Anna Deavere Smith: "Untitled" in Austin

I’ve been following Anna Deavere Smith’s career since the 1980s, when she participated in the Women and Theatre Program (WTP) (www.athe.org/wtp) annual meetings that took place before the professional conference of theatre educators every year. Anna was then a freelance actor and teacher based at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Like so many other women performers of color, she was scratching out a living, finding work in regional theatres around the country, picking up teaching gigs here and there, going to conferences, making connections. She was also just starting work on her “On the Road” series, through which she uses interviews to create stories of communities she visits to perform back to them. Her work with "On the Road" investigated American character, and often focused on communities in conflict.

In 1988, in fact, she performed a piece for and about the WTP at the meetings in San Diego. She’d interviewed many of us, in person or by phone, and knit our opinions and stories together in a rather controversial tapestry of images and representations that actually incited a fractious public argument about the Program and its work. Her shamanic skills helped us channel our own issues from the private to the public, to put them onstage for examination and dispute. However upset some participants felt, the moment became historic for the organization. (See my book, Presence and Desire for an accounting of this event, http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=9850.)

In 1993, Anna saw her first national success with Fires in the Mirror, her one-woman show about the conflict in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, between the Lubavitcher Hasidim and the African American residents of the small neighborhood. The chief rebbe’s motorcade had run a red light and struck and killed Gavin Cato, an African American boy from the neighborhood. In apparent retribution, a group of African Americans killed Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian Jew studying with his family in the area. The two events set the community against itself, and prompted physically and verbally violent exchanges that required political and legal city intervention.

Not long after the turbulent events, Anna visited Crown Heights to speak with people from the community, Hasidim and African Americans alike. She also interviewed other New York luminaries and a series of scholars and politicians whose views on the events lent insight or controversy. In her inimitable style, Anna tapes her informants and then learns their words verbatim, performing their vocal inflections and their gestures, assisted only by simple costume pieces and a few props. In Fires in the Mirror, for example, Orthodox Jewish women’s remarks and stories bump up against African American activist Rev. Al Sharpton and others, all played through Anna’s commanding, singular presence. (See http://www.montereymedia.com/literature/americanplayhouse/fires_in_mirror.html)

With Fires’ success, Anna went on to collect stories of the revolt staged in Los Angeles after the Rodney King beating trial verdict was handed down. In Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992 (2000), she performed an even wider range of ethnicities and across genders, as she interviewed and shared the words of Korean grocers, white police officers, African American activists, and many other LA citizens involved in or touched by the events. (See http://www.pbs.org/wnet/stageonscreen/twilight/twilight.html)

House Arrest, Anna's next piece, was less successful as a solo performance, perhaps because of its more diffuse focus. The piece looked at the American presidency, taking on both historical and contemporary events and characters to weave a tapestry of the office and those who’ve served in it. The piece’s politics are more overt, and yet at the same time, its perspective gets a bit blurry, given Anna’s desire to represent such a range of affiliations, commitments, and controversies. This piece, unlike her earlier two, has developed a production life as more than a solo show; regional theatres around the country have produced it with casts of various sizes, races, genders, and ethnicities. I saw an early workshop production of the play with students at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, where it seemed to suffer from the absence of Anna’s magnetism at its center. The script meandered without a central point, and the young performers seemed much less virtuosic at taking on Anna’s impersonation skills.

In a later incarnation of the piece, I saw Anna perform House Arrest solo at the Public Theatre in New York. Here, her canny ability to capture the essence of those whose words she shares, and her facility with creating a kind of social gestus for each of her informants, helped the piece cohere. But still, the more powerful, singular thematics of the earlier two pieces were missing from a story about a more scattered sense of power and social structure. Ironically, the piece performed most palpably Anna’s relationship to power; each interviewee seemed evidence of her own access, rather than a key piece of insight or information into the workings of the presidency. (See http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/theater/reviews/2637/ for John Simon's rather uncharitable review of the production, and http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400033577 for the published text of the play.)

The Zachary Scott Theatre in Austin (http://www.zachscott.com) produced House Arrest as a multi-performer ensemble play a year or two ago, and began a relationship with Anna that’s brought her to town several times to workshop new material. This last May 18 – 21, for example, she performed an untitled work-in-progress about the medical establishment, public health, and, as she remarked in a talk-back after the performance I saw on May 20, the “resilience and vulnerability of the human body.” The piece-in-progress is ambitious and a bit unwieldy, but displays Anna’s remarkable curiosity about people all over the globe and her interest in knitting disparate experiences together to juxtapose their similarities and their differences. In this piece, for example, she offers the words and gestures of African healers and orphanage directors, and American athletic coaches, dancers, bull-riders, oncologists, physicists, politicians, physicians, patients, runners, movie critics, and male escorts, as well as more ordinary people caught up in the complexities of health and disease in some of its local and global manifestations.

Anna selects stories for their metaphorical, as well as their theatrical potential, sharing paragraphs or a few lines from each informant she impersonates. Her intimacy with her subjects means that we hear the voices of people who rarely speak in public forums, from the parents of cancer patients to their doctors, who talk in reflexive modes atypical for their public selves. Anna moves from the famous—former Texas governor Ann Richards, for example—to the more ordinary person and manages to imbue all of their words and stories with truth and dignity. Commanding the three-quarter stage in a white shirt and black pants, over which she layered minimal costume pieces to signal character shifts, Anna held her script in hand. The text, in fact, was continually being written and edited during her visit, transforming daily based on interviews she continued to conduct through the last Austin performance.

Some of her informants were local, based on interviews she conducted at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston or with Austinites; others were with people like dancer/choreographer Elizabeth Streb, whose company is based in New York, or with Zackie Achmat, who runs the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. The rhythms of their speech, through which Anna builds her intimate characterizations, changed rapidly from South and Central African to New York to Central and West Texas and back again. Anna’s facility to get to the root (and the truth) of a voice was perhaps most apparent in the familiar characters: Ann Richards, whose story about protecting her “chi” as she undergoes radiation therapy for esophageal cancer was hilarious and identifiable; Mack Brown, head football coach at UT, who’s something of a local hero; and Joel Siegel, the ABC News movie critic, all prompted laughs of recognition and delight as they seemed to appear in the room with Anna as their host.

Hearing those moments click made me think about how recognition works in performance. That is, watching Anna perform known people, and hearing spectators connect with their voices and their gestures, seems to give people quite a lot of pleasure. Her impersonations of the less well known put her performance more firmly in the realm of conventional theatre, creating as she did characters whose inaccessibility to our knowledge made them fictions of her making for us in this present moment. Their unfamiliarity, however, made them no less beguiling--they simply compelled our attention differently. One of the sweetest parts of the evening was knowing that one of Anna’s Texas informants was in the audience—Dr. Kazumichi Suzuki, a physicist at MD Anderson’s Proton Therapy Center, actually sat behind me, and blushed with pleasure when Anna came into the audience after the performance to shake his hand. That mix of the present and the absent, the real and the unreal, the known and the unknown, creates the excitement and frisson of Anna’s performances.

Her presence in this workshop production was also explicitly marked, in a rather Brechtian fashion, by her announcement of each person before she assumed their character. These simple identifiers worked almost as placards, allowing us to look in a more historicized way at the people she performed. At the same time, we could mark the moment when Anna announced them as herself and trace it to the moment she began speaking in character, and feel privileged to watch this performer at work. In those brief transitional moments, Anna demonstrated that an external (or outside in) approach to character can be as effective as the psychological (or inside out) method still touted by too many actor training programs.

Anna's impersonations were layered, specific, revelatory, not only in how they captured something of the person speaking, but in how they accumulated into the story she wanted to tell, shaped and sharpened by her own keen intelligence and commitment to the issues. The stagehands moved around her, rearranging chairs and hand props like Bunraku attendants. Her method allowed us to note her own charisma, her own presence, and the transmutability of her own rubber face and flexible body to stand in the shoes of another with respect and humility. (See Chapter Three of my book, Utopia in Performance, for further discussion of Anna's ability to stand in another's experience, http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=119520)

What was more evident in this workshop production than in any other piece of Anna’s work I’ve seen her perform was her overriding humanism, her willingness to touch another’s soul with her own to re-enliven them onstage. Not one of her informants was belittled in this piece. While some were played for the inherent comedy of their words (like Richards, who can’t miss being funny, and Brent Williams, a bull-rider who spoke with Anna about toughness of body and mind), each was played with deep respect for who they are, what they do, and how they think, speak, and feel.

The production also proceeded without setting up a binary of good and evil on which too much performance remains based. The medical establishment here was not the enemy, but a conglomeration of individuals working for the common good through various means. Anna establishes a commonality among her subjects that preserves, rather than levels, their differences, and lets us appreciate each of them for their work and their indefatigable commitment.

While I applaud Anna’s refusal to reduce her subjects to simplistic binaries, this work-in-progress has some of the diffuseness of House Arrest as a result. The play has no central conflict, no explicit sides to rehearse, the way that Fires in the Mirror debates the literally black-and-white perspectives of Crown Heights, or Twilight LA’s agon ranges from the police and those victimized by looting to the people of color appalled at their continuing victimization by a race-biased legal system. In the current work, conflict is staged between bodies and disease, or bodies and their own mechanical and spiritual limits, rather than between people.

But her refusal to instantiate a binary allowed Anna to stage the audience talkback as a public forum on ethics—the ethics of death and dying, of medical intervention into life and death, of the government’s role in safeguarding people’s right to control their own bodies and their destinies. In the discussion the night I saw the performance, Anna addressed the embodiedness of grief, and asked how we might persuade governments themselves to grieve. Sympathetic feeling, she suggested, might inspire humane and empathetic action. Although some spectators disagreed, the invitation to discuss such issues in a public forum—talking about public feelings as well as public health policies—offered a refreshing slant on issues of medical, personal, and political ethics.

The Zach Scott Theatre Center is hoping to bring Anna back in the 2006-2007 season to continue her work, which will no doubt eventually find its way into production at the Public Theatre or somewhere else in New York. Zach Scott’s willingness to engage their audiences with the issues of the day is commendable—since I’ve lived in Austin these last six years, my theatre-going has been graced by occasions for reflection with other spectators, as well as the actors and artists who participate in each production. Extending the moment of performance into a communal “cool down,” in which the audience resettles itself around a tacticle embrace of the evening’s tired but energized performers, allows us to publicly honor the evening’s work—the work to create and to make meaning of the performance. These moments—like Anna Deavere Smith’s work—encourage us to confront and respect each other’s humanity. I’m always grateful for the opportunity.

With thanks,
The Feminist Spectator

Actor Training, Gender, and Advertising: An Irritated Reader

Reading a New York Times Sunday Magazine story recently about the “Child Actor Program” at Oakwood Hills in Los Angeles (Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, “Hollywood Elementary,” 4 June 2006 www.nytimes.com), I was struck by how much actor training for young people has changed since I took my first classes at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in the early 70s. These kids, of course, train to be film and television stars, while my friends and I thought we were learning an art form. I could be romanticizing my experience, but it seems to me that the scenes we did from Shakespeare (which I taught to even younger children when I hit my teens) and from Chekhov (I distinctly remember doing a scene from his comedy A Marriage Proposal with a would-be boyfriend) were as much about appreciating a canon of dramatic literature as they were about learning the beats and objectives of the Stanislavski method, whose lessons we applied slavishly.

I find it dispiriting, then, to read of pre-teen kids today who are taught that acting means learning to cry on cue, to do cold readings for casting directors stocking commercials with nubile young things, and who already know that they’ll be cast on the basis of their “type.” Is this the world for which those of us who teach theatre in universities and colleges are training our students? One without a literature, without a history, with only an ever more crassly capitalist future in which celebrity, rather than acting, is really what’s being taught?

Then I look in Theatre Communications Group’s trade magazine American Theatre at all the advertisements for university and college training programs, and I get even more disheartened. Although it’s difficult for an ad to represent the full range of what and how we teach in our very diverse departments, the social images that inform these ads appear to me politically retrograde, and send a message to aspiring actors about their future positions in the field. The photographs that provide the cornerstone of these ads overwhelmingly feature young women upstaged by young men. Regardless of the form or genre implied, whether the classical repertoire or contemporary realism, the gender dynamic is disturbingly the same. While the men are visibly active in the foreground of these ads, the young women stand behind or beside them. The young men look straight out at the audience/reader; the women look at the men, so that they’re invariably represented in profiles that send the ads’ center of gravity elsewhere.

These ads delimit a very small range of theatrical moments. Where is the evidence of formal and social experimentation that surely some of our programs offer? Where is gender and racial and ethnic diversity, and how might we represent it as more central to our educational missions? I’m afraid these ads tell an unfortunate truth in how they attempt to lure prospective students; that is, the power relations they depict faithfully hew to the gender dynamic performed in conventional American theatre and too often unquestioningly replicated in our programs.

How can theatre educators and artists and critics acquiesce to this state of affairs? As citizens of the 21st century, shouldn’t we be inspiring our students to think beyond old-fashioned gender and race and ethnic relations that were shopworn, if not already patently offensive, by the final decades of the 20th century? Shouldn’t the graphic art with which we represent our programs, and the productions we select for our seasons, reflect a world where women and people of color finally take center stage, speak for themselves, and look out to address the audience as citizens of the world of the play in their own right, instead of pitching their focus to the too often still centered white male?

Although the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin isn’t consulted about how our programs are advertised (and would probably never come to a consensus should such an invitation be extended), as a teacher here, in one of the largest undergraduate theatre departments in the country, I, too, am complicit. Our department’s ads focus on the success of our graduates and the proximity we offer to professionals. Each ad typically includes a small photo of a celebrity, surrounded by a running list naming visiting artists and lecturers. In the October 2005 American Theatre, for example, alum John Rando was featured and congratulated on his success with the musical Urinetown (one of the most produced plays in the 2005-2006 season, according to TCG). Rando did visit the department and spend time in classes and at brown bag lunches talking with students. He even expressed a willingness to maintain an on-going relationship with the idea of a musical theatre concentration in the department. Other visitors named in our ad have given workshops or lectures and have also made themselves available to students. Jonathan Miller, for example, took on one of our recent MFA students as an apprentice director, and paved her professional path.

At the same time, what we’re selling, at least without the explicit gender arrangements of the more visually “staged” ads, is proximity to past success and the carrot of reiteration. If Rando and celebrity alum Marcia Gay Harden can be successful, so can the new student, our ad’s reasoning goes, despite the fact that the faculty might have changed or that the department itself has morphed in completely different directions than it took in the 70s or 80s. We’re selling a simulacrum, a mirror, a second- or third-order pretense of reality, based on the illusion that a path carved by someone who began in the same place will end in the same place for someone else. This faith in such repeatability founds the success of residential communities for would-be child actors like the Oakwood: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Frankie Muniz, and Hilary Duff lived there, the article reports, and look what they’ve accomplished.

What we don’t articulate in our advertisements are the values we teach or the methods through which they’re imbued. Even the names of degrees we offer have become opaque, empty placeholders; after all, what is a BA in Acting really about? What do students learn who embark on such programs of study? Will a BA from UT know the same things as a BFA from, say NYU? What’s the difference and how is it expressed in the training and in the work? What do students think they’re getting from these degrees? What does the faculty think they’re teaching?

Shouldn’t students expect, regardless of their formal degree program, to learn the history of the traditions into whose stream they’re about to step? Shouldn’t they engage the ethical questions of what it means to embody someone else’s experience? John Istel wrote in his recent American Theatre essay (www.tcg.org/publications/at) of the prevalence of current plays with children in compromising situations, and the complications of young people performing (or watching) these roles. Shouldn’t we engage our students in these debates?

Shouldn’t we sell prospective students on the value of our programs by touting how we’ll make them better people, sharper thinking artists, and imaginative and creative and engaged citizens, who might go on to reshape the gender and racial dynamics in those advertisements and use theatre to help us all experience something new about our world?

When the girls (interesting, too, that most of those interviewed were girls) in the Times article described what they called their “passion” for acting, I had no idea what they meant by passion or what they meant by acting, and neither, it seemed, did they. Those of us teaching in universities and colleges might start exactly there, to tease out the nature of that passion and how it might morph, and the varied, productive ways of defining that craft. I’m not sure how we can represent passion in an advertisement, but there are certainly more creative, progressive, hopeful, inspirational ways both to market and to ply our craft.

Ranting and wondering,
The Feminist Spectator

"United 93" and "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants"

I had a feeling I didn’t want to see United 93. Seeing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 a couple summers ago threw me into a profound depression that required chemical intervention to resolve. I worried that watching this latest take on the reality of the terrorist hijackings would again unsettle my psyche but, curious about the film and the number of conflicting responses it’d already received, I was persuaded to go along.

The film was indeed horrific, reliving September 11th from the perspective of the people on the doomed plane eventually forced down by its passengers into a Pennsylvania field. But as directed by Paul Greengrass, the movie showed more restraint and a remarkable kind of respect for history and experience, something I wasn’t expecting from a mainstream release.

One of the most salient aspects of the film is how it captured what ordinary life was like before that day, before something so unimaginable happened and proceeded to change us. Watching the dawning realization on the faces of the air traffic controllers and the passengers alike about what was happening along the east coast that day, I was struck by how historical, already, seems that sense of surprise. Although the United States might once again be caught off guard and although we no doubt remain vulnerable, we’re now psychically and emotionally prepared for what on September 10th, 2001, was literally unthinkable.

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the film is its refusal to participate in a knee-jerk discourse of patriotism and individualistic heroism that could have been fabricated for the narrative. None of the men (and of course they were men, although the female flight attendant proves fairly brave throughout) who stormed the terrorists were turned into individual heroes. The film represented them as a group of ordinary people who made the necessary decisions and took the necessary action. United 93 seems almost un-American in its willingness to distribute collective agency for action, and also surprised me with how little it invited the audience to admire the group acting to bring down the plane. In its laudable restraint, the narrative observes, conjectures, and speculates, but never invites us to single out one of the people on the plane for undue hero worship or, for that matter, demonization.

Although the film manages not to completely demonize the hijackers, it can’t resist making them seem alien. The film opens with a fairly long establishing scene that puts the hijackers in their hotel room, preparing themselves for martyrdom. Rather than representing them as full of righteous bloodlust, however, the film, without really personalizing them at all, since both the hijackers and the passengers remain nameless ciphers throughout, manages to express the hijackers’ own terror at their pending acts, and the dizzying fear that grips them even as they go about their unalterable plan. The film watches them praying in dim light; watches them pull their packs together and get ready to leave. Offering just that much of the terrorists’ experience meant that the film shared more of their back-stories than any of the other passengers.

The film could have pandered to sentimentality, using a Flight Plan-style of airplane drama in which each character is carefully established, mostly for his/her good/bad role in the eventual drama, and then plugged into a predictable plot line whose ending is clear from the opening frame. But although we all know what happens at the end of United 93, the film steers away from predictability in the more distanced, external way in which it handles the characters.
The film goes out of its way to represent commonalities between the passengers and the hijackers, especially in scenes toward the end when both groups are seen praying, even if to different gods. The hijacker flying the plane, who’s represented as barely knowing what he’s doing, radiates remorse and ambivalence, along with palpable personal fear. For better or worse, all of these people seemed caught up in something larger than themselves, in a current of history that pulls them inexorably toward a finale in which they’re ultimately only bit players.

The scenes of passengers calling their loved ones to say goodbye, once they understand that they’ll never return to the ground alive, are wrenching, but in a more global or even universal way, since the audience really doesn’t have the time or the information to fashion identifications with any of them individually. The sorrow we feel as several of them make their last cell phone calls is akin to mourning for a horrible, tragic situation that embraces them and us, the hijackers and the passengers, rather than singling out anyone for more specific, particularizing grieving. This choice made my reaction to the film that much more poignant; it asked me to mourn for us all, for everyone in the world touched by these events.

The film escalates in pace and tone until it achieves a kind of hysteria that proceeds to the final bloody encounter between passengers and hijackers, but the emotion is a shared, rather than an individual (and what would be a typically gendered) one. Even the air traffic controllers and the Air Force people on the ground trying to piece together what’s happening to the plane aren’t singled out by their heroism (even though many of those in the film are real people, replaying the events of the day, rather than actors reimagining them). Perhaps the film’s most political gesture is to underline how flummoxed all the officials were and how little protocol they could rely on in this particular situation.

To hear the Air Force personnel begging for rules of engagement, and to see an FAA administrator trying to making decisions on his own, on the spot, without any guidance from the government, is the most chilling and in a way humanizing part of the film. Here, United 93 picks up where Fahrenheit 9/11 left off, underscoring how Bush and his administration were nowhere in evidence at the most devastating moment of recent American history. Watching the air traffic control staff and the Air Force personnel frantically trying to connect with higher government powers, I could only picture Bush in Moore’s film, frozen in that kindergarten classroom listening to a story with his lips pursed and blank fear in his eyes after he’s been told that planes have flown into the World Trade Center.

Seeing Michael Moore’s film sent me into a major tailspin, and I left United 93 feeling similarly, hammered by a tremendous loss of my typical faith in the power we have to change things. I left both films embarrassed at the naiveté with which I write books with “hope” in their subtitles. A sense of utter futility overcame me, thinking about how much is wrong in the world and how incapable any of us are of really effecting meaningful change. These moments of despair make me feel defeated and ineffectual, paralyzed and powerless, and just silly in my life of hope and conviction. And that’s not good. To me, falling off that particular horse means giving in to something evil and oppressive in the world, something that insists on its version of truth at the cost of my own, however fragilely mine is held.

So when I got home from United 93 that night—still wondering why we need to see such films, why they need to be made, even knowing that it’s because history needs them, and so do we, so that we don’t forget so easily what happened and how it made us feel and think—I settled in front of television to allow popular culture to help me escape for a moment instead of reminding me to remember and forcing me to confront my own hope-filled futility.

I surfed channels until I found Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the ‘tween girls’ story based on a young adult novel by Ann Brashares about four friends who find a pair of pants that miraculously fits all of them, which they send back and forth to each other while they’re apart for the summer. The magical pants prompt an epiphany of sorts for each girl, through rather stock plots: One finds love in the Greek isles with her grandparents and a dreamy fisherman. Another goes away to soccer camp where she seduces one of the instructors, looking for the love she lost when her mother committed suicide. Another (America Ferrera) goes to visit her father for the summer, only to find that he’s brutally replaced her and her Puerto Rican mother with the whitest of white families.

The most interesting character is a would-be filmmaker (Amber Tamblyn) with a social conscience who interviews people who work at places like Wal-Mart about their lives, but can’t really see their humanity until she meets a 12-year-old girl who’s dying of leukemia. The kid teaches the older girl to see life ethically and expansively before she (of course) dies, but there’s also something refreshingly queer about their relationship. I appreciated the baby-dyke outlook of Tamblyn’s character, and the insights about racism the film tries to share, even if their resolution is too pat.

Although I knew as I watched that Sisterhood was manipulating my emotions and reassuring me with its conventions, I needed the easy tears the film prompted, and the beautiful settings and the cute kids and the ironic outsider/queer kid and all that predictable plotting to make me feel a bit more even again. Sometimes, narrative is just reassuring, even when we want to change the stories it tells about the women and the girls, even when we see its holes and pettiness, even when we’re profoundly aware of its unreality and the damage it can do when it’s not engaged it critically. The narratives of United 93 and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants serve two wildly different social functions. I think we need them both.

The Long Hiatus . . .

I can only offer an apology for these three months of silence in these cyberpages. Despite my best intentions to write bi-monthly, I’m afraid that life intervened. Although I resent the loss of my writing time, I’m trying to persuade myself that this is a fact of life for a woman whose attention is often split among multiple fronts. My life as a professor/academic (the latter seems a dirtier word than the former, although they no doubt run neck-to-neck in some conservative vocabularies) requires quite a lot of time at the committee meetings that regulate a “faculty-governed” academic’s life. And teaching, too, takes a certain kind of ruminative and organizational energy, although I most often find that my time in the classroom inspires my critical faculties and facilitates my blogging.

Then there’s the ever-thwarted attempt to have a personal life that’s not about criticism or academic politics. The old feminist adage that the personal is political sometimes feels like a prison sentence instead of a wise theory about the imbrications of various aspects of our lives. Sometimes, I want to close a door on my public self. Instead, more often than not, I feel the public seeping into the private and vice versa in increasingly discomfiting ways.

My time in April and May (which required resting all of June) was consumed with a search committee process (for a new dean of the College of Fine Arts) that became personally and professionally bruising, testing my faith in higher education. I always, perhaps naively, assume that people are operating in good faith. In this particular case, I found too much ill-will, cantankerous complaint, rumor-mongering, and back-stabbing, which prevented a clear eye on the purpose of the hire, which was to find the best possible candidate to lead our college.

The irony of academic scuffles like these is that no matter how vociferously debated and no matter the outcome, no one dies; no one is critically injured; and no one loses their job. The stakes are absurdly low for the amount of devious double-dealing conducted in this business, which is partly what makes academics a laughingstock to the rest of the world. That said, I have to keep believing that institutions of higher learning can change, that UT won’t just atrophy under a network of leaders who care more about the status quo than they do about the future of the arts. Without that faith, I couldn’t do my job. And my real job is my teaching and my writing and my engagement with the arts and culture as theory and as practice.

Again, I apologize for my silence. Back to being a spectator.

Visiting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

We had a lovely time in Ashland, our first visit to the renowned regional theatre. Ashland is a charming small town, whose main street is lined with chic, interesting shops and gourmet restaurants, all in the shadow of pine covered hills that gesture to mountains beyond. The theatre is Ashland’s major economic engine; its three theatres sit together on a small rise above the main drag. The facilities are comfortable and warm, even when Ashland, in the winter, is relatively damp and cold. The operation seems impeccably run; our guide for the backstage tour was one of the company’s 60 resident actors, whose smart, informative talk fascinated the 15 or so participants who followed him, rapt, around the theatres’ front of house and back.

The festival attracts spectators from all over the country but especially from the San Francisco to Portland corridor, many of whom subscribe or come to Ashland every year to take in four or five productions at a time. This is the festival way—the OSF, the Shaw Festival, Stratford, and the Utah Shakespeare Festival all operate on a similar structure of presenting productions in repertoire, so that visitors can saturate themselves with multiple plays a few days at a time. The OSF offers eleven productions a year, nine of which run in repertoire at the height of their season. In a two-day visit, we only got to see two, but the experience whet our appetite for more.

The Importance of Being Earnest

This is my favorite of Wilde’s plays, in which I performed when I took acting classes as a kid at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. Wilde’s bon mots and wit stayed with me, and all these years later I find them even more pungent, smart, and topical. Perhaps this is why Earnest is being performed at regional theatres all over the country this year, a coincidence I found inexplicable until I saw the play again.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Angus Bowmer Theatre is an intimate, warm space with a modified, small thrust stage that brings the audience close to the actors, making the back row of the 600-seat hall seem not very far away at all. The Earnest set design builds the play’s few different scenes on a turntable, which revolves easily and prettily from interiors in the city to exteriors and interiors in the country, neatly outlining the play’s dance between urban and rural moral codes.

The set’s colors and textures are lush and rich, but the design is also playful; in the last scene of the play, busts of famous playwrights stand atop library shelves. Although the play is set at the end of the 19th century, the anachronistic busts depict writers from across generations, including Coward, Shakespeare, and Wilde himself. The joke plays not only visually, but metaphorically, underlining the play’s resonance for contemporary audiences.

The double-identity plot, all of which hinges on the name “Ernest” and its homonym “earnest,” is a silly romance in which Jack Worthing cooks up an incorrigible brother named Ernest who’s always getting himself into trouble in whatever place Jack isn’t—the city or the country. His ward, Cecily, falls unaccountably in love with the idea of the character, so that when Jack’s dandy friend Algernon Moncrieff arrives, passing himself off as the wayward brother, she willingly falls into line as his lady.

Jack, on the other hand, passing himself off as Ernest in the city, woos Algie’s cousin Gwendolen, daughter of the great dowager, Lady Bracknell. Both women love the men because their names are Ernest. Both men, caught in the bind of their subterfuges, require immediate re-christening with the required name, or they’ll lose their lovers’ faith and their hands in marriage. Complications ensue, all of which are resolved for the best in typical farcical fashion.

The play is filled with asides to the audience, in which a character speaks his or her inner thoughts, which often contradict those he or she shares openly. This gives a good production something of a Brechtian feel, as the actors address the audience directly and collude with them in the evening’s good fun and critical stance. The OSF actors deliver their asides with crystal clear good cheer and a knowing chuckle to the crowd, inviting us in on amusing, sometimes wry, always intelligent jokes.

As Wilde intended, the mores of Victorian society are satirized mercilessly, but the jokes seem fresh more than 100 years later because contemporary American society under the reign of George the W is as riddled with fake sanctimony and ridiculous propriety as the culture Wilde criticized. The superficiality and slavishness to appearances over substance; the silly repartee that substitutes for real engagement; the astounding self-centeredness of each character; the strict hierarchy of social roles and interaction; all these resonate in contemporary American culture, and make Wilde’s parody more timely than ever.

A Winter’s Tale

I’m usually not a fan of Shakespeare productions. The language, instead of seducing me with its complexity and poetry, tends to alienate me, and I take even longer than usual to fall into the rhythms of the play. Gertrude Stein wrote about going to the theatre that in her first few moments of watching every production she experienced “syncopated time.” She fell behind the narrative as she tried to absorb the scene, the atmosphere, the characters, and the experience of being in the world of the audience as well as the world of the play.

My own sense of syncopation at Shakespeare is always attenuated. I’m tripped up not by the lack of naturalism, or by the stinted speech and sometimes awkward dress and the way the actors’ bodies bend themselves into different poses and attitudes as a result; I don’t necessarily need naturalism with my performances to make them mean something. I’m more distracted by how archaic the language sounds, and how hard I have to work to find my way in (to “blast” my way in, as avant-garde playwright and director Richard Foreman used to say about what spectators needed to do to enter the off-kilter world of his performances). Often, I never make it, because I’m put off, irritated that we continue to venerate a writer who was simply successful in his own day and never meant to be so venerated, but comes to us as canonical through a centuries-long discourse of critical, ideological, and pedagogical insistence.

I was surprised and moved, then, to find myself entranced by the OSF’s production of A Winter’s Tale, which I’d seen only once before, in a muddled university theatre production almost 20 years ago that left a bad taste in my mouth for the play ever since. The OSF production, directed by Libby Appel and performed in their indoor Angus Bowmer Theatre (where, remarkably, I’d seen Earnest the night before, evidence of the OSF’s marvelous quick set changeovers), is a taut version of the text, running just under three hours and launching immediately into its storytelling, holding the audience spellbound from its first moment to its last.

Paulina enters to sit on the steps that ring the front of the thrust stage with King Leontes’ and Queen Hermione’s son, telling him she has the perfect tale for a winter’s night. Before we know it, the frame has receded and the central story begun, with Leontes and Hermione at a party in their Sicilian kingdom, both trying to encourage Leontes’ friend King Polixenes of Bohemia to extend his visit. When Hermione’s entreaties work, after Leontes’ have failed, the king becomes unaccountably suspicious and flies into a jealous rage that undoes the rest of their collective lives.

While it’d be silly to look for rational reasons for Leontes’ outsized, violent fears, and while the story requires a certain suspension of disbelief throughout, Appel’s production convinces us not to worry too much about the details. Her succinct direction allows us to attend to the emotions, the nuances of each moment as they’ve vividly conveyed. The actors’ skill lies in their ability to conjure the immediacy of the present, even as their actions gesture toward a tragic future or mire them in a mistaken and unhappy past. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a production of Shakespeare in which the story moved so fluidly and took my imagination and my emotions along so effortlessly.

I still tripped over the experience of that awkward, archaic syntax and vocabulary, but the actors made such good sense of the language that it felt colloquial. I was drawn into a story that seemed told in the vernacular, and left free to concentrate on the folly of power and jealousy, of retribution exacted for wrongs no one even dreamed of committing. The inevitable deaths and unfolding sorrows felt resonant and new, as we watched the king come to terms with the devastation wrought by his own insecurities.

Although the last act bogs down in second-hand story telling, in which minor characters spend a long time reporting on unseen events, the visually spare, compellingly choreographed production evokes a sense of redemption, of the world setting itself once again aright after a terrible, too human wrong has turned it awry. Because the play is finally a romance, the long dead Hermione is resurrected to live happily ever after with her king, and the relationships are forged anew. But the spare, sharp production manages to let the sorrow linger, as though even while we watch Leontes and Hermione reunite, we know that the residue of what they lost through his jealousy (time, common memory, and especially, their sweet son) will haunt them, offering us a cautionary tale about abuses of power and the fatal stupidity of overactive male egos threatened by strong, seductive women.

The Feminist Spectator

Catching Up with Culture

I guess they say April is the cruelest month, but for me, February and the beginning of March proved most crushing. My resolve to write twice a month was foiled by other commitments and obligations, and while I longed daily for the time to write, it just never transpired.

I’m now posting from a Sheraton Hotel, looking out at the rainy banks of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, where I’ve escaped for spring break. We’re seeing a production at the Oregon Children’s Theatre later today; leaving tomorrow to make our way to Eugene through the pinot noir region of the Willamette Valley; and arriving the next day in Ashland, to spend a couple of nights seeing productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’m looking forward to a rejuvenating week, one that should give me plenty of things on which The Feminist Spectator can ruminate in these cyberpages.

To catch up, however, from this unfortunate six-week lull, I have various things on which to report and discuss, which I’ll do in backwards chronological order. First, the controversy over the New York Theatre Workshop’s “postponed” production of My Name is Rachel Corrie; second, the Oscar broadcast and Brokeback Mountain’s upset by Crash; and finally, in my next posting, three productions I saw in New York over the blizzard weekend in February 2006.

My Name is Rachel Corrie Postponed at NYTW

My Name is Rachel Corrie is a play based on the journals and emails of an American peace activist who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer she was attempting to keep from destroying Palestinian property. Devised by British actor Alan Rickman and The Guardian journalist Katherine Viner, the play was produced to strong reviews at London’s Royal Court Theatre, which apparently negotiated a transfer to New York Theatre Workshop for this spring. Last week, however, Jim Nicola, artistic director of NYTW, announced that the theatre intended to postpone the production indefinitely. Nicola said, “We were not confident that we had the time to create an environment where the art could be heard independent of the political issues associated with it” (see http://www.playbill.com/news/article/98213.html for the story and Nicola’s quote).

NYTW does have a track record for producing risky theatre productions with a decidedly political slant. In fact, I opened this blog last August with their production of the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs. Right now, they’re presenting Will Power’s The Seven, which tells in hip-hop verse, with choreography by Bill T. Jones and direction by Jo Bonney, Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes. NYTW brought us Jonathan Larson’s Rent, Tony Kushner’s Slavs, various Naomi Wallace productions, including The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, and various other productions by playwrights whose commitment to critically engaging the social is clear-eyed and articulate (the many problems with Rent notwithstanding). Nicola insists in Playbill that his theatre is committed to “help our audiences and our community engage in an open and civil discourse on issues of our time. Our purpose for being is to create the most conducive place for these conversations.”

Yet many see his stance as a dodge for what they perceive as his capitulation to the local Jewish community, which stood fast against the production. Earlier stories in the New York Times—first reported by Jessie McKinley on February 28, 2006—reported that Nicola “said he had decided to postpone the show after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feelings about the work. ‘The uniform answer we got was that the fantasy that we could present the work of this writer simply as a work of art without appearing to take a position was just that, a fantasy,’” McKinley notes. Artists from around the world—including actor Vanessa Redgrave and New York playwright Christopher Shinn, a member of NYTW’s affiliated artists’ group, The Usual Suspects—slammed the theatre for retreating from the potential controversy.

I haven’t seen the play, and obviously can’t judge it myself on anything but the reports I’ve read and its glowing London reviews (the producers have secured a transfer to the West End, after which they’re looking for another New York theatre to which to move it). But I can, like many others, consider NYTW’s decision to postpone the production and find it lacking.

Given the recent passing of the second iteration of the Patriot Act; given the wiretapping scandal that Bush’s administration has so neatly sidestepped; given the debacle of Dubai’s operation of US ports; given the lack of open public discourse about these and so many other issues, doesn’t a theatre company with a reputation for social commitment have a responsibility to offer its stages to for discussion and debate, however acrimonious? As Edward Rothstein points out in his March 6th “Connections” piece in the Times, the backlash NYTW sought to contain by the postponement has erupted in any case, without giving audiences the opportunity to actually see the play and decide for themselves what it means and what it might tell us about the state of global politics and our common humanity. We might, in fact, find that the play is slight or even trite, and not worthy of the political burdens it’s now been forced to bear. If we do find it moving and illuminating, better we should come to those conclusions by witnessing the production ourselves.

Nicola’s decision isn’t surprising. How can theatres not feel cowardly, when resources are shrinking, when public support for the arts is practically non-existent, when theatres rely on donors to fill the gaping holes in their budgets? But if the bottom line drives artistic decisions, then why continue to produce? Nicola should have produced My Name is Rachel Corrie this spring, and invited those of us who would have attended the production—to decide for ourselves what it means—to help support NYTW by becoming donors ourselves, by supporting not just this production, but future work that might take what some consider political risks. By bowing to pressure (real or imagined) not to agitate the sympathies of present donors, Nicola and company missed an opportunity to cultivate those who might have surprised him by assuming their own places on his donor rolls, happy for the chance to support a company willing to take a risk by producing a topical play.

Brokeback Mountain’s Best Picture Loss

Those of us who thought for sure that Brokeback had a lock on the Best Picture Oscar last Sunday (March 5th, 2006) were surprised when Crash won instead. Plenty of speculation surrounds the Academy’s decision. Ultimately, this matters very little in the scheme of things, except perhaps as a fleeting cultural moment in which we might learn something about the preferences and prejudices of a very small, self-selected group of artists who represent “the Academy,” artists given an undue amount of power to sway public opinion on the movies.

Some commentators decided the nod to Crash demonstrated Brokeback backlash, a gesture of dismissal for the “gay cowboy movie” that had stirred so many sympathies and inspired so much editorial ink and tabloid images. Oscar night host Jon Stewart captured the spirit of the thing with his amusing, cleverly edited montage of cowboy films past, all spliced to underline the homoerotic implications always present in the genre. Nothing new about Brokeback, the clips seemed to say, except that Ennis and Jake consummate what in many of these films is an unstated, inarticulate longing.

Brokeback might not be a “great” film—but then, is Crash? Or Lord of the Rings, or many of the films that won Best Picture in years past? Crash’s ensemble drama offers terrific performances by actors often lost in the shuffle of the Hollywood cash cows they’re stuck milking—Sandra Bullock, Brendan Frasier, Ryan Phillipe, in particular, all turn in wonderful moments in the carefully intercut narrative that let them transcend the one-note acting of their previous work. In Crash, they remind us that they’re artists of a sort, willing and able to stretch themselves out of stereotypes and into characters whose ambivalences and racism and corruption (examined or not) seems real and painful and somehow instructive. Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton, and the terrifically talented Terrence Howard (whose turn in Hustle and Flow provides the perfect social counterpoint to his upwardly striving, assimilationist, soul-deadened television director in Crash) also provide moments of complicated insight into the murky, always gray but sometimes illuminating and hopeful areas of contiguity in a city (or country) where so many cultures cohabit and collide.

But Crash’s conceit—determined as it is to let lives bump against each other and to find, in that serendipity, moments of both brutality and redemption—is finally a bit too pat, as the stories line up surprisingly neatly in how they touch the central and radiating tragedies. I found Crash thought-provoking and at times moving, although I’m not sure it told us anything new about bigotry and class privilege or offered us original perspectives or ways out of the quagmire of racial suspicion and disregard.

While I couldn’t turn off the Oscar show applauding Crash as a “first” (the first film to address racism in LA and in the US so trenchantly, for example, would be an overstatement, applied here), I could have left the long evening of tepid television moved by Brokeback’s distinction as the first film with gay or lesbian content to win Best Picture. Brokeback, too, might not be a “great” film (a distinction with no doubt as many definitions as there are viewers), but its story—told so majestically by Ang Lee and his cinematographer, and so poignantly by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal—does offer us something new. I chafe when people call it the “gay cowboy movie,” because its story resonates more widely than that. Brokeback tells the historical yet resonant story of two men in the 60s who killed their spirits living lies because they couldn’t see anything in their futures but certain violence if they chose to own up to and publicly live out their passion for each other.

The wrenching image of the two shirts hung one over the other, first seen in Jake’s abandoned closet in his parents’ house, and finally seen as the signature, underscoring image in Ennis’s closet in his trailer, provides the moving history lesson that’s ultimately Brokeback’s greatest contribution to contemporary culture. The image crystallizes the painful reminder that these men’s love for each other was forbidden to be seen, and could only be demonstrated metaphorically by intertwining the arms of the fabric in which their arms once held each other. The two shirts on one hanger remain tucked carefully away behind the firmly shut doors of the closets in which Ennis and Jake were forced, by social convention and constricting morality, to lead their truncated lives.

Leaving the Oscar telecast knowing that a Best Picture award for Brokeback might have opened those metaphorical closet doors would have meant a lot in a cultural moment in which gays and lesbians feel their own version of public backlash, when state after state holds referenda about constitutionally closing off marriage and sometimes adoption rights, and when conservative legislators and far-right watch dog groups monitor televised images for “pro-gay” content. Under the social extremism of the Bush administration, it’s “hard out there” not just for a pimp (the rap anthem from Hustle and Flow that provided its own, more pleasing upset when it won Best Song), but for queer people trying to live their lives with dignity and to take pleasure in our sameness and our difference from other Americans. I would have been moved to witness Brokeback be named the first film about gay people to win Best Picture.

But I guess we’ll have to keep waiting.

In “Catching Up II,” I’ll report from a feminist perspective on the New York productions of Sweeney Todd (starring Patti Lupone and Michael Cerveris), The Little Dog Laughed (the Hollywood closet play by Douglas Carter Beane), and The Color Purple (the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s award-winning novel).

I hope to keep this blog up-to-date from now on, because it’s so important to keep the dialogue going. I always appreciate your responding posts and comments—let’s keep talking about what all this means and what we might observe and say and do to keep our culture progressive.

The Feminist Spectator

Utopia in Performance

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I wanted you to know that my latest book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, has been published by the University of Michigan Press.

Eventually, the book will be in bookstores around the country.

The book is now available from the publisher at http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=119520 and should also be available online from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other internet booksellers.

When I figure out how to add images to this blog, I'll attach the cover!

My best,
The Feminist Spectator

Wendy Wasserstein, In Memoriam

Wendy Wasserstein died today at 55 from lymphoma. The New York Times and other media outlets have reported the details of her life and death, to which I want to add just a few words of my own.

I haven't always been a fan of Wasserstein's work. In my book Presence and Desire, I devote a large part of one chapter to analyzing the conservative threads in her popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Heidi Chronicles. Although the play purports to be about contemporary U.S. feminism, I argued that in fact, it launched its bon mots at the expense of lesbians and a more radical critique of gender relations. Wasserstein's heroine epitomized the generation that wanted "it all"--the job, the baby, the marriage, success on the dominant culture's terms without too much strife or too much self-reflection. That Heidi, at the end of her play, was left with a baby and a good job but without a man (apparently like Wasserstein herself) seemed a paltry gesture of critique.

When I directed a summer theatre production of the play at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 80s, I took every opportunity to lampoon the comedy, stretching out its jokes with sight gags and other deconstructive critical commentary that I hoped would point up some of her liberal feminist excesses. I tried to use theatricality to suggest a more thorough-going critique of the play's description of white women's rush to marriage, children, family and away from more imaginative ways of imagining social relations.

But Wasserstein's play proved surprisingly durable. Despite my attempts to engage it critically with bold visual choices and strong female performances (to counter what I saw as the ultimately cipher-like character of Heidi), Wasserstein's comedy spoke through and her liberal critique won. You've got to admire a writer that tough.

And at this remove, in fact, I find that I do. Wasserstein was bound to take some hits, as one of the first women playwrights to succeed in the mainstream. Her subsequent plays, Sisters Rosensweig, An American Daughter, Isn't it Romantic, Old Money, and her most recent piece, Third, played either on or off Broadway, often with luminous casts filled with remarkable performers happy for the choice roles she wrote for women. Wasserstein was part of the inner circle of New York theatre, friends with powerful directors and other writers; her plays made money and were reproduced consistently at regional and community theatres.

Wasserstein never meant her writing to foment the feminist revolution. Her world was part and parcel of the one of which she wrote: the moneyed elite, women who in the 50s would have been constrained to their roles as family matriarchs, doling out love and dollars, who in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s--the years Wasserstein chronicled so deftly--had more and more perplexing choices that consumed them with the deep ambivalence that often roiled the clever surface of her plays. Uncommon Women and Others, her first play, which famously starred Glenn Close, Swoozie Kurtz, and Meryl Streep in its first production, remains on of the most trenchant dismemberings of the angst of early feminism for upper-class white women with new choices. The play deserves remounting, to see what it might have to offer these many decades after its first production.

Wasserstein's humor contributed to feminist discourse in the theatre in numerous ways. Her plays are simply funny, and tweak the stereotype of feminists as humorless and strident. She wrote bright, comic plays with a twinge of sadness, melancholy that became more evident and more cutting as her career went on.

When The Heidi Chronicles was first produced on Broadway, I spoke with a few colleagues on a panel devoted to the play at one of our academic theatre conferences. The room was packed with people who'd seen or read the play, mostly feminists like me, furious with the way Wasserstein had represented our lives, determined to critique her elitism and her one-sidedness, her glib erasure of the real blood, sweat, and tears that formed the platform on which Heidi came eventually to dance with a baby in her arms. We were disappointed that she hadn't told it all.

But I have to admit I will miss hearing what else she might have had to say. Who will fill her shoes, as a popular, commercially succesful woman playwright unafraid to at least address feminism by name, as well as by concept and conceit, courageous enough to look at women's lives and insist that they be the universal to which other human beings can relate and aspire, empathize and identify? Many other women playwrights write as well or better than Wendy Wasserstein, with perhaps more nuance, more complexity, more daring forms and contents. But who will gain the power to tell some of our stories on Broadway, as she's done so consistently all these years? Who will replace her as a public humorist, as someone to be counted on to laugh at our foibles as human beings from the perspective of women in a way that Broadway audiences can find accessible, as well as maybe provoking and just a little bit challenging?

If Wendy Wasserstein's goal was to assimilate, she did it very well, and carved a path for women in the theatre that we have to be careful doesn't close up after her. She'll be missed.

The Feminist Spectator

Back to the Movies . . .

. . . because they’re always a pleasure and so telling about the state of American culture in all its permutations and variety. Spoiler alert.

Match Point

Woody Allen’s latest has been heralded as his return to form, after a series of films that made little impression on the zeitgeist. This one breaks his stride, however, by relocating his preoccupations to London, in a story about a working class tennis pro (Chris, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who befriends a man (Tom) from a hugely wealthy British family, insinuates himself into their circle, and eventually marries Tom’s sister (Chloe), all the while lusting after the American actress (Nola, played by Scarlett Johansson) who for a time is engaged to Tom. When Chris and Nola consummate their affair, he becomes obsessed with having her and jeopardizes the privilege he’s acquiring by association with his newfound friends.

Allen tells a good story. The narrative moves well and is filled with remarkably natural, even improvised-sounding dialogue that overlaps and repeats and intermingles in the messy, abrupt way that mirrors how we talk to each other. Such freely formed speeches make the characters sound real, and yet their actions are difficult to believe. The plot, as some critics have pointed out, resembles A Place in the Sun, which tells a similar story of a young man torn between the privilege he desires and the woman he truly loves. But in Allen’s retelling, it’s not clear that Chris really has the capacity to love anyone, not even himself.

As a result, the film’s central moral dilemma is hollow and unpersuasive. When Chris is quickly promoted through his father-in-law’s business, he doesn’t seem pleased or satisfied with his success, preoccupied as he is with his affair with Nola. At the same time, while Chris seems genuinely fond of Chloe, he’s almost too compliant with her increasingly strident demands that he have sex with her so that they can produce a child. Allen means him to be torn by relationships, but instead, the film observes him being torn only by circumstance.

For instance, when Nola inadvertently becomes pregnant (even though it’s Chris and Chloe who are trying frantically to conceive), she instantly retires her sultry seductiveness and becomes a needy, shrewish “other woman,” desperate for Chris to tell Chloe about their affair and for him to leave his wife. All the nuance of her character before the pregnancy vanishes; she morphs from a melancholy, slightly mysterious figure with a great deal of allure into an ordinary complaining, almost-wife who drags on Chris’s energy and attention.

While the film does indeed carry spectators along in its suspense, I found the choice of violence to free Chris from Nola predictable and kind of reprehensible. Here’s another story so familiar it’s practically mythological: the husband who needs to get rid of either his wife or his mistress so that he can maintain the appearance of sexual and financial success and “have it all.” (Why aren’t men excoriated for that desire, the way women are?) Once Chris kills Nola, setting up the murder so that it looks like a drug-related robbery that she unfortunately interrupts, we see him sweating and crying and unable to sleep, as though these performances of a conscience are enough to persuade us that his anguish is ethical or real.

Perhaps even Allen doesn’t trust his script. He interrupts the final third of the action with a “dream” sequence styled straight out of his earlier, more familiarly New York “kvetch” movies (or out of the mainstream chestnut, Ghosts): Chris hears noises in the night and enters his kitchen to find the ghosts of Nola and her neighbor (whom he also killed, in what he calls “collateral damage”) berating him for what he did to them. He tries to rationalize his actions, quoting Sophocles (of all things) and explaining in that anachronistically erudite, contemplative, ironic style of Allen’s films why he did what he did. This eruption into meta-narrative exposition is clumsy and out of place, even as a stylistic flourish. When this scene jump-cuts into a shot of the detective who suspects Chris bolting awake in bed claiming he knows that Chris did it, Allen’s hand becomes heavy indeed.

But because Chris is “lucky”—an emblem of the capriciousness of fate that Allen stresses throughout the script, from the opening shot, in which a tennis ball balances on top of a net, poised to drop to the opponent’s side or fall on Chris’s own—Chris gets away with the murder and is left to stew in the soup of his own guilt. But finally relieved from the narrative suspense of wanting to know what happens (and after a few unusually false endings), I found myself completely unmoved and perplexed by what I found an utterly predictable, conventional piece of work.

Not to mention its gender implications. Chloe is the vaguely insipid, innocent wife, who can’t see the betrayal that’s right in front of her; Nola is the failed actress who her rich former friends eventually label as “hard” and possibly a prostitute, reinstating the (very) old equation of women who perform on the stage as whores. Rather than somehow letting her revel in her unconventional, deeply physical sexuality (she and Chris first have sex outside in a field, during a driving rain), Allen’s narrative choice to make Nola pregnant reduces her not just to the “other woman,” but to the would-be other wife/mother, implying that mother or whore are (still) the only choices women have.

Tom’s family—whose too British prattling about business and horses and socializing provides the backdrop for Chris’s adventures—chatter incessantly about reproduction. Even though Tom and his wife (the more appropriate woman he marries instead of Nola) are pregnant at the alter, Tom and Chloe’s mother keeps badgering Chloe to get pregnant, as though she’s not fully part of the human race unless she’s reproducing it. “Family,” in this movie, is both empty and hegemonic, absolutely central to a social process that’s ultimately bankrupt even for the captain of industry Chris becomes. Allen doesn’t seem to be indicting the family, however, so much as promulgating these shopworn values.

Chris is the anti-hero, the one who suffers from his violent determination to hold on to his hard-won, newly privileged social position at all costs. Chris is the one who’s killed his child by his mistress. Chris is the one who, because he’s always been different, will finally never belong to this club of superficiality and wealth to which who would want to belong anyway?

Well over two hours later, I come away saying, “So what?” And shouldn’t we expect more than that?

My best,
The Feminist Spectator

The Delicate Balance of Criticism, II

I’d promised last month to talk about Lara Shalson’s article in the latest issue of Theatre Topics. Theatre Topics, by the way, is an excellent, accessible academic journal that addresses theatre and performance practice as well as ideas about contemporary culture. One of the latest special issues addresses “devising” theatre, in which groups of artists collaborate on texts that they create from the ground up, often with local communities. I highly recommend the journal for its reports on innovative approaches to practice, and its very good critical engagements with the teaching, as well as the making, of theatre and performance.

Shalson’s article, “Creating Community, Constructing Criticism: The Women’s One World Festival 1980-1981,” addresses the critical community that participated in the international performance festival which, 25 years ago, prompted the founding of New York’s WOW Café, which became the most vital generator of feminist performance in the 20th century. Shalson uses this historical event to launch an inquiry into critics’ position vis-à-vis community-based performance, and to challenge some of our received notions about the relationship of critics to the work they review. She describes our understanding of the critic as “outside” of the theatre-making community, and how community-based work is presumed to be “insular” and “confined,” “preaching to the converted.”

Shalson does a good job of arguing that what she calls “constructing criticism,” on the contrary, might contribute to the process of creating community through performance. “[T]hese two activities,” she writes, “are mutually reinforcing rather than oppositional and must be thought together” (223). That is, performance helps to create communities as well as the critics who write about it; critics, in this model, aren’t outside the work, but are part of its creation in the moment in which it’s seen. Rather than asserting power over a performance, or positioning herself as the intermediary between the community and the presumptively larger, more important dominant culture, the critic is a participant in a local process of witnessing and engaging performance.

As Shalson points out, the festival nature of the Women’s One World event highlighted the mutually constituting relationship of critics and performers. The festival, she suggests, “created the same reception conditions for critics as they did for all participants,” which resulted in a “heightened self-awareness on the part of critics about their role in relation to this community-based performance” (234).

When I was starting out as a feminist theatre critic, I, too, bought into the traps Shalson outlines. I felt my duty was to report on feminist theatre and performance to the larger audience I presumed should be intended for the work. I decided that aesthetic considerations were more important than political ones. As sympathetic as I might be to the “cause” that much of the work I reviewed espoused, I held it to the same rigorous standards I might bring to any performance. I indeed saw myself as separate from the performers/theatre-makers, with a duty not necessarily to be objective, but to side with the audience, which I presumed cared more about theatre than they did feminism.

As Shalson quotes in her article, when one of the groups I wrote about in my first book, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, wanted to see what I said about them before they’d give me permission to use a photograph of their work, I declined. I resented the implication that they should have any input into how I saw them and what I said. I recall, too, even earlier, my righteous guilt when I gave a Boston political theatre group a less than complimentary review in Sojourner, the feminist newspaper I wrote for at the time. Although I’d worked with Maxine Klein—an important leftist theatre-maker who’d actually been my teacher in the theatre department at Boston University during my first semester as an undergrad—I felt compelled to say that her company (Little Flags Theatre) had created a slipshod production of a didactic play without much artistic merit.

Who did I think I was serving with that review? And why did I guard my words so jealousy from preview by At the Foot of the Mountain, the feminist group who wanted to exchange viewing rights for that photograph? I was buying into exactly the assumptions about the relationship between critics and artists that Shalson challenges in her essay.

How should we, then, approach community-based theatre and performance, especially when we’re part of the community being addressed? How do we balance considerations of political meanings and intentions with aesthetic and artistic execution? These aren’t new questions; they have a long history in theatre criticism and I’ve mulled over them throughout my career. I feel urgent about them today, knowing that so much of the theatre and performance about which I care a great deal has lost funding and is under attack by right wing ideologues who haven’t even seen it, who will never take the time to truly look at work they despise a priori.

Shalson’s method of “constructing criticism,” which acknowledges that critics, too, are part of the audience being addressed by community-based performance, that they’re equally a part of the community, rather than people with pens who sit at an Olympian remove, is perhaps one answer. The presumptive reader to whom critics write might, in this case, be the community-based audience who has shared the moment with them, rather than some assumed, anonymous audience who might never, in fact, see the performance.

A community-based critic might write for other reasons than judging artistic or aesthetic merit or measuring consumers’ investments. They might write about the moment itself, describing the audience, the context, the importance of the event, as much as they write about the production, per se. In this way, a record of a moment of community is entered into our common store, not simply an assessment based on standards that might not, in fact, be relevant.

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Jaclyn Pryor and I have been working on what we call “colleague criticism.” Paul began this conversation in a graduate seminar I taught at UT several years ago; Jaclyn joined this work shortly after, and I began participating a year ago, when we presented on the subject at a local conference. Colleague criticism changes the relationship between critic and performer by embedding the critic within the work as it’s being generated, much as a dramaturg might work on a production.

Rather than assuming that the critic comes to the performance with the same knowledge as the spectator, as a kind of tabula rasa with few expectations except for maybe some knowledge of the script, the colleague critic might be part of the process of generating the work; might have seen it in earlier incarnations; might know the performer very well; and might understand in a deeper way the context in which the performance is generated. All of this knowledge goes into the writing, so that the colleague critic’s account is a kind of thick description, a layered discussion of the process and product of a performance, rather than a surface gloss on what’s seen in the moment.

Colleague criticism, it seems to me, is a way of writing about performance as a rich cultural process. It takes into account the multiple stages of generating a performance; it describes the desire of both the performer and the audience to have an intimate, meaningful exchange; and it opens a record of not only this performance, but of a history of feelings, desires, choices, and moments on which the performance is constructed and on which it will continue to change, grow, and live.

There’s much more to say about criticism, but I’ll consider this the beginnings of an on-going conversation, one I’ll use as a reference point in future posts. As usual, I’m happy to hear your thoughts. Thanks for all your posts on my holiday movie musings.

Happy New Year.
My best,
The Feminist Spectator

Holiday Films: Mainlining Popular Culture

I’m afraid I’ve broken my resolution to write bi-monthly this December, a lapse I hope readers will forgive, as the month has been filled with planned family travel, unplanned fatigue, and a general sense of lassitude necessary after the rigors of a semester of teaching. In the new year, I’ll be back to my twice-monthly entries.

I planned to write my next blog about feminist criticism in general, and to engage with Lara Shalson’s piece in the latest Theatre Topics, in which she discusses the importance of criticism to the initial stirrings of feminist theatre in the 1980s, in particular. I still intend to write that piece, but given the season, I’ve been caught in the spirit of the holidays and their effulgence of holiday films. With grading finally behind me, and a trip to see family fully and pleasantly accomplished, I’ve been indulging my passion for the movies and trying to catch up on all these end-of-year flicks touted as Oscar material and contenders for other awards. I’d like to detail a few of my reactions here.

But first, this experience of spending so much time in movie theatres instead of live theatres has made me think about the differences I feel consuming the two forms. In a brief piece in last week’s Entertainment Weekly—which I read religiously, since I enjoy the smart, literate film reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman—their “Ask the Critic” column answered a question from a reader who wondered why it’s so much easier to tolerate plot confusions or peculiarities on television shows (or films on tv) than it is when you go to see a movie. Schwarzbaum replied that we go to the movies with so much more hope, that schlepping out into public to be with people to watch something on the much bigger screen demonstrates an investment of hope for the experience that shoddy plotting disappoints.

Her remark seemed right to me, and very much in line with my own belief in what I call “utopian performatives,” those moments when you go to see a performance and feel yourself in the presence of a group of strangers experiencing a moment together that fills us with hope that our world might be better than the way we currently know and experience it. Performances, because they’re live, are richer for me than film: the presence of the actor in front of breathing spectators implies an expectation that sharpens our watchfulness, our awareness of ourselves as a group, and the potential for our hope to translate into action.

It’s palpably different to walk into a movie theatre than it is to a theatre that presents live performance. Arriving early to see a mid-morning showing of Harry Potter the other day, I entered the theatre under the screen in the near-dark, confronted with rows of empty, looming seats. The room felt cold and corporate; there’s no life there without the audience. No one would ever leave a ghost light on in a movie theatre. (A ghost light is the standing lamp with the single bare bulb that sits in the middle of a bare stage or sometimes hangs alone from the rafters at night or when a theatre is empty; according to superstition, it’s left on to keep the theatre from “going dark,” or closing.) The blank white screen in a cinema doesn’t leave a residue of lives lived, as does the stage.

An empty theatre is warm, unsettled by the vibes of the living, cluttered with the labor and detritus of creating the magic of theatre. The back brick theatre walls and the revealed stage wings offer a sense of depth, of “there-ness,” of perspective that connects it with the audience. (Marvin Carlson beautifully details what he calls “the haunted stage” in his book of the same name.) In a movie theatre, the separation between the audience and the screen is clear, two-dimensional. It’s no accident that in the first scene of Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice folds herself into a chair in a theatre to gaze at the stage and watch her life unfold again (a conceit also attempted by the much less success De-Lovely, the Cole Porter biopic starring Kevin Kline). The theatre is haunted by its ghosts—its stories, its players, its audiences, its stagehands. The cinema is haunted by underpaid kids who roll their garbage bins up the aisles between showings.

But films still hold out the possibility for transcendent moments, moments of recognition, understanding, empathy, and identification that speak to something urgent and desirous in me, that capture something intensely and sear themselves onto my emotional canvas in a lasting way. I love being entertained and entranced by films. In backwards chronological order, then, here are my impressions of and musings about the films I saw this holiday season:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

I’m a big fan of the Harry Potter novels, which I find exceptionally fun and smart fantasies. J.K. Rowling’s books invent unique, creative worlds, where the Hogwart’s headmaster Dumbledore, for instance, can store his thoughts in something called a “pensieve” when his head gets too crowded, and where trains appear on half-tracks reached through acts of magical will. The sixth, most recent novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, seemed very much a post-9/11 story, in which an aura of fear inspired by an unseen but sharply felt enemy prompts a crackdown on civil liberties in the magical world of the story in much the same way we’re feeling this process in the States. The Goblet of Fire, the fourth book, began to move the series into a darker world, after Harry’s godfather Sirius has been killed. The Goblet of Fire is literally a dark film, shot in shades of blue and black and grey that make it a noir-ish experience. This, along with the coursing hormones of the characters, whose relationships are newly strained by more complicated feelings and desires, drain the pleasantries and color from Rowling’s magic and replace them with a series of challenges to Harry’s body and his emotions, if not his soul.

The film moves at harrowing speed through the various tasks set for the four Tri-Wizard champions, each challenge more ominous and impossible than the next, until the reluctant Harry finally makes his way through the proverbial maze. He’s accompanied on his proving journey by Cedric Diggory, with whom he shares ethical, responsible, humble moments that keep Harry from seeming a lone, cockier sort of hero. Reaching the goblet of fire, which turns out to be a “port-key” that sucks him through a vortex into a parallel world, Harry finally meets his nemesis, Voldemort, the Dark Lord, played by Ralph Fiennes made-up to look like a man in the process of painfully, evilly resurrecting himself. Daniel Ratcliffe does a good job facing the traumas of being an adolescent hero and the supporting players gamely assist the suspension of disbelief that makes the story so addictive.

What’s striking from a feminist perspective, though, is how quest stories like The Goblet of Fire remain all about boys and men. Teresa de Lauretis, in her foundational book of feminist film theory Alice Doesn’t, suggested that that the mythic hero’s quest, in which a territory is crossed and conquered, is always about the masculine conquering the feminine. In Harry Potter, this very much holds true. The quest, as reluctant a hero as Harry seems in this film, remains his, even though it’s his very smart friend Hermione who often feeds him information and the motivation to step up to the test that awaits him. And even though one of the four Tri-Wizards is a young woman, it’s a given that she’ll never win. She gets very little screen time, and in the maze, the most daunting of the tests of skill and will, she’s swallowed by a hedge well before the three boys fail or succeed. Even though Hermione has grown through the series—and in this more sexualized part of the story, looks attractive and alluring enough to attend the Hogwart’s dance with one of the visiting Tri-Wizards—she remains the smart side-kick.

Capote

Philip Seymour Hoffman is virtuosic as Capote, capturing his peculiar voice and speech patterns and his fey, effete character in a chilling portrait of a man whose own success outweighed any ethical concern for the killers on whose story he hitched his star. The film is a character study, but also says a lot about American culture, not just in the late 50s and early 60s, when the story takes place, but in the United States now, when celebrity is achieved at all costs and our mutual responsibility to each other seems lost in the greedy drive for personal achievement. Capote lies repeatedly and with unnerving sincerity to murderer Perry Smith, his main informant, whom he befriends in his jail cell to wrest his story from him. The writer preys on Smith’s need to be seen as good, as smart, as better than his actions would lead people to believe. Smith thinks he’s won Capote’s favor, that he’s found a champion for his story and his cause. Instead, Capote uses him and judges him (calling his book In Cold Blood, a damning phrase for a man who thought his horrible actions could be seen as nuanced and complex because of his childhood depravations) and makes his fortune on the killer’s life.

The film tells the story sparely, alternating scenes in Smith’s cell, Capote enacting all the gestures of false intimacy that lead Smith to trust the writer, with scenes of Capote camping and vamping at public parties, parlaying his access to the killers into a corrupt cultural capital. His lover shakes his head at Capote’s exploits, and Capote’s stalwart best friend, Nell Harper Lee, played by the amazing Catherine Keener, stands by him until she, too, is repulsed by his excessive self-involvement. Keener’s role is thankless; she’s a smart, talented actress schlepped along by the male lead, uttering very few lines, but telling pages of stories by acting with her face and her gestures and the sheer fact of her brilliant, knowing presence. Hoffman’s performance wouldn’t be half as good without Keener’s; her reactions to his actions allow us to see Capote as pathetic, as well as tragically talented. But we never see Harper Lee writing To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s Capote we see on the red carpet outside the movie’s premiere. Lee’s commitment to Capote seems motivated by the fact that they share a southern background, but given his neglect and self-centeredness, that doesn’t seem enough. In this too-familiar pattern, a female character is used in the service of the male, written as a foil for a compromised great man.

Brokeback Mountain

As a lesbian nearing 50, it’s still amazing to me to see a film about gay desire on the screen. So many mainstream reviewers of this mainstream film write with a blasé attitude about a same-sex relationship in the 60s, as though they’ve seen it all before. I haven’t and I only want to see more. I saw Brokeback as an historical film, one no doubt accurate to what it meant to love another man, in Wyoming, at a time when gays and lesbians remained either invisible or reviled.

Although the film feels contemporary, with Jake Gyllenhaal’s and Heath Ledger’s rugged good looks, the story is set at a time when the love they felt for each other could only be terrifying and shameful. The intercut scenes of violence against men suspected of loving each other are chilling and foundational in the film. Those images, seared into his young mind by a father eager to teach him a lesson, for a son who might have suspected some of that passion in himself even then, become defining for Ennis Del Mar, dooming him to a life of longing and furtive passion. I was moved by their relationship, by Jack Twist’s willingness to give up everything so that he and Ennis could share their lives, by Ennis’s fear of giving in to his love for Jack, and by the knowledge that in that particular time and place, their options were limited to the ones they ultimately choose. There are no heroes here.

Of course the women in this story are after-thoughts, cogs in the narrative machinery, stick figures to represent how society in the 60s expected heterosexual couples and their families to behave. Ann Hathaway is wonderful as Jack’s wife, wealthy, competent, and beautiful until she settles into a more garish middle-aged version of her younger self. Her own spirit is clearly stifled by her dominating father and weak-willed husband (until he finally asserts himself at a holiday dinner table and “wins” a modicum of his “manhood,” in a scene that underlines how ludicrous are the chest-thumping displays of male ego and prerogative). Michelle Williams is also very good as Ennis’s beleaguered wife, who sees her husband practically devouring Jack after a four-year absence and has no frame of reference through which to interpret the kissing and clutching she sees. She only knows that the passion she witnesses in Ennis is unfamiliar, something he feels for someone else, and a man, at that. Williams’ nearly wordless performance is a study in perplexed shame and confusion, and finally, anger and retribution. Brokeback is a man’s movie. These women decorate the window into the souls of two men whose love for each other is tortured and desperate because their society refused to allow it to be any other way.

King Kong

This high spectacle from Peter Jackson feels big (sometimes cumbersome), intent on eliciting the kinds of cheap emotions that come from watching computer-generated dinosaurs cavort and fight with 25-foot gorillas while little white men gasp and scurry to get out of the way. The film offers some amusing references to the popular entertainments of the 30s, where Ann Darrow, soon to be Kong’s play-thing, starts out as a vaudeville performer who’s let go by her struggling Depression-era company and is “discovered” by a corrupt impresario (Jack Black) trying to cast the romantic lead in a movie for which the funding has already been pulled. Jackson’s film, at first, seems happily parodic, a satire of all the beautiful-young-woman-discovered-as-a-star films, and all the greedy-egotistical-producer-will-make-his-film-at-all-costs stories.

But when the cast arrives on Skull Island, the unexplored territory on which Black’s character wants to film his opus, Jackson’s takes an unsavory turn. He portrays the island’s denizens as grotesque savages, losing all the satirical notes that first graced the film. The natives all look African; they wear bones and sticks through their noses and other parts of their anatomy, and their faces are wet with war paint. They shudder in Jackson’s frenzied fantasies of ritual ecstasy, rolling their eyes back into their heads and shaking their limbs and their rattles and their sabers as the camera cuts among them, furiously whipping up the audience’s sense of dread and loathing. Jackson told Entertainment Weekly that the Skull Island “natives” were cast with extras of a number of different races, nations, and ethnicities, and then painted with the same dark make-up so that they would appear to be of the same tribe. The end result, though, is that they all look African, and all succumb to stereotypes of native people as primitive and grotesque, inhuman and cannibalistic.

Against this colonialist, racist backdrop, Naomi Watts, as Darrow, stands out as the dewy white, pure “virgin,” who must be captured and sacrificed to the reigning god of the island, King Kong. When Watts and the CGI-projected, Andy Serkis-animated animal meet, the film takes an interesting romantic turn. With her wit and her rather glowing presence, Watts pulls off an attachment to the ape that seems real, full of affection and eventually, mutual love. Considering that she did much of her acting against a green screen, with perhaps only Serkis in his wired, motion-capturing black suit to interact with, Watts’s performance is indeed remarkable. She ends the film in Kong’s hand, being chased up the Empire State Building, where, in her flowing, sleeveless white dress and precarious high heels (giving new meaning to winter white), she climbs a ladder to the very top of the building (with nary a hair out of place) and tries to save Kong from his inevitable death.

The film wants to speak to the necessity for human (and animal) connection and compassion, in moments of dire need and greed that too often prompt corruption. Watts’s character represents the pure, unsullied version of “America,” capable of falling in love with the “Other” and finding his humanity (always translated anthropomorphically into something that resembles her own). Black’s character represents the greedy corporate businessman who will stop at nothing to make a buck off his “art.” That Black brings the captured Kong to Broadway, where audiences flock to see this remnant of another time and place, is an irony too bald to be lost. We’re willing to pay quite a lot to gaze safely on the spectacle of the other, Jackson seems to say, an other whose rage and desire breaks his bonds and lets him escape to his eventual doom, ignorant of the bloodlust of his captor and the audience who comes to get their scopophilic pleasure watching him restrained and ultimately killed. “Freaks” have always been useful to capitalism; too often, though, those offered up as freaks were just different from what the dollar decides is “us.” The virgin sacrificed to the beast finally forces the beast to sacrifice himself for her, and we learn nothing new about women or the other, and only a little about the capricious, greedy, evil egotism of “man.”

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach’s supposedly semi-autobiographically film is about a family deteriorating from the parents’ self-absorption and superiority, while their children are left without clear ethical role models on which to shape their own choices. Nothing much happens in this film, but the snapshots of relationships on view, and the growing awareness of the two boys’ anxieties about losing their own childhoods to their parents’ strife, winds up being captivating and moving. Jeff Daniels, as the self-absorbed, pretentious father, has received the bulk of critical acclaim for this film. But Jesse Eisenberg, of Rodger Dodger, is wonderful as the teenage son trying to shape his own pretensions, who finds himself too influenced by his father’s snobbish opinions to lead an honest, earnest life. The younger son is even more wounded, caught between conflicting demands of two parents who can’t quite focus him in their viewfinders. Laura Linney plays the wife, who begins the film being attacked by tennis balls launched on the doubles court by her passive-aggressive husband, and ends with the upper hand in the dissolution of her marriage as her career as a writer soars while her husband’s sours. Implicit here is a critique of the assumption that women will always forgive men their trespasses. Watching Linney disabuse Daniels’ character of these notions is poignant, painful way.

Walk the Line

I love films about performers that actually show them performing, especially when the filmmakers capture the distinct gestalt of being onstage in front of a live audience. This biopic about Johnny Cash and his relationship with June Carter is best when Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix, who sang their parts themselves, are seen performing, partly because they must capture something of how Cash and Carter looked and felt and partly because it’s clear that Phoenix and Witherspoon were also charged and nervous about performing themselves. Both layers come through in their performances. The film manages to get at what it means to have stage presence, and how Carter, regardless of the messes she confronted in her life offstage, slipped easily into the kind of charisma that makes spectators love a performer.

Walk the Line paints Carter as a smart, principled woman. Witherspoon is a joy to watch, graduating from her Legally Blonde series—films which themselves parody the stereotype of the dumb blonde—into a role that lets her use her own innate intelligence to lend a depth of character to June Carter. Watching them perform onstage together is a revelation; whether or not Witherspoon and Phoenix approximate the magic of the real Carter and Cash, they clearly strike up something novel and appealing of their own. Offstage, in the film, the gendering of their roles is more predictable, as June mothers and Johnny fails at the project of responsible manhood, until the narrative pulls them along toward a predictably redemptive ending.


The New York Times reported recently on the proliferation of Christian- and evangelical-based web sites that rate films according to not just their quality but their morality quotient, so that Brokeback Mountain, for instance, can get a high grade for artistry and a very low grade for what the sites consider “normal” moral behavior. I share their concern for films as influential, if not determining, artifacts of American culture, and hope that many more avowedly liberal—feminist, progressive, or otherwise—writers will continue to pen their own overtly ideological readings of the movies, as well as other forms of representation.

Here’s hoping that 2006 gives us lots more to think about and write about from a feminist perspective on the arts.

Warm wishes,
The Feminist Spectator

Sarah Schulman Redux: The Delicate Balance of Criticism, I

My last blog entry on Sarah Schulman’s representation in the New York Times generated a bit of behind-the-scenes sturm und drang. I received an email from Sarah the day after I posted, in which she both appreciated my attempt to point out the excesses in Jesse Green’s feature story and took apart my own posting, objecting to my characterization of her and her work. I also received an email from a friend in New York who told me that Sarah, despite her objections to my post, had forwarded it to a number of people in the city with the subject line “Finally,” apparently using it as vindication for the critical lashing she typically receives.

The Times published two letters in response to Green’s article from other lesbian theatre folks: Lisa Kron, of the Five Lesbian Brothers and her own solo work fame, and Linda Chapman, the Associate Artistic Director of the New York Theatre Workshop, which first produced Jonathan Larson’s Rent (see “Letters: Sarah Schulman,” New York Times, Sunday, November 13, 2005, Arts and Leisure Sec. 8). Kron’s letter pointed out that she, too, has shared Schulman’s “frustration at the marginalization of lesbian work,” and noted that many lesbian artists have been “under-recognized” by the mainstream press and industry. But Kron’s careful to acknowledge those artists who opened doors for her, like Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), Maria Irene Fornes (Mud), Jane Chambers (Last Summer at Bluefish Cove), and Claire Chafee (Why We Have a Body). She ends her letter by saying, “I applaud your success, Sarah. And I wanted you to know, you’re not alone.” The letter subtly underlines Schulman’s tendency, at least as quoted in Green's piece, to point to her own exceptionalism, when in fact, most lesbian playwrights and performers have suffered the lack of notice she describes.

Linda Chapman’s letter tries to set the record straight, once and for all, on the Rent debacle, and in the process, offers some interesting information about Schulman’s tussle over the authorship of Larson’s musical. Chapman says she gave Larson Schulman’s novel, People in Trouble (which Schulman subsequently accused him of plagiarizing), after the “characters and indeed the setting and given circumstances of the work were well established.” She asks that Schulman and the media put this event behind them; New York Theatre Workshop and Chapman herself continue to support Schulman’s work.

Ultimately, I’m glad that the Times wrote about Schulman’s work, glad I wrote about it here, glad Schulman contacted me, and glad that Kron and Chapman followed up with letters to the Times. For a rare moment, lesbian theatre artists got some attention from the mainstream press, and prompted some healthy debate about what visibility means and to whom it’s accessible.

I was frankly caught up a bit short when I received Schulman’s email, an exchange that’s lead me to think, again, about a critic’s responsibility (more accurately, my responsibility) to the community of artists and critics and readers and spectators of which they’re a part. Is my job as a writer about theatre, performance, and the arts one of advocacy? Is it to simply get the word out about work by women, lesbians, people of color, and others to whom more visible venues don’t typically offer their space? I believe my job is to extend the conversation about art practices that aren’t as easily accessible in the mainstream media and to watchdog those outlets for how they portray the people they tend to marginalize.

But what are the ethics of participating in the conversation I want to so extend? Should I never “critique”? Should I not have written sometimes less than positively about, for instance, Oedipus at Palm Springs, with which I started this blog? Should I not have referred, in my last blog, to Schulman’s notorious reputation for being “difficult” because I don’t, as she noted in her email to me, have personal experience with this side of her personality? Even though I know that blogs are often places where people express themselves unfiltered to readers invited to listen pruriently to the writer’s “id,” I’d prefer that “The Feminist Spectator” always maintain an ethical relationship not just to readers but to the artists whose work I do indeed want to promote, in a thoughtful, if sometimes polemical, way.

After all these years, I still find myself debating just what it means to be a feminist critic. And I guess that’s a good thing.

Next month’s first blog entry (since I’ve clearly committed to bi-monthly postings here) will continue this conversation by looking at a recent essay in Theatre Topics, one of two journals published by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Lara Shalson’s article, “Creating Community, Constructing Criticism: The Women’s One World Festival, 1980-81,” addresses some of these very issues about feminist criticism, which I’ll take up again shortly. If you’re interested, the article is available at Theatre Topics 15.2 (2005) 221-239, and on-line from Project Muse at participating library sites.

On a personal note, my most recent book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, has just been published (with a lovely cover) from the University of Michigan Press. I wrote the book to be accessible to a wide audience—it addresses the ways in which theatre and performance can provide a forum for ideas and experiences that inspire us all toward imagining (and for a moment, even, feeling) a better world. And it offers some examples of transcendent moments I've had recently at the theatre. I’ll try to figure out how to attach the cover art here in my next post.

Best wishes,
The Feminist Spectator

Sarah Schulman and the Plight of Women Playwrights

The Women and Theatre Program listserve (available at wtp@athe.org) began a conversation a week or so ago about Jesse Green’s New York Sunday Times feature story on playwright Sarah Schulman and Green’s inability to position Schulman as anything but a once-angry lesbian now trying to “reform.” The story, called “Who’s Afraid of Sarah Schulman” (10-23-05), is rife with the kind of containing, inadvertently disparaging descriptions that continue to plague women theatre artists. While leading his piece with references to Schulman’s notoriously prickly personality and her “difficult” nature as an artist, he remarks, “Though her speech is armored with jargon, the effect is often mitigated, in person, by her almost maternal warmth. In private, she has been a loving mentor to many young writers, feeding them encouragement and home-cooked meals. Even during our interview, she occasionally took my hand to emphasize an important point, and spoke in a modest whisper. Still, I found myself repeatedly preparing to flinch as she stalked me for bad motives, tired agendas and prejudices; when she thought she spied one she pounced as if to drag it from behind some trees and let it rot in the sun.”

In one short paragraph, Green manages to employ most of the stereotypes that still stick to women artists: they are smart but have to remain maternal, offering home-cooked meals to younger playwrights and touching the writer modestly to whisper privately. At the same time, Green paints Schulman as something of an animal, waiting to pounce on his words like prey she’s eager display like a trophy then let desiccate. This feature isn’t much different from one of the first New York Times Sunday Magazine stories to run on a woman playwright, which featured Marcia Norman in 1983, when her play ‘night, Mother ran on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Nearly 25 years later, the tone is the same: bewilderment that a woman could be an artist, and a desperate need to place her in a domestic, rather than a professional space. Green’s piece on Schulman spends a great deal of time preoccupied with her sixth floor walk-up in the East Village, which stands in as the measure of Schulman’s inability to achieve profitable mainstream success. But it also slants the story, making it appear as though Schulman’s only aspiration is to find a new apartment. Green quotes Schulman’s confident assertion that she’s a good writer, that she’s trying to do “something that’s never been done before,” but he seems to undercut Schulman’s confidence by domesticating her and implicitly belittling the streak of paranoia that runs (no doubt rightfully) through Schulman’s stories.

After all, this is the woman who accused Jonathan Larson of plagiarizing her novel People in Trouble in his hit, long-running Broadway musical Rent. Stagestruck (Duke University Press, 1998), Schulman’s screed about the production and American theatre’s refusal to give lesbian playwrights their due, reads as the work of a writer slightly unhinged in her account of Larson’s purportedly unauthorized borrowing of her work. But after decades of neglect as a playwright, some resentment, even fury, seems logical and rational, rather than hysterical.

I don’t know if Schulman is a good playwright, as I’ve never seen or read her work. Manic Flight Reaction, the play recently produced at Playwrights Horizons, which occasioned Green’s Sunday feature, was reviewed in the Times by Christopher Isherwood (10-31-205). Isherwood calls the play “talky and hyperanalytical” and notes, “Virtually everyone onstage seems to have just emerged, eyes ablaze, from either an unusually revelatory therapeutic session or a seminar on the oppressions of the ‘media-industrial-art-technology complex,’ as one character puts it.” He criticizes Schulman for letting her characters quote philosopher Walter Benjamin, and for attempting to combine “didactic impulses” with “generation-gap comedy.” Isherwood expects conventional drama that closely hues to singular genre expectations; that refuses to be too thoughtful or intellectual, if it intends to be a comedy; and that keeps its references safely, slyly hidden. Schulman’s sin, in this play, doesn’t appear to be her lesbian characters or her own lesbian identity, but rather her intellectual and political commitments, which mainstream reviewers would rather elide from performance. Unless, of course, the playwright is Tom Stoppard or Tony Kushner.

Schulman’s play could be as awkward and heavy-handed as Isherwood insists. But shouldn’t we applaud a woman who uses her midtown production to stage a play with a 50ish woman academic in the lead, someone who’s lived multiple lives, someone who thinks deeply and isn’t afraid of contradictions? Isn’t it to Schulman’s credit that while she draws this unusual character, she also apparently unravels a plot in which one of the lead’s former female lovers has now married a Republican candidate for office and is determined to heterosexualize her past and her future? This sounds like a fine combination of issues and intriguing peccadilloes to me. Why isn’t there space in American theatre to let a writer like Schulman take a few risks, and even court failure, without dismissing her for her erudition or trying to reinscribe her as a mother, the role to which women in theatre apparently remain best suited?

I’ve long believed that more women—specifically, more feminists—need to write about theatre and the arts for the mainstream press. We need to make feminism the default perspective, so that Schulman’s experiences and her resentment over the lack of acclaim for her work might be described differently. When might we be able to consider our theatre from the perspective of a woman (even lesbian) playwright or critic, instead of relying on a less than sympathetic, entitled male reviewer who still can’t imagine what it feels like to be marginalized by gender from the most important forums of American culture life?