Perhaps I’m anticipating the show ending its run next season, with eight short episodes in which to wrap up the sprawling melodramatic plot. But my sadness at the end of this season’s The L Word felt much more like the grief I experienced at the end of the first season, knowing I’d have to wait months to watch, rapt, until this lesbian soap opera started up again.
Maybe it’s because the resolutions this season were more satisfying than usual. Maybe it’s because the typically ham-fisted cliff-hanger ending seemed so over-the-top . Maybe it’s because the narrative captured the spirit of an ending more than any of the other seasons. Whatever the reason, I feel this year the same sort of separation anxiety and sadness that plagued me for weeks after the first season ended.
I’ve saved the season finale on my DVR, and watch it (well, parts of it) regularly, not because the writing is particularly good, but because I feel moved by certain threads in the story, and because certain images and scenes strike a chord in me that makes them both familiar and keenly nostalgic.
For instance, I’m embarrassed by how delighted I am that Bette and Tina have rekindled not just their relationship but their romance. The scene I’d wear out if I were re-watching it on tape happens toward the end of the final episode, at the wrap party for Les Girls, when Tina and Bette join the party’s dancing women. The camera tracks Tina leading Bette by the hand toward the dance floor. It’s not particularly artful camera work; in fact, the lighting is dark, the subjects far from the lens. But you can see Tina in control, with Bette following almost shyly, as they wind their way through the crowd toward the floor.
Laurel Holloman, especially, got this moment right. She performed that nuanced pride that a woman in the lead radiates as she parades her partner into a public party space. In some ways, she demonstrated that deeply queer sense of what Joan Nestle called “erotic responsibility” (although Nestle was talking about butch lesbians in the 1950s, which hardly describes Tina). Something in her manner, in the proprietary way she lead Bette to the floor, showed off her newly found sense of agency and social and sexual power. I’ve found it inexplicably satisfying to watch Tina come into her own in this way, and to see her role in her relationship with Bette strengthened and broadened. I also find it rather sexy to see Bette “topped” in this subtle way, to see the erotic power between her and Tina grow and shift.
When they reach the floor—as a lovely cover of “Walk on By” plays on the soundtrack—they perform a dance of mutual seduction that’s both breathtakingly intimate and boldly public, caressing each other’s hips and arms, shoulders and backs, moving in for kisses that look almost artful in how well they meld together physically and emotionally.
Uber-producer Ilene Chaiken, who wrote and directed the episode, also does a good job using the “audience” for their dance floor performance, letting the Greek chorus of Bette and Tina’s friends note their reunion and agree with Kit when she remarks that “they belong to together and always will.” Chaiken also cuts into the scene several reaction shots of women on the floor who note Bette and Tina’s seduction dance with a kind of proud envy. These moments of public feeling, if you will, are crucial in lesbian communities—or at least in my own historical experience of them. Before lesbian weddings or commitment ceremonies were options for public display, these moments on the dance floor were when we acknowledged relationships, approved of partnerings, and shared a kind of community pride in how we were learning to love each other.
I remember those moments in smoky dyke bars, leading a lover to the floor to visibly declare our existence as a couple. I recall almost viscerally how necessary the affirmation of our community was to believing we could continue to love each other, to figure out how to be together, to make our way in a world in which we were never as visible or as supported as we were in those moments on those dark, loud dance floors, twirling together under disco balls. Fortified by those moments, we made our way out into a much less compassionate world.
While party scene reminded me of my bar dyke days, Bette and Tina’s conversation beside their luxurious pool reminded me that lesbian relationships are now solidified and acknowledged in more domestic ways. As they reminisce about their history, Bette protests that she never really left Tina, and Tina corrects her, saying, “Yes, you did. But you came back.” I was moved by their renewed commitment and enjoyed watching the staged intimacy of their conversation at home But then Chaiken had to go and ruin it all by having Bette whisper into Tina’s hair as they embraced, “Should Angie have a baby brother or baby sister?”
I regret that this representation of what finally seems like a good lesbian relationship has to be marked as reproductive and conventionally kinship-based. Angelika is a cute little kid (and a sweet little actor, giving her one-word lines the appropriate inflection: “Jodie!” “Honk horn?”). I like seeing Bette and Tina raise a bi-racial child. But do they really need another baby? Do they have to underline the newly found, hard-won health of their relationship by reproducing again?
And why can’t Chaiken and company cut poor Shane a break? Why does her inability to commit have to provide the overly melodramatic cliff-hanger for every season? This year, it seemed the show’s resident Don Juan (or Don Juanita, as Lily Tomlin would call her) had finally found her match in the reluctant lesbian turned Sapphic enthusiast Molly (Clementine Ford). Although Molly was just coming out, her initial refusal to fall for Shane’s charms made her a worthier conquest for Shane, who had to modulate her expectations and her seduction strategies to Molly’s slower pace.
When they finally had sex, their emotional connection was already established, their affectionate give and take already grounding their physical connection. Their sex scenes seemed to work better than any others Kate Moenig has played over the years—Clementine Ford actually seemed to be fond of her, and they seemed to meld physically in more fluid, persuasive ways than Moenig’s other on-screen sex partners.
How disappointing, then, to have the writers contrive this too-predictable, abrupt and self-abnegating break-up. When does Shane get to show some strength and self-respect, instead of acquiescing to queer shame and abjection at the end of every season? She actually seems to love Molly, and only leaves her because Phyllis, with her arrogant class snobbery, can’t bear the thought of her precious daughter’s life sullied by a street kid like Shane (who, let’s face it, as a hairdresser on a Hollywood movie, is hardly slumming anymore). Shane caves too easily; casting off Molly at Phyllis’s behest doesn’t make sense. When will Shane get to fight for herself?
And what’s with this casual sex with Nikki at the episode’s end? Granted, the sex is nicely explicit, happily public, and pretty hot (I’ve enjoyed, all season, the actor playing Nikki. Her bedroom scenes with Jenny seemed sincere, and their attraction more authentic than other sexual liaisons performed on the show across the seasons). I can be persuaded that Shane and Nikki’s mutual loneliness would throw them together. But honestly, who cares anyway? Why does sexual fidelity always arbitrate who stays together and who breaks up? In this sense, the show wears its conservativism on its sleeve, even though the fact that it exists at all continues to be something of a political and cultural miracle to me.
Jenny and Nikki have been a compelling couple this season, appreciating and honoring each other’s vulnerability, ambitious in their sexuality, yet caught in the strictures of a Hollywood system that requires its stars to stay closeted. Jenny’s diva-dom falls apart when the viper Adele replaces her as the director of Les Girls, and she and Shane have a sweetly intimate but Platonic moment together at home on their couch, getting high and cuddling to take Jenny’s mind off her fall from grace.
Jenny and Shane, in fact, provide one of the more interesting relationships on the show—the friends who’ve never been lovers, but whose love for each other is foundational, necessary, motivating. Yes, Shane seduces Nikki (who could resist Shane hanging over your table making eyes at you as she did to Nikki?). But why does it have to break Jenny’s heart? Why does sexual betrayal have to be the period put on the end of the season?
Likewise, Alice’s relationship with Tasha needed the addition of a new love interest for Alice to help it dissolve, instead of more frankly addressing the couple’s incompatibility. Rose Rollins as Tasha has been an elegant presence on the show; her throaty, sometimes nervous laugh always added a level of sincerity to the proceedings, while at the same time, seemed to underline the show’s essential falseness. But Tasha and Alice were never a good match.
Chaiken and company, however, write their pending break-up as a clash of class values and politics instead of addressing straight on their racial differences. Alice can’t understand why Tasha would join the police academy, a choice that fundamentally contradicts Alice’s liberal politics and also disappoints her class aspirations. Alice’s attraction for a white woman (another actress with a British accent of unknown origin) and Rose’s isolation from any vestige of a lesbian community of color isn’t interrogated or even explored, leaving the show’s racial implications strangely unexplored in the narrative.
The parodic Sopranos-esque subplot about Kit losing The Planet to Dawn Denbo-and-her-lover-Cindy ended in grand style. Deus ex Helena came to the rescue with her newly re-released trust fund, encouraged by her possibly-dying mother (played by the divine Holland Taylor) to solve the situation by simply buying Denbo out. With The Plant secured and Cindy freed (whether into Helena’s arms or not), we can rest assured that our heroines will have somewhere to get their lattes on their way to work in the morning, and can return there in the evenings to listen to women musicians, fall into each other’s arms on the dance floor, and otherwise not engage in Turkish oil wrestling, the show’s ridiculous wet t-shirt contest moment of the season.
Perhaps next season, Kit will get her life back. Without a paramour, she’s left without a plot-line, except as little Angie’s babysitter and Bette’s disapproving older sister. She also carries the show’s “color,” performing race with the colloquial greetings she tosses out regularly, but never written to have a life in which her race is truly explored as a factor.
It’ll be interesting to see if Rachel Shelley returns fulltime from her sojourn with the tax-dodging prison-escapee in South America to bring some allure and levity to the L-girls’ machinations. And hopefully, Bette and Tina will continue to grow their relationship without necessarily growing their brood.
Eight episodes next year should be enough to wrap things up. But anticipating the series ending, I already regret not having The L Word's Sunday night escapades as a touchstone in my life. Over these last five years, loving and hating the show has been not only a pleasant pastime, but a meaningful, moving incursion into pop culture territory for an old-time lesbian feminist like me. I’ve enjoyed watching Chaiken (who’s chronologically my contemporary) mature as a writer/director—with lots of help from her co-producers, especially Angela Robinson, whose own directing and writing always bumps the series up a notch. Chaiken’s willingness to parody herself with the Les Girls subplot, using it to mirror and acknowledge the excesses of The L Word itself, proved a generous gesture to fans.
The season’s treasure trove of in-jokes, too, seemed shout-outs to lesbian and queer culture that made me feel part of a community, not just of the show’s viewers, but of a certain strata of lesbians who’ve traded in open secrets about closeted lesbians and other subcultural knowledge for many years, without a cable tv show to affirm us. This season’s casting of Kelly McGillis as the closeted army sergeant prosecuting Tasha under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was particularly fun, especially in the same year when Jodie Foster finally acknowledged that she’s a lesbian, given rumors of her affair with McGillis on the set of The Accused. This kind of reference added to the show’s fun.
I’ve also enjoyed watching the actors grow with their characters, especially this season, as some of that growth was portrayed with more nuance and sophistication, and seemed more complicated, hard-won, and heart-felt. Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, Leisha Hailey, and even the boyish Kate Moenig all look older than they did five years ago, when The L Word began. Looking at the new lines on their faces, and the way even their lithe, toned bodies are starting to soften, I’m moved by the time I’ve spent with them as actors in this lesbian comedy-melodrama. Their familiarity with and affection for each other as people seems reflected in the ease of their characters’ interactions and commitments. Their growth over time is evident in the comfort of their physical relationships with one another, regardless of their dialogue. In their screen presences, and in their acting, I sense how they’ve matured and aged, and I’m reminded that I’m older, too. I already feel nostalgic, watching the last episode of the season; I’m already starting to miss them.
The Feminist Spectator
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
The Beebo Brinker Chronicles
I’m a great fan of Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novels, which I read when Naiad Press re-released them in the early 80s. With their lurid, silhouetted covers of women’s figures in poses of contrived agony that foreshadowed the plots so nicely, I enjoyed approximating what a 1950s reader must have felt like, furtively turning their pages. I’ve long thought that the novels should be theatricalized, mostly because the figure of Beebo Brinker is so indelible and dynamic.
Beebo is the iconic, fresh-faced young butch who makes her way to New York from a farm in Wisconsin to save herself from a life of isolation and despair. She’s found in “Greenwich Village” by Jack Mann, the flamboyant, self-hating gay guy who teaches her what it means to be “in the life” in the 1950s. In Bannon’s novels, Beebo progresses from a naïve masculine wanderer to a self-destructive alcoholic, who kills her own dog to recapture a lover’s waning attentions, and engages in otherwise very bad behavior.
As a 1970s lesbian feminist just discovering the history of those who came out before feminism and before Stonewall, Bannon’s novels held great fascination for me, and Beebo herself presented a kind of mysterious allure.
Sadly, I found The Beebo Brinker Chronicles's adaptation disappointing. The production seems unsure what to make of Bannon’s stories, unable to decide whether to play them for camp or for real, leaving its actors in a muddle with little plot or character from which to work.
Adapted from three of Bannon’s six novels by Linda Chapman and Kate Moira Ryan, lesbian theatre artists with impeccable credentials, and directed by Leigh Silverman, who’s worked with the Five Lesbian Brothers and recently directed Lisa Kron’s Public Theatre and subsequent Broadway production of Well, Beebo has all the right artistic credentials. But somehow, this 80 minute adaptation gets short circuited by too many little, episodic scenes in which nothing much happens.
The story wanders from place to place, none of them demarcated clearly on the empty, visually uninteresting set. The actors looked hemmed in by each locale for reasons that seem more practical than allegorical. A bar called The Cellar, where Jack brings his straight friends to observe lesbians he refers to as “animals,” is indicated by a counter and a few stools that sit against the stage right wall. The barest suggestion of Jack’s apartment hovers stage left, where he takes in strays like Laura, a recently out lesbian who thinks she is in love with her straight roommate, Marcie. In Laura and Marcie’s apartment, represented by a multi-purpose trundle bed pulled out stage center, the straight girl baits Laura mercilessly, and later confesses that she seduced Laura only to win a bet with her boyfriend.
Meanwhile, in California, Laura’s college girlfriend Beth pines for her lesbian lover, while her husband, Charlie, can’t figure out why Beth no longer likes having sex with him. Curled on the same stage center bed, Beth ponders how she could have rejected Laura’s true love to marry this boring man and have kids she abhors.
And back at Beebo’s place, set again on the one ubiquitous bed, Beebo seduces Laura, only to abuse her. Laura leaves, refusing to let Beebo possess her. To complete the circle, Beebo eventually lures in Beth, after Beth finally leaves her husband to travel from California to New York to find her long-lost Laura. But by the time Beth lands in New York—nine years later—Laura has settled into a marriage of convenience with Jack that’s produced an artificially inseminated daughter. Laura rather brutally rejects Beth’s nostalgic amorous protestations and sends her hustling into to the dubious protection of Beebo’s arms.
The Beebo Brinker Chronicles's rather twisted plot has all the makings of a juicy lesbian melodrama. But the dialogue is curiously flat, corny without the ironic inflections of camp, and opaque where it should be seductively revealing. No subtext adds layers of interest to the proceedings and no chemistry helps enliven the actors’ awkward exchanges.
David Greenspan, as Jack, swans about the stage striking increasingly odd poses, until by the play’s end, he’s hanging over from the waist in some sort of strange indication of exhausted resignation. Greenspan seems to be playing a drag queen in pants, in a broad presentational style that might have worked in a David Belasco production, but just seems ridiculous in this one. He connects with none of his female acting partners, forcing them to flail about, trying to divert his attention from his own solipsistic line readings and overwrought expressions. Jack is supposed to serve as the voice of the Village, the omniscient, world-weary, self-hating Dante for the gay girls. In Greenspan’s interpretation, he can’t see past his own narcissism, delivering a self-centered, closed off, rather irritating performance.
This production, playing at 37 Arts on 37th between 9th and 10th Avenues, is a commercial Off Broadway run, an extension of the one that began downtown in 2007 (see http://www.hourglassgroup.org/beebo.html). The original production, at the 4th Street Theatre, garnered rave reviews last year, especially for Greenspan. Perhaps his performance has just tuckered out and become a parody of itself in the intervening months.
The performance I attended at 37 Arts had an understudy playing Laura, with Autumn Dornfeld as Beth, and Carolyn Baeumler playing Marcie and a few other supporting characters. They all tried valiantly to play off of Greenspan’s uninspired lead. But the script gives them little meat on which to chew, whether they aim for satire or for realism. Even as camp caricatures, the characters offer little to go on. They’re familiar without being interesting; they add nothing new to the taxonomy of lesbian stereotypes, and their prattling and whining doesn’t reveal much about the historical experience of women who once lived like them. The actors try hard to mine the play’s attempts at comedy and its efforts at anguish, but the dialogue forces them into one-note performances.
The script’s most egregious misconception, however, is delivered by Jenn Colella’s Beebo. (Colella replaced Anna Foss Wilson, who starred in the original downtown production.) The eponymous heroine is given very little to do. Instead of centering the plot within Beebo’s fatal charm, she appears like a non-sequitur at odd moments in the story, and does little but bed the girls, threaten them when they get too confident, and leave them for the next one. But her machinations appear subservient in this adaptation to Jack’s more lethal allure.
This Beebo is a cartoon figure in her own chronicles. Colella affects an unconvincing butch swagger, posing in a listless attempt at a lesbian gestus. Beebo is archetypal in the lexicon of lesbian pulp fiction; in this production, her charisma is a joke that never delivers its punch-line. Physically compact, Colella is barely masculine and unconvincing as an irresistible Casanova. She doesn’t generate any heat with her female co-stars, and she disappears in the face of Greenspan’s preening.
The L Word's Shane is Beebo’s contemporary heir, the serial monogamist (or the resolute non-monogamist) who won’t grow up to embrace socially acceptable, coupled lesbian norms. Just as The L Word moralizes against Shane and her promiscuity even while it adores her and gives her all those sexy love scenes, the Bannon novels placed Beebo in an equivocal position as their loathed yet loved Lothario. Without a powerful Beebo to hold up her end of the mythic tales, these stories of doomed lust make no sense. The other characters revolve aimlessly in a universe that lacks someone magnetic to hold them in her orbit.
Beebo should have been played by Peggy Shaw, the virtuosic performing veteran of Split Britches and the WOW Café, who can galvanize an audience and her stage partners just by making an entrance. Shaw’s female masculinity would make the proceedings crackle, give the Chronicles historical heft, and provide the authentic charge of someone whose own experiences approximate those that Bannon’s novels represent. Audiences understand why characters go crazy for Peggy Shaw, because spectators, too, feel the pull of her charisma.
With someone like Shaw anchoring Beebo, the rest of the characters should have been played by the Five Lesbian Brothers, who could have delivered with high style on the campy promise of the original novels. The Brothers have performed these stories before, in plays like Brave Smiles and The Secretaries. They’re adept at the kind of affectionate, smart, knowing parody that bringing Bannon’s novels to the stage requires.
As it is, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is strangely meaningless, an emotionally empty, sexually, politically, and aesthetically bereft production that might have satisfied an audience decades ago, when lesbians didn’t know any better. But in the 21st century, we’re too discerning to take much pleasure in a one-dimensional, uneasy adaptation of archaic genre fiction.
With its impressive pedigree (Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner are among the producers, too), The Beebo Brinker Chronicles should have delivered much more. I was hoping to see my nostalgia for the stories affirmed in a production that would honor the history of Bannon’s work even as it, of necessity, handled it parodically. Too bad. Maybe next time.
The Feminist Spectator
Beebo is the iconic, fresh-faced young butch who makes her way to New York from a farm in Wisconsin to save herself from a life of isolation and despair. She’s found in “Greenwich Village” by Jack Mann, the flamboyant, self-hating gay guy who teaches her what it means to be “in the life” in the 1950s. In Bannon’s novels, Beebo progresses from a naïve masculine wanderer to a self-destructive alcoholic, who kills her own dog to recapture a lover’s waning attentions, and engages in otherwise very bad behavior.
As a 1970s lesbian feminist just discovering the history of those who came out before feminism and before Stonewall, Bannon’s novels held great fascination for me, and Beebo herself presented a kind of mysterious allure.
Sadly, I found The Beebo Brinker Chronicles's adaptation disappointing. The production seems unsure what to make of Bannon’s stories, unable to decide whether to play them for camp or for real, leaving its actors in a muddle with little plot or character from which to work.
Adapted from three of Bannon’s six novels by Linda Chapman and Kate Moira Ryan, lesbian theatre artists with impeccable credentials, and directed by Leigh Silverman, who’s worked with the Five Lesbian Brothers and recently directed Lisa Kron’s Public Theatre and subsequent Broadway production of Well, Beebo has all the right artistic credentials. But somehow, this 80 minute adaptation gets short circuited by too many little, episodic scenes in which nothing much happens.
The story wanders from place to place, none of them demarcated clearly on the empty, visually uninteresting set. The actors looked hemmed in by each locale for reasons that seem more practical than allegorical. A bar called The Cellar, where Jack brings his straight friends to observe lesbians he refers to as “animals,” is indicated by a counter and a few stools that sit against the stage right wall. The barest suggestion of Jack’s apartment hovers stage left, where he takes in strays like Laura, a recently out lesbian who thinks she is in love with her straight roommate, Marcie. In Laura and Marcie’s apartment, represented by a multi-purpose trundle bed pulled out stage center, the straight girl baits Laura mercilessly, and later confesses that she seduced Laura only to win a bet with her boyfriend.
Meanwhile, in California, Laura’s college girlfriend Beth pines for her lesbian lover, while her husband, Charlie, can’t figure out why Beth no longer likes having sex with him. Curled on the same stage center bed, Beth ponders how she could have rejected Laura’s true love to marry this boring man and have kids she abhors.
And back at Beebo’s place, set again on the one ubiquitous bed, Beebo seduces Laura, only to abuse her. Laura leaves, refusing to let Beebo possess her. To complete the circle, Beebo eventually lures in Beth, after Beth finally leaves her husband to travel from California to New York to find her long-lost Laura. But by the time Beth lands in New York—nine years later—Laura has settled into a marriage of convenience with Jack that’s produced an artificially inseminated daughter. Laura rather brutally rejects Beth’s nostalgic amorous protestations and sends her hustling into to the dubious protection of Beebo’s arms.
The Beebo Brinker Chronicles's rather twisted plot has all the makings of a juicy lesbian melodrama. But the dialogue is curiously flat, corny without the ironic inflections of camp, and opaque where it should be seductively revealing. No subtext adds layers of interest to the proceedings and no chemistry helps enliven the actors’ awkward exchanges.
David Greenspan, as Jack, swans about the stage striking increasingly odd poses, until by the play’s end, he’s hanging over from the waist in some sort of strange indication of exhausted resignation. Greenspan seems to be playing a drag queen in pants, in a broad presentational style that might have worked in a David Belasco production, but just seems ridiculous in this one. He connects with none of his female acting partners, forcing them to flail about, trying to divert his attention from his own solipsistic line readings and overwrought expressions. Jack is supposed to serve as the voice of the Village, the omniscient, world-weary, self-hating Dante for the gay girls. In Greenspan’s interpretation, he can’t see past his own narcissism, delivering a self-centered, closed off, rather irritating performance.
This production, playing at 37 Arts on 37th between 9th and 10th Avenues, is a commercial Off Broadway run, an extension of the one that began downtown in 2007 (see http://www.hourglassgroup.org/beebo.html). The original production, at the 4th Street Theatre, garnered rave reviews last year, especially for Greenspan. Perhaps his performance has just tuckered out and become a parody of itself in the intervening months.
The performance I attended at 37 Arts had an understudy playing Laura, with Autumn Dornfeld as Beth, and Carolyn Baeumler playing Marcie and a few other supporting characters. They all tried valiantly to play off of Greenspan’s uninspired lead. But the script gives them little meat on which to chew, whether they aim for satire or for realism. Even as camp caricatures, the characters offer little to go on. They’re familiar without being interesting; they add nothing new to the taxonomy of lesbian stereotypes, and their prattling and whining doesn’t reveal much about the historical experience of women who once lived like them. The actors try hard to mine the play’s attempts at comedy and its efforts at anguish, but the dialogue forces them into one-note performances.
The script’s most egregious misconception, however, is delivered by Jenn Colella’s Beebo. (Colella replaced Anna Foss Wilson, who starred in the original downtown production.) The eponymous heroine is given very little to do. Instead of centering the plot within Beebo’s fatal charm, she appears like a non-sequitur at odd moments in the story, and does little but bed the girls, threaten them when they get too confident, and leave them for the next one. But her machinations appear subservient in this adaptation to Jack’s more lethal allure.
This Beebo is a cartoon figure in her own chronicles. Colella affects an unconvincing butch swagger, posing in a listless attempt at a lesbian gestus. Beebo is archetypal in the lexicon of lesbian pulp fiction; in this production, her charisma is a joke that never delivers its punch-line. Physically compact, Colella is barely masculine and unconvincing as an irresistible Casanova. She doesn’t generate any heat with her female co-stars, and she disappears in the face of Greenspan’s preening.
The L Word's Shane is Beebo’s contemporary heir, the serial monogamist (or the resolute non-monogamist) who won’t grow up to embrace socially acceptable, coupled lesbian norms. Just as The L Word moralizes against Shane and her promiscuity even while it adores her and gives her all those sexy love scenes, the Bannon novels placed Beebo in an equivocal position as their loathed yet loved Lothario. Without a powerful Beebo to hold up her end of the mythic tales, these stories of doomed lust make no sense. The other characters revolve aimlessly in a universe that lacks someone magnetic to hold them in her orbit.
Beebo should have been played by Peggy Shaw, the virtuosic performing veteran of Split Britches and the WOW Café, who can galvanize an audience and her stage partners just by making an entrance. Shaw’s female masculinity would make the proceedings crackle, give the Chronicles historical heft, and provide the authentic charge of someone whose own experiences approximate those that Bannon’s novels represent. Audiences understand why characters go crazy for Peggy Shaw, because spectators, too, feel the pull of her charisma.
With someone like Shaw anchoring Beebo, the rest of the characters should have been played by the Five Lesbian Brothers, who could have delivered with high style on the campy promise of the original novels. The Brothers have performed these stories before, in plays like Brave Smiles and The Secretaries. They’re adept at the kind of affectionate, smart, knowing parody that bringing Bannon’s novels to the stage requires.
As it is, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is strangely meaningless, an emotionally empty, sexually, politically, and aesthetically bereft production that might have satisfied an audience decades ago, when lesbians didn’t know any better. But in the 21st century, we’re too discerning to take much pleasure in a one-dimensional, uneasy adaptation of archaic genre fiction.
With its impressive pedigree (Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner are among the producers, too), The Beebo Brinker Chronicles should have delivered much more. I was hoping to see my nostalgia for the stories affirmed in a production that would honor the history of Bannon’s work even as it, of necessity, handled it parodically. Too bad. Maybe next time.
The Feminist Spectator
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Humana Festival 2008
Compared to the wealth of compelling theatre on hand at last year’s festival, the four offerings I managed to see this year disappointed in both content and form. Three of the four were simple realism, so unadorned with theatrical flair they could easily have been written for low-grade television. The fourth was a solo hip hop piece that included some representational video art, which also failed to exploit the possibilities of the medium and its mix with live performance.
All four were domestic relationship dramas with very little concern for a world beyond couples or families, giving the four-play focus a rather parochial if not claustrophobic effect. Their preoccupations seemed predictable, their outcomes prosaic, their insights few. Since Humana remains a breeding ground for plays that go on to be produced in regional theatres (and sometimes further up the mainstream theatre food chain), this year’s offerings (with the exception of Becky Shaw, which I saw last) don’t give theatre-goers across the country much to anticipate as they move from their trial runs forward.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s oddly presumes to introduce audiences to hip hop’s form, style, and preoccupations, as though this sort of performance is new. Perhaps it is, at the Humana Festival in Louisville, but it’s certainly not on the larger landscape of American theatre. Hip hop performance festivals have been produced annually in New York and other cities around the country, and the performance art form that it embellishes and expands is a staple even in regional theatre seasons. Joseph’s style mixes movement along with the dj sampling and percussion punctuations that underscore his amped up storytelling, and his energetic, charming presence makes his an appealing act. But hip hop’s critical engagement with questions of race and authenticity are given only slight treatment here, as Joseph seems too quickly to try then shy away from interrogating the political meanings of the form and his own stories.
To warm up the audience, his drummer wandered the pre-show audience with a cordless mike, posing questions that were later repeated in pre-taped video segments intercut with Joseph’s monologue. The questions—“What do you think of white people in hip hop?” “What one question would you ask Jay-Z?” “Name a demographic.” “If jazz is the broom that African Americans jumped, what is hip hop?” “What do you think about women in hip hop?”—could be probing, but the answers elicited from the mostly white and mostly middle-aged audience the night I saw the show were vague, uninformed, and uninteresting. When more poignant and insightful answers were presented later in the video clips, they enhanced the earlier conversations and, cross cut with stories Joseph told, gained new resonances and meanings. But the evening ended without pursuing their true complexities.
Some of Joseph’s anecdotes and vignettes were thoughtful and provoking, such as his trip to Senegal, where he wound up working with a white American woman who was agitating against female genital mutilation. He sheepishly described her facility with the local language, and her ability to reach people who embraced her by calling her an “African American,” where Joseph was only recognized as a “Black American.” The irony of his position made his own trip toward authenticity complex and suspect, and positioned the audience to see race and nation drawn in more complicated ways than usual. At the same time, Joseph shied away from the dicey politics of female genital mutilation, letting the story stand without parsing its layers of cross-cultural ethical quandaries.
The story that framed the break/s, and to which he repeatedly returned, addressed Joseph’s ambivalence about his relationship with this white girlfriend. She wants to marry him; he has commitment issues. On four large video screens angled out from the theatre’s flies, black and white fingers intertwine then slip away from each other, literalizing the story’s progress from intimacy to estrangement. Although the failed relationship might have been about racial difference, Joseph doesn’t make it seem so; it’s more of a man thing than a black man/white woman thing in his performance, which reduces the tale to something more quotidian and ubiquitous than might be expected from a performer with some of Joseph’s insights.
A long vignette about meeting Prince and touring his art collection seems finally to be about nothing but Joseph’s access to someone as rich and visible as the artist-once-known-as-etc. Ironically, Joseph’s very charm and virtuosity seems to get in the way of the performance’s import, as he works harder to be liked than to employ hip hop’s critique of racial inequities and unequal social distributions of power.
Perhaps his presence as a young African American man centered on stage for 75 minutes, telling his own stories through intelligent perceptions and a boundless athleticism, is radical enough for an occasion like the Humana Festival. But my theatre-going companions and I weren’t as captivated or impressed as we’d hoped, especially since we’d heard that Joseph is a galvanizing teacher and that other work he’s presented has been much more successful than we found the break/s.
Lee Blessing’s Great Falls began our smorgasbord of three consecutive realist family dramedies. This one-act, two-hander begins obliquely, as a middle-aged man and teen-aged girl share the front seat of a car he’s driving across the country. She’s sullen and alienated; he’s needy and garrulous without making much sense, covering over the awkwardness between them. We soon find out that he’s taken the girl on this trip against her will; for the first fourth of the play, Blessing lets us teeter on an uncomfortable edge, unsure if the man is a pedophile with ill-intent or a moral man whose protestations to the girl’s mom, when the teenager insists on calling her, that he means no harm, that they just have things to talk about, can possibly be true.
Although Blessing gradually reveals who the two characters are to each other, the man (called “Monkey Man” in the script, never by his name) never clarifies his urgent need to solicit the girl’s forgiveness for his infidelity to her mother. Although the rather elliptical exposition made me want to follow along to see how the relationship would play out, why this young girl matters to this man remains mysterious. Blessing’s refusal to provide a back-story means that ultimately, the audience has a hard time caring about whether or not they reestablish their trust and intimacy.
As they drive across the upper mid-West, with him retracing memories of his childhood family vacation for unexplained, apparently unjustified nostalgic reasons, the girl (unfortunately and significantly called only “Bitch”) begins to get the upper hand in their emotional tussle. After she elicits his confession and explanation for how and why he hurt her and her family, she manipulates his feelings so that he’ll help her have the abortion she finally (halfway through the play) reveals she needs.
It turns out she decided to lose her virginity, not to her boyfriend, as she was afraid that would bring on an unseemly panic attack, but to a boy she barely knew, who turned out to be a brutal rapist. After he violently deflowered her, he called a friend to share her, and the two took turns violating her. When she finally got away and turned to her boyfriend for comfort and support, they, too, had sex. She explains to “Monkey Man” that she doesn’t know which boy is the baby’s father.
As he gets increasingly distraught—whether out of love and concern for her or some more abstract moral outrage unfortunately isn’t clear—the girl reminds him of her childhood abuse at the hands of her father and her “recovery” through prolonged psychiatric care. While she uses these facts of her sorry life to shore up his resolve to take her to Planned Parenthood, he finally extracts what Blessing suggests is the real reason she wants to abort the fetus: because she’s found out it’s a boy, and men, you see, can’t be trusted.
The play sounds worse in my description than it actually was, but its ambivalence about whether it means to be a morality tale or a coming-of-age drama kept it from being satisfying. Great Falls held my interest, perhaps more to see what new outrages Blessing would add to this poor girl-child’s past and present than anything else. But the play finally dismisses the girl and ennobles the cipher of a man. He cares for her when a Chlamydia infection nearly kills her after the abortion, then drives her an hour away from her home, leaves her with his car, and severs her from his life. The girl winds up as no more than a sorry tool of the man’s self-understanding, and the violence reportedly done to her slight body, related in prurient, gratuitous detail, is grotesque not because it’s her character’s experience, but because Blessing uses it only to make the audience feel sorry for the man.
The characters are rather thankless, but Tom Nelis brings a kind of awkward, self-righteous searching quality to Monkey Man’s journey that calls your attention, if not your empathy. Halley Wegryn Gross, as Bitch, overplays teenage apathy, so that she seems a careless, rather lazy performer, rather than an actor who’s putting specific, precise energy behind the choice to play at being disaffected. Still, when she started smiling later in the play, her face lit up with an entirely new quality that could have been pursued to more vivid effect. The director, Lucie Tiberghien, makes good use of an awkward theatre-in-the-round with hydraulic lifts that deliver seedy motel and barren abortion clinic settings through the stage floor. The actors stay in character as they move between scenes, accomplishing shifts of locale, costume, and attitude with a grace sometimes more interesting than the dialogue.
Great Falls can’t generate enough ethical insight or emotional nuance to make us care either way about either character. I wound up feeling complicit in a rather pornographic voyeurism, forced to listen to the girl recite her history of indignities, at best, and victimization, at worst, without being guided thoughtfully by the playwright in what to make of or do about these events or the man’s own bid for forgiveness for participating in her history of pain and abuse.
Carly Mensch’s All Hail Hurricane Gordo tries to take its characters on a similar journey toward self-knowledge, but its central figures are too trapped in their own abandonment to choose freedom for themselves against each other. Two young brothers, now in their early 20s, were inexplicably left in a parking lot when they were small by Hippie parents who couldn’t be burdened with children. One brother, Chaz (Matthew Dellapina), is competent and responsible; the other, Gordo (Patrick James Lynch), acts as though he has a social and emotional disorder like autism. He bangs his head against the wall when he’s under stress, touches strangers inappropriately, acts like a child even though he’s a man, and suffocates his brother with his energetic, unfocused need.
Chaz tried to go to college, but Gordo's needs kept him home. He now holds down two jobs at which you never see him work so that he can pay the rent on the house their parents left to them. At the same time, he collects phone books from cities around the country; we find out very late in the play that he sifts through them looking for people who share his surname, writing them letters in an effort to track down his wayward parents. Gordo, on the other hand, is quite content with things as they are, even though the house and its furniture totter and crumble from neglect, and even though their lives are circumscribed and small. Chaz’s thoughts run to larger things, but his guilt-provoking sense of obligation keeps him from pursuing his own desires.
Although the theme is insistently American—it’s the conflict between Blanche and Stella over leaving Belle Rive, played out on two brothers instead of sisters—Hurricane Gordo offers no new angle from which to study its permutations and effects. Naturally, a girl (Tracee Chimo) comes to stay with the boys, drawn by their ad for a boarder. She’s soon revealed to be a colorful fraud, pretending to be a drifter but really a comfortably middle-class teen-aged runaway whose irritated father comes to drag her back to Manhattan where she belongs. She tries to seduce Chaz into running away with her to California, the paradigmatic land of freedom and opportunity for pioneers and dreamers.
But once again, the girl only provides the fulcrum on which the men play out their conflicts. Hurricane Gordo isn’t her story; it belongs—from the overly precious pre-show basketball game between the two actors until the predictable ending—to the brothers, whose vaguely homoerotic connection never gets mined for more interesting dramatic or characterological tensions. The girl leaves and the boys stay, giving up their fantasy of reassembling their biological family, but finding enough between the two of them and their rotting homestead to preclude adventure in the wider world.
The play’s suffocating aura seeps out into the audience. Nothing changes here; no one really learns anything at all, not the characters or the spectators. The set doesn’t change from one act to the next; the costumes change a little, but not enough to brighten the scene or reverse the characters’ fates. Little of the outside penetrates the detritus of their small lives. But instead of offering insights from such shuttered existences, or inspiring emotions that might make spectators feel something meaningful about our own lives and choices, we just feel tired by the brothers’ stasis, by Gordo’s prattling and prowling, and by two young white men’s insufferable self-involvement. One of my companions noted how the play converses with True West, another story of brothers caught in a vicious cycle of familial and social abuse. But this play pales in comparison to Shepard’s provocative and lastingly satisfying drama.
After these three productions, my friends and I were feeling a bit depressed about the state of American theatre. Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw lifted our spirits, at least because the play knows exactly what it is and what it means to do. The writing, direction, and acting were assured, confident, and precise—no word, movement, or emotion was wasted through the whole often hilarious evening.
Although Becky Shaw, too, is a realist family drama, these characters are sharply drawn and complicated, contradicting themselves with surprising desires, and catching us unaware with unexpected shifts in motivation and strategy. The story plays out a bit like a competition, in part because its driving force, Max Garrett (David Wilson Barnes), is a financier who’s always working angles. He’s a fixer, someone who not only makes people rich, but corrects their mistakes and rewrites their self-scenarios to make them come out right. Max is both astute and blinkered; he can diagnosis someone else’s neuroses at first glance, but his particular emotional deficits keep him from overcoming his own.
Becky Shaw raises questions about fidelity, family, and the future, all through characters who collide and cajole, trying to work angles for reasons none of them can truly fathom. Max’s mother died of cancer when he was 10; his dissolute father allowed the Slater family to adopt and raise him. Suzanna Slater (Mia Barron), his erstwhile sister, becomes his best friend and sparring partner; she speaks his language, can keep up with his rapid, biting observations, and can match his mordant, sometimes wounding wit. He’s protected Susie their whole lives, not by coddling her but by teaching her to be tough, to be what he calls “the biggest dick in the room,” so that she’ll win, as he does, at mergers and acquisitions in banking and in life.
When the Slater patriarch dies, Max steps in to clean up the mess, bartering a truce between Susie and her imperious, physically handicapped but emotionally powerful mother (also called Susan, flawlessly played by Janis Dardaris). The play’s compelling mother-daughter dynamic doesn’t waste a word on fake affection between the two women, and its plot doesn’t move them toward a treacly, fake reconciliation. Instead, the mother is left with a kind of impervious dignity, often delivering insights that sound more rabbinical than maternal. She’s a woman of a certain age, who’s learned to make her compromises to get what she needs to sustain her; her pragmatism is both admirable and chilling.
The younger Suzanna doesn’t know herself half as well as her elder, and allows herself to be buffeted about emotionally and professionally by Max and her erstwhile husband Andrew (Davis Duffield), whom Gionfriddo uses as the yin and yang of contemporary masculinity. For each of Max’s bullying barbs, Andrew rebounds with a conciliatory, “radical feminist” protestation of injustice and healing. Max is a warrior; Andrew is a caretaker, who finds his own self-worth in healing women whose emotional damage attracts him like sirens’ songs. The two men despise each other; Susie, caught between them, is pulled toward Max’s strength and feels obligated to Andrew's succor.
Into this already complex set of relationships walks the eponymous Becky Shaw (Annie Parisse), who at her first entrance appears such an outré version of femininity that she seems like a drag queen. She’s flighty, jittery, doesn’t know at whom to look, or where to put her hands, yet in her first scene, she observes Max and Susie and Andrew with clear knowingness and insight.
One of the play’s deficits is that rather than playing off Becky’s implicit, rather uncanny emotional strength, it cuts her down to size. Each of her scenes finds her appearing physically smaller and smaller, until by the last scene, I wondered how I ever could have mistaken her for a man-dressed-as-a-woman-playing-a-female, so fragile and wispy does she finally become. Her trauma and overwhelming need drive the plot and the characters’ changing reactions to one another, but her own back-story (which is vaguely, gratuitously racist) never fully explains why she becomes so important and defining in their lives.
Becky Shaw makes a good drawing room comedy of slightly more than errors. Gionfriddo is on to something about contemporary heterosexual relationships; she’s an MFA graduate of Brown, and enjoys sending barbs back at her alma mater for its politically correct reputation and its production of gentle feminist men and ecologically-minded anti-corporate women. Her characters move through the world, recognizing the necessity of compromise, the constraints of what appear to be infinite choices. They’re self-conscious enough about their privilege to be guilty when Becky protests her poverty; they’re self-reflexive enough to know that however flawed their nuclear family, they’re fiercely loyal to each other at a primal, tribal level that will carry them through to the kind of social victories for which they’ve all been groomed.
Becky, the outsider, has to use her wiles and wits to get what they have. If she wants Max to be her entrée into the world of wealth and power, she’ll use her own keen intelligence to manipulate his vulnerability and emotional failings enough to prey on his delusions. Finally, she’s the meek outsider come to make her place in a world that the rich have only appeared to inherit. Her ultimate malevolence is her meal ticket.
A feminist role model she’s not. But at least Becky Shaw sketches the complications of relationships, the compromises and costs, the dark ways in which we’re all instrumental to one another. These characters rub against the world, and the heat of their friction throws off a rather illuminating light, if only onto the heterosexual relationships that always already seem doomed, functional, and short-sighted from the start in this crop of new American plays.
At least at Becky Shaw, it was really nice to spend a few hours laughing out loud.
The Feminist Spectator
All four were domestic relationship dramas with very little concern for a world beyond couples or families, giving the four-play focus a rather parochial if not claustrophobic effect. Their preoccupations seemed predictable, their outcomes prosaic, their insights few. Since Humana remains a breeding ground for plays that go on to be produced in regional theatres (and sometimes further up the mainstream theatre food chain), this year’s offerings (with the exception of Becky Shaw, which I saw last) don’t give theatre-goers across the country much to anticipate as they move from their trial runs forward.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s oddly presumes to introduce audiences to hip hop’s form, style, and preoccupations, as though this sort of performance is new. Perhaps it is, at the Humana Festival in Louisville, but it’s certainly not on the larger landscape of American theatre. Hip hop performance festivals have been produced annually in New York and other cities around the country, and the performance art form that it embellishes and expands is a staple even in regional theatre seasons. Joseph’s style mixes movement along with the dj sampling and percussion punctuations that underscore his amped up storytelling, and his energetic, charming presence makes his an appealing act. But hip hop’s critical engagement with questions of race and authenticity are given only slight treatment here, as Joseph seems too quickly to try then shy away from interrogating the political meanings of the form and his own stories.
To warm up the audience, his drummer wandered the pre-show audience with a cordless mike, posing questions that were later repeated in pre-taped video segments intercut with Joseph’s monologue. The questions—“What do you think of white people in hip hop?” “What one question would you ask Jay-Z?” “Name a demographic.” “If jazz is the broom that African Americans jumped, what is hip hop?” “What do you think about women in hip hop?”—could be probing, but the answers elicited from the mostly white and mostly middle-aged audience the night I saw the show were vague, uninformed, and uninteresting. When more poignant and insightful answers were presented later in the video clips, they enhanced the earlier conversations and, cross cut with stories Joseph told, gained new resonances and meanings. But the evening ended without pursuing their true complexities.
Some of Joseph’s anecdotes and vignettes were thoughtful and provoking, such as his trip to Senegal, where he wound up working with a white American woman who was agitating against female genital mutilation. He sheepishly described her facility with the local language, and her ability to reach people who embraced her by calling her an “African American,” where Joseph was only recognized as a “Black American.” The irony of his position made his own trip toward authenticity complex and suspect, and positioned the audience to see race and nation drawn in more complicated ways than usual. At the same time, Joseph shied away from the dicey politics of female genital mutilation, letting the story stand without parsing its layers of cross-cultural ethical quandaries.
The story that framed the break/s, and to which he repeatedly returned, addressed Joseph’s ambivalence about his relationship with this white girlfriend. She wants to marry him; he has commitment issues. On four large video screens angled out from the theatre’s flies, black and white fingers intertwine then slip away from each other, literalizing the story’s progress from intimacy to estrangement. Although the failed relationship might have been about racial difference, Joseph doesn’t make it seem so; it’s more of a man thing than a black man/white woman thing in his performance, which reduces the tale to something more quotidian and ubiquitous than might be expected from a performer with some of Joseph’s insights.
A long vignette about meeting Prince and touring his art collection seems finally to be about nothing but Joseph’s access to someone as rich and visible as the artist-once-known-as-etc. Ironically, Joseph’s very charm and virtuosity seems to get in the way of the performance’s import, as he works harder to be liked than to employ hip hop’s critique of racial inequities and unequal social distributions of power.
Perhaps his presence as a young African American man centered on stage for 75 minutes, telling his own stories through intelligent perceptions and a boundless athleticism, is radical enough for an occasion like the Humana Festival. But my theatre-going companions and I weren’t as captivated or impressed as we’d hoped, especially since we’d heard that Joseph is a galvanizing teacher and that other work he’s presented has been much more successful than we found the break/s.
Lee Blessing’s Great Falls began our smorgasbord of three consecutive realist family dramedies. This one-act, two-hander begins obliquely, as a middle-aged man and teen-aged girl share the front seat of a car he’s driving across the country. She’s sullen and alienated; he’s needy and garrulous without making much sense, covering over the awkwardness between them. We soon find out that he’s taken the girl on this trip against her will; for the first fourth of the play, Blessing lets us teeter on an uncomfortable edge, unsure if the man is a pedophile with ill-intent or a moral man whose protestations to the girl’s mom, when the teenager insists on calling her, that he means no harm, that they just have things to talk about, can possibly be true.
Although Blessing gradually reveals who the two characters are to each other, the man (called “Monkey Man” in the script, never by his name) never clarifies his urgent need to solicit the girl’s forgiveness for his infidelity to her mother. Although the rather elliptical exposition made me want to follow along to see how the relationship would play out, why this young girl matters to this man remains mysterious. Blessing’s refusal to provide a back-story means that ultimately, the audience has a hard time caring about whether or not they reestablish their trust and intimacy.
As they drive across the upper mid-West, with him retracing memories of his childhood family vacation for unexplained, apparently unjustified nostalgic reasons, the girl (unfortunately and significantly called only “Bitch”) begins to get the upper hand in their emotional tussle. After she elicits his confession and explanation for how and why he hurt her and her family, she manipulates his feelings so that he’ll help her have the abortion she finally (halfway through the play) reveals she needs.
It turns out she decided to lose her virginity, not to her boyfriend, as she was afraid that would bring on an unseemly panic attack, but to a boy she barely knew, who turned out to be a brutal rapist. After he violently deflowered her, he called a friend to share her, and the two took turns violating her. When she finally got away and turned to her boyfriend for comfort and support, they, too, had sex. She explains to “Monkey Man” that she doesn’t know which boy is the baby’s father.
As he gets increasingly distraught—whether out of love and concern for her or some more abstract moral outrage unfortunately isn’t clear—the girl reminds him of her childhood abuse at the hands of her father and her “recovery” through prolonged psychiatric care. While she uses these facts of her sorry life to shore up his resolve to take her to Planned Parenthood, he finally extracts what Blessing suggests is the real reason she wants to abort the fetus: because she’s found out it’s a boy, and men, you see, can’t be trusted.
The play sounds worse in my description than it actually was, but its ambivalence about whether it means to be a morality tale or a coming-of-age drama kept it from being satisfying. Great Falls held my interest, perhaps more to see what new outrages Blessing would add to this poor girl-child’s past and present than anything else. But the play finally dismisses the girl and ennobles the cipher of a man. He cares for her when a Chlamydia infection nearly kills her after the abortion, then drives her an hour away from her home, leaves her with his car, and severs her from his life. The girl winds up as no more than a sorry tool of the man’s self-understanding, and the violence reportedly done to her slight body, related in prurient, gratuitous detail, is grotesque not because it’s her character’s experience, but because Blessing uses it only to make the audience feel sorry for the man.
The characters are rather thankless, but Tom Nelis brings a kind of awkward, self-righteous searching quality to Monkey Man’s journey that calls your attention, if not your empathy. Halley Wegryn Gross, as Bitch, overplays teenage apathy, so that she seems a careless, rather lazy performer, rather than an actor who’s putting specific, precise energy behind the choice to play at being disaffected. Still, when she started smiling later in the play, her face lit up with an entirely new quality that could have been pursued to more vivid effect. The director, Lucie Tiberghien, makes good use of an awkward theatre-in-the-round with hydraulic lifts that deliver seedy motel and barren abortion clinic settings through the stage floor. The actors stay in character as they move between scenes, accomplishing shifts of locale, costume, and attitude with a grace sometimes more interesting than the dialogue.
Great Falls can’t generate enough ethical insight or emotional nuance to make us care either way about either character. I wound up feeling complicit in a rather pornographic voyeurism, forced to listen to the girl recite her history of indignities, at best, and victimization, at worst, without being guided thoughtfully by the playwright in what to make of or do about these events or the man’s own bid for forgiveness for participating in her history of pain and abuse.
Carly Mensch’s All Hail Hurricane Gordo tries to take its characters on a similar journey toward self-knowledge, but its central figures are too trapped in their own abandonment to choose freedom for themselves against each other. Two young brothers, now in their early 20s, were inexplicably left in a parking lot when they were small by Hippie parents who couldn’t be burdened with children. One brother, Chaz (Matthew Dellapina), is competent and responsible; the other, Gordo (Patrick James Lynch), acts as though he has a social and emotional disorder like autism. He bangs his head against the wall when he’s under stress, touches strangers inappropriately, acts like a child even though he’s a man, and suffocates his brother with his energetic, unfocused need.
Chaz tried to go to college, but Gordo's needs kept him home. He now holds down two jobs at which you never see him work so that he can pay the rent on the house their parents left to them. At the same time, he collects phone books from cities around the country; we find out very late in the play that he sifts through them looking for people who share his surname, writing them letters in an effort to track down his wayward parents. Gordo, on the other hand, is quite content with things as they are, even though the house and its furniture totter and crumble from neglect, and even though their lives are circumscribed and small. Chaz’s thoughts run to larger things, but his guilt-provoking sense of obligation keeps him from pursuing his own desires.
Although the theme is insistently American—it’s the conflict between Blanche and Stella over leaving Belle Rive, played out on two brothers instead of sisters—Hurricane Gordo offers no new angle from which to study its permutations and effects. Naturally, a girl (Tracee Chimo) comes to stay with the boys, drawn by their ad for a boarder. She’s soon revealed to be a colorful fraud, pretending to be a drifter but really a comfortably middle-class teen-aged runaway whose irritated father comes to drag her back to Manhattan where she belongs. She tries to seduce Chaz into running away with her to California, the paradigmatic land of freedom and opportunity for pioneers and dreamers.
But once again, the girl only provides the fulcrum on which the men play out their conflicts. Hurricane Gordo isn’t her story; it belongs—from the overly precious pre-show basketball game between the two actors until the predictable ending—to the brothers, whose vaguely homoerotic connection never gets mined for more interesting dramatic or characterological tensions. The girl leaves and the boys stay, giving up their fantasy of reassembling their biological family, but finding enough between the two of them and their rotting homestead to preclude adventure in the wider world.
The play’s suffocating aura seeps out into the audience. Nothing changes here; no one really learns anything at all, not the characters or the spectators. The set doesn’t change from one act to the next; the costumes change a little, but not enough to brighten the scene or reverse the characters’ fates. Little of the outside penetrates the detritus of their small lives. But instead of offering insights from such shuttered existences, or inspiring emotions that might make spectators feel something meaningful about our own lives and choices, we just feel tired by the brothers’ stasis, by Gordo’s prattling and prowling, and by two young white men’s insufferable self-involvement. One of my companions noted how the play converses with True West, another story of brothers caught in a vicious cycle of familial and social abuse. But this play pales in comparison to Shepard’s provocative and lastingly satisfying drama.
After these three productions, my friends and I were feeling a bit depressed about the state of American theatre. Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw lifted our spirits, at least because the play knows exactly what it is and what it means to do. The writing, direction, and acting were assured, confident, and precise—no word, movement, or emotion was wasted through the whole often hilarious evening.
Although Becky Shaw, too, is a realist family drama, these characters are sharply drawn and complicated, contradicting themselves with surprising desires, and catching us unaware with unexpected shifts in motivation and strategy. The story plays out a bit like a competition, in part because its driving force, Max Garrett (David Wilson Barnes), is a financier who’s always working angles. He’s a fixer, someone who not only makes people rich, but corrects their mistakes and rewrites their self-scenarios to make them come out right. Max is both astute and blinkered; he can diagnosis someone else’s neuroses at first glance, but his particular emotional deficits keep him from overcoming his own.
Becky Shaw raises questions about fidelity, family, and the future, all through characters who collide and cajole, trying to work angles for reasons none of them can truly fathom. Max’s mother died of cancer when he was 10; his dissolute father allowed the Slater family to adopt and raise him. Suzanna Slater (Mia Barron), his erstwhile sister, becomes his best friend and sparring partner; she speaks his language, can keep up with his rapid, biting observations, and can match his mordant, sometimes wounding wit. He’s protected Susie their whole lives, not by coddling her but by teaching her to be tough, to be what he calls “the biggest dick in the room,” so that she’ll win, as he does, at mergers and acquisitions in banking and in life.
When the Slater patriarch dies, Max steps in to clean up the mess, bartering a truce between Susie and her imperious, physically handicapped but emotionally powerful mother (also called Susan, flawlessly played by Janis Dardaris). The play’s compelling mother-daughter dynamic doesn’t waste a word on fake affection between the two women, and its plot doesn’t move them toward a treacly, fake reconciliation. Instead, the mother is left with a kind of impervious dignity, often delivering insights that sound more rabbinical than maternal. She’s a woman of a certain age, who’s learned to make her compromises to get what she needs to sustain her; her pragmatism is both admirable and chilling.
The younger Suzanna doesn’t know herself half as well as her elder, and allows herself to be buffeted about emotionally and professionally by Max and her erstwhile husband Andrew (Davis Duffield), whom Gionfriddo uses as the yin and yang of contemporary masculinity. For each of Max’s bullying barbs, Andrew rebounds with a conciliatory, “radical feminist” protestation of injustice and healing. Max is a warrior; Andrew is a caretaker, who finds his own self-worth in healing women whose emotional damage attracts him like sirens’ songs. The two men despise each other; Susie, caught between them, is pulled toward Max’s strength and feels obligated to Andrew's succor.
Into this already complex set of relationships walks the eponymous Becky Shaw (Annie Parisse), who at her first entrance appears such an outré version of femininity that she seems like a drag queen. She’s flighty, jittery, doesn’t know at whom to look, or where to put her hands, yet in her first scene, she observes Max and Susie and Andrew with clear knowingness and insight.
One of the play’s deficits is that rather than playing off Becky’s implicit, rather uncanny emotional strength, it cuts her down to size. Each of her scenes finds her appearing physically smaller and smaller, until by the last scene, I wondered how I ever could have mistaken her for a man-dressed-as-a-woman-playing-a-female, so fragile and wispy does she finally become. Her trauma and overwhelming need drive the plot and the characters’ changing reactions to one another, but her own back-story (which is vaguely, gratuitously racist) never fully explains why she becomes so important and defining in their lives.
Becky Shaw makes a good drawing room comedy of slightly more than errors. Gionfriddo is on to something about contemporary heterosexual relationships; she’s an MFA graduate of Brown, and enjoys sending barbs back at her alma mater for its politically correct reputation and its production of gentle feminist men and ecologically-minded anti-corporate women. Her characters move through the world, recognizing the necessity of compromise, the constraints of what appear to be infinite choices. They’re self-conscious enough about their privilege to be guilty when Becky protests her poverty; they’re self-reflexive enough to know that however flawed their nuclear family, they’re fiercely loyal to each other at a primal, tribal level that will carry them through to the kind of social victories for which they’ve all been groomed.
Becky, the outsider, has to use her wiles and wits to get what they have. If she wants Max to be her entrée into the world of wealth and power, she’ll use her own keen intelligence to manipulate his vulnerability and emotional failings enough to prey on his delusions. Finally, she’s the meek outsider come to make her place in a world that the rich have only appeared to inherit. Her ultimate malevolence is her meal ticket.
A feminist role model she’s not. But at least Becky Shaw sketches the complications of relationships, the compromises and costs, the dark ways in which we’re all instrumental to one another. These characters rub against the world, and the heat of their friction throws off a rather illuminating light, if only onto the heterosexual relationships that always already seem doomed, functional, and short-sighted from the start in this crop of new American plays.
At least at Becky Shaw, it was really nice to spend a few hours laughing out loud.
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Dynasty Handbag
New York-based performance artist Dynasty Handbag is the "solo music/video/voiceover/comitragic performance vehicle created and executed by Jibz Cameron," according to www.dynastyhandbag.com. She visited Austin recently to perform a benefit evening for the local queer DIY performance space CampCamp, and also offered a one-night show at the Vortex Theatre in East Austin. Word-of-mouth primed me for her performance—Dynasty Handbag got raves at the “WOW and Now” cabaret staged at Joe’s Pub during the Performance Studies International Conference at New York University in November 2007.
I can see why. In the small café that serves as a casual lobby off the Vortex's theatre, Dynasty set up a tiny platform stage under a few even tinier lights and proceeded to seduce the audience with her casual, quirky charm. In a talk after the short show, she positioned herself within overlapping music and performance practices, describing her work with various bands as well as her training in theatre at ACT in San Francisco.
The multiplicity of styles and talents shines in her work. She performed an interactive conversation with her own recorded voice, played from a laptop perched beside an amp just off the small stage, selecting numbers from a playlist on the screen, assisted only by a friend who reached out to adjust the volume during each piece. Dynasty reminded me all at once of a singer, a stand-up comic, a performance artist, and a dancer, as her mobile face and flexible body seemed to register each nuance of emotion that crossed through her.
Physically, Dynasty Handbag performed like a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin and Gumby. Her “costumes” were outrageous arrays of clothing layered like non-sequiturs—a leotard over sweat pants, a cut off t-shirt worn over a long-sleeve shirt. She seemed dressed for mobility, if not for speed; the queer (meaning “odd”) look of her outfits enabled the herky-jerky movement of her arms and legs, as thoughts and questions and answers hurtled across her body in spastic, but supremely controlled, finally dancerly style.
In many ways, Dynasty mostly plays reaction shots, responding physically to her taped voice as it prompts her movement through each piece. But what for a less talented, less confident performer would look like mugging, in Dynasty’s rendition seemed like a symphony of considered, meaningful, even moving response. For instance, I’ve never noticed the complex of emotions available in a raised eyebrow. Dynasty lets us see differently things we think we've seen before.
The evening’s highlight was her interaction with a series of discarded plastic and paper bags that littered the small platform. As each bag pestered her to be noticed, Dynasty approached them warily, with resignation, and let herself be commanded by their needs and desires. Her face and her body registered the humiliations of succumbing to instructions delivered by inanimate objects, yet her generosity with her attention became strangely heartwarming.
Far from cynical, her irony seemed shy rather than coy, hopeful rather than debased. As she pet one of the rumbled plastic bags, pleasuring it with the nearly sexual abandon it demanded, her face moved into and out of confused expressions of embarrassment and willingness, as her body just went with the flow. As each bag called to her in turn, Dynasty acknowledged the publicness of her interactions with these objects; she knows we’re watching, and goes through her motions with a wink and a nod to how ridiculous and yet necessary her exchanges seem to be. When the last bag—an upright, rather imperious brown paper one with handles—called her attention, she sighed, “I’m tired of talking to bags.” The line resonated as loudly and deeply (if much more comically) as Willie Loman setting down his sales cases and telling his wife he’s tired of traveling.
In another number, Dynasty sat in a chair, playing an artist deciding the content of her next piece. The number was a tour-de-force of affectionate self-satire, as the stream-of-conscious monologue spooled off the laptop while she sat responding with her face and body, pen poised over an open notebook turned to a blank page (this after she borrowed the pen from someone in the audience).
Dynasty’s talent, perhaps, lies in how fresh her reactions seem, how persuasive she is in convincing us that she’s never heard these thoughts before (and neither have we). At the same time, she crafts a knowing, intimate connection between herself and her spectators, bringing us into this wry, slightly askew world where your own voice gets literalized (auralized?) outside your head, and you judge each choice of action, and respond to what you hear yourself telling yourself. It’s the super-ego come to life in a very public place, jousting with the body-as-id, as the ego just tries to hold it together and proceed, knowing that its contradictory, ambivalent, and finally deeply humane actions are under gentle (if pre-disposed to be generous) scrutiny.
Dynasty Handbag’s appearance might have been mediated through apparatus of her laptop and that amp, but the intimacy she creates carries a lovely current of liveness. We hear along with her the outrageous demands of things, the cacophony of others’ judgments and needs, the absurdity of trying to negotiate questions and comments that press at us from everywhere and nowhere.
In the process, she predisposes us to identify with her disidentifications, with her cautious acquiescence and delicious resistance to the nameless forces that be, which sound an awful lot like, well, Dynasty Handbag. Far from solipsistic, the performance externalizes a conversation we can recognize and to which we can relate: the ambivalences and doubts that prompt our hopeful, finally graceful actions, and the generosity with which we all go about believing in the possibilities of our interconnected lives.
The Feminist Spectator
I can see why. In the small café that serves as a casual lobby off the Vortex's theatre, Dynasty set up a tiny platform stage under a few even tinier lights and proceeded to seduce the audience with her casual, quirky charm. In a talk after the short show, she positioned herself within overlapping music and performance practices, describing her work with various bands as well as her training in theatre at ACT in San Francisco.
The multiplicity of styles and talents shines in her work. She performed an interactive conversation with her own recorded voice, played from a laptop perched beside an amp just off the small stage, selecting numbers from a playlist on the screen, assisted only by a friend who reached out to adjust the volume during each piece. Dynasty reminded me all at once of a singer, a stand-up comic, a performance artist, and a dancer, as her mobile face and flexible body seemed to register each nuance of emotion that crossed through her.
Physically, Dynasty Handbag performed like a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin and Gumby. Her “costumes” were outrageous arrays of clothing layered like non-sequiturs—a leotard over sweat pants, a cut off t-shirt worn over a long-sleeve shirt. She seemed dressed for mobility, if not for speed; the queer (meaning “odd”) look of her outfits enabled the herky-jerky movement of her arms and legs, as thoughts and questions and answers hurtled across her body in spastic, but supremely controlled, finally dancerly style.
In many ways, Dynasty mostly plays reaction shots, responding physically to her taped voice as it prompts her movement through each piece. But what for a less talented, less confident performer would look like mugging, in Dynasty’s rendition seemed like a symphony of considered, meaningful, even moving response. For instance, I’ve never noticed the complex of emotions available in a raised eyebrow. Dynasty lets us see differently things we think we've seen before.
The evening’s highlight was her interaction with a series of discarded plastic and paper bags that littered the small platform. As each bag pestered her to be noticed, Dynasty approached them warily, with resignation, and let herself be commanded by their needs and desires. Her face and her body registered the humiliations of succumbing to instructions delivered by inanimate objects, yet her generosity with her attention became strangely heartwarming.
Far from cynical, her irony seemed shy rather than coy, hopeful rather than debased. As she pet one of the rumbled plastic bags, pleasuring it with the nearly sexual abandon it demanded, her face moved into and out of confused expressions of embarrassment and willingness, as her body just went with the flow. As each bag called to her in turn, Dynasty acknowledged the publicness of her interactions with these objects; she knows we’re watching, and goes through her motions with a wink and a nod to how ridiculous and yet necessary her exchanges seem to be. When the last bag—an upright, rather imperious brown paper one with handles—called her attention, she sighed, “I’m tired of talking to bags.” The line resonated as loudly and deeply (if much more comically) as Willie Loman setting down his sales cases and telling his wife he’s tired of traveling.
In another number, Dynasty sat in a chair, playing an artist deciding the content of her next piece. The number was a tour-de-force of affectionate self-satire, as the stream-of-conscious monologue spooled off the laptop while she sat responding with her face and body, pen poised over an open notebook turned to a blank page (this after she borrowed the pen from someone in the audience).
Dynasty’s talent, perhaps, lies in how fresh her reactions seem, how persuasive she is in convincing us that she’s never heard these thoughts before (and neither have we). At the same time, she crafts a knowing, intimate connection between herself and her spectators, bringing us into this wry, slightly askew world where your own voice gets literalized (auralized?) outside your head, and you judge each choice of action, and respond to what you hear yourself telling yourself. It’s the super-ego come to life in a very public place, jousting with the body-as-id, as the ego just tries to hold it together and proceed, knowing that its contradictory, ambivalent, and finally deeply humane actions are under gentle (if pre-disposed to be generous) scrutiny.
Dynasty Handbag’s appearance might have been mediated through apparatus of her laptop and that amp, but the intimacy she creates carries a lovely current of liveness. We hear along with her the outrageous demands of things, the cacophony of others’ judgments and needs, the absurdity of trying to negotiate questions and comments that press at us from everywhere and nowhere.
In the process, she predisposes us to identify with her disidentifications, with her cautious acquiescence and delicious resistance to the nameless forces that be, which sound an awful lot like, well, Dynasty Handbag. Far from solipsistic, the performance externalizes a conversation we can recognize and to which we can relate: the ambivalences and doubts that prompt our hopeful, finally graceful actions, and the generosity with which we all go about believing in the possibilities of our interconnected lives.
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
THE L WORD's LATEST HIGH
Season Five on The L Word continues to be its best since the series began. Producer Ilene Chaiken and friends have returned to the fast and funny satirical premise that made the lesbian dramedy so appealing in the first place, and the characters have settled into their quirks and peccadilloes with an easy charm. The actors seem more comfortable with each episode, plying their trade with a wink and a nod to spectators as if we’re all now in on The L Word's best joke: the fantastic hubris that lets it aspire to be a cable tv show about “lesbian lives and loves.”
That The L Word has always in some ways been a parody of itself is no longer an open secret, but now overtly delivered with delicious self-mockery through Jenny’s vanity film project, Les Girls. With the once tortured, traumatized nouveau-lesbian cutter now fully in bloom as dyke diva, Jenny muddles her way through directing her script, adapted from her eponymous novel. That Les Girls is itself a not-so-thinly-veiled, not-so-fictionalized version of stories told in the first season of The L Word makes the references even more fun. The show’s winking allusions to its own excesses make it even easier to forgive its interim few seasons of labored, unconvincing dramaturgy.
In last night’s episode (#6, see http://www.sho.com/site/lword/previous_episodes.do?episodeid=130341 for clips and on-line viewings), Jenny and company fly to Vancouver to scout locations. Jenny quickly denounces the city as a poor excuse for Los Angeles, and demands she be allowed to shoot in California. Since The L Word itself shoots in Vancouver, the producers poke fun at spectators’ early objections to the unrealistic Canadian locations that substitute for the city in which the show takes place. Les Girls moves its shoot to the very LA street on which Bette and Tina and Jenny and Shane live, mixing up the layers of reference and reality as The L Word's characters meet the Les Girls actors who play them.
Jenny’s moment coaching the women playing “Bev” and the film’s version of Tina through their first sex scene is a hysterical parody of the straight actors of The L Word rumored to have been tutored in the fine points of lesbian sex by Chaiken and her crew. Jenny gives the two embarrassed, befuddled actors an elaborate set of sexual instructions, to which they respond with terrified, awkward ineptitude. Frustrated, Jenny barks to her no-longer-so-abject assistant, Adele (Malaya Rivera Drew), that they need to hire a lesbian sex expert to teach the actors a thing or two, an obvious reference to The L Word employing Susie “Sexpert” Bright to instruct its performers while the first season was being shot.
Creating narrative stand-ins for the regular cast of characters lets the audience see how far Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, and the rest of the cast have come with their roles. And the utterly satisfying consummation of Bette and Tina’s re-simmering passion proved them once again the most believable, compelling couple on the show. Beals and Holloman’s affection for each other seems real, and their comfort with one another’s bodies makes their sex scenes convincingly erotic. When Bette, in the throes of desire, tells Tina that she’s missed her, the audience can only agree. After three seasons of watching other characters' much less expert sexual fumbling, it’s good to have Bette and Tina back in action (and especially nice to watch Tina take control of their moves).
Even Kate Moennig seems to be loosening up as Shane (could it be those newly buff abs she’s now sporting?). While her hair still looks like a disaster (but then, what do I know?), her three-way with the SheBar girls and its aftermath has given her new spunk, as she stands up to defend The Planet and poor Kit’s reputation. Elizabeth Keener (Catherine’s look-alike sister) plays a mean jealous lover, and the conflict over lesbian capitalism is both funny and relevant, as the two establishments fight for the dyke dollar.
The ensemble of actors playing the core group of friends--Holloman, Moennig, Pam Grier, and Leisha Hailey--show their affection for each other with real conviction, their repartée and teasing now finely honed, warm, and easy. Hailey might have lost Rose Rollins’s Tasha to Alice’s dubious decision to out a famous African American football star, but Alice’s budding career as a talking head (now being prepared to audition for The L Word's version of The View, with sarcastic references to Alice taking Rosie O’Donnell’s “lesbian” place) promises more subtle political commentary from the always vivacious character. Alice might bear the burden of the show’s queer politics, but she handles her role as spokeswoman pretty well (except for her inexplicably naïve and ignorant jibes at transman Max, whose sole purpose these days seems to be videotaping Alice and figuring out what’s up with the suspicious, covertly ambitious Adele).
Cybil Shepard continues her run as Phyllis, the out Chancellor of “California University” where Bette serves as the art school dean. The plot’s recent controversy over “extreme” art proves that Bette’s become more conservative in her very responsible administrative position. Bette’s erstwhile lover, artist Jodi, now sings the anthem for free expression in the arts, defending her student’s right to put a gun to his head as part of his performance. Bette worries about donors and the school’s board of directors, a far cry from the Bette who mounted “Provocations” at the LA museum where she was the curator (in the far more politically progressive Season One).
If Phyllis’s lack of concern over the controversy isn’t believable, her new-found lesbian identity continues to serve The L Word as a source of both pedagogy and parody. Phyllis’s freshly introduced daughter, Molly (played by Shepard’s actual daughter, Clementine Ford), promises new sexual tensions and possibilities for the irrepressible Shane (whose recent vow of celibacy didn’t even last an episode).
Given that network television has been a wasteland these last few months while the writers’ strike ensured that the best scribes in the business will get the income they deserve, it’s been a pleasure to follow The L Word's more accomplished scripts, well-paced directing, musically evocative scores (fabulous to hear Joan Armitrading last night), and capable, relaxed, committed performances. Since the future of Friday Night Lights (my other favorite) seems in doubt post-strike, at least we’ve got the girl crew in Vancouver—rather—“LA” to entertain us. How nice that some of the best television available these days is by and about lesbians.
Indulging happily,
The Feminist Spectator
That The L Word has always in some ways been a parody of itself is no longer an open secret, but now overtly delivered with delicious self-mockery through Jenny’s vanity film project, Les Girls. With the once tortured, traumatized nouveau-lesbian cutter now fully in bloom as dyke diva, Jenny muddles her way through directing her script, adapted from her eponymous novel. That Les Girls is itself a not-so-thinly-veiled, not-so-fictionalized version of stories told in the first season of The L Word makes the references even more fun. The show’s winking allusions to its own excesses make it even easier to forgive its interim few seasons of labored, unconvincing dramaturgy.
In last night’s episode (#6, see http://www.sho.com/site/lword/previous_episodes.do?episodeid=130341 for clips and on-line viewings), Jenny and company fly to Vancouver to scout locations. Jenny quickly denounces the city as a poor excuse for Los Angeles, and demands she be allowed to shoot in California. Since The L Word itself shoots in Vancouver, the producers poke fun at spectators’ early objections to the unrealistic Canadian locations that substitute for the city in which the show takes place. Les Girls moves its shoot to the very LA street on which Bette and Tina and Jenny and Shane live, mixing up the layers of reference and reality as The L Word's characters meet the Les Girls actors who play them.
Jenny’s moment coaching the women playing “Bev” and the film’s version of Tina through their first sex scene is a hysterical parody of the straight actors of The L Word rumored to have been tutored in the fine points of lesbian sex by Chaiken and her crew. Jenny gives the two embarrassed, befuddled actors an elaborate set of sexual instructions, to which they respond with terrified, awkward ineptitude. Frustrated, Jenny barks to her no-longer-so-abject assistant, Adele (Malaya Rivera Drew), that they need to hire a lesbian sex expert to teach the actors a thing or two, an obvious reference to The L Word employing Susie “Sexpert” Bright to instruct its performers while the first season was being shot.
Creating narrative stand-ins for the regular cast of characters lets the audience see how far Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, and the rest of the cast have come with their roles. And the utterly satisfying consummation of Bette and Tina’s re-simmering passion proved them once again the most believable, compelling couple on the show. Beals and Holloman’s affection for each other seems real, and their comfort with one another’s bodies makes their sex scenes convincingly erotic. When Bette, in the throes of desire, tells Tina that she’s missed her, the audience can only agree. After three seasons of watching other characters' much less expert sexual fumbling, it’s good to have Bette and Tina back in action (and especially nice to watch Tina take control of their moves).
Even Kate Moennig seems to be loosening up as Shane (could it be those newly buff abs she’s now sporting?). While her hair still looks like a disaster (but then, what do I know?), her three-way with the SheBar girls and its aftermath has given her new spunk, as she stands up to defend The Planet and poor Kit’s reputation. Elizabeth Keener (Catherine’s look-alike sister) plays a mean jealous lover, and the conflict over lesbian capitalism is both funny and relevant, as the two establishments fight for the dyke dollar.
The ensemble of actors playing the core group of friends--Holloman, Moennig, Pam Grier, and Leisha Hailey--show their affection for each other with real conviction, their repartée and teasing now finely honed, warm, and easy. Hailey might have lost Rose Rollins’s Tasha to Alice’s dubious decision to out a famous African American football star, but Alice’s budding career as a talking head (now being prepared to audition for The L Word's version of The View, with sarcastic references to Alice taking Rosie O’Donnell’s “lesbian” place) promises more subtle political commentary from the always vivacious character. Alice might bear the burden of the show’s queer politics, but she handles her role as spokeswoman pretty well (except for her inexplicably naïve and ignorant jibes at transman Max, whose sole purpose these days seems to be videotaping Alice and figuring out what’s up with the suspicious, covertly ambitious Adele).
Cybil Shepard continues her run as Phyllis, the out Chancellor of “California University” where Bette serves as the art school dean. The plot’s recent controversy over “extreme” art proves that Bette’s become more conservative in her very responsible administrative position. Bette’s erstwhile lover, artist Jodi, now sings the anthem for free expression in the arts, defending her student’s right to put a gun to his head as part of his performance. Bette worries about donors and the school’s board of directors, a far cry from the Bette who mounted “Provocations” at the LA museum where she was the curator (in the far more politically progressive Season One).
If Phyllis’s lack of concern over the controversy isn’t believable, her new-found lesbian identity continues to serve The L Word as a source of both pedagogy and parody. Phyllis’s freshly introduced daughter, Molly (played by Shepard’s actual daughter, Clementine Ford), promises new sexual tensions and possibilities for the irrepressible Shane (whose recent vow of celibacy didn’t even last an episode).
Given that network television has been a wasteland these last few months while the writers’ strike ensured that the best scribes in the business will get the income they deserve, it’s been a pleasure to follow The L Word's more accomplished scripts, well-paced directing, musically evocative scores (fabulous to hear Joan Armitrading last night), and capable, relaxed, committed performances. Since the future of Friday Night Lights (my other favorite) seems in doubt post-strike, at least we’ve got the girl crew in Vancouver—rather—“LA” to entertain us. How nice that some of the best television available these days is by and about lesbians.
Indulging happily,
The Feminist Spectator
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Come Back, Little Sheba on Broadway
William Inge was one of the notables of mid-20th-century American playwriting, often mentioned in the same breath as Williams and Miller, even though his relatively slimmer output garners him fewer words in history surveys (or might that be because he was gay?). After the success of his second play, Come Back, Little Sheba, on Broadway in 1950, Inge went on to write Picnic (1953), which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize, Bus Stop (1955), and Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). He won an Academy Award for his first screenplay, Splendor in the Grass (1960), which starred Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. According to the Inge Center web site (www.ingecenter.org), the playwright became depressed after two plays he wrote in the early 60s were unsuccessful. He left New York for LA, where he committed suicide in 1973.
This Manhattan Theatre Club-produced revival of Inge’s 1950s realist drama was first staged in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre (see http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/come5744.htm). The production opens on Broadway on January 24, 2008, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, affectionately known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the long-running, original Law and Order television series. Merkerson plays Lola, the apparently desperate and deluded housewife whose attempt to keep her marriage intact and “normal” drives the plot.
Sheba is a conventional play, to the extent that it’s rife with all the tropes of realism: the “secrets” that sour its relationships; the repressed desires that wind up exploding and ruining its characters; the compromises that make the lives it portrays ones of rue and regret. But in this production, rather than providing a recipe for the obvious, director Michael Pressman and his leading woman find nuances and depths to these familiar stories that make Sheba vital and resonant.
James Noone’s soaring set quotes the claustrophobic domestic spaces that Jo Mielziner captured in his original 1949 design for Death of a Salesman. The home in which Lola’s unhappiness unfolds is a multi-level, multi-room space with doors and stairs and furniture backed up against imaginary walls, a physical embodiment of the porousness between a family’s private and public lives. Lola’s kitchen is a bright but strangely empty space, with none of the hominess usually ascribed to the nerve center of nurture and sustenance. The living room, at the opening curtain, is furnished with mis-matched pieces and a threadbare rug, and strewn with the detritus of careless lives: newspapers and magazines, fresh laundry and dirty clothes.
The boarder’s room off the living room is decorated in detail, as renter Marie’s love life is as central to the plot machinations as the room’s location suggests. Up the stairs, balanced precariously over the action, is the shared bath and master bedroom, suggested with doors but revealed by the bedroom’s lack of walls, where an always disheveled bed figures the entanglements of thwarted desire that thread through the story.
The set changes, which require reorienting props and pieces of the décor in between scenes, are directed as part of the play’s life. As stagehands come on to attend to various objects, the actors move around the set in character, making transitions in the play’s timescape. The dream-like simultaneity of the play’s action and the production’s logistical needs let you see the characters in even more of their quotidian reality as they move pensively from one room to the next in the half light.
The set suggests both the home’s solidity and its precariousness, just as Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes lend the characters both dignity and disrepute. Merkerson wears the housedresses that encaged 1950s housewives, all ties and bows and cheap cloth wrapped around the loosening figures of female middle age. Doc (Steppenwolf’s Kevin Anderson) wears suspenders to hold up already high-waisted trousers tightly pulled over his expanding waist-line, foiling his attempt at style and leaving him slightly ridiculous looking. This is a couple playing at the conventions of 1950s domesticity, and failing, badly.
Shirley Booth originated Lola on Broadway and in the subsequent film version, for which she won an Academy Award. Her simpering, foolish flibbertigibbet of a woman haunts the character, and provides a sharp contrast for Merkerson’s reinterpretation. In the play’s first act, she puts her own spin on what appear to be Lola’s self-delusions about her relationship and her life, playing the woman as more languid and dreamy than Booth’s always bustling, high-pitched fussbudget.
But as the second act moves through its devastating unraveling, Merkerson reveals Lola as a surprisingly strong but trapped woman trying frantically to hold onto a marriage she knows was a mistake from the start, struggling to be a partner to a husband whose alcoholism destroys them both.
The secrets alluded to at the beginning find the harsh light of day at the end, as Doc’s hatred for the woman whose pregnancy trapped him into a loveless marriage explodes in violence. Lola’s attempt to hang on to the innocence that let her trust her young lover 25 years ago becomes more and more painful, as it’s clear their liaison produced only loss. The baby they inadvertently conceived died when they used a substandard doctor to attend to the delivery; their shotgun wedding was obviated by the disappearance of their progeny, its unhappiness exacerbated by the couple’s inability to bear another child. Lola calls Doc “Daddy,” underlining ironically (although she always says it earnestly) the emptiness of their union.
Marie, their boarder (Zoe Kazan), inflames an already fraught relationship with her flirtatious presence, taunting Doc with casual intimacies that quicken his step. When Marie flaunts 1950s propriety by sleeping with Turk, the young man with whom she cheats on her out-of-town boyfriend, Doc’s carefully manufactured moral code falls apart and knocks him off the wagon of sobriety he’s maintained for one uneasy year.
The language of Alcoholics Anonymous's 12-step program (still relatively new to American culture in 1950, and much more stigmatized than its commonplace presence today) to which Doc and Lola cling barely holds his bitterness and incipient rage in check. Even though he attends meetings and sponsors other alcoholics, helping them through brutal visits to the local hospital’s drunk tank, and even though Lola asks him to repeat his daily affirmation, neither Lola nor Doc truly believe his nature has changed. Director Pressman gradually builds the production’s impending doom, letting spectators recognize that what we see as Lola’s inanity is really her frantic attempt to shore up the façade of her relationship’s normalcy.
In 2008, that façade already seems cracked. The production suggests that the conventions of heterosexual marriage were already rotten in the 50s, even as American ideology worked so hard to construct the nuclear family living happily in the suburbs as the sine qua non of such relationships. Both Lola and Doc suffocate in the confines of their home, fabricating intimacy and performing normalcy as they suffer their emotional and social isolation.
Doc is jealous of Marie and Turk, and funnels his repressed desire into flirting with her under the guise of paternalism. Lola likes to watch the young couple’s romantic couplings; she openly admits that she spies on them. While the audience can read her voyeurism as benign longing for her own lost beauty and youth, her watching also reeks of sexual perversion, as though she’s doomed to lurk about the corners of other people’s passion, feeding her own desire vicariously.
Their neighbor, Mrs. Coffman (Brenda Wehle), who’s suspect enough that Lola first wonders if she has poisoned the missing old beloved dog, Sheba, becomes the play’s reproving Greek chorus, stepping into and out of their home and the action with her thin lips pinched, tsk tsking her way through their lives as she first judges Lola’s inadequate housekeeping and then pities her victimization.
Inge suggests that even those with the most in common—lonely housewives chained to deadening routines—must invest in appearances of decorum instead of reaching out to each other with sympathy and agency. When Mrs. Coffman inadvertently visits after Doc’s rampage, she wordlessly helps Lola right the overturned furniture and clean up broken glass, replacing the vestiges of her dignity without suggesting that Lola change anything.
The Marie/Turk subplot offers interesting feminist resonances. Temporarily separated from her socially upstanding boyfriend, Marie embarks on an affair with a man who’s all brawn and no brains, whose only option for social intercourse is sexual. Marie clearly feels something for Turk, but she tells Lola that he’s “not the marrying kind.” Inge neatly reverses the charge usually leveled against “loose” women, painting Marie as the sexual opportunist who knows she’ll soon settle down with a more appropriate man.
When her boyfriend Bruce appears at the house, he’s straitlaced, dull, and judgmental, impatient with Lola’s fussing and already puffed up by the obligations to which he’s carefully calibrated his life. His appearance on the scene underlines Marie’s compromises and Inge’s intimation that social propriety requires emotional and spiritual sacrifice.
Merkerson is a revelation as Lola. Casting an African American woman in the wife’s role without changing a word of the text and casting the rest of the characters as white (with the exception of one of Doc’s AA friends, played by African American actor Keith Randolph Smith) layers the play with racial nuances unavailable when a white woman performs the part. In many ways, Lola’s servitude is more readily apparent; in one key scene, when Lola’s made a fancy dinner for Marie and her visiting boyfriend to which Doc, out on a bender, fails to show, Lola announces that she won’t eat with the couple, but will be their “butler.”
Her declaration productively underlines Lola’s indentured servitude, as Merkerson’s race (and her maid-like adornments) suddenly becomes evident in ways it doesn’t through the rest of the production. This color-blind casting in fact underlines gender commonality across race. We’re no doubt meant to see this choice through a 21st century perspective, since in fact, a mixed-marriage in the 1950s would have been scandalous.
Merkerson slows Lola’s tempo, reading her lines with a drawling, southern-inflected cadence that points up her race more than trying to obscure it. Her voice is lovely and wistful, rich and warm, while her face seems frozen with her effort to make something nice out of a life wasted in a loveless lie of a relationship. Where Booth seemed convinced of her own revisionist history, Merkerson’s performance reveals the labor required to construct such stories, and the psychic and spiritual toll they take.
Instead of hiding her sadness behind relentless movement and meaningless domestic busyness, Merkerson’s Lola is almost indolent in her melancholy. When we first see her, she’s lying in bed in that upper room, wearing a cream-color full slip and staring quietly into space. There’s something erotic and charged about Merkerson’s lassitude; she could be a heroine from the steamier bloodlines of Williams’s oeuvre.
In another scene, left alone in the house, Lola turns on “Taboo,” a radio program that promises covert seductions to its lonely-hearted listeners. Lola drapes herself on the couch, preparing to luxuriate in some physical fantasy; her guilt is palpable when she’s startled by Doc’s unexpected return from work.
Merkerson’s performance is fully embodied and sexually charged. Her invitations to the milkman and the mailman and even to Mrs. Coffman to come sit, stay, have a cup of coffee, listen to a story, to just be with her, all have unsettling, slightly unseemly sexual overtones. And yet over the course of the play, the men who first reluctantly enter her home glancing at their watches and rolling their eyes gain affection and respect for Lola.
As her domestic strife becomes more obvious, they begin to see her as someone real, rather than a caricature of the happy housewife she once performed for them so aggressively. The mailman writes her a letter just so that she’ll get one, and the milkman proudly shows her his picture in a physique magazine (shadings of Inge’s homosexuality, as such rags were notorious as the gay porn of their time).
Although Mrs. Coffman would be a highly unlikely sexual liaison for Lola, Lola’s situation echoes that of the much more respectable middle-class housewife of the same era Julianna Moore plays in the film version of Michael Cunningham’s book The Hours. The emptiness and indignities of heterosexual domesticity fan Moore’s character’s lesbian longing and propel her out of the family nightmare.
No such redemption is possible for Lola. Her boredom is stultifying (Doc prevents her from going to work), and she’s utterly dependent on others in her version of house arrest. Her estranged family won’t take her back, now 25 years after her sexual indiscretion, even though her drunken husband has threatened her life, brandishing a machete in their living room, calling her names, and promising to “cut the fat off” of her with his weapon.
When drink lets Doc drop his mask, the audience sees the horror Lola has put up with for 25 years, and suddenly, her behavior makes a terrible kind of sense. She’s terrorized in her own home, with no way to escape. She has no means, no skills, nowhere else to go. Yet as Merkerson plays her, Lola’s unflinching resolve to survive outweighs her terror. When Doc returns, chastened, from his short rehabilitative hospital stay, he’s pink and pitiful, helpless as a mewling newborn, and begs Lola not to leave him.
With one look in response, Merkerson’s devastating expression takes in her present and her future, chained to a mercurial alcoholic who will descend into madness and claw his way back to temporary redemption again and again, leaving her to fend off his murderous rage and to soldier through a fake life. She walks Doc to their kitchen table and proceeds to cook for him as they glance at each other warily, pretending, again and always, that their suburban prison houses something real and nourishing.
Pressman’s wrenching production makes the realist conventions of Inge’s play critical of the very domestic story they structure. This revival is one of the most progressive realist dramas I’ve ever seen produced, not because the director deconstructed it, but because he and his cast fight their way to the horrible core of the situations it describes. They don’t blame their characters, regardless of their ethical or moral failings, but instead indict a culture that insists that heterosexual, coupled, suburban domesticity is the best way to live.
No wonder second wave American feminism asserted itself a decade after this play was first produced.
The Feminist Spectator
This Manhattan Theatre Club-produced revival of Inge’s 1950s realist drama was first staged in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre (see http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/come5744.htm). The production opens on Broadway on January 24, 2008, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, affectionately known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the long-running, original Law and Order television series. Merkerson plays Lola, the apparently desperate and deluded housewife whose attempt to keep her marriage intact and “normal” drives the plot.
Sheba is a conventional play, to the extent that it’s rife with all the tropes of realism: the “secrets” that sour its relationships; the repressed desires that wind up exploding and ruining its characters; the compromises that make the lives it portrays ones of rue and regret. But in this production, rather than providing a recipe for the obvious, director Michael Pressman and his leading woman find nuances and depths to these familiar stories that make Sheba vital and resonant.
James Noone’s soaring set quotes the claustrophobic domestic spaces that Jo Mielziner captured in his original 1949 design for Death of a Salesman. The home in which Lola’s unhappiness unfolds is a multi-level, multi-room space with doors and stairs and furniture backed up against imaginary walls, a physical embodiment of the porousness between a family’s private and public lives. Lola’s kitchen is a bright but strangely empty space, with none of the hominess usually ascribed to the nerve center of nurture and sustenance. The living room, at the opening curtain, is furnished with mis-matched pieces and a threadbare rug, and strewn with the detritus of careless lives: newspapers and magazines, fresh laundry and dirty clothes.
The boarder’s room off the living room is decorated in detail, as renter Marie’s love life is as central to the plot machinations as the room’s location suggests. Up the stairs, balanced precariously over the action, is the shared bath and master bedroom, suggested with doors but revealed by the bedroom’s lack of walls, where an always disheveled bed figures the entanglements of thwarted desire that thread through the story.
The set changes, which require reorienting props and pieces of the décor in between scenes, are directed as part of the play’s life. As stagehands come on to attend to various objects, the actors move around the set in character, making transitions in the play’s timescape. The dream-like simultaneity of the play’s action and the production’s logistical needs let you see the characters in even more of their quotidian reality as they move pensively from one room to the next in the half light.
The set suggests both the home’s solidity and its precariousness, just as Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes lend the characters both dignity and disrepute. Merkerson wears the housedresses that encaged 1950s housewives, all ties and bows and cheap cloth wrapped around the loosening figures of female middle age. Doc (Steppenwolf’s Kevin Anderson) wears suspenders to hold up already high-waisted trousers tightly pulled over his expanding waist-line, foiling his attempt at style and leaving him slightly ridiculous looking. This is a couple playing at the conventions of 1950s domesticity, and failing, badly.
Shirley Booth originated Lola on Broadway and in the subsequent film version, for which she won an Academy Award. Her simpering, foolish flibbertigibbet of a woman haunts the character, and provides a sharp contrast for Merkerson’s reinterpretation. In the play’s first act, she puts her own spin on what appear to be Lola’s self-delusions about her relationship and her life, playing the woman as more languid and dreamy than Booth’s always bustling, high-pitched fussbudget.
But as the second act moves through its devastating unraveling, Merkerson reveals Lola as a surprisingly strong but trapped woman trying frantically to hold onto a marriage she knows was a mistake from the start, struggling to be a partner to a husband whose alcoholism destroys them both.
The secrets alluded to at the beginning find the harsh light of day at the end, as Doc’s hatred for the woman whose pregnancy trapped him into a loveless marriage explodes in violence. Lola’s attempt to hang on to the innocence that let her trust her young lover 25 years ago becomes more and more painful, as it’s clear their liaison produced only loss. The baby they inadvertently conceived died when they used a substandard doctor to attend to the delivery; their shotgun wedding was obviated by the disappearance of their progeny, its unhappiness exacerbated by the couple’s inability to bear another child. Lola calls Doc “Daddy,” underlining ironically (although she always says it earnestly) the emptiness of their union.
Marie, their boarder (Zoe Kazan), inflames an already fraught relationship with her flirtatious presence, taunting Doc with casual intimacies that quicken his step. When Marie flaunts 1950s propriety by sleeping with Turk, the young man with whom she cheats on her out-of-town boyfriend, Doc’s carefully manufactured moral code falls apart and knocks him off the wagon of sobriety he’s maintained for one uneasy year.
The language of Alcoholics Anonymous's 12-step program (still relatively new to American culture in 1950, and much more stigmatized than its commonplace presence today) to which Doc and Lola cling barely holds his bitterness and incipient rage in check. Even though he attends meetings and sponsors other alcoholics, helping them through brutal visits to the local hospital’s drunk tank, and even though Lola asks him to repeat his daily affirmation, neither Lola nor Doc truly believe his nature has changed. Director Pressman gradually builds the production’s impending doom, letting spectators recognize that what we see as Lola’s inanity is really her frantic attempt to shore up the façade of her relationship’s normalcy.
In 2008, that façade already seems cracked. The production suggests that the conventions of heterosexual marriage were already rotten in the 50s, even as American ideology worked so hard to construct the nuclear family living happily in the suburbs as the sine qua non of such relationships. Both Lola and Doc suffocate in the confines of their home, fabricating intimacy and performing normalcy as they suffer their emotional and social isolation.
Doc is jealous of Marie and Turk, and funnels his repressed desire into flirting with her under the guise of paternalism. Lola likes to watch the young couple’s romantic couplings; she openly admits that she spies on them. While the audience can read her voyeurism as benign longing for her own lost beauty and youth, her watching also reeks of sexual perversion, as though she’s doomed to lurk about the corners of other people’s passion, feeding her own desire vicariously.
Their neighbor, Mrs. Coffman (Brenda Wehle), who’s suspect enough that Lola first wonders if she has poisoned the missing old beloved dog, Sheba, becomes the play’s reproving Greek chorus, stepping into and out of their home and the action with her thin lips pinched, tsk tsking her way through their lives as she first judges Lola’s inadequate housekeeping and then pities her victimization.
Inge suggests that even those with the most in common—lonely housewives chained to deadening routines—must invest in appearances of decorum instead of reaching out to each other with sympathy and agency. When Mrs. Coffman inadvertently visits after Doc’s rampage, she wordlessly helps Lola right the overturned furniture and clean up broken glass, replacing the vestiges of her dignity without suggesting that Lola change anything.
The Marie/Turk subplot offers interesting feminist resonances. Temporarily separated from her socially upstanding boyfriend, Marie embarks on an affair with a man who’s all brawn and no brains, whose only option for social intercourse is sexual. Marie clearly feels something for Turk, but she tells Lola that he’s “not the marrying kind.” Inge neatly reverses the charge usually leveled against “loose” women, painting Marie as the sexual opportunist who knows she’ll soon settle down with a more appropriate man.
When her boyfriend Bruce appears at the house, he’s straitlaced, dull, and judgmental, impatient with Lola’s fussing and already puffed up by the obligations to which he’s carefully calibrated his life. His appearance on the scene underlines Marie’s compromises and Inge’s intimation that social propriety requires emotional and spiritual sacrifice.
Merkerson is a revelation as Lola. Casting an African American woman in the wife’s role without changing a word of the text and casting the rest of the characters as white (with the exception of one of Doc’s AA friends, played by African American actor Keith Randolph Smith) layers the play with racial nuances unavailable when a white woman performs the part. In many ways, Lola’s servitude is more readily apparent; in one key scene, when Lola’s made a fancy dinner for Marie and her visiting boyfriend to which Doc, out on a bender, fails to show, Lola announces that she won’t eat with the couple, but will be their “butler.”
Her declaration productively underlines Lola’s indentured servitude, as Merkerson’s race (and her maid-like adornments) suddenly becomes evident in ways it doesn’t through the rest of the production. This color-blind casting in fact underlines gender commonality across race. We’re no doubt meant to see this choice through a 21st century perspective, since in fact, a mixed-marriage in the 1950s would have been scandalous.
Merkerson slows Lola’s tempo, reading her lines with a drawling, southern-inflected cadence that points up her race more than trying to obscure it. Her voice is lovely and wistful, rich and warm, while her face seems frozen with her effort to make something nice out of a life wasted in a loveless lie of a relationship. Where Booth seemed convinced of her own revisionist history, Merkerson’s performance reveals the labor required to construct such stories, and the psychic and spiritual toll they take.
Instead of hiding her sadness behind relentless movement and meaningless domestic busyness, Merkerson’s Lola is almost indolent in her melancholy. When we first see her, she’s lying in bed in that upper room, wearing a cream-color full slip and staring quietly into space. There’s something erotic and charged about Merkerson’s lassitude; she could be a heroine from the steamier bloodlines of Williams’s oeuvre.
In another scene, left alone in the house, Lola turns on “Taboo,” a radio program that promises covert seductions to its lonely-hearted listeners. Lola drapes herself on the couch, preparing to luxuriate in some physical fantasy; her guilt is palpable when she’s startled by Doc’s unexpected return from work.
Merkerson’s performance is fully embodied and sexually charged. Her invitations to the milkman and the mailman and even to Mrs. Coffman to come sit, stay, have a cup of coffee, listen to a story, to just be with her, all have unsettling, slightly unseemly sexual overtones. And yet over the course of the play, the men who first reluctantly enter her home glancing at their watches and rolling their eyes gain affection and respect for Lola.
As her domestic strife becomes more obvious, they begin to see her as someone real, rather than a caricature of the happy housewife she once performed for them so aggressively. The mailman writes her a letter just so that she’ll get one, and the milkman proudly shows her his picture in a physique magazine (shadings of Inge’s homosexuality, as such rags were notorious as the gay porn of their time).
Although Mrs. Coffman would be a highly unlikely sexual liaison for Lola, Lola’s situation echoes that of the much more respectable middle-class housewife of the same era Julianna Moore plays in the film version of Michael Cunningham’s book The Hours. The emptiness and indignities of heterosexual domesticity fan Moore’s character’s lesbian longing and propel her out of the family nightmare.
No such redemption is possible for Lola. Her boredom is stultifying (Doc prevents her from going to work), and she’s utterly dependent on others in her version of house arrest. Her estranged family won’t take her back, now 25 years after her sexual indiscretion, even though her drunken husband has threatened her life, brandishing a machete in their living room, calling her names, and promising to “cut the fat off” of her with his weapon.
When drink lets Doc drop his mask, the audience sees the horror Lola has put up with for 25 years, and suddenly, her behavior makes a terrible kind of sense. She’s terrorized in her own home, with no way to escape. She has no means, no skills, nowhere else to go. Yet as Merkerson plays her, Lola’s unflinching resolve to survive outweighs her terror. When Doc returns, chastened, from his short rehabilitative hospital stay, he’s pink and pitiful, helpless as a mewling newborn, and begs Lola not to leave him.
With one look in response, Merkerson’s devastating expression takes in her present and her future, chained to a mercurial alcoholic who will descend into madness and claw his way back to temporary redemption again and again, leaving her to fend off his murderous rage and to soldier through a fake life. She walks Doc to their kitchen table and proceeds to cook for him as they glance at each other warily, pretending, again and always, that their suburban prison houses something real and nourishing.
Pressman’s wrenching production makes the realist conventions of Inge’s play critical of the very domestic story they structure. This revival is one of the most progressive realist dramas I’ve ever seen produced, not because the director deconstructed it, but because he and his cast fight their way to the horrible core of the situations it describes. They don’t blame their characters, regardless of their ethical or moral failings, but instead indict a culture that insists that heterosexual, coupled, suburban domesticity is the best way to live.
No wonder second wave American feminism asserted itself a decade after this play was first produced.
The Feminist Spectator
Thursday, January 17, 2008
THE L WORD: Season Five Begins
The L Word's fifth season began January 6th with a tepid episode full of exposition. Some of it explained the absence of last season’s key characters (the “manny” played by Dallas Roberts, now dumped and gone, who’d fallen in love with Kit and then summarily cheated on her with some low-life babysitter) and some of it didn’t (what happened to the sexually irrepressible Papi)? Written by Ilene Chaiken, the series’ creator and head producer but not its most talented scribe, the forgettable episode heralded a new low for the lesbian comic soap opera. (See the official show site at http://www.sho.com/site/lword/home.do).
Even director Angela Robinson, who usually brings a light touch and firm sense of humor to her vision of the show, couldn’t rescue the script from its burdensome task of resolving old issues and setting up new conflicts to drive this season forward. Jodi returned to LA with no explanation; Bette screwed up yet again, decorating Jodi’s new loft and demonstrating her infinite capacity to be controlling. In the show’s continuing campaign to beat Bette down, Jodi retaliated by blindfolding her lover and topping her sexually (in one of the least erotic interactions Jennifer Beals has ever performed on film).
In fact, most of the first episode’s relationships felt flat and perfunctory. Alice fretted about Tasha, watching images of the Iraq war on CNN with increasing distress, as she presumed her girlfriend had shipped out for her latest tour of duty. At the episode’s end, Tasha somehow appears at Alice’s door, still in LA, still alive, still ready and willing as Alice pulls her into the apartment, strips off her clothes, and lowers her to the floor for another desultory sex scene.
Shane immediately got into trouble, revving up this season’s sexual escapades with a realtor who had just shown her and her erstwhile girlfriend Paige a possible apartment. Shane’s inability to just say no to any pretty old thing, and her utter incapacity with the appropriately placed white lie (she can’t tell Paige she’s “in love” with her) infuriates Paige, so she sets Shane’s salon/skateboarding rink on fire. Noble, guilty, uninsured Shane refuses to press charges.
Meanwhile, Tina pined for Bette as they played house with their adorable little daughter, Angie, trying to get her enrolled in the best nursery school programs on the tony side of LA. Their pseudo-domestic moments stirred my nostalgia for the days when Bette and Tina really were a couple, flaws and all, but their tentatively rekindling interest in each other bodes well.
In one of the episode’s few highlights, Shane, Tina, and Alice visit poor Helena, who’s been thrown in jail because of her botched betting fiasco from last season. The visiting trio parade down the hall between the cells—a hilarious catwalk in which Shane flirts with the women behind bars, as though Clarice Starling had been played by an out Jodie Foster. When they meet Helena, to school her in appropriate prison decorum, the three warn her not to “drop the soap,” a tip she utterly fails to understand.
Pam Greer as Kit gets her own perp-style walk between the prison cells, doing her best Foxy Brown as she arrives to meet Helena in the visitors’ room. Kit’s instructions are more precise than the white girls’; she tells Helena to get a “daddy,” quick.
The best moment of the first episode comes as Jenny writes her screenplay for her ridiculous roman à clef, Les Girls. As Jenny rewrites history, Beals, Holloman, and Moennig act out her script in a fantasy sequence with perfect satirical irony, a winking campiness aimed directly at the viewer. The L Word itself has come to approximate Jenny’s bad writing, and the actresses seemed to be signaling that they know where it’s all headed through the flames of the show’s debacle.
But happily, Episode Two—directed by Jamie Babbit (of the lesbian films But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee fame, see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0044803/)—turned things around enough to make The L Word worth loving to hate again. The show even seemed to wink at its own self-seriousness; writer Cherien Dabis piled on rapid, richly obvious allusions to other filmic melodramas. Jenny’s new star-struck assistant, Adele, brings with her clear shades of All About Eve; it’ll be fun to watch as the obsequious side-kick develops into a threat to the entirely self-absorbed, profoundly insufferable, completely oblivious diva.
Likewise, Shane’s escapades at the wedding of the daughter of the unbelievably wealthy, fawning entrepreneur (played by Wallace Shawn, of all people) funding Jenny’s film echo with allusions to Warren Beatty’s Don Juan hairdresser in Shampoo. Shane arrives at the wedding to help put the bride’s locks in place, and winds up having sex with her, each of her bridesmaids, and finally, the mother of the bride, in a revolving door of farcical pre-matrimonial Sapphism.
Personally, I can’t see Shane’s appeal, and have to accept her as the resident lothario more on faith than on Moennig’s charisma. She’s supposed to be a hair stylist, but her own mop often looks like a rat’s nest. Moennig’s boyishness is appealing, but her flat, rail-thin body and her awkward sex scenes make her purported allure dubious. Shane goes through the sexual motions with each of her conquests in Episode Two, pumping their breasts without a hint of even fleeting desire. Then again, Warren Beatty wasn’t falling in love with his clients, either; he was servicing them, just like Shane.
Meanwhile, back in the prison showers, Helena does drop the soap and finds herself instantly accosted by two lumpy female inmates who press a knife to her beautiful long white neck. She’s saved by her cell mate, Dusty, whom Helena thinks is a vicious murderer (no doubt because the woman is butch, of color, inarticulate, and chows down the inedible prison food). Dusty thwarts the shower attack by claiming that Helena is “hers.”
When Helena and her new “daddy” wind up having sex soon after, Helena learns that Dusty’s doing time for tax fraud, not homicide, comically underlining Helena’s implicit racism. As silly as it all is, at least Rachel Shelley has settled into her performance, refining her comic timing every season. She’s given up the femme fatale role for the soubrette, and surprisingly, it works.
Bette and Jodi don’t quite make sense as a couple, but they do have art (and age) in common. As the more mature pair on The L Word, they dispense wistful, cheap wisdom. The clueless, eager Phyllis (toothsome, always game Cybill Sheperd) complains that her paramour, Joyce—played with a cocky old-fashioned butch strut by Jane Lynch—won’t get lost. Bette tells Phyllis patiently, “Some lesbians you have to break up with more than once.” Because Jodi’s deafness requires frequent translations, Bette and Jodi become The L Word's Greek chorus, commenting on the action with a eyes rolling and eyebrows arched.
There’s already plenty to be arch about this season. Tasha’s about to be investigated under the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” for active homosexuality. Alice’s liberalism clashes with her girlfriend’s patriotism; that Tasha is played by the gorgeous African American actor Rose Rollins offers a hint of the racism through which the military is populated. (A recent article in The Progressive describes how high schools in East LA are targeted for military recruitment, while white, middle-class schools elsewhere in the city never host recruiters.)
But the politics of the war and the military’s policy on gay soldiers are addressed obliquely, as one of many loosely motivating subplots. The relationship between Tasha and Alice, while sightly (Rollins has gorgeous eyes), doesn’t generate a hint of chemistry. I miss the old days, when Erin Daniels and Leisha Hailey seemed to have so much good old erotic fun.
Likewise on the political front, Max, the transman, has so far this season been relegated to the wings. He decided not to have top surgery; in this episode, he offers Phyllis and Alice a pedagogical disquisition about how some transmen don’t need surgery to feel like guys. Phyllis’s earnest naiveté about lesbianism provides an excuse for The L Word’s many flat-footed explanations about queer girl life. (“U-hauling,” Phyllis murmurs, jotting the definition in her handy notebook of lesbian lore. “Transman,” she repeats, as Max tells his tale, as if she's listening to a Berlitz tape.) Where the show takes Max’s masculinity remains to be seen; for now, he’s only an adjunct to the main story.
Regardless of their titillation value, the photos I see of The L Word cast celebrating their new season and the plot teasers I read in Entertainment Weekly and People and other magazines thrill me. I still can’t get over that the show is mainstream enough to be widely noticed, even though its very popularity is what makes it pander to the lowest common (presumed) denominator of audience taste. From what I’ve read, a subplot about female Turkish oil wrestlers (whatever that means) is coming up soon.
Waiting with bated breath,
The Feminist Spectator
Even director Angela Robinson, who usually brings a light touch and firm sense of humor to her vision of the show, couldn’t rescue the script from its burdensome task of resolving old issues and setting up new conflicts to drive this season forward. Jodi returned to LA with no explanation; Bette screwed up yet again, decorating Jodi’s new loft and demonstrating her infinite capacity to be controlling. In the show’s continuing campaign to beat Bette down, Jodi retaliated by blindfolding her lover and topping her sexually (in one of the least erotic interactions Jennifer Beals has ever performed on film).
In fact, most of the first episode’s relationships felt flat and perfunctory. Alice fretted about Tasha, watching images of the Iraq war on CNN with increasing distress, as she presumed her girlfriend had shipped out for her latest tour of duty. At the episode’s end, Tasha somehow appears at Alice’s door, still in LA, still alive, still ready and willing as Alice pulls her into the apartment, strips off her clothes, and lowers her to the floor for another desultory sex scene.
Shane immediately got into trouble, revving up this season’s sexual escapades with a realtor who had just shown her and her erstwhile girlfriend Paige a possible apartment. Shane’s inability to just say no to any pretty old thing, and her utter incapacity with the appropriately placed white lie (she can’t tell Paige she’s “in love” with her) infuriates Paige, so she sets Shane’s salon/skateboarding rink on fire. Noble, guilty, uninsured Shane refuses to press charges.
Meanwhile, Tina pined for Bette as they played house with their adorable little daughter, Angie, trying to get her enrolled in the best nursery school programs on the tony side of LA. Their pseudo-domestic moments stirred my nostalgia for the days when Bette and Tina really were a couple, flaws and all, but their tentatively rekindling interest in each other bodes well.
In one of the episode’s few highlights, Shane, Tina, and Alice visit poor Helena, who’s been thrown in jail because of her botched betting fiasco from last season. The visiting trio parade down the hall between the cells—a hilarious catwalk in which Shane flirts with the women behind bars, as though Clarice Starling had been played by an out Jodie Foster. When they meet Helena, to school her in appropriate prison decorum, the three warn her not to “drop the soap,” a tip she utterly fails to understand.
Pam Greer as Kit gets her own perp-style walk between the prison cells, doing her best Foxy Brown as she arrives to meet Helena in the visitors’ room. Kit’s instructions are more precise than the white girls’; she tells Helena to get a “daddy,” quick.
The best moment of the first episode comes as Jenny writes her screenplay for her ridiculous roman à clef, Les Girls. As Jenny rewrites history, Beals, Holloman, and Moennig act out her script in a fantasy sequence with perfect satirical irony, a winking campiness aimed directly at the viewer. The L Word itself has come to approximate Jenny’s bad writing, and the actresses seemed to be signaling that they know where it’s all headed through the flames of the show’s debacle.
But happily, Episode Two—directed by Jamie Babbit (of the lesbian films But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee fame, see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0044803/)—turned things around enough to make The L Word worth loving to hate again. The show even seemed to wink at its own self-seriousness; writer Cherien Dabis piled on rapid, richly obvious allusions to other filmic melodramas. Jenny’s new star-struck assistant, Adele, brings with her clear shades of All About Eve; it’ll be fun to watch as the obsequious side-kick develops into a threat to the entirely self-absorbed, profoundly insufferable, completely oblivious diva.
Likewise, Shane’s escapades at the wedding of the daughter of the unbelievably wealthy, fawning entrepreneur (played by Wallace Shawn, of all people) funding Jenny’s film echo with allusions to Warren Beatty’s Don Juan hairdresser in Shampoo. Shane arrives at the wedding to help put the bride’s locks in place, and winds up having sex with her, each of her bridesmaids, and finally, the mother of the bride, in a revolving door of farcical pre-matrimonial Sapphism.
Personally, I can’t see Shane’s appeal, and have to accept her as the resident lothario more on faith than on Moennig’s charisma. She’s supposed to be a hair stylist, but her own mop often looks like a rat’s nest. Moennig’s boyishness is appealing, but her flat, rail-thin body and her awkward sex scenes make her purported allure dubious. Shane goes through the sexual motions with each of her conquests in Episode Two, pumping their breasts without a hint of even fleeting desire. Then again, Warren Beatty wasn’t falling in love with his clients, either; he was servicing them, just like Shane.
Meanwhile, back in the prison showers, Helena does drop the soap and finds herself instantly accosted by two lumpy female inmates who press a knife to her beautiful long white neck. She’s saved by her cell mate, Dusty, whom Helena thinks is a vicious murderer (no doubt because the woman is butch, of color, inarticulate, and chows down the inedible prison food). Dusty thwarts the shower attack by claiming that Helena is “hers.”
When Helena and her new “daddy” wind up having sex soon after, Helena learns that Dusty’s doing time for tax fraud, not homicide, comically underlining Helena’s implicit racism. As silly as it all is, at least Rachel Shelley has settled into her performance, refining her comic timing every season. She’s given up the femme fatale role for the soubrette, and surprisingly, it works.
Bette and Jodi don’t quite make sense as a couple, but they do have art (and age) in common. As the more mature pair on The L Word, they dispense wistful, cheap wisdom. The clueless, eager Phyllis (toothsome, always game Cybill Sheperd) complains that her paramour, Joyce—played with a cocky old-fashioned butch strut by Jane Lynch—won’t get lost. Bette tells Phyllis patiently, “Some lesbians you have to break up with more than once.” Because Jodi’s deafness requires frequent translations, Bette and Jodi become The L Word's Greek chorus, commenting on the action with a eyes rolling and eyebrows arched.
There’s already plenty to be arch about this season. Tasha’s about to be investigated under the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” for active homosexuality. Alice’s liberalism clashes with her girlfriend’s patriotism; that Tasha is played by the gorgeous African American actor Rose Rollins offers a hint of the racism through which the military is populated. (A recent article in The Progressive describes how high schools in East LA are targeted for military recruitment, while white, middle-class schools elsewhere in the city never host recruiters.)
But the politics of the war and the military’s policy on gay soldiers are addressed obliquely, as one of many loosely motivating subplots. The relationship between Tasha and Alice, while sightly (Rollins has gorgeous eyes), doesn’t generate a hint of chemistry. I miss the old days, when Erin Daniels and Leisha Hailey seemed to have so much good old erotic fun.
Likewise on the political front, Max, the transman, has so far this season been relegated to the wings. He decided not to have top surgery; in this episode, he offers Phyllis and Alice a pedagogical disquisition about how some transmen don’t need surgery to feel like guys. Phyllis’s earnest naiveté about lesbianism provides an excuse for The L Word’s many flat-footed explanations about queer girl life. (“U-hauling,” Phyllis murmurs, jotting the definition in her handy notebook of lesbian lore. “Transman,” she repeats, as Max tells his tale, as if she's listening to a Berlitz tape.) Where the show takes Max’s masculinity remains to be seen; for now, he’s only an adjunct to the main story.
Regardless of their titillation value, the photos I see of The L Word cast celebrating their new season and the plot teasers I read in Entertainment Weekly and People and other magazines thrill me. I still can’t get over that the show is mainstream enough to be widely noticed, even though its very popularity is what makes it pander to the lowest common (presumed) denominator of audience taste. From what I’ve read, a subplot about female Turkish oil wrestlers (whatever that means) is coming up soon.
Waiting with bated breath,
The Feminist Spectator
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Desert Hearts Forever
In a pique of nostalgia, I watched Donna Deitch’s lesbian classic Desert Hearts (1985) again the other night, then trolled on line to find out that it’s recently been re-released as a “vintage” DVD with additional footage and cast interviews. In fact, YouTube now features footage of Deitch shooting the film’s love scene (famous as the first on mainstream film to treat lesbian sexuality seriously). Various interviews with Deitch and stars Patricia Charbonneau and Helen Shaver are also available in short clips on line. And in an odd coincidence, the same evening I watched the DVD, I turned on a (thankfully) new episode of Law and Order: SVU to find that Charbonneau was among the guest stars and that Shaver had directed. A cosmic link indeed, and nice to see that they’re still working together after cooking up all that on-screen chemistry 23 years ago.
Meanwhile, the film itself holds up very well as the prototypical lesbian coming-out comedy/melodrama. Shaver plays Columbia English professor Vivian Bell, who arrives in Reno, Nevada, from New York for a no-fault divorce in 1959. She emerges slightly less than fresh off her train, wearing a glorious fitted 1950s-style suit that Shaver carries off, along with the rest of her costume wardrobe, with great style and beauty. Picked up by the alcoholic ranch-owner Frances (Audra Lindley, vivid as the inadvertently butch rancher), Bell reluctantly settles in to the slow cadence of life on the ranch as she waits the compulsory six weeks for her divorce to be final.
I’d forgotten how beautiful Reno appears in the film. The red soil, rolling hills, and desperately blue sky practically blind the bookish Vivian and immediately lure the viewer into the story. One of the film’s pleasures is watching Shaver open up to the environment, as well as to the idiosyncrasies of life on the ranch. While the other visiting divorcées wait for their paperwork by gossiping about their soon-to-be-exes, Vivian writes lectures at her desk and walks alone in the chaparral. Only Cay, Frances’s unofficially adopted daughter, draws her out of her head and introduces her to sensual pleasures unimagined in Vivian’s old life with her well-respected scholarly husband.
Cay Rivers offered Charbonneau her first film role, and it shows. Although she’s physically stunning, with rich dark hair that frames a gamin face, and a lithe, athletic figure she shows off to seductive effect, Charbonneau’s acting is earnest but two-dimensional. Sometimes, her naiveté works for the role; she’s supposed to be 25, ten years younger than Shaver’s Vivian, and that puppy-dog panting affect she adopts to chase after the older woman comes off convincingly. In the more serious scenes, Charbonneau’s acting deficits cost the film more; her line readings, especially in that infamous sex scene, only underline the film’s melodrama.
Shaver, on the other hand, finds deeper levels and more subtle, nuanced emotional responses in Vivian Bell, developing a portrayal of pain, confusion, and longing that makes the actress herself irresistibly sexy. When the film was released in the mid-80s, some of my lesbian friends laughed off the film’s sex as unrealistic and too “straight.” But I continue to think that Shaver and Deitch (and Charbonneau) achieved a moving understanding of Vivian’s sexual awakening with Cay. Shaver’s face registers the slightest shivers of desire, and fear mingled with excitement shudder through her at Cay’s touch. Cay’s coltish advances land awkwardly, but Shaver as Vivian feels each one as a physical tremor of Richter scale import.
Even in more mundane scenes, Shaver peels off Vivian’s protective layers in impeccable emotional detail. Deitch shoots montages of Vivian’s life on Frances’s ranch and her growing attraction to Cay. The first time she smiles in the film, Shaver’s beauty is sudden and shocking. Although the professor who lets down her hair is a narrative stereotype, in Desert Hearts Shaver makes it fresh and somehow true. Trying on western-style clothing with Cay becomes an occasion for hilarity; rolling dice in the casino establishes new horizons of chance and luck. Shaver moves through it all with an affecting wonder, her beauty looser and more unwittingly seductive in each scene. Watching Shaver open Vivian to her future continues to offer real viewing pleasure.
Desert Hearts documents some of mainstream films’ first strong female friendships, in addition to its first lesbian affair, which makes it as remarkable for its feminism as it is for its sexuality. Deitch recreates Reno in 1959 as a woman-centered world. Cay’s friend Silver (Andra Akers), who works with her at the casino where Cay is a change-girl, is a failed singer turned card dealer about to marry a good Italian man from New Jersey. Silver is both strong and fragile as she embarks on her own romance, and her friendship with Cay is full of real warmth, affection, and respect. A bathtub scene, in which Cay and Silver loll together in bubbles while Silver’s fiancée brings them martinis, evokes girlfriends’ physical closeness and the erotic connections that bubble between them, even when they remain platonic.
Likewise, Cay and Frances’s relationship rides its own complicated erotic currents. Cay’s father was Frances’s married lover; when he died, and Cay’s mother abandoned the girl, Frances took her in, making Cay both a surrogate daughter and a constant reminder of her doomed romantic affair. Frances loves Cay for how she inspires her memories, but her jealousy over Cay’s sex life keeps their relationship tense. Still, the two women talk in bed like girlfriends, and enact the intensity of their relationship through a casual but volatile physical intimacy.
Nancy Cooper’s script portrays Vivian as a stereotypically aloof, abstract, intellectual whom the other women both envy and scorn. Cay is a sculptor, the most physical of artists, who molds things (clay and obviously women) with her hands. Vivian’s and Cay’s orbits would barely intersect outside the bedroom in which they find solace in each other, and Reno is worlds apart from Manhattan. But Desert Heart’s utopian fantasy is that these two can make a go of it romantically; perhaps the film remains a perennial favorite because Deitch makes just that leap of faith.
Rather than chalking her experience up to divorce-inspired madness, Vivian invites Cay to come to New York, to try out a different way of life, to test the potential of escaping from a Nevada in which she’s singular and illegible as a lesbian (one of the ranch hands, watching various women come and go from Cay’s cottage, mutters, “I don’t know how you get all that traffic without no equipment”).
Cay’s free-spirited generosity lets her laugh off such comments, and her courage, as a lesbian in 1950s rural northwest America before Stonewall, is palpable as she moves through the film as out as she can possibly be in such an environment at such an historical moment. But Vivian invites her to escape, to come to a city where together, they could participate in the crucible of feminist and lesbian sexual revolution in the decade just ahead. Vivian’s 11th hour offer, made from the steps of a moving train, gives not only Cay but the film a glowing sense of hope and possibility.
It helps, of course, that Patsy Cline and other country western crooners grace the Desert Hearts sound track. Schmaltzy doesn’t begin to describe the film, but Deitch manages to both embrace and transcend the romantic style by choosing background ballads like Cline’s “Crazy,” then tempering it with satirical visual details like the rodeo scenes sewn into Frances’s leather couch.
The director respects the kitschy charms of 1950s Reno, dignifies her female characters’ ambivalence and heartache, shades them all with the steely resolve necessary to be strong women before Second Wave American feminism, directs a steamy lesbian sex scene, and persuades us that this odd couple of misfit artist/intellectuals might have a chance to be happy together.
Prior to the 1980s, lesbians in film typically committed suicide or, if they stayed alive, ended their narrative trajectories humiliated and alone. A short 23 years ago, Desert Hearts broke important new ground. I remember seeing the film for the first time in 1985 on the Upper West Side of New York when it opened, amazed at what it felt like to follow the travails of a lesbian character, and Cay and Vivian’s dawning attraction, and their consummated sexuality in a widely marketed, Sundance-sanctioned film at a mainstream cinema. Every critical faculty I’d ever exercised waited for me at the popcorn stand while I watched, completely cathected, jaw dropped, eyes misted.
When my then-partner and I had a drag down fight some days later, I ran back to the theatre by myself to watch the movie again, as I could think of no better way to make myself feel less alone. Just like many other women I’ve now watched online attest, Desert Hearts meant the world to me then, and captures my heart even now.
For a classic film in which same sex attraction and love propels women toward each other and into new lives of greater social and emotional potential, Desert Hearts remains unparalleled.
Here’s to the late, great, lesbian novelist Jane Rule for first telling the story,
The Feminist Spectator
Meanwhile, the film itself holds up very well as the prototypical lesbian coming-out comedy/melodrama. Shaver plays Columbia English professor Vivian Bell, who arrives in Reno, Nevada, from New York for a no-fault divorce in 1959. She emerges slightly less than fresh off her train, wearing a glorious fitted 1950s-style suit that Shaver carries off, along with the rest of her costume wardrobe, with great style and beauty. Picked up by the alcoholic ranch-owner Frances (Audra Lindley, vivid as the inadvertently butch rancher), Bell reluctantly settles in to the slow cadence of life on the ranch as she waits the compulsory six weeks for her divorce to be final.
I’d forgotten how beautiful Reno appears in the film. The red soil, rolling hills, and desperately blue sky practically blind the bookish Vivian and immediately lure the viewer into the story. One of the film’s pleasures is watching Shaver open up to the environment, as well as to the idiosyncrasies of life on the ranch. While the other visiting divorcées wait for their paperwork by gossiping about their soon-to-be-exes, Vivian writes lectures at her desk and walks alone in the chaparral. Only Cay, Frances’s unofficially adopted daughter, draws her out of her head and introduces her to sensual pleasures unimagined in Vivian’s old life with her well-respected scholarly husband.
Cay Rivers offered Charbonneau her first film role, and it shows. Although she’s physically stunning, with rich dark hair that frames a gamin face, and a lithe, athletic figure she shows off to seductive effect, Charbonneau’s acting is earnest but two-dimensional. Sometimes, her naiveté works for the role; she’s supposed to be 25, ten years younger than Shaver’s Vivian, and that puppy-dog panting affect she adopts to chase after the older woman comes off convincingly. In the more serious scenes, Charbonneau’s acting deficits cost the film more; her line readings, especially in that infamous sex scene, only underline the film’s melodrama.
Shaver, on the other hand, finds deeper levels and more subtle, nuanced emotional responses in Vivian Bell, developing a portrayal of pain, confusion, and longing that makes the actress herself irresistibly sexy. When the film was released in the mid-80s, some of my lesbian friends laughed off the film’s sex as unrealistic and too “straight.” But I continue to think that Shaver and Deitch (and Charbonneau) achieved a moving understanding of Vivian’s sexual awakening with Cay. Shaver’s face registers the slightest shivers of desire, and fear mingled with excitement shudder through her at Cay’s touch. Cay’s coltish advances land awkwardly, but Shaver as Vivian feels each one as a physical tremor of Richter scale import.
Even in more mundane scenes, Shaver peels off Vivian’s protective layers in impeccable emotional detail. Deitch shoots montages of Vivian’s life on Frances’s ranch and her growing attraction to Cay. The first time she smiles in the film, Shaver’s beauty is sudden and shocking. Although the professor who lets down her hair is a narrative stereotype, in Desert Hearts Shaver makes it fresh and somehow true. Trying on western-style clothing with Cay becomes an occasion for hilarity; rolling dice in the casino establishes new horizons of chance and luck. Shaver moves through it all with an affecting wonder, her beauty looser and more unwittingly seductive in each scene. Watching Shaver open Vivian to her future continues to offer real viewing pleasure.
Desert Hearts documents some of mainstream films’ first strong female friendships, in addition to its first lesbian affair, which makes it as remarkable for its feminism as it is for its sexuality. Deitch recreates Reno in 1959 as a woman-centered world. Cay’s friend Silver (Andra Akers), who works with her at the casino where Cay is a change-girl, is a failed singer turned card dealer about to marry a good Italian man from New Jersey. Silver is both strong and fragile as she embarks on her own romance, and her friendship with Cay is full of real warmth, affection, and respect. A bathtub scene, in which Cay and Silver loll together in bubbles while Silver’s fiancée brings them martinis, evokes girlfriends’ physical closeness and the erotic connections that bubble between them, even when they remain platonic.
Likewise, Cay and Frances’s relationship rides its own complicated erotic currents. Cay’s father was Frances’s married lover; when he died, and Cay’s mother abandoned the girl, Frances took her in, making Cay both a surrogate daughter and a constant reminder of her doomed romantic affair. Frances loves Cay for how she inspires her memories, but her jealousy over Cay’s sex life keeps their relationship tense. Still, the two women talk in bed like girlfriends, and enact the intensity of their relationship through a casual but volatile physical intimacy.
Nancy Cooper’s script portrays Vivian as a stereotypically aloof, abstract, intellectual whom the other women both envy and scorn. Cay is a sculptor, the most physical of artists, who molds things (clay and obviously women) with her hands. Vivian’s and Cay’s orbits would barely intersect outside the bedroom in which they find solace in each other, and Reno is worlds apart from Manhattan. But Desert Heart’s utopian fantasy is that these two can make a go of it romantically; perhaps the film remains a perennial favorite because Deitch makes just that leap of faith.
Rather than chalking her experience up to divorce-inspired madness, Vivian invites Cay to come to New York, to try out a different way of life, to test the potential of escaping from a Nevada in which she’s singular and illegible as a lesbian (one of the ranch hands, watching various women come and go from Cay’s cottage, mutters, “I don’t know how you get all that traffic without no equipment”).
Cay’s free-spirited generosity lets her laugh off such comments, and her courage, as a lesbian in 1950s rural northwest America before Stonewall, is palpable as she moves through the film as out as she can possibly be in such an environment at such an historical moment. But Vivian invites her to escape, to come to a city where together, they could participate in the crucible of feminist and lesbian sexual revolution in the decade just ahead. Vivian’s 11th hour offer, made from the steps of a moving train, gives not only Cay but the film a glowing sense of hope and possibility.
It helps, of course, that Patsy Cline and other country western crooners grace the Desert Hearts sound track. Schmaltzy doesn’t begin to describe the film, but Deitch manages to both embrace and transcend the romantic style by choosing background ballads like Cline’s “Crazy,” then tempering it with satirical visual details like the rodeo scenes sewn into Frances’s leather couch.
The director respects the kitschy charms of 1950s Reno, dignifies her female characters’ ambivalence and heartache, shades them all with the steely resolve necessary to be strong women before Second Wave American feminism, directs a steamy lesbian sex scene, and persuades us that this odd couple of misfit artist/intellectuals might have a chance to be happy together.
Prior to the 1980s, lesbians in film typically committed suicide or, if they stayed alive, ended their narrative trajectories humiliated and alone. A short 23 years ago, Desert Hearts broke important new ground. I remember seeing the film for the first time in 1985 on the Upper West Side of New York when it opened, amazed at what it felt like to follow the travails of a lesbian character, and Cay and Vivian’s dawning attraction, and their consummated sexuality in a widely marketed, Sundance-sanctioned film at a mainstream cinema. Every critical faculty I’d ever exercised waited for me at the popcorn stand while I watched, completely cathected, jaw dropped, eyes misted.
When my then-partner and I had a drag down fight some days later, I ran back to the theatre by myself to watch the movie again, as I could think of no better way to make myself feel less alone. Just like many other women I’ve now watched online attest, Desert Hearts meant the world to me then, and captures my heart even now.
For a classic film in which same sex attraction and love propels women toward each other and into new lives of greater social and emotional potential, Desert Hearts remains unparalleled.
Here’s to the late, great, lesbian novelist Jane Rule for first telling the story,
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Juno: Teen Feminism
Juno is a refreshingly smart movie about an articulate, precocious young person with a clear sense of herself and her nascent place in the world. Written by the also precocious new screenwriter Diablo Cody, the film stands as a corrective to all the mass-marketed teen movies that engage the tired, ideologically destructive story of girls’ inhumanity to girls. Cody paints instead a portrait of a kid at a young age whose bon mots stand with the best of them, offering an ironic but warm, wise but not at all weary view of her world’s minor calamities and major achievements (see http://www.foxsearchlight.com/juno/).
Juno resembles My So-Called Life for the 21st century, as Juno (the multiple awards-nominated Ellen Page, delivering a brilliant, witty, unself-conscious performance as the calm and collected 16-year-old) comments in a sophisticated-beyond-her-years voice-over on her inadvertent pregnancy and her plan to give the baby to a childless yuppie couple she finds in the local penny-saver circular. The slightly off-kilter situations (who, after all, would arrange to find her offspring adoptive parents in the small-town equivalent of craigslist.com?) deliver an affectionate, respectful view of the travails of a rather ordinary (if extremely wry, kind, and generous) cobbled-together family coming to terms with the indiscretions of their oldest child.
When Juno delivers the news to her father and step-mother, instead of reacting with the disapprobation popular culture has lead us to expect of conventional parents, the couple resign themselves to helping Juno follow through on her plan without judgment. Her father is played with great warmth, forgiveness, and verve by J.K. Simmons, a terrific character actor who’s turned in detailed, knowing, and realistic portraits on everything from HBO’s Oz—as a fascist inmate—and Law and Order: SVU—as the observant police shrink—to The Closer—as Brenda’s rather hapless superior and one-time lover. The sublime Allison Janney plays Juno’s dog-loving step-mom with sardonic wit and empathy (this role is a happy corrective to the catatonic wife/mother she played in Alan Ball’s American Beauty some years back). She delivers one of the film’s best monologues when she berates the prim, judgmental ultra-sound technician who comments on Juno’s pregnancy. Although the two aren’t happy about it (after her confession, they privately admit that they’d been hoping she was on hard drugs or had been expelled from school), and although they wonder why she’s chosen not to have an abortion, they’re willing to support Juno’s choice.
The politics of choice in Juno are rather complicated. While the movie’s less conventional take on teenagers works very well, Cody and Reitman could be more progressive in how they address abortion. Juno plans an abortion first thing, but on her way into the clinic, a mopey school friend holding a lonely picket sign and demonstrating alone in the parking lot informs her in passing that her embryo has fingernails. The image resonates too loudly for Juno to go through with the procedure. Her reconsideration seems a bit too easy, and lets the film avoid a frank confrontation with abortion as a real choice.
On the other hand, before she backs out, Juno finds the abortion clinic front desk staffed by an extremely pierced young woman whose apathy and attitude renders it common-place instead of controversial. The receptionist’s response to Juno’s appearance makes going for an abortion as mundane as picking up a packet of birth control pills. Juno chooses to deliver her baby not from some religiously inspired moral epiphany, but because she just can’t shake the image of those growing fingernails on the tadpole she carries.
Where other teen girl flicks set up obvious conflicts between the cool kids and the nerds, Juno forgoes the obvious to imagine high school life on a more level playing field, in which even the heterosexual gender tensions are more humor-filled than angst-ridden. Controlled by her hormones and teenage curiosity, Juno seduces her best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera), distracting him from running practice and track events. Neither kid is conventionally cool; Juno is wordy and ironic without being nihilist or superior, and Bleeker is inarticulate but sweet, masking his feelings with the armor of his color-coordinated, team-branded running shorts and sweat bands.
Loving her with a hang-dog, puppy-eyed sweetness and vulnerable innocence, he haplessly follows Juno’s lead and her advice, never questioning that her choice about the baby (or their relationship) are hers alone to make. Girls rule, but boys don’t drool here—they’re thoughtful, kind, and supportive (underlining, perhaps, the film’s fairy-tale effect).
Juno’s best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), also thwarts teen-flick conventions. Leah is a cheerleader, but rather than hanging with jocks (who make virtually no appearance in Juno), Leah crushes out on her teachers (including a dowdy male English teacher). She’s Juno’s stalwart companion, by her side when Juno tells her parents she’s pregnant, and holding her hand through her ultra-sound and her delivery. Leah plays Pancho to Juno’s Quixote, admiring her plans, eager to help, along for the ride. Leah might be pretty and athletic and Juno might be artsy and intellectual, but in this film, their differences don’t prevent a fast friendship.
The yuppie couple Juno chooses to raise her child live in an anonymous, cookie-cutter subdivision dripping with wealth and privilege, which intimidates Juno and her heat-and-cooling-system-maintenance-man father not at all. They drive their outmoded royal blue van into the yuppie couple’s driveway and march to the door for their first meeting, in which Juno proceeds to set the terms of arrangement to the couple’s surprised and rattled lawyer.
The Lorings (Vanessa, played by a radiant and sad Jennifer Garner, and Mark, played by an ambivalent and sad Jason Bateman) worry that Juno will back out of the deal, an idea that never occurs to Juno (in another of the film’s refusals to follow traditional narrative tracks). Instead, their own tenuous bond breaks during Juno’s pregnancy, as Mark decides to follow his own dreams instead of supporting his wife’s romantic race toward her nesting destiny.
Juno could have resolved in a number of conservative ways, and could have painted the baby’s potential futures in several colors of moral judgment. Instead, the screenplay resists tradition and follows its complexly-drawn main character’s nuanced heart, arriving at the more progressive of possible endings without sacrificing the edgy, humor-tinged realism in which it trades.
Director Jason Reitman films Juno with the same wry comic touch that infuses the screenplay, selecting details in each scene that complement screenwriter Cody’s fusillade of smart words. Critics have unanimously remarked on Juno’s hamburger phone, with which she calls Leah and the abortion clinic. But the film is also littered with other visual comments and treats, like the pictures of beloved dogs that Juno’s step-mom cuts out of magazines; the ballerina outfit Juno’s step-sister “Liberty Belle” wears out of the house when the family rushes to the hospital after Juno’s water breaks; the complex piece of machinery on which her father works, spread out across the kitchen table; the dessert-named paint colors Vanessa experiments with on the walls of the baby’s nursery; the guitars and sound equipment that litter Mark’s room, his chaotic sanctuary from the ordered but empty, monied adult world his wife so meticulously creates; and even the gold- and rust-colored running outfits that adorn the long-distance boys running team, decorated with their “Dancing Elks” team name, all of which lend Juno its warmth and richly observed character.
For all Juno’s smart bravado, she’s ultimately still a teenager, a state of bliss (if not innocence) captured in the film’s last scene, when she flies out of her house onto her bicycle with a guitar strapped to her back to pedal off to visit her friend.
A movie like this gives me hope that popular culture can deliver more complicated stories about choice, about girls, and about the ethical ways we choose to live, without sacrificing humor and depth. Some critics call Juno post-feminist; I’d just call it feminist.
The Feminist Spectator
Juno resembles My So-Called Life for the 21st century, as Juno (the multiple awards-nominated Ellen Page, delivering a brilliant, witty, unself-conscious performance as the calm and collected 16-year-old) comments in a sophisticated-beyond-her-years voice-over on her inadvertent pregnancy and her plan to give the baby to a childless yuppie couple she finds in the local penny-saver circular. The slightly off-kilter situations (who, after all, would arrange to find her offspring adoptive parents in the small-town equivalent of craigslist.com?) deliver an affectionate, respectful view of the travails of a rather ordinary (if extremely wry, kind, and generous) cobbled-together family coming to terms with the indiscretions of their oldest child.
When Juno delivers the news to her father and step-mother, instead of reacting with the disapprobation popular culture has lead us to expect of conventional parents, the couple resign themselves to helping Juno follow through on her plan without judgment. Her father is played with great warmth, forgiveness, and verve by J.K. Simmons, a terrific character actor who’s turned in detailed, knowing, and realistic portraits on everything from HBO’s Oz—as a fascist inmate—and Law and Order: SVU—as the observant police shrink—to The Closer—as Brenda’s rather hapless superior and one-time lover. The sublime Allison Janney plays Juno’s dog-loving step-mom with sardonic wit and empathy (this role is a happy corrective to the catatonic wife/mother she played in Alan Ball’s American Beauty some years back). She delivers one of the film’s best monologues when she berates the prim, judgmental ultra-sound technician who comments on Juno’s pregnancy. Although the two aren’t happy about it (after her confession, they privately admit that they’d been hoping she was on hard drugs or had been expelled from school), and although they wonder why she’s chosen not to have an abortion, they’re willing to support Juno’s choice.
The politics of choice in Juno are rather complicated. While the movie’s less conventional take on teenagers works very well, Cody and Reitman could be more progressive in how they address abortion. Juno plans an abortion first thing, but on her way into the clinic, a mopey school friend holding a lonely picket sign and demonstrating alone in the parking lot informs her in passing that her embryo has fingernails. The image resonates too loudly for Juno to go through with the procedure. Her reconsideration seems a bit too easy, and lets the film avoid a frank confrontation with abortion as a real choice.
On the other hand, before she backs out, Juno finds the abortion clinic front desk staffed by an extremely pierced young woman whose apathy and attitude renders it common-place instead of controversial. The receptionist’s response to Juno’s appearance makes going for an abortion as mundane as picking up a packet of birth control pills. Juno chooses to deliver her baby not from some religiously inspired moral epiphany, but because she just can’t shake the image of those growing fingernails on the tadpole she carries.
Where other teen girl flicks set up obvious conflicts between the cool kids and the nerds, Juno forgoes the obvious to imagine high school life on a more level playing field, in which even the heterosexual gender tensions are more humor-filled than angst-ridden. Controlled by her hormones and teenage curiosity, Juno seduces her best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera), distracting him from running practice and track events. Neither kid is conventionally cool; Juno is wordy and ironic without being nihilist or superior, and Bleeker is inarticulate but sweet, masking his feelings with the armor of his color-coordinated, team-branded running shorts and sweat bands.
Loving her with a hang-dog, puppy-eyed sweetness and vulnerable innocence, he haplessly follows Juno’s lead and her advice, never questioning that her choice about the baby (or their relationship) are hers alone to make. Girls rule, but boys don’t drool here—they’re thoughtful, kind, and supportive (underlining, perhaps, the film’s fairy-tale effect).
Juno’s best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), also thwarts teen-flick conventions. Leah is a cheerleader, but rather than hanging with jocks (who make virtually no appearance in Juno), Leah crushes out on her teachers (including a dowdy male English teacher). She’s Juno’s stalwart companion, by her side when Juno tells her parents she’s pregnant, and holding her hand through her ultra-sound and her delivery. Leah plays Pancho to Juno’s Quixote, admiring her plans, eager to help, along for the ride. Leah might be pretty and athletic and Juno might be artsy and intellectual, but in this film, their differences don’t prevent a fast friendship.
The yuppie couple Juno chooses to raise her child live in an anonymous, cookie-cutter subdivision dripping with wealth and privilege, which intimidates Juno and her heat-and-cooling-system-maintenance-man father not at all. They drive their outmoded royal blue van into the yuppie couple’s driveway and march to the door for their first meeting, in which Juno proceeds to set the terms of arrangement to the couple’s surprised and rattled lawyer.
The Lorings (Vanessa, played by a radiant and sad Jennifer Garner, and Mark, played by an ambivalent and sad Jason Bateman) worry that Juno will back out of the deal, an idea that never occurs to Juno (in another of the film’s refusals to follow traditional narrative tracks). Instead, their own tenuous bond breaks during Juno’s pregnancy, as Mark decides to follow his own dreams instead of supporting his wife’s romantic race toward her nesting destiny.
Juno could have resolved in a number of conservative ways, and could have painted the baby’s potential futures in several colors of moral judgment. Instead, the screenplay resists tradition and follows its complexly-drawn main character’s nuanced heart, arriving at the more progressive of possible endings without sacrificing the edgy, humor-tinged realism in which it trades.
Director Jason Reitman films Juno with the same wry comic touch that infuses the screenplay, selecting details in each scene that complement screenwriter Cody’s fusillade of smart words. Critics have unanimously remarked on Juno’s hamburger phone, with which she calls Leah and the abortion clinic. But the film is also littered with other visual comments and treats, like the pictures of beloved dogs that Juno’s step-mom cuts out of magazines; the ballerina outfit Juno’s step-sister “Liberty Belle” wears out of the house when the family rushes to the hospital after Juno’s water breaks; the complex piece of machinery on which her father works, spread out across the kitchen table; the dessert-named paint colors Vanessa experiments with on the walls of the baby’s nursery; the guitars and sound equipment that litter Mark’s room, his chaotic sanctuary from the ordered but empty, monied adult world his wife so meticulously creates; and even the gold- and rust-colored running outfits that adorn the long-distance boys running team, decorated with their “Dancing Elks” team name, all of which lend Juno its warmth and richly observed character.
For all Juno’s smart bravado, she’s ultimately still a teenager, a state of bliss (if not innocence) captured in the film’s last scene, when she flies out of her house onto her bicycle with a guitar strapped to her back to pedal off to visit her friend.
A movie like this gives me hope that popular culture can deliver more complicated stories about choice, about girls, and about the ethical ways we choose to live, without sacrificing humor and depth. Some critics call Juno post-feminist; I’d just call it feminist.
The Feminist Spectator
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