious person, but it strikes me that teaching is one of the most sacred professions. We’re entrusted with minds, and lives, and bodies; people turn their faces to ours, expectantly. That trust demands reciprocity. Being a teacher, as a result, is also one of the most vulnerable professions, because if you’re really going to reciprocate, you have to bare a bit of your own soul. I’m so grateful for all the students who’ve helped my soul grow over these last 25 years.

One of the most meaningful aspects of teaching, for me, like performance itself, is how fleeting it is. On the best days, I leave a classroom on a high I rarely find elsewhere, already wishing I could recapture the heady nuances of the discoveries we just made in our fragile, hopeful, temporary learning community. But teaching is about speech, which disappears just as it’s uttered. Even those of us who take notes during class—myself included—in our efforts to archive and remember, can’t do justice to the timbre and tone, to the burning underpinnings of how we speak in our most urgent classroom conversations. That we can’t recreate them makes them that much more precious, and makes me that much more eager to try.

It’s been an unexpected pleasure, this career. But teaching is not without precedent in my family. My Uncle Mel—who’s here today—taught me the “word for the day” every day when I was a kid; I think he’s astonished at how many I’ve learned since. My mother spent her career as a kindergarten teacher. I’d visit her classroom and absorb the model of her patience and magnanimity, her hope that she could in some way open her kids’ futures as she taught them to tie their shoes. My father taught me, among other things, how to play tennis. I learned from him a generous, happy sportsmanship that I like to think is part of my own teaching.

And Stacy Wolf, my partner, entered my life as my student, but has for 22 years also been my teacher. Now, when we teach courses together, I’m so grateful for how much I continue to learn from her—about teaching, about theatre, and about the pleasure of so intensely living your life.

My classrooms structure my kinship networks. Let me thank my former student, and my friend, Ramón Rivera-Servera, who I understand organized my nomination for this award, as well as all the graduate and undergrad students I’ve taught, and all the colleagues with whom I’ve worked—at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the CUNY Graduate Center; the University of Texas at Austin; and now at Princeton. You all mean the world to me.

Let me end by saying I wish more people really understood what happens in our classrooms. I rue how the Right disparages progressive pedagogy like ours, especially when it’s grounded in art forms they also seem to despise. If they could only appreciate how passionately we feel and how rigorously we think about the theatre and performance we see and do and study. If they could only realize how cataclysmic are our new understandings, and how transformative our experiences, in our prosaic, everyday classrooms and on the magical classroom of the stage. In our teaching and our learning, we shape the possibilities of our culture.

We theatre people work in the medium of love; we rely on our hearts as well as our minds and our souls. To also love what you do and to be honored for it seems a great gift indeed. Thanks so much.

The FS Suggests . . . Sex in Mommyville

2011-07-18T04:06:00.000-07:00

Called to my attention by its writer/producer, Anna Fishbeyn, Sex in Mommyville has been transformed from a solo show that opened in 2010 at the Flea Theatre in NYC to a multi-character play that's premiering at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre on July 27, 29, and 31.

The show has also been booked to play at the opening of the Museum of Motherhood, sponsored by Mamapalooza, in September.

MamaBlogger365 discusses her experience of the performance here.

FYI, The Feminist Spectator

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two

2011-07-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed the final installment in the Harry Potter film series. I read the book when it was first released, and remember feeling very moved by how J.K. Rowling wrapped up her epic saga. Although the plot details of how Harry and company retrieve the Horcruxes necessary to destroy Voldemort sometimes escaped me—in the film and the book—I enjoyed the mastery of Rowling’s story-telling and the headlong rush of good to triumph over evil.

This final story is very much an action film, especially after the relatively static Part 1, which saw our heroes and heroine mostly killing time in a magical tent, waiting to take their next step. Part 2 begins with Harry and his friends stealing into Gringotts, the bank in which one of the Horcruxes has been hidden in Bellatrix Lestrange’s (Helena Bonham Carter) vault.

The wonderful scene transforms Hermione into Bellatrix so that she can get into the bank. She’s accompanied by Harry and Griphook (Warwick Davis)—the Gringotts goblin banker he’s forced to help him—who are hidden under the famed and powerful invisibility cloak so that they can enter the vault. Filmed from both the disguised Hermoine’s point of view and Harry’s perspective, as he peers about under the cloak, this early scene sets up the suspense and visual verve of the whole film.

(I have to say, though, that my only quarrel with all the Potter films is how they represent the Gringotts bankers. The bank’s goblins sport large hooked noses and large ears, and look like a Nazi stereotype of Jewish financiers. I cringed again in Deathly Hallows Part 2 to see all those rows of Jewish-looking characters sitting on high benches doing their sums as Harry and his friends passed nervously below.)

The film proceeds a bit by-the-numbers, since how it ends is never in question. But director David Yates creates a compelling atmosphere in which Hogwarts has become a gloomy, dismal place, policed by Snape (Alan Rickman), the Dark Arts teacher who’s taken over as Headmaster. The castle is surrounded by the fearsome, disembodied Death Eaters, who hover in the air waiting to attack. As Manohla Dargis noted in her excellent Times review, the film’s color scheme is so monochromatic that it almost appears to have been shot in black and white.

Occasional flashes of color highlight a character or a narrative thread. For instance, the ethereal Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) wears lavender pants and an aqua-print top when she directs Harry to the Ravenclaw ghost who gives him the clue that unlocks the whereabouts of the remaining Horcruxes. Luna stands out as a visual oddity—which also underlines the strangeness of her character—in a scheme in which the other students’ uniforms seem worn and drained of color and life.

I found the destruction of Hogwarts one of the film’s saddest themes. The monumental battle between Harry and Voldemort takes place in and around the school’s grounds. Yates stages their confrontation in a style reminiscent of World War II fighting films. By the end, the once pristine castle, the site of so much pedagogical potential, looks much like images of Berlin after the war. Its walls have fallen into rubble, its ornamentation is destroyed, and the vaulted Great Hall in which the students are sorted into their respective houses has devolved into a make-shift hospital ward, replete with the 1940s-era stretchers onto which the dead and wounded are loaded.

In this gruesome, hopeless scene, Harry struggles valiantly to destroy his nemesis. When it turns out that to do so requires that he destroy a part of himself, he’s forced to confront the piece of Voldemort’s soul that resides within him. The dual nature of Harry's character has always been a key part of the series, as it allows Rowlings to universalize the boy wizard's story. After all, don't we all struggle with evil twins or doppelgangers, if not in quite so spectacular a fashion as Harry? And aren't we all, Rowling suggests, protected from our base natures by those we love?

The Resurrection Stone, which Harry unlocks from the Quidditch snitch near the film’s end, shows him that all those he’s loved and lost remain close to his heart: his mother, Lily, always inspiring; Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), his friend and mentor; and others of the freedom fighters who’ve died in the battle against the Dark Lord surround him to reassure him that his death will be neither painful nor in vain.

Though his mano a mano battle with Voldemort (an increasingly mortal-looking Ralph Fiennes) appears to kill Harry, it turns out their duel has only destroyed the Horcrux his body harbors. The ghost of Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) appears to tell Harry he can choose to return to life. Their conversation takes place in a ghostly train station, in a scene drenched in white light. Although this Heaven Can Wait-style moment is a bit corny, Dumbledore’s blessing sends Harry back to Hogwarts to seal the deal, dispatching with Voldemort and ending as the hero he’s always been destined to be.

And yet there’s no parade for Harry. He returns to Hogwarts’ fold dirty and disheveled, where Rowling refuses to let him be excessively celebrated or overly adored. In fact, the Harry Potter series’ cautious and sober vision of the effects of power is hopeful and relevant in an age when politicians seem to want to exercise it only for its own sake.

The fascism of power-lust is very much part of Rowling’s critique. When Harry has finally dispatched Voldemort, he remains the rightful heir of the elder wand, that supreme symbol of power and might. As Hermione and Ron watch in disbelief, Harry breaks the wand in two and throws the pieces over the precipice of Hogwarts’ bridge. He’s seen power misused enough to know that he wants no part of such a weapon.

The good professors at Hogwarts also relish their opportunity to retrieve a moral, ethical world from the Dark Lord and his minions. Maggie Smith, delectable as Professor Minerva McGonagall, the head of Gryffindor, has a few wonderful scenes once she takes over Hogwarts’ leadership from Snape. She sends into action all the monumental stone warrior figures that decorate the Hogwarts façade, confessing to Mrs. Weasley (Julie Walters) with some glee that she’s always wanted to cast that spell.

Part 2, however, is Harry’s moment. Daniel Radcliffe boasts a five o’clock shadow on his jaw and abs of steel, which are obvious when he removes his shirt to change into dry clothes (Harry, Ron, and Hermione for some reason get drenched a lot in this installment). Radcliffe comports himself admirably as Harry grows into his final burst of self-sacrificing heroism.

Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) admit their long-simmering love for one another in a comic moment after they’ve vanquished an enemy. At the action sequence’s end, they turn to one another impulsively and launch into their first real kiss, after which they laugh with some embarrassment. Yates lightens the moment by satirizing the film cliché; it’s a cheesy popcorn romance moment that has the grace to acknowledge itself as such.

Harry’s similar romantic exchange with Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), his long-time intended, is also treated lightly. When the students all think they’re going to die, exchanging a kiss seems the least these teenaged lovers can do. (Although truth be told, Radcliffe and Wright have less chemistry than Grint and Watson.) Ginny does little more than worry about Harry as he runs off to his next death-defying adventure.

But their bond seems fated, in part, I’d suggest, so that Ron and Harry can be brothers (even if in-law) forever. Their marriages ultimately secure their threesome’s bond; it could be a stretch, but I'd propose this is Rowling’s neat twist on the nature of kinship. Harry Potter doesn't celebrate its couples nearly as much as it honors the deep and lasting relationships among its trio.

After all the sound effects and visual conflagrations, and all the suspense and tension of seeing the plot play itself out, Part 2 does indeed feel cathartic. Many spectators have attested to how sad they are that this film ends the epic series for good. More than one of our students has said that it feels like the end of their childhood.

Apparently Rowlings is filling fans’ endless need with a new web site called Pottermore, in which she intends to “give back” to those who’ve been so dedicated to her character and his exploits. In addition to offering 18,000+ more words about the series’ characters and their backstories, the web site will sell the soon-to-be released Harry Potter e-books directly to fans, insuring that Rowlings’ and her publisher’s fortunes will continue to grow.

But why shouldn’t this woman cash in on Potter mania? The incredibly imaginative, creative series spun a tale intriguing and suspenseful enough to keep people across generations craving more for nearly 14 years.

Although I never enjoyed the films as much as the books on which they’re based, I was moved by watching The Deathly Hallows Part 2. The experience let me release Harry, Hermione, and Ron back into that hallowed place in which they’ll rest in my own imagination.

In the meantime, I enjoyed seeing Daniel Radcliffe in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway last spring, where he adopted the vibrant, hopeful aspect of the striving young businessman, freed from the darkness that his Potter counterpart carried in his heart for so long. He seems a talented, steady young person, determined to refashion himself as an artist and not just a now-grown boy who once sported a lightning bolt on his forehead.

Emma Watson was impressive from the start as Hermione, the baby-feminist intellectual whose powers of logic and deduction and formidable knowledge saved Harry and Ron’s lives much more than once. In Part 2, Hermione is somewhat overshadowed by Ron, who suddenly seems to have all the good ideas about getting out of scrapes. But Hermione’s pride in Ron is somehow touching.

Watson is a subtle actor, who manages to hang onto a certain presence and screen power regardless of how much she’s actually doing in a scene. She’s also enrolled at Brown—on leave this semester to study at Oxford—and is a self-professed and proud feminist. I hope she continues to be a role model for girls and young women.

I’ve been delighted to play in the Harry Potter sandbox for these many years. It’s given me great pleasure, allowed me to engage in fun conversations about the characters’ relationships and their meanings, and fired my imagination about a magical place and time that always seemed as close to our own as platform 9¾ in King's Cross Station.

The Feminist Spectator

Request Programme at the Galway Arts Festival, Ireland

2011-07-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

The Galway Arts Festival opened last Monday, July 11, promising an impressive range of Irish and global theatre and performance opportunities through July 24. My own consumption of the daily events and productions began with a site-specific production of Franz Xavier Kroetz’s Request Programme. First produced in Stuttgart in 1973, the play is a silent meditation/lamentation, a slice of life at the end of a day in one ordinary woman’s life.

I saw the play (then called Request Concert) produced in New York in the early 1980s, with a stunning performance by Joan Mackintosh. That production, however, was played on a proscenium stage, into which the audience peered like voyeurs as this unnamed, unknown woman performed the mundane actions of her typical evening. She returned from work; settled in; washed her face; cooked her meal; and prepared for bed.

We know nothing about her or her circumstances. The slow unraveling of her control over her emotions and her final cataclysmic action comes without an explanatory backstory. The play’s silence—there is no dialogue—keeps the woman’s interior life remote and mysterious. The intimacy of her quotidian activities makes spectators question what it means to watch the progress of someone else’s life.

In a site-specific production like this one, skillfully mounted by Corcadorca Theatre Company’s founder and artistic director Pat Kiernan in an elegant Galway apartment just off of the central Eyre Square, the audience’s voyeurism is both invited and heightened. Ushered to the two-bedroom, two-bath residence 15 minutes prior to the performance’s official start time, we were given a sheet of instructions that encouraged us to roam through the apartment and look at things at our leisure. Nothing was off-limits—we could open drawers, cabinets, the refrigerator, and examine books and personal effects at will.

Watching fellow spectators navigate this invitation indicated how comfortable we all are with interpersonal boundaries. Some folks the evening I attended opened dresser drawers and closets and sifted through toiletries; others stood in the center of the living room, peering about but forgoing the invitation to touch. We were told that keeping silent was the one unbreakable rule, and that the actor/character (the superb Eileen Walsh) would not acknowledge our presence.

Request Programme requires diligent investigation and observation to put together the narrative cues that pepper the scene and the woman’s actions. Who she is, what she cares about, where she’s been, and where’s she’s going is ambiguous. Looking at her bookcases ahead of time, for instance, I noted a number of contemporary novels written by women and a few “self-help” titles. On her bedside table lay David Nicholl’s recent novel One Day, with a bookmark half-way through. Beside it, the most recent Vanity Fair was open to a story called “Betting the Farm,” which addresses property rights in the Hamptons, in the States.

But the article’s title and the subject of Nicholl’s book offer clues, of a sort, to where this woman might be headed. One Day details the same date over twenty years in the lives of two characters whose relationship is stormy, vexed, passionate, and ultimately, tragically, failed. And although the woman in Request Programme might have nothing to do with the Hampton’s proper, to “bet the farm” colloquially means to risk everything you have on one thing. (To “buy the farm,” on the other hand, means to die.)

Whether or not you read these clues (and whether or not they really are clues), closely observing the woman’s behavior hints at her increasing despair and desperation. When she arrives, her keys engage the lock and we hear her heels clicking into the narrow front hallway. She’s wearing a white and beige linen suit, and a lanyard around her neck from which a corporate identification tag hangs. She comes into the living room/kitchen to start her tea boiling, then moves into her bedroom, where most of the audience follows, watching her change into casual linen pants and a pilled grey wool sweater to begin her evening rituals.

The first half of the performance details her close control over her environment. Before she changes out of her work clothes, she opens the apartment’s windows, pausing for a moment to stare out pensively. She finds a dead fly on a window sill, and takes a relatively large amount of time to pick up its carcass with a tissue; throw it in the garbage, her nose wrinkled with distaste; and spray the sill with disinfectant, furiously wiping it down after.

This obsessive cleanliness continues throughout her routine. She washes her dishes three or four times over the course of the performance, then spraying the sink with cleaning solution and rigorously wiping it out. But each time she does so is a bit different. By the last time, she’s not quite as precise or careful.

Likewise, when she sets the table for her dinner, she carefully lines up every kitchen implement she’ll need to cut her paté and organize her bottled red peppers, which she arranges on her plate like a still life—garnished with parsley from a pot above her range—that she proceeds to eat methodically, careful not to soil the picture with crumbs.

Later, she pours herself a second cup of tea and eats from a packet of digestive biscuits, flicking them out of the cellophane one at a time, dunking the cookie into her tea, and putting the whole thing hastily in her mouth to avoid getting crumbs on the quilting project she’s chosen for her night’s activity.

Watching the woman’s compulsive behavior gradually and subtly fall apart over the course of the 75 minute performance points to how her evening (and ours) eventually ends. Her demeanor, too, begins to crack. Early on, she peers into a mirror in the living room, running a finger over a spot on her face and applying some sort of salve, clearly unhappy and preoccupied with this evidence of imperfection on her person.

When she uses the toilet (in full view of the roaming spectators, twice), she winces. I happened to notice a box of tablets to treat cystitis in one of her kitchen cabinets on my own rifling through her personal effects before the performance. This, along with her pain and the glass of diluted cranberry juice she drinks at one point in the performance, indicates an ordinary and annoying urinary tract infection. But because nothing is told to the spectators, you’re required to assemble the evidence and come to your own conclusions.

Request Programme happens in real time. She turns on the television after she changes her clothes, and watches a Sky News story about Rupert Murdoch’s media corporation’s phone-hacking scandal in the UK. Clearly, the television broadcast is “real.” Later, as she’s sewing a piece onto a quilt she intends to use to cover her coffee table, she listens to the radio, accessed as part of a combo CD/FM player on her bookcase.

The songs that we heard played that night seemed so thematically relevant to her situation—or at least its emotional valence—that the radio broadcast seemed to be a tape collated specifically for the performance. We heard songs by Van Morrison, Tracy Chapman, and other mournful ballads about love lost play over the air, all of which seem related to this woman’s deep sadness. But because the whole performance seems to take place in “reality,” the radio program’s status as fact or fiction wasn’t certain. (In a discussion with director Kiernan two days after the performance I saw, Walsh referred to the radio broadcast as in fact happening in real time.)

[Spoiler alert.]

Kroetz’s play ends with the woman’s suicide, a choice her evening’s activities, in retrospect, seem to lead toward throughout. We return with her to her bedroom—spectators crowded around the periphery of the small room, no more than two feet or so from Walsh—and watch as she undresses, uses the attached bathroom, climbs into bed, turns out the light (which plunges us all into shared darkness), and then proceeds to sob. (A number of spectators moved to leave when she turned out the light; they were caught short by her unexpected crying.)

She returns to the kitchen, where she takes out a bottle of what I assumed were prescription sleeping pills. First she takes one, but as she turns the bottle over in her hands, we see her make another decision. She pours all the pills out, arranging them in pairs on a clean plate like a final still life, as orderly as ever, even as she moves toward taking her own life, and begins to swallow them down with gulps of water.

Halfway through, she takes a half-bottle of champagne from the refrigerator and pours it into her glass to chase the rest of the pills. The champagne bubbles over the top of the glass onto the table. She doesn’t wipe it up. And as the sleeve of her dressing gown trails into the wine and she doesn’t react to what 30 minutes ago she would have considered a desecration of her methodical rituals, we know she’s done for.

In one final moment, as the plate is cleared of pills, Walsh suddenly looks up from her sorrowful task, and takes a moment to make clear eye contact sequentially with every spectator in the room. Holding her gaze for that moment is devastating. What is she asking of us, in this final bit of intersubjectivity? Is she blaming us for not taking responsibility for stopping her suicide? Is her surprisingly intense, fiery peering into our eyes meant to accuse us as fellow travelers who didn’t care enough to step in? Or is she simply acknowledging our presence, after these 75 minutes? Is this the character, or Walsh, looking at us so urgently? Was she perhaps just saying goodbye?

I was very moved by this moment, as it highlighted what I’d felt as a connection to Walsh and to my fellow spectators as we made our way through this moment of a life together. The performance requires a bit of endurance; that is, the apartment gets stuffy and close as we stand, jockeying for position to see Walsh’s actions but also moving out of her way when necessary.

And the intimacy of the evening is unusual; we’re not accustomed to being that close to a performer, or to being able to see one another so clearly as we comprise an audience. That we can look wherever we wish throughout the performance means that we see one another, as well as Walsh. As a result, I was aware of how I directed my gaze, and felt clear responsibility for where and when I moved and looked.

Because the woman is anonymous, you’re invited to project yourself into her actions and her final choice. The heartbreak of Request Programme isn’t necessarily that we mourn this particular woman’s decision to end her life; we don’t know her. And there's nothing particularly desperate about her circumstances; even her casual clothes are elegant, and her apartment and its fixtures are tastefully high-end. It's not economic despair that moves her to take her life. But perhaps we mourn the deadening rituals and routines of our own lives, however comfortable they are or aren't, and consider how easy it would be for us, too, to slip from motivation to despair.

In another artists’ discussion at the festival, playwright Enda Walsh, who worked with Eileen Walsh and Pat Kiernan as part of Corcadorca in the mid-90s, said that his own plays are all about his wonder at how it is that we survive at all, how we move through each day determined to keep living. Request Programme offers the grim flipside, when that determination ends and someone decides to simply stop.

Witnessing a character make that choice, in a performance in which you make your own choices about where, when, and how to position yourself around her, makes the project of survival poignant indeed.

The Feminist Spectator

Request Programme, by Franz Xaver Kroetz, starring Eileen Walsh, directed by Pat Kiernan, produced by Corcadorca for the Galway Arts Festival, July 11, 2011.

Victor & Gord and 565+ in Ireland

2011-07-06T23:17:00.000-07:00

Úna McKevitt conceived and directed the companion pieces Victor & Gord and 565+, which were performed together at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Ireland, last weekend. Seeing the performances under the auspices of the Synge Summer School in County Wicklow, which is directed by the Irish theatre and performance scholar Patrick Lonergan, the evening raised a host of issues for our students and the other Synge School participants about what makes “theatre.” Both performances are devised works. McKevitt openly admits an interest in making theatre from everyday life. Her method is basically to interview friends and relatives and then ask them to perform their stories.

565+, the evening’s first piece, is a monologue by Marie O’Rourke, McKevitt’s cousin, a middle-aged, ordinary Irish woman with a story to tell. As the piece opens, Marie sat in the audience, happily ensconced in the front row, where she described why she loves to sit so close when she’s at the theatre. I was seated beside her that night, having just purposefully moved from the back of the house to the front for similar reasons, so I thoroughly enjoyed Marie’s explanation. After she confessed her obsessive love for the theatre, she mounted the stage to spin a loosely organized story about her life’s trajectory.

Marie got pregnant when she was rather young, and was surprised to find that her boyfriend, Tom, wanted to marry her. Although Tom and his family were delighted by their union, Marie’s family never approved. Marie reconstructs how she walked down the aisle at her wedding, wearing Janus-faced emotions depending on whether she was greeting Tom’s family or her own. Her family’s reaction proved prophetic.

Marie is never happy in the marriage, but conventional mores that insist women should perform happiness in domestic situations mean that she can’t tell anyone about her misery. She’s entrapped in a domestic space in which she’s lonely and bored, and she falls into a depression from which she can’t disentangle herself through any typical means. Although she describes various kinds of therapy—psychological and physical—she ultimately and unexpectedly finds solace at the theatre.

Marie becomes a compulsive theatre-goer, seeing everything she possibly can, because it’s only while hearing other people’s stories and watching other people’s bodies inhabiting them that she can both forget herself and better understand herself. She becomes something of a local hero—theatres hold the curtain for her if she’s running late, and local police don’t mind if she’s driving a bit above the speed limit to get to a performance on time. 565+ turns out to be the number of performances she’s seen . . . and counting.

Úna McKevitt performed with Marie the night we saw the performance, although it seems sometimes Marie is on stage alone and sometimes with a few more people. McKevitt sat mostly silent, watching Marie with a wry smile. The director seemed to efface her own presence for Marie’s, but seemed somehow active and important nonetheless. Wearing aqua jeans and sneakers, and sporting bright red hair, McKevitt sat on a trunk across from Marie for most of the performance, witnessing her story. She served as something of an on-stage prompter, marking the story and their place in it; sometimes, she seemed to offer Marie a cue to help her remember her lines, and other times, McKevitt herself seemed to forget the order of things.

At other moments, McKevitt seemed to serve as Marie’s conscience or companion. In a monologue about loneliness and its abatement, it might have been painful to watch Marie alone on stage. McKevitt’s presence lent her monologue a warm protection; that is, because the story addressed the vulnerabilities of a middle-aged woman with few options, Úna’s stolid, quiet presence projected the confidence that Marie would finally come out of her crisis into something else, something simply better.

At one point, it was clear Marie and Úna had lost their way through the story. They had a bit of a comical exchange about where they were, what they’d forgotten, and where they should pick up. Úna left the trunk on which she’d been sitting stage right, and moved to the worn red chaise on which Marie sits through most of the hour, saying, “I’m going to come over here with you.” Marie moved to make room for her and continued her story-telling as Úna continued her listening.

I found this simple moment moving and somehow true. Úna’s was a gesture of intimacy, of wanting to be closer, of lending physical as well as emotional support that seemed impulsive and right, rather than calculated or “representational.” In fact, in the discussion after both pieces, Úna admitted that she has something of an obsession for reality television shows. Her interest in how real lives are represented seeps into these two live performance pieces. Marie relates her story without much regard for chronology or even coherence, although it has the semblance of a beginning, middle, and end. Slides are projected behind her as if in a photo album, digitized snap-shots of Marie’s personal history: Marie in her wedding gown beside Tom in his tux; Marie and her children; and the occasional motto or phrase.

As the performance begins, the words “I find pain in the truth and truth in pain” are projected, handwritten in capital letters, as a kind of epigraph. Marie’s story is indeed painful—she lost a twin sister when they were born; her marriage was loveless; her life was mostly unmoored, solitary, and unpleasant. But it’s delivered with a light touch, with a sense of irony, and with the comfort of retrospection in which we know, as Marie’s presence on stage testifies, that everything turns out more or less all right. Marie has found—in a place of dissembling, unreality, and untruth; that is, at the theatre—a way to survive her own life.

Marie O’Rourke is not a professional actor. Our students were dismayed by the performance’s lack of virtuosity. They were appalled when Marie and Úna forgot their lines, and by their general lack of actorly command. That Marie told her story under the auspices of theatre—given the professional venue, the use of lighting instruments, the stage furniture and the theatre programs scattered around Marie’s chaise like props—seemed to heighten their expectations that what they saw would meet their standards for “proper” theatre. Instead, they were frustrated by what seemed Marie and Úna’s casual disregard for theatre conventions. And they fretted over their sense of the director and designers’ apathy about whether, for instance, the projections were visible and legible.

But the students’ very disgruntlement seems to me an indication of the performance’s success. McKevitt admits that hers is an anti-theatre project and that the last thing she aims to create is a well-made play. In fact, she said in the talk-back that the actors don’t work from written scripts for 565+ or for Victor & Gord. The performers tell her their stories, and then rehearse them together, but they don’t fix a text.

At the Synge School, Irish theatre scholar Fintan Walsh said in a seminar he lead on queer performance in Ireland that McKevitt’s work should be read within the history of the nation’s theatre as intensely literary, not to mention only white, male, and of course straight. In this context, McKevitt’s rejection of a fixed text is a resistant choice. She dissents from a history of Irish theatre that refuses to narrate the likes of her and those whose stories she helps frame. By rejecting the literary, she asks us to pay attention to stories that historically don’t get written down. She’s committed to staging stories that haven’t been heard before in the public forum of the stage.

Victor & Gord, like 565+, came from McKevitt’s interest in a relationship she’d never seen detailed on stage before. Her sister, Áine McKevitt, and her childhood neighbor, Vickey Curtis, have been friends forever, maintaining a diffident, complicated relationship in which they both love and dislike one another in the manner of people who have and will know each other their entire lives. Áine relates that Úna saw a picture of her and Vickey that inspired her to ask the two to tell stories about their friendship, which in turn became the performance. Victor and Gord greet the audience:

VICTOR: Hi, how’s it going? I’m Victor, born Victoria Elizabeth Margaret Mary Jessica Curtis, and this here is Gord. . . . Gord is short for Gorgeous. I’ll let yiz make your own minds up about that one, though. Her real name is Áine McKevitt.

GORD: The reason we’re here tonight is because my sister, Úna, who christened us the names Victor and Gord, had seen a picture of us in my bedroom in our school uniforms when we’re about sixteen . . . and thought it would be interesting to explore further our friendship, which she describes as frustrated, constipated, and intense. (266, Queer Notions)

An early version of the play, which included two other performers (Ali and Michael) is now collected in Walsh’s edited book, Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork University Press, 2010). But the published script is really just an archival trace, rather than the formal blueprint for subsequent performances. Úna originally directed the show in 2009 as a devised “durational work in progress” for Project Brand New 3 at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. The show then went on to run at the Queer Notions Festival in Dublin and at Dublin’s Fringe Festival.

Like 565+, Victor & Gord is an affecting, happily formless story about three people whose lives usually don’t merit the kind of attention that the theatre provides. Áine and Vickey grew up as neighbors. Their comfort with one another is based on proximity rather than desire; that is, they’re related by place rather than by choice, although their long history makes them unable to sever their established bond. Áine wears a red hoodie that frames her curly blonde hair; Vickey wears a cap, and long shorts, and sneakers, and sports various piercings and buttons that read as “queer.” She relates stories of changing her name to suit her self-performance, and of lesbian conquests and consorts.

Because for whatever reason, Vickey and Áine have trouble looking one another in the eye, most of the performance is played frontally, with the two women speaking to the audience and only glancing at one another. But their wry observations and anecdotes about their adjacent lives detail a contiguous intimacy that means regardless of how far apart they stand, their lives are linked in a rhythm of history that extends into the future.

Neither is a professional performer, and like Marie and Úna, they sometimes forget their place in the story or laugh together at a mistake they make in the blocking. But the two women boast an easy stage charisma that no amount of actor training can provide. Victor and Gord talk about their lives in off-handed ways without giving one anecdote more power or emphasis than another. They reminisce about growing up together, sharing details of what they remember from one another’s homes. They talk about Free Love, when they and their friends “would get together for a night of drinking and snogging; the girls would kiss the girls, the boys would kiss the boys, but not too many boys kissed the boys.”

Gord says, “We actually only did Free Love once but talked about it so much it seemed like we did it every weekend.” Part of the fun of the performance, in fact, is measuring the relative import of an event against its reality; that is, framed as “theatre,” we expect to imbue everything we hear with a cumulative importance. Victor & Gord pulls that particular rug from under us. After the Free Love exchange, Victor admits, “And I actually wasn’t there; I was in Amsterdam making my own kind of Free Love.” This refusal of narrative power felt rather freeing to me. Instead of working to put together a coherent narrative arc, I was content to rest in the moment, enjoying each exchange for what it was, as the performers’ affect encouraged me to do, instead of working to write some broader importance into the story.

In this version of the piece, Vickey and Áine are joined by Jason Breen, who replaced Ali and Michael Barron, the sister and brother who appear in the published play. Jason is a solid, working-class man, who was abused by a hard-drinking father; cared for his mother until she died of cancer; had a younger brother he protected from abuse; and now has a cherished daughter of his own. Jason is trying not to drink his way into his father’s footsteps. He shares his stories with the same matter-of-fact bemusement as Victor and Gord, as if wondering who really cares about his experiences.

Jason wears blue jeans and white t-shirt, and delivers most of his lines facing front, rocking on his heels while a small smile plays over his lips. When he’s not performing, he watches the women and vice versa. Sometimes, their three stories overlap and they speak lines consecutively, looking out in the audience with patient, expectant, but not particularly urgent expressions. As non-actors, they focus lightly on the task at hand, and betray none of the vaunted “concentration” for which professionals strive so hard to achieve. The performers are simply there, with us in the moment of story-telling. They seem to enjoy one another’s presence and they’re large enough, on stage, to project out into the house in appealing ways. But they lack conventional actors’ more calculated desire to please, to be seen, or even to be acknowledged as somehow important.

I found this one of the most productively “queer” aspects of the evening. Only Victor is a lesbian; Áine remarks at one point that people think she’s “gay” because she’s in this performance, but she’s not. But Victor & Gord refuses to play to the audience or to fulfill our expectations of “good” theatre. It prevents spectators from easily seeing themselves reflected in the performance; although some of us might identify and empathize in all sorts of ways, that seems not to be McKevitt’s point. The piece also refuses to make the performance “about” the audience or, in fact, “about,” necessarily, anything at all.

At the same time, despite McKevitt’s rejection of the well-made play tradition, Victor & Gord does perform its connection to Irish theatre conventions. Although the script might not be written down, it’s been rehearsed and constructed in a way that does make poetry from the three performers’ lives. The rhythm of the lines; their overlap and repetition; the images they evoke; and even the general shape of the evening all do evoke the canon of Irish drama, even as Victor & Gord productively twists those conventions. (And as Stacy—FS2—and Fintan Walsh and Patrick Lonergan suggested, Jason Breen serves in this production as rather a Christie McMahon figure, a Playboy of the Western World in his own right, with his appealing swagger and his pub-style relating of the story of triumphing over his own personal demons.)

Still, I found the production's resistance to generic convention an interesting queering of this tradition. We’re asked, over the course of this innovative performance, to witness, just as Úna does for Marie. We’re invited to listen to, perhaps to enjoy, and to observe people we might never otherwise look at, if we passed them on the street or in the market. McKevitt’s achievement with both of these pieces is to pull the ordinary out from the crowd, even if just for a moment, to celebrate the quirkiness and resilience and indeed importance of lives usually lived out of the spotlight.

The Feminist Spectator

Victor & Gord and 565+, conceived and directed by Úna McKevitt, Mermaid Arts Centre, County Wicklow, Bray, Ireland, July 2, 2011.

New Titles in Feminist Performance

2011-06-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

In the category of shameless self-promotion, let me call your attention to two forthcoming titles, one by my partner, Stacy Wolf (or "Feminist Spectator 2") and the other a collection of performances by Peggy Shaw, which I edited for the University of Michigan Press.

Stacy's book, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, can be found on the Oxford University Press web site or on Amazon.

The book is a terrific feminist engagement with musicals from the Golden Age to the present, written for a trade and academic audience in readable prose with keen insights. Stacy is particularly good on the difference between how a musical's book might position its female characters (that is, in often derogatory ways) and how a female star's power in performance often works against her disempowerment by the text.

A Menopausal Gentleman: The Performances of Peggy Shaw, for which I was honored to write the introduction and to edit, is available for pre-order on Amazon. It can also be ordered at the Michigan web site. The book collects Shaw's You're Just Like Your Father; Menopausal Gentleman; To My Chagrin; and Must: The Inside Story, on which Peggy collaborated with the UK-based Clod Ensemble. It also includes interstitial pieces from Peggy's work with Split Britches and her own introduction.

At the ATHE conference at the Palmer House in Chicago this August, Peggy and Lois Weaver will perform their two-hander Lost Lounge and we'll celebrate the publication of Stacy's book and Peggy's collection.

Enjoy both books and join us for the celebration if you're at the conference.

The Feminist Spectator