Unhappy Thespians: A Manifesto on Training Theatre Students

I delivered this position paper/manifesto on a plenary panel at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Denver on August 1st. The session was called "The Elephant in the Room"; speakers were encouraged to discuss issues we feel the field ignores at its collective peril.

The other manifestos can be found at http://www.athe.org/conference/ (look under the 2008 conference, manifestos for the plenary session--eventually, an audio link will also be available). My presenting colleagues included Jorge Huerta (UC-San Diego), Mark Heckler (Valparaiso), Susanne Bourgoyne (Missouri), Sandra Shannon (Howard), and Doug Paterson (Nevada-Omaha). The session was chaired by ATHE president Steve Peters.

In his wonderful, uncharacteristically generous report on the Educational Theatre Association’s International Thespian Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska, in July, Charles Isherwood describes how 2,000 self-described “theatre geeks” eagerly rehearse and perform and gossip, preparing themselves not only for their roles in the festival, but for lives in the theatre. Isherwood notes the T-shirts for sale in the auditorium lobby “with the words ‘Theatre Geek’ emblazoned upon them above masks of tragedy and comedy; these young drama enthusiasts,” he says, “are clearly happy and proud to declare themselves thespians” (7/13/08, NYT, Arts and Leisure sec., 1).

While an article about such a festival could be snarky and sarcastic, Isherwood instead records how impressed he was by performances of classics and contemporary plays and musicals, at which he consistently found tears in his eyes, and chronicles the long-standing quality reputation of the festival’s productions. The students learn, but also teach one another, trying out songs from less acclaimed musicals and mounting interpretations of a fairly standard range of classic and contemporary plays. The general impression Isherwood imparts is of a group of students and teachers happy to be involved in the festival, doing high-standard work for appreciative audiences. His article concludes, “Theatre geeks rock!”

My concern—which I currently see as the proverbial “elephant in the room” for our field—rests on what happens to these happy thespians after they graduate, when they apply to our college and university theatre programs eager to continue the fun they experienced as theatre geeks in high school. How is it that our programs tend to dissipate all that commitment and energy and pride, instead of stoking it and refining it and channeling it into new and different ways of continuing a life as a theatre geek? Why is it that so many of our undergraduate majors become disillusioned so quickly, dropping our programs for communications degrees because they decide that media might offer them more lucre, even if it’s not as much fun? Why do we impede their fun in ways that makes changing their majors likely?

What kinds of pressure do we impose by assuming that we’re grooming them for acting careers in professional theatre, instead of encouraging them to refashion their theatre geek-dom into careers as dramaturgs, arts administrators, critics, grant administrators, philanthropists, or maybe most importantly, theatre aficionados who will attend performances regularly and support theatre financially? And most importantly, what structural, cultural, and ideological influences pressure our departments to create this situation?

I just finished a nine-year tenure in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest departments in the country. During my stint there, the undergraduate major was reduced from a high of around 450 students to approximately 300, by various assessments meant to admit a stronger, leaner class. I also saw the growth of the MFA program in acting. Moribund when I arrived, thanks to the leadership of nationally acclaimed actor Fran Dorn, the three-year program soon gained a competitive reputation.

But despite what might seem these successes, the students in our undergrad and graduate acting programs never seemed very happy. Many undergrads left, and many grad students complained about the narrowness of what they learned. The grad students suffered a schedule that prevented them from taking advantage of the department’s other curricula, including our flourishing graduate program in Performance as Public Practice, which aimed to expand applications for theatre and performance studies outside professional, mainstream theatre into community-based and socially active settings. With pre-professional programs intent on feeding the US regional theatres, if not Broadway, the majority of our students weren’t encouraged to imagine other ways of plying their trades, or of using their studies creatively and with more agency than mainstream theatre employment practices for actors often allow.

Most discouraging to me was watching graduate students who’d been through three years of rigorous training in acting, voice, and movement arrive at the showcase moment of their MFA program tenure. Thanks to Fran Dorn’s professional connections, the students traveled to New York and Los Angeles to present work for casting agents, directors, and other people in the business. But when they returned, many of the students reported that the feedback they received concerned their looks more than their talent. More than one went on a crash diet; the first three-year class started nearly in unison a version of The Zone diet that reduced all of them to wan and wasted stick figures in a few weeks’ time. Men and women alike were told by showcase spectators that they needed to lose weight, fix their noses, their teeth, their skin, their facial bone structures, all in the service of hewing closely to the “type” in which they’d inevitably be cast.

For this a student needs three years of expensive MFA training?

Thanks again to Fran Dorn’s powers of persuasion, the MFA acting class boasted great racial and ethnic diversity (much more so than our woefully, predominantly white undergraduate program and even, to my chagrin, our Performance as Public Practice program). But I was regularly surprised by the casting choices made for our university theatre productions, which required students of color to perform in subsidiary roles (sometimes, frankly, in servant roles) while their white colleagues, although the minority students in their classes, received the leads. Apparently, not-conventionally-slender women of color and lesbians posed a particularly thorny problem in this context.

Why should a university acting program conform to the most egregious racial and body-type profiling practices of the mainstream profession? As an African American woman, Dorn herself has played across the canon of American drama. In the last ten years, I’ve admired her performances as Christine in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and as the Gypsy in Camino Real, both at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC. I had the great pleasure of seeing her powerhouse run as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Austin’s Zachary Scott Theatre, and watching her in Mrs. Warren’s Profession at Austin’s State Theatre. But I rarely saw graduate students in our program color-blind cast in comparably meaty theatre-historical roles.

The undergrads fared far worse, as the very few students of color routinely turned up as servants or backdrops in productions that conformed to conventional casting and staging practices.

I don’t mean to launch an ad hominem attack on my former department or any of my colleagues, all of whom I respect and admire (and miss). In fact, I’m curious how and if other college and university departments do this differently, or whether we’re all held hostage to trickle-down effects from television and film casting practices that dictate such rigid conformity to type and to such narrow notions of beauty. Perhaps only “character actors” are allowed to think outside the box of their bodies. Perhaps the late Heath Ledger, for instance, gets so much press for his transformative turn as the Joker in the new Batman flick, The Dark Knight, after his Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, because physically, he could rest on his laurels as a romantic (and heterosexual) lead. Why aren’t all actors considered “character actors”? Isn’t that what all of them play? Characters who aren’t them?

It pains me to think of all those theatre geeks who love the freedom and creativity of performing, the community wrought by long hours of commitment to a common pursuit, the thrill of the audience, the intimacy of the dressing room, the camp-like spirit of can-do-ship seeing their passion squelched by the awful authority of cultural convention. How horrible to think of all those students arriving in our programs only to be told—by implication if not explicitly—that their bodies are wrong, that their color, ethnicity, size, weight, face structure, or sex appeal will consign them to shadowy support roles to those whose genes make them desirable to a very narrowly defined culture of beauty and low expectations of talent.

How nice it would be if instead, we could encourage our students to be healthy, as well as creative and committed. What if we taught them how to create their own theatres, where they can make art outside the dictates of an unimaginative mainstream, as my colleague Paul Bonin-Rodriguez does in his undergraduate senior seminar on the entrepreneurial creative artist? What if we taught them to be critics and dramaturgs who bring to wide attention the violence done to our bodies and souls by physical standards impossible for normal people to fulfill without surgical intervention?

What if we taught them to be smart, activist actors, who tried to change the industry from within, as well as from outside? What if we encouraged them to keep reasonable hours, to eat well, and to give up smoking, instead of tacitly condoning anorexia that helps them look “right”? What if we cultivated performers who don’t fit norms, as my colleague Lisa McNulty at Manhattan Theatre Club is trying to do with the Butch Casting Project (www.butchcastingproject.com), dedicated to “celebrating butches, trannies, and genderqueers in the arts, media, and entertainment”?

Some of our students do find the courage and the imagination to apply their training outside of norms. For instance, Anastasia Coon, a lesbian UT MFA acting student who graduated several years ago, moved to San Francisco where, in addition to plying her own acting talent, is teaching genderqueers how to use their voices to conform to their new, chosen gender interpretations. Flordelino Lagundino, a Filipino MFA acting student who also graduated from the reorganized program, has since worked with Perseverance Theatre in Juno, Alaska, where he’s created community-based theatre projects with the local Inuit population.

I continue to believe that university theatre programs should push at the envelope of cultural expectations about the arts. If we defy conventional beauty and body image standards; if we routinely commit to color-blind or cross-race cast our productions; if we teach students to critique representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers in our own and mainstream productions, along with their aesthetic and ideological values; and if we teach students to reach outside conventional theatre to form their own companies and to create their own plays and performances, then we’ve truly added something to the national dialogue not just about the arts, but about citizenship and democracy. Supporting the status quo is untenable.

Teaching to transgress and transform (a la bell hooks),
The Feminist Spectator

Hair in Central Park

So here’s the thing: Given Ben Brantley’s glowing New York Times review, Hair will no doubt move to Broadway. Although it deserves a wider audience and a much longer run (or re-run, given its original Broadway success), part of what makes the Public’s Delacorte Theatre production in Central Park wonderful is that Hair finds its natural setting outdoors. Entering the open-air house feels like stumbling on the young, energetic “Tribe” in their natural habitat.

It’s not that the designers have gone to great lengths to recreate say, Tompkins Square Park, the far East Village Ground Zero for New York’s Aquarius generation in the late 1960s. It’s that all the designers and the terrific director, Diane Paulus (recently appointed the next Artistic Director of ART, in Cambridge), have taken advantage of the freedom and the pleasure and the wonder of being young and alive under the sky, living on the streets as the characters in Hair (at least sometimes) do.

The actors enter the small, undecorated stage from the roofless house, roaming the aisles to address the audience. They’re not panhandling, but almost; they entreat us not for cash but for our opinions about their hair, their clothes, their beings. Spectators I noticed at the preview performance I saw August 5th happily went along with their interactions with the cast, turning the whole evening into something of a mutual love fest. And rightly so, since the Public’s revival is vivid and fresh, even magical.

The designers might maintain a bare bones aesthetic—perhaps inspired by the concert-style version the Public mounted in the park last summer—but the rest of the production is fully embellished with choreography and music. The energetic, geometric, and precise dance moves were devised by Karole Armitage, and Rob Fisher supervised the musical direction by Nadia Digiallonardo of a small band of horns, percussion, and electric guitars (since Hair was, as Stacy reminds me, the first rock musical) played by musicians decked out in the colorful, eclectic costumes of 1960s’ Hippies. The band congregates under a chuppah-like cloth canopy perched in the back middle of the intimate playing space.

Bare of more elaborate decor, the Delacorte stage is perfectly attuned to the musical’s simplicity. The stage floor sports a threadbare layer of Astroturf to evoke the balding grass of the Tribe’s arena, and the low fences at the back and sides of the stage became part of these Hippies’ hollow, the comfy outdoor encampment in which the characters frolic through a long night or two of the soul.

The night I attended, Hair seemed a wonderful nostalgia trip for the audience. As the band played the opening chords of “Aquarius,” and Dionne (Patina Renea Miller) wandered up to center stage to herald the approach of the new age, people across the packed audience sang along, grooving in their seats to those old lyrics and a tune that seems embedded in the collective memory of a certain generation of Americans. Even younger spectators rose to the occasion, singing along.

Who could fail to be moved by the infectious energy and commitment of the cast; by Paulus’s direction, which paces each number and exchange with fail-proof ease and speed; by uniformly excellent singers, who put their own stamp on these classic melodies without offending the audience’s recollection of their original delivery; or by dances that manage to seem both authentic to the physical and spiritual freedom of the Hippies’ historical moment and sharp and contemporary enough to speak to the movement vocabulary of today’s young folks? As “Aquarius” dawned and the song’s final chords sounded, I’d hazard to say we were all already hooked.

Hair is really a revue, a string of songs linked along the bare bones of a plot. Each number captures a feeling, an attitude that signals the emotions and passions of young people of the anti-Vietnam War, flower power, civil rights, psychedelic, free love, anti-establishment era. The characters, such as they are, depict stock figures of the moment: Berger (Will Swenson), the handsome womanizer who can’t be bothered to appreciate Sheila (Caren Lyn Manuel), his erstwhile main squeeze; Woof (Bryce Ryness), the about-to-be flamboyant on-his-way-to-being “homosexual” who’s in love with Mick Jagger; Hud (Darius Nichols), the Afro-encircled black man bursting with then-new racial pride; and Jeanie (Kacie Sheik), inadvertently pregnant by another man, but thoroughly, unrequitedly in love with Claude (Jonathan Goff, of Spring Awakening fame), the confused boy torn between fidelity to the Tribe and some misplaced sense of obedience to authority, whether incarnated by his parents or “the law” or “the country.”

For reasons that haven’t been clear in any production I’ve ever seen of Hair, Claude decides not to burn his draft card like his mates, but instead follows through with his Army induction. He cuts his down-to-there hair, goes off to war, and is promptly slaughtered, reduced from an idealistic, attractive young man to just another anonymous body sent home in a box wrapped in just another empty, wasted flag.

The draft-card-burning scene that ends Hair’s first act, staged to the reiterative melody of “Hare Krishna,” is particularly affecting in the Public’s Delacorte production, partly because the outdoor setting lets it viscerally evoke the moment. As smoke pours into the night air from a fire lit in a street-size steel garbage can, each of the cast’s men take their turn ritually dancing up to the light. They throw their cards into the flames as drums beat and trumpets blare, and the rest of the cast dances triumphantly, until Claude approaches the can and just . . . can’t . . . do it. As the ritual of refusal comes to an abrupt end, the Tribe backs away from their friend, confused. The spirit of group-think, so pleasurable a force to which to surrender, dissipates, and the group breaks apart, wandering off into the night in pairs or trios.

But as Claude sings the haunting ballad of ambivalence and bewilderment “Where Do I Go?”, the Tribe returns for the fleeting rather sacramental nudity that was part of what made the original Hair so radical for its time. Under cover of night and low stage lights, the Tribe gathers back near Claude, casting off their clothes not under the privacy of a large billowing tarp, as they did in the 1960s, but openly, and with a kind of conviction and vulnerability that both underlines and contrasts with Claude’s hesitancy. Discarding their outfits to stand naked before the audience gestures to a primal necessity underneath the radical posturing, to the possibility of feelings not sexual, but unmediated and, if you will, pure. Although nudity on stage no longer shocks (at least not in Central Park in New York City), in this production the cast’s collective disrobing played as a declaration of authentic presentness more than it did rebellion or desire.

The moment also works effectively here to question the momentum of political feeling in the 60s that sometimes devolved into lifestyle instead of a more considered, analytical program of dissent. In the Public’s production, I was struck for the first time that the Tribe isn’t first and foremost committed to activism, but rather indulges in a way of life that’s pleasurable because it’s free from the “square” expectations of the moment and unfettered by the dogma of its politics. Until it ends with the draft-card burning ritual, the first act establishes the Tribe’s preoccupation with personal relationships over the political, in songs like “Donna,” “Frank Mills,” and “Easy to be Hard.” It both lampoons and celebrates the counter-culture’s social practices in “Hashish,” “Sodomy” and “Hair,” evoking the moment but resolutely embedding it in personal, rather than political, choices.

On the other hand, Act One offers its share of social satire, critiquing the sorry state of our skies in “Air,” the impenetrability and proliferation of acronyms in “Initials,” and the rigidity of the 1950s generation in “My Conviction.” Performers Andrew Kober, who plays the drag role of Margaret Meade as well as the uptight, all-purpose “Dad,” and Megan Lawrence, who’s physically and vocally on target as the stereotypical yet familiar anxious “Mother,” parody the “establishment” with acerbic physical wit.

Although Claude is a cardboard cut-out of a character, his second act drift away from his community into the maw of the war machine is wrenching, not because the audience has necessarily identified with him or any other character, but perhaps because it’s in the last half of the evening when Hair becomes most relevant to the present and when analogies with the war in Iraq feel most palpable. This, too, is handled with a light touch consistent with the rest of the production. In the show's finale, as the Tribe sings the final anthem, they part down the middle to reveal Claude, dressed in full military colors, lying still on the stage floor across a large American flag. Their friend’s empty sacrifice resonates with those of the many soldiers over the last five years who’ve lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, for equally suspect political reasons.

The second act more specifically resonates with the ideological commitments of the moment (then and now). “Let the Sunshine In,” as Public Theatre Artistic Director Oscar Eustis notes in the program, was never “a celebratory anthem; it was always a broken-hearted plea by a tribe that has not only failed to stop the war, but failed to keep one of their own from being consumed by it.” Taken out of context, the song became a commercialized feel-good hit, but Eustis and this production recalls its origins as a cri de coeur, a heartfelt plea for tolerance and peace.

The Public’s production doesn’t suffocate Hair under overworked contemporary references. Paulus lets the cast’s freak flags fly in the exuberance of the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, and the invigorating night air. Hair is by now a “costume piece”—the long-flowing locks on most of the men are obviously wigs, and the fringed vests worn over their bare chests obviously evoke another era’s sartorial style. In fact, the cast’s bodies give away the persistence of the present most emphatically, in the sculpted six-pack abs of the male actors and the svelte physical lines of the women, perceptible even under their long, fluid skirts. The contrast between Hair's premiere 40 years ago and this revival seems embodied in how much tighter, leaner, and, ironically, rather warrior-like the ideal American body has become.

Still, Hair’s “messages” are all here, along with the pleasure of nostalgia, the poignancy of being reminded how history repeats itself, and the joy of watching young people so physically, musically, and emotionally dedicated to embodying if not fully fleshed out characters, then the simple spirit of a moment now long past, yet close to the present nonetheless.

When the cast invited the audience onto the stage to dance as the band played after the curtain call, people of all ages (and colors, although unlike the Public’s very diverse staff, working at the Delacorte as security and ushers, the audience for Hair was predominantly white the night I attended) bound down to join them. The dancing was a utopic, performative slice of “now” inspired by an evening’s performance that knit audience and cast together in communal fellow-feeling and hope.

I can imagine some readers or spectators disparaging this production as empty nostalgia or easy sentiment, unattached to actions that might actually change or critically note how bereft are the politics of war and imperialism. But I left the theatre buoyed not just by the electricity of memory, or by hearing the enduring if sometimes silly lyrics, but by the production’s full-hearted devotion to the present, to making these songs and the representation of an inclusive, open-handed spirit of belonging and rebellion mean something in a time when we don’t readily value ideas or movements or even just moments that bring us together so unashamedly.

In their program bios, each cast member ends his or her paragraph with “Love.” Just the word, period. Corny, but also sweet, and evidence, perhaps, of how much this cast’s generation came to appreciate and even share the sentiments first embodied in Hair by the last.

Good morning starshine indeed,

The Feminist Spectator

Mamma Mia! on screen

Seeing middle-aged women frolicking mindlessly on screen might not seem like much of a feminist achievement, but I’m pleased to consider Mamma Mia! part of the improving landscape for older women in popular entertainments. If summer is traditionally when action films like Hancock and The Dark Knight and Iron Man open, trolling for dollars from the pockets of the young and the male, then Mamma MIa! breaks the mold in a refreshing and pleasurable way.

The film continues in the tradition of the stage play on which it’s based, a string of ABBA songs never meant for the theatre that are stuck along a plot no more than a millimeter thick. A young girl, Sophie, about to marry her young boyfriend, Sky, is desperate to meet the father she’s never known before she begins her adult life. Her mother, Donna, was a free-spirited American who stayed on an idyllic Greek island after a summer vacation, pregnant with a daughter who could belong to any one of three men. The determined Sophie somehow finds these now 20-years-older men, invites them back to the fantasy isle for her wedding, and lo and behold, unknown to her astonished mother, they come.

Plot contrivances make sure Sophie and the audience never find out for sure which man is the father, but the cast winds up dancing and we wind up toe-tapping in our seats if we’ve let ourselves enjoy the fanciful fun and silliness of the slight enterprise. The musical was never meant as high art, but as a campy romp that uses ABBA’s songs to explain the paper thin depths of character psychology and motivation across a story that strains credulity, and the film follows suit. As more than one critic has remarked, those ABBA songs really are difficult to resist. Even glancing at a print advertisement for the film can lodge one of the tunes in my head for hours (and who needs to hum “Dancing Queen” while trying to work?).

Part of the film’s fun comes from watching Meryl Streep sing (not too badly) and dance (terribly, although not much is required of her) and, as one critic described, mug her way through the throw-away role of the counter-cultural mother, Donna. With her blond hair long, scraggly, and wind-blown, Streep magnanimously gives in to the proceedings’ campiness. Donna’s once-upon-a-time suitors, all of whom remember her fondly enough to traipse halfway around the world to see her again, are played by unlikely men, all three clearly surprised to find themselves in a musical: Pierce Brosnan plays Sam, the most serious of her former lovers, who’s saddled with the plot’s biggest leap of faith as (spoiler alert) he actually proposes to Donna, after no contact for 20 years, at the film’s end. The poor actor can’t sing a note, but watching Brosnan, and Colin Firth as Harry and Stellan Skarsgard as Bill, Donna’s other long-ago mates, warble their way through a verse or two makes you feel kindly toward guys who would so gamely essay something at which they’re really not very good.

In fact, only Christine Baranski, as Tanya, one of Donna’s two old friends who come to the wedding, has any experience with Broadway musical theatre, which makes Mamma Mia! more like a sing-along than a full-out movie musical. None of the leads are expected to really be able to dance—what passes for choreography looks more like the moves set on high school students eager to do The Music Man with no song or dance training. All the gestures key literally to the lyrics, and overly obvious visual puns and jokes ensure that they’re fun to watch, if not artistically innovative.

As a result, the music seems to heighten the lives of the characters, but in a highly quotidian, rather accessible way. Supernumeraries who otherwise serve as cooks or bellmen or handymen at the small hotel that Donna runs, suddenly become (of course!) the Greek chorus when they hear the tinkling intro to the next ABBA tune, dropping their tasks to face the camera and rock out as Streep’s back-up singers. That they return to their jobs without a thought after they’ve held each song’s last note just seems a matter of fact in Mamma Mia!’s alternative universe.

In one of the movie’s best scenes, Streep becomes a pied piper, the head point on a phalanx of women of all ages who leave their work at the hotel and their laundry lines in town to join Donna in singing and marching purposefully nowhere to “Dancing Queen” (if I’m remembering correctly), which they transform into an anthem of self-assertion about collectively washing their men right out of their hair. The film’s joke is that no one is meant to take these shenanigans seriously, but only to enjoy them with a big dollop of great good fun.

Streep, Baranski, and Julie Waters, as Rosie, the third of the adult female trio, appear to have their own hugely pleasurable time camping it up together. They all play women in their mid-50s or so, with tenuous connections to conventionality. Baranski’s Tanya is a sardonic, much-married sophisticate who clearly enjoys her husbands’ money as much if not more than she’s pleased by their companionship, and luxuriates in her mutual seduction with one of the hotel’s barkeeps. Waters’ Rosie rejects the idea of settling down, happily chasing after Bill for some good clean dirty fun. Their spirit of anti-establishment female hell-raising becomes infectious. And though they act silly and campy, the film (helmed by Phyllida Lloyd, who directed the stage version), never makes fun of them. Instead, we’re encouraged to be entertained by the good time they seem to be having, which is a rather neat trick for a mass market summer film when middle-aged women are involved.

The only unfortunate plot choice is that the film sticks to the original musical’s ending, which (spoiler alert, again, if anyone would rather try to be surprised by the story) requires Sam to propose marriage to Donna at the 11^th hour. Somehow, daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), whom Donna has tried to dissuade from her own wedding to the handsome but dunderheaded Sky, is finally convinced—at the altar no less--that she should travel the world instead of getting hitched. This is clearly a happy outcome for a girl so desperately young and obviously naive (signaled by how and what she sings and how shrilly she shrieks with her girlfriends, a trio not at all as compelling as Donna and her friends).

But god forbid a good wedding should go to waste. Sam comes to the rescue with his knees bent and his hat in his hand, asking Donna to forgive him for leaving her the first time and now, 20 years later, to give him another try and marry him while she’s at it. The rules of romance on film require her to accept, which Streep performs with watering eyes and tremulous lips in unnecessary close-ups, throwing over in a ludicrous moment Donna’s own adulthood of more sober, unconventional, interesting choices and perfectly competent hotel management. Apparently, Donna wasn’t even aware of the torch she’d been holding for Sam, and her eyes widen with surprise when it turns out to be burning her backside.

And so, of course, the priest is happy because he gets to say his vows, and the guests are happy, because they’ve schlepped up a very high and narrow, precariously winding mountainside stairway to get to the church for the ceremony. The movie’s setting, too, is a fairy tale—how could even a Greek island be that picturesque and dazzling, the hotel Donna runs so charmingly dissolute, and even the sailboat on which the three once-and-future suitors arrive together so vividly seaworthy? The whole enterprise resembles a karaoke performance of a Disney-like film: a lot of fun if you’ve drunk enough really sweet cocktails not to be bothered by performers who can’t sing and a lot of mass-manufactured by-the-numbers ideology about love.

But I was happy to watch those middle-age leading women throw their arms around each other and laugh, cavorting merrily, even if by the film’s end, I was so exhausted from all the forced gaiety and frivolity I needed a cocktail myself.

Dancing queens indeed,
The Feminist Spectator

Back East, Back to Blogging: A Personal Summer Update

I knew that my recent move from Austin, TX, to Princeton, NJ, would disrupt my writing, but I’m chagrined that my last post was May 28, 2008. Since I hadn’t moved in nearly nine years, I’d forgotten how time consuming and energy sapping it is to pack, unpack, and reestablish your home and your habits in a new place.

I’ll start teaching at Princeton University this fall, as a professor in English and the Program in Theatre and Dance. With easier access to New York and other theatre centers on the eastern seaboard, and with resources to see theatre and performance around the country, I hope to expand The Feminist Spectator from a bi-monthly blog to one with more frequent installments.

Although it might take me a moment or two to get up to speed on an increased schedule, I’m hoping to be able to write about a wider palette of performance, and perhaps expand into posting relevant interviews and features. Feel free to email me personally with any suggestions you might have for coverage, anywhere, any time, at jsdolan@Princeton.edu.

Despite the distractions of traveling across the country and finding my way around a new home and town, I’ve managed to see some things worth a few words here. So, to get back into the habit of feminist spectatorship and reportage, here’s a round-up of my viewing over the last six or so weeks. In this installment, I give you my thoughts on a few performances. In the next, some films at the theatre and on DVD.

Miss America, LaMama, NYC, June 26, 2008

Influential lesbian and feminist performers Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver work together sporadically now, but happily, for their fans, collaborated on this beautiful, simple two-hander at LaMama in June. Full of Sid Caesar- and Imogene Coco-inspired set pieces and meditations on the state of the country and the world, “Miss America” works simultaneously as a noun and a verb. Weaver subtly deconstructs beauty contest conventions, and Shaw expresses longing for an America that no longer exists. Their long years of performing together are apparent in the synchronicity of Shaw and Weaver’s comic and physical timing, in their easy rapport on stage, and in their seamless delivery.

The show is tinged with the melancholy and ambivalence that’s pervaded their work together for the last five or so years, perhaps prompted by time passing, love aging and changing, and bodies that can’t be relied on in quite the same way. Also, as they admit at one point here, it’s hard to make comedy out of America these days.

Stage pictures repeat profitably, especially Shaw’s tendency to fall to the floor in the same outstretched pose, on her side, arms above her head, her feet sticking out of her too-short pants, shoes off, leaving her palpably vulnerable and confused. The set includes an overturned refrigerator and an old, discarded stove, domestic detritus no longer used to create a nurturing home, but handy for dancing on.

These discarded appliances and a few additional chairs become semiotically rich through each routine, even if they never accumulate permanent meaning. The kitchen antiques here resemble the 1960s pick-up truck Shaw employs to such poignant effect in her solo piece, To My Chagrin, her early 2000’s meditation on her progeny and her own aging.

In Miss America, Shaw and Weaver use the hallway behind the stage’s back wall to extend their playing space, creating a beautiful depth of field that underlines how they engage with proximity and distance, visually and metaphorically. In the duo’s hands, an empty chair acquires affecting meaning; their presence provides a rich aura that imbues a simple piece of furniture with portent.

The pastiche-like script is comprised of various bits and routines that add up to a series of impressions rather than a coherent story, including a fake tap-dance number that sees both performers appearing to dance rhythmically across the refrigerator, stove, and the rest of the stage. The taps are pre-recorded; the performers only imitate the moves required to produce them, but they do so with virtuosity and abandon.

Weaver told me later that this was a Caesar-Coco routine, as was, perhaps, the other sweetly comic routine of the evening, in which the couple stages a discussion of adultery across cultures in different accents and nationally-inflected postures (which they identify ahead of time as American, French, and British, admitting that the accents they create are rather indistinguishable).

The intimate LaMama space and the audience’s clear familiarity with Shaw and Weaver lent the evening a casual, knowing tone. Weaver makes her first entrance through the audience, wearing a thick black fur coat and toting a camera with which she takes pictures that she invites spectators to pose in for her. The business is fun, and the awkwardness of making space for Weaver as she climbs down the seats in the middle of the audience lets spectators see one another as we interact with her.

At the evening’s end, the portraits Weaver took play in a slide show we all watch together, recognizing ourselves and each other, marking the brief but somehow poignant passing of the time we’ve spent together.

I’m always buoyed by seeing Peggy and Lois perform, moved by their creativity, touched by their perspective on the world. I’ve known them for decades now, and sometimes wonder what spectators who’ve never before seen their work would make of their style, and looseness of their script and its compelling way of accruing meaning, rather than staking their claim to some final coherence.

Judging by the audience when I saw Miss America, the insiders seem to bring the outsiders along, so that by the end, we’re all in it together, in the theatre and in an America that desperately needs more of the kind of generosity of spirit and acuteness of vision that Weaver and Shaw consistently display.

Bus Stop, Princeton Summer Players, Princeton, NJ, July 4, 2008

Since we’ll be teaching theatre at Princeton beginning this fall, my partner Stacy and I decided to see what the students are up to in the summer. We bought discount tickets for the holiday performance, unsure who else might forgo fireworks to come to the theatre. To our surprise and delight, the house in Murray Dodge Hall on campus was filled with spectators, eagerly supporting what’s apparently a long-standing summer theatre-going ritual on campus.

The student players and especially the adept, pace-conscious director produced a solid production of Inge’s 1950s-era dramedy. The set evoked the simple pleasures of a warm diner on a snowy night, providing a cozy backdrop for stock characters: The big-hearted, tough-talking diner manager, a competent woman complacent in her sometimes affair with the bus driver who often passes through; the innocent young girl in training as a waitress and as a woman, who catches the attention of a passing pedophile but never suffers his unwanted affections; the protective, watchful local sheriff, who keeps a steady hand on the reins and reminds the characters and the audience of the play’s deeply moral center, even when its homoerotic subtext threatens to seep out of the events like the filling in a warm piece of pie.

The disruptive influence blows in with the wind of a stormy winter’s night that strands a long-haul bus at the diner. Disembarking passengers include a flouncy, Marilyn Monroe-type soubrette (Monroe in fact played the role in the film version), who insists she’s been kidnapped by a naïve but forceful young cowboy. The dumb but finally sweet boy-man thinks he’s doing the right thing by taking her home to his ranch to marry her after they have sex (his first). While she initially resists his affections, she’s eventually persuaded that he’s her true love, and off they ride to the ranch. This plot twist is pretty much all that serves as action in the otherwise staid and talky play.

The Princeton student production served the text well, but I couldn’t help thinking why young people in 2008 would want to revive this particular Inge play. If their mission is to produce titles from the American canon, lots of others come to mind that retain some bite and relevance, while they also offer good roles and simple scenery. Bus Stop’s gender and sexuality anachronisms render it toothless now, and this production chose not to mine what could be its more interesting gay subtext.

Damn Yankees, City Center, Encores!, July 15, 2008

While it’s not the most substantive or even entertaining American musical ever written (as my partner, the expert, concurs), Damn Yankees offers lots of good music from the nation’s popular songbook—including “Heart” (as in “You gotta have . . .” and “Near to You,” and even “Whatever Lola Wants”—all of which get their due in this by-the-book production. Last year’s summer Encores! showcase was the powerhouse Gypsy, which moved to Broadway and won Tonys for its stars Patti Lupone, Boyd Gaines, and Laura Benanti. This year’s summer Encores! gimmick casts television stars Sean Hayes (Will and Grace) and Jane Krakowski (30 Rock, Ally McBeal) as the demonic Applegate and his side-kick, Lola, and saves the romantic lead for Cheyenne Jackson (now starring on Broadway in Xanadu).

The casting choices undermine director John Rando’s (Urinetown) otherwise quickly paced and entertaining production, mostly because Hayes and Krakowski don’t project personality or charisma into the large City Center house. Watched through binoculars, their faces are captivating enough, but their stage personalities don’t fill out roles that require a largess of physical comedy and a slickness of seduction played broadly enough to resonate on a wide proscenium.

Krakowski, who won a 2003 Tony for her work in Nine, and always scored with her theatre-inspired breakout numbers on Ally McBeal, should know better. She doesn’t do justice to Fosse’s original choreography, recreated here by Mary MacLeod, and seems uninspired by the part. Her performance improves just a little when she moves from body to soul, deciding she loves Joe, instead of just trying to seduce him. Krakowski oddly seems more persuasive as the girl next door than as the temptress from hell.

Hayes works best as a walking compendium of queer subtext. Known for his refusal to name his sexual preference during his years as the flamboyant gay man on Will and Grace, Hayes here wears the red accents—amusing socks, neckties, and other accessories—of the devil, but the costume flounces are also reminiscent of the Nance, the gay prototype who used a red necktie to signal his closeted affections in early 20^th century America (according to the sexologist Havelock Ellis).

The amusing use of the devilish color here provokes a lot of queer fun. Rando pushes the Applegate-as-gay presumption even further by staging Hayes’ tour-de-force “Those were the Good Old Days” as a Liberace-style piano number, with a white grand graced by a towering candelabra, and Hayes mimicking Liberace’s campy, mincing style. Hayes, who tickles the keys with a wonderful flourish, makes his most successful connection with the audience here, finally letting out the stops on his performance.

Knowing that Cheyenne Jackson, as the transformed Joe Hardy, is an out gay performer also enhances the queer subtext, even though Jackson’s beautiful face and gorgeous body make him a perfectly convincing (and conventional) heterosexual male lead. Some of Jackson’s scenes with Hayes become even more amusing as the two trade what seem to be wry, insider jokes just underneath the surface of their lines.

Without a queer subtext to enjoy, the production would be utterly run-of-the-mill.

Happy to be back,
The Feminist Spectator

Indy’s Women: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford’s wry, sardonic, vaguely reluctant action-energized masculinity always seems to hold the seed of its own critique. Even in the current flick, he comments wearily on the necessity that he extract himself from touchy situations, assessing his ability to contain threats with quick insight and clear confidence but none of the arrogance or stupid invulnerability that seems de rigueur for so many action heroes.

Indy’s escapades always have an ulterior motive; ultimately, it’s all about the research. The representation of professors on film speaks volumes about cultural stereotypes—see, for only several, recent instances, Smart People, in which Dennis Quaid plays a disheveled, impervious literature prof, and The Visitor, in which Richard Jenkins offers a much more nuanced portrait of a sad, lonely, professionally stalled economics professor. In the Crystal Skull, we first see Indy captivating his class of young acolytes, wearing the requisite suit and bow tie of the 1950s egghead. Donning his battered brown fedora signals his transition to action hero. Gone is the effeminizing suit and tie, replaced with his sweat-stained safari shirt, brown pants, and scuffed boots, his worn but ubiquitous bull-whip by his able side.

When his younger boy-partner admires Indy’s strength, our hero wise-cracks that he’s only a teacher part-time. During the rest, adventure is his playground and he’s proud of his ability to execute his moves. Under every ivory-towered absent mind, it seems, is a superman waiting to loosen his tie and leap tall buildings. But for Indy, the requisite one-against-many fist fights, car chases, and narrow escapes seem subsidiary to the character’s main goal, which is to secure knowledge, as well as the containers in which it’s supposedly borne. In the Indiana Jones series, the quest to know justifies the pursuit of things.

The Crystal Skull, in fact, makes the pursuit of knowledge its overt and primary motive, as the totemic object over which its heroes and villains struggle represents an ancient Mayan ritual symbol that honored the gods and dispensed wisdom. The errant skull must be returned to its rightful resting place, so Indy and his team face a perilous journey down a series of increasingly long, fast, and furious waterfalls, and into and out of various caves and tombs, shoving aside cobwebs and fighting off the creatures of the dark that imperil their way.

(In one of the film’s most unfortunate missteps, these creatures, who stream from the central tomb much as the horrible, giant red ants copiously bled from their mound earlier in the film, are costumed as caricatures of Native American Indians, with feathers, war-paint, and loin-cloths. The extras’ over-the-top make-up screams Disney World ride more than it serves as a scary narrative detail, a gratuitous bit of racism that could have easily been cut.)

The characters line up good and bad pretty much along the knowledge v. things axis—Max, the turncoat double-agent who pretends to be “Jonesy’s” friend, inevitably becomes consumed in the great final conflagration since he refuses to leave the cave of treasures, greedily stuffing his pockets with jewels and gold. The good folks, who survive, are those who “know,” and know enough to constrain their desire by respecting the origins and proper ownership of things. “Oxy,” for example, Indy’s anthropologist colleague, somehow lost his mind in his effort to return the skull to its rightful homestead, but proceeds to regain his coherence over the course of their journey. His appreciation for “the natives” is rewarded quid pro quo: the return of the skull buys him the return of his mind. As they travel, Oxy’s cryptic remarks, which only Indy can decipher, lead them to the skull’s originary cave and allow them to set the world aright.

The film’s villain, on the other hand, can’t keep her obsession with knowledge separate from an imperialist desire to acquire things and cultures. In the final confrontation, when the skull is returned to sit among the twelve others that make up their own tribal council, the Russian villain is incinerated by her own hubris. Played with gleam by Cate Blanchett (even if, as A.O. Scott reported in the Times, her accent slips all over the globe), the icy evil-doer peers too deeply and looks too hard into the skull’s empty eye sockets, chanting, “I want to know” (or rather, “I vant to know”) over and over until the skull’s extraterrestrial powers turn her into smoke, her greed punished with death.

Most notable in this fourth installment of the Indy chronicles is his reunion with Marion Ravenwood, his hard-drinking buddy from the first film, and her newly introduced son, who (spoiler alert, although it’s not much of a secret anymore) turns out to be Indy’s. “Mutt,” played by Shia LeBeouf as a rather vain greaser, has quit school to pursue motorcycle maintenance (a perhaps an oblique reference to a more Zen way of life than the kind Indy pursues, however reluctantly). When he realizes the boy is his, Indy insists he should go back to finish school, again trying to honor knowledge over adventure. Given old Dad’s activities, book-learning is a hard sell.

Ford’s advanced age is addressed head on, providing some of the film’s best jokes. Always the hesitant hero, Indy is now also a profoundly tired one. Mutt calls him “gramps” and “pops” not because of their new familial tie but because Indy seems ancient to him: “What are you, 80?” Mutt asks guilelessly. That Indy doesn’t try to overcompensate for his old bones is one of the film’s sweetest conceits.

Given Ford’s limited ability to perform his own stunts (although he clearly accomplishes enough of them to make his performance impressive for a 65-year-old), this film focuses on his relationships much more than the earlier ones, creating for him a nuclear family that’s solidified in the end by a marriage, of all things. How ironic to see Indiana Jones domesticated, although since more sequels are never out of the question, whether he can settle into the conventional, complacent couple-dom that action heroes always, if sadly and nobly, resist remains an open question.

Until film’s rather ludicrous, conservative conclusion in marriage, Karen Allen, returning as Marion, has fun representing a middle-aged woman who’s more than a domestic help-mate for Indy. She drives their get-away cars over cliffs, confident that they’ll all survive; she delights in fighting off evil physically and intellectually; and she never cowers in the face of the fearsome or revolting challenges that confront Indy’s party on their way to the story’s happy finale. Watching her take such energetic good fun in being part of the crew brings a welcome point of female identification to the typically masculine (and male) action story.

Likewise, Blanchett’s villain, with her silly black helmet-hair and her icy blue eyes—however ridiculous the character or her recycled Cold War conflict—provides a fun display of female power and ingenuity. With two women in central roles—one good, one bad—the Crystal Skull offers more gender balance to the action-adventure plot. Of course, were Indy as young as he used to be, the women might remain constrained in subsidiary, sex-object-to-be-protected roles. Now that he’s older and more conscious than ever of his mortal limitations, Indy’s women can assume a more central role in his escapades—his masculinity has less to lose or to prove.

But that’s part of the fun of it.

Humming to John Williams’ familiar score,
The Feminist Spectator

Deb Margolin's Time is the Mercy of Eternity

Deb Margolin takes her title and her impulse for this set of four brief plays from a poem by William Blake. I saw the production May 9th, at the West End Theatre in New York, a third floor walk-up space perfectly intimate and appropriate to the sentiments of the evening. The four pieces read like short stories interconnected by themes of loss, grief, violence, and death. Margolin’s language, always so rewarding and exciting to experience at the theatre, is typically rich, allusive, and elliptical here. Her narratives drop the audience into the middle of stories that don’t necessarily need a beginning, middle, or end, because what we experience in their telling is the vitality of a moment in which something is observed, the clarity of a slice of time that captures something keen and unforgettable, something that might otherwise be forever lost.

Margolin’s sense of time works like that—she demonstrates, through her writing, that life is really an accumulation of moments that we can never retrieve, that we can only try to remember through association, through language, through feelings that are always undependable but necessary, nonetheless, to fleshing out our memories.

Margolin calls this evening “a quartet of pieces for a quartet of actors” who are multiply cast across each playlet. “The multiple casting,” she says in the published script, “is designed as a kind of human poetry, casting light on the imbricated conceits and thematic unity of the multiple pieces.”

The first piece, When They Quiet Down I Start, is masterfully performed by Curzon Dobell. He presents the intense monologue directly to the spectators, who serve as witnesses to the posthumous confessions of a man who was a suicide bomber in some unnamed location (leaving us free to imagine him anywhere in the Middle East, from Israel to Iraq). He’s now the bus driver, he tells us, the ferryman crossing the River Styx to carry the souls of the newly dead into heaven/eternity.

Dobell’s performance is precise and compelling, his wiry body tense with focus yet conversational, almost colloquial in his delivery if not in his language. He pulls us into his disquisition about the ridiculousness of suicide bombers’ actions and desires, scoffing at the notion that 72 virgins constitute adequate motivation for mass murder.

Instead, the bus driver says he was convinced to join the self-destructive ranks of suicide terrorists not for the rewards his initiators tell him will be his in the next life, but for how pulling the string on his jerry rigged device of self-immolation will make everything stop, will arrest a life that’s become too chaotic and emotionally over-stimulated.

Margolin writes chilling images that in Dobell’s delivery capture their macabre appropriateness. He describes bodies that look wrong, because they’re new to being dead and don’t quite know how to do it yet. He describes faces frozen in death masks, covering bereft souls weeping with loss as he ferries them to his world.

He describes his own moment of destruction, when he approached a crowded train station and watched as people moved down the tracks toward a train that stopped farther away from him than he expected. Only after they’ve cleared his portion of the platform does he pull the string that sets off his bomb, killing himself but not, he implies, many others.

Throughout When They Quiet Down I Start, a second actor wearing the white cassock of a priest stands with his back turned to the audience, appearing to pray. The bus driver refers to him occasionally, glancing at his glowering back for a response, somehow wordlessly rejecting the solace of his presumed prayer.

The small stage is decorated by an overturned table, its legs extended into the air, with two upended chairs resting on its underside, and a large steamer trunk set vertically, against which the bus driver leans and on which he places his blue-and-white paper coffee cup.

A video plays overhead, projected against a set of very large steel doors. Images of train tracks and women splatter and fragment across the screen, illustrating the chaos and inchoate sensations of a man walking knowingly toward his own death. The design’s cumulative effect creates the aura of noisy quietude, the force of its contradictions compelling us to witness the stories that unfold within.

The monologue imagines the emotional interior of a man who’s by no means a martyr, but someone unhappy for other reasons, who sees his carefully choreographed murderous act as a way to address his own psychosis and despair. By making it personal instead of political, Margolin’s writing somehow humanizes these terrorist acts. She puts a specific face on the action and lets us imagine that these destructive choices are made by particular people with real histories, whose brief lives brought them to this moment for individual, more than political, reasons. Margolin and Dobell deftly remind us that human actions exceed ideology.

In Clarrise and Larmon, the second piece, Lisa Kron plays the mother of a boy who’s been killed, senselessly, in war. In the play’s opening moment, a soldier gives her and her husband a photograph of their son’s remains: his knee, calf, ankle, and foot. Clarisse questions the reporting soldier’s language of fear. In answer to her questions, he says, “I’m afraid so,” or “I’m afraid not,” or “I’m afraid it would have been . . .” and other declarations of timid hesitation. “Why are you so afraid of everything?” she asks impertinently and honestly. He can’t understand her challenge to the banal language we use to inform people of the most awful truths.

Kron and Dobell—making a quick emotional transition into the husband’s role from the terrorist he plays in the first piece—play wife/husband mother/father in the intimate yet formal way that typifies Margolin’s work. Their language is too perfect, too writerly to be real, but at the same time, that bit of artifice helps heighten our understanding of the emotional magnitude of their feelings.

The play’s most wrenching image is the last, when Clarisse rips the photograph of her son’s leg into bits, crying that the boy needs to go back where he came from, and tries to shove his image back into her womb. The pain of loss and the impossibility of retrieval become achingly clear.

The third play, The Rich Silk of It, is dedicated to the memory of Lyric Benson, a Yale acting student who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend/fiancé. Her death devastated the Yale community of which Deb, who teaches playwrighting and acting and other courses at the university, was a part. The piece imagines the final three seconds of Lyric’s life, as she stands on the stoop of her apartment building, trying to persuade her psychotic ex not to kill her.

She recalls happier moments from their shared past; she tells him he wouldn’t want her mother to find her body on the stoop, as what mother should be forced to discover the body of her child? She talks non-stop to him and to us, as the light focuses our attention on her face and her assassin’s inscrutable back.

The piece is perhaps the evening’s most ambitious, partly because Margolin attempts to tell so much of the back-story of this last tragic moment. In the other three pieces, she spins out a rich web of allusions and connections that comprise one particular moment of eternity. But in Rich Silk, she looks for answers in a larger network of time, in a series of moments that culminate in Benson’s murder.

The piece dislodges chronological time, flashing forward and back across the moments that brought the young woman and the deranged man to the moment of her death. Yet where the evening’s three other plays are tinged with irony and absurdism, The Rich Silk of It plays earnestly and realistically, generating the expectation that the story will provide motivations and reveal the secrets that realism leads us to anticipate. Instead of the swift slice of intersectional, slightly skewed reality that the other pieces provide, this one is more teleological, looking for answers that really can’t be found.

While the slain student (played by Claire Siebers) is a unified, clearly delineated character, her murderer—played by Khris Lewin, a visually arresting, muscular, small, bald, white man—changes personae frequently. Lewin portrays the very troubled boyfriend in one moment, a dubious gay bartender the next, and an anonymous man whom the boyfriend also accosts the next.

Although this instantaneous multiple casting underlines the boyfriend’s chaotic subjectivity, it also lessens the frightening effect of his insanity. The play intercuts his moments of pure psychosis with more sober reflections by the other characters Lewin plays, breaking the terrible momentum of his drive to murder the woman.

We observe the boyfriend’s possessive rages, his expressed desire to cut the woman into little pieces the better to devour her. We hear the bartender’s cautions, his sense that something’s not right with the man the young woman intends to marry. We see her visit a priest, concerned that she can’t seem to bring her fiancé to god. And we watch uncomfortably as he performs his desire to possess her emotionally, physically, and sexually.

Because the piece is more realistic, we expect explanations. Our desires, though, are finally foiled; what answers can be found in the act of a madman? The image of a woman talking against the silhouette of a man holding a gun on her is compelling, but clouded by the back and forth of time. Leaving her suspended in that one awful moment, those three seconds before she’s hurried to eternity before her time, might have been a powerful enough choice.

In the eponymous last piece, Kron returns to play “Woman in Bed,” who’s revealed as stage-hands open those large steel doors and push a full, tastefully decorated bed out onto the stage. It turns out she’s lolling, fully dressed, on a store display, calling for the attention of “Woman in Blazer,” an officious saleswoman who tries to cajole her out of her bedding back into the proper reality of the department store.

Although her motivations are never quite clear, the Woman in Bed feverishly describes her desire to talk to the Woman in Blazer, finally seducing her into the bed to frolic among the sheets and covers. The brief scene ends in a passionate, unexpected kiss, providing a moment of humor and happiness, however inexplicable, that ends the evening.

Margolin’s writing and the actors’ embodiments provide the evening’s rich satisfactions. The direction, however, is a bit too ham-fisted for such delicate, intricate writing and ideas. Although in his program note, director Marc Stuart Weitz seems to understand Margolin’s intent, he freights the four pieces with cumbersome weight.

Weitz envisions these scenes with too much stuff and too many extraneous people come on between the plays to move décor on and off. These intersessions let us detach and rest, when we should be moved inexorably through each of these short pieces to feel their cumulative effect.

Ultimately, they all tell one story of loss, death, yearning, and finally, hope. Their collective impact might be better served by a directorial hand able to highlight the writing through simple, crystalline images, instead of filling the stage with actions and things that distract from the pure impact of Margolin’s words and the actors who say them and feel them so well.

The Feminist Spectator

La Vie En Rose

When I first ordered this film from NetFlix, I got the beginning French article wrong and received instead Ma Vie En Rose, the coming-of-age story about a young boy who desperately wants to dress as a girl. I was disappointed that I hadn’t received the biopic about Edith Piaf I’d expected, but I’d wanted to see the other film and watched it anyway. Although I thought it beautiful and moving, I’m still not sure whether it’s trans- and homophobic, or if it’s a sensitive discussion of a boy’s gender ambivalence/ambiguity.

La Vie En Rose, on the other hand, I found unambiguously wonderful. Writer-director Olivier Dahan’s film eschews chronology, cutting backwards and forwards in Piaf’s tragic life, from her collapse onstage at one of her final performances and onward to her death, back to her childhood as the abandoned daughter of an alcoholic street singer and a circus contortionist. She’s taken in early on by a warm-hearted prostitute named Tatine who works under the stern hand of her madam, who happens to be Piaf’s paternal grandmother. Scenes of the sickly young Edith navigating the purgatory of a 1930s Paris bordello capture the inchoate confusion of the perversions and lusts that course through the house’s warren-like rooms and winding hallways.

Here and throughout the film, Dahan shoots from Piaf’s perspective. These early brothel scenes deliver incoherent images of men and women in various states of undress and unusual sexual postures that are difficult to piece together, as they would be for an eight-year-old child who knows not what she sees. Seen through Edith’s eyes, the brothel seems a happy place; Tatine and another prostitute clearly love and care for the girl in ways her parents could never manage. They entertain her during her bath, and take her for walks, swinging her by the arms between them.

Poor health consigns young Edith to months in bed; at one point, she’s temporarily blinded by an eye inflammation. Her dependency on caretakers and medications begins early and haunts her life, eventually contributing to her premature death in her mid-40s. Her physical needs infect her emotional constitution, turning her quickly from a strong, devil-may-care young woman with a flippant attitude to her own poverty, to the cantankerous, querulous diva who adores and despises those who eventually control her career.

La Vie en Rose is an often moving biopic whose form and content meld to create its portrait of the tragic artist. The camera dedicates itself to Piaf’s perspective; as it moves through her life, hand-held shots with very few edits move with her from room to room, seeing through her eyes the walls literally closing in around her, feeling along with her confusion, determination, and despair. The camera captures physically, as well as metaphorically, how time and space collapse around Piaf.

Toward the end, the film detours into unnecessary melodrama, given Piaf’s already heightened life story. The story reveals that she had a child, a daughter who died young from meningitis. It’s not entirely clear why Dahan’s script withholds this information until the finale, which overburdens the secret with importance it doesn’t really earn. Are we supposed to think that Edith’s often cruel emotional connections to people resulted from the loss of her only child? Does the writer-director presume this explains more of her complicated personality than scenes of her own degrading childhood?

In fact, the film does its best work illuminating the formative impact of poverty on Piaf’s life. When her stardom brings her wealth, she believes in it no more than she did her own mother’s fealty. The diva’s bitterness is so thoroughly internalized, no fortune could compensate for those early deprivations. She remains, throughout her life, the street singer, hat in hand, reaching out to audiences who marveled at her voice to feed her emotionally and physically.

Marion Cotillard’s performance as Piaf richly deserved the Oscar she received for Best Actress this year. Her performance of the doomed diva is intensely physical; it seems to emanate from her round, kohl-drawn eyes as well as her pleading, sweeping hands. Cotillard lip-synced Piaf’s singing, but her physical mannerisms and her impersonation of Piaf’s vocal virtuosity is so persuasive it’s difficult to tell that the voice emanating from those perfectly rounded, quivering lips isn’t hers.

Cotillard embodies Piaf’s songs completely, reveling in the chanteuse’s vocal idiosyncrasies and her signature gestures, using her elegant, bird-like hands to enhance her music’s emotional appeal. The film underlines that “piaf” means “little sparrow” in French, a name bestowed on Edith by her first benefactor (played benevolently by Gerard Depardieu).

Despite her precarious health, Piaf commands a stage. The contrast the film captures between her increasingly vulnerable, frail body and her powerful, charismatic stage presence is utterly compelling, even frightening. Later scenes, in which her talent overwhelms the capacities of her small, brittle frame, are terrifying, brutal in how they depict Piaf’s will to sing and the way in which her talent ultimately seems to kill her from within. Her body, it seems, couldn’t withstand the power of her voice.

Cotillard never loses sight of Piaf’s intense vulnerability and her contradictory strength (opposing characteristics that Joe Roach, in his wonderful book, It, says are what mark people who have “it,” that most elusive, difficult-to-describe star quality). She persuasively ages, playing Piaf from her teen-aged years to the end of her life with nuanced, convincing changes of tone, character, and emotional quality. The sole DVD extra demonstrates the make-up artist’s achievement with the film, as the meticulously constructed age effects and wigs allowed Dahan to film Cotillard in extreme close-up without losing believability.

The crippling arthritis that contributed to Piaf’s early death made the singer look twice her age. Convalescent scenes after her breakdown toward the end of her career show her bent as if with osteoporosis. In her illness, she wears her once-dark, lush hair in a badly dyed haze of carrot-colored fuzz around her head, and her face is lined and crumpled. Yet despite her body’s deterioration, Piaf continues to command her spirit, her voice, and her companions. Only when she realizes that she’ll never sing again does Piaf acquiesce to death.

Piaf’s original talent was raw and rather glib, as she stood on street corners nearly daring people to stop to listen and appreciate her voice. As various male coaches help her construct the more calculating emotive image for which she became known, the performativity laced through her performances becomes stunningly clear. Piaf performed herself, even while she truly seemed to love and feed off of her fan’s adoration for the image she created and held at such a short distance from herself. She found kinship in performance, connecting to audiences who were always anonymous and fleeting, but huge sustaining presences in her life.

The Feminist Spectator

L Word Season Five Finale, the Jodi Addendum

A friend wrote to remind me that I hadn’t addressed the Jodi debacle of the last episode(s), which does seem worth at least a few words. Jodi’s character shifted in unpredictable and rather unbelievable ways through the course of her run on the series. She started as a sex radical of sorts who didn’t want to commit to a monogamous relationship with Bette, and ended as a betrayed girlfriend infuriated by Bette’s affair with Tina. Too bad the show’s writers couldn’t maintain their hold on a character who could practice non-monogamy with magnanimity, but had to reduce her to a conventionally jealous, spurned lover.

When at the end Bette protests that their relationship never really worked, spectators can only agree. As I’ve noted before, Jennifer Beals and Marlee Matlin (who apparently have long been close friends in “real life”) never sparked much, physically or emotionally. Their sex scenes seemed forced and perfunctory; toward the end, when Jodi so frequently tried to force herself on Bette, their scenes were nearly distasteful.

Bette’s rekindled desire for Tina inspired all sorts of new moralizing from her friends (I still can’t fathom why Bette’s choices are always judged so harshly), with everyone protesting that they didn’t want to see Jodi hurt. Although the character was drawn as everyone’s best friend this season, the inner circle’s reactions tread close to pity for the disabled deaf girl who was about to be dumped.

Granted, Jodi’s affection for the L girls made her into a good buddy, but I couldn’t help feeling suspicious and uneasy that their protectiveness toward her came at least partly from her deafness. While writing a deaf character into a series like The L Word is a progressive choice, implicitly pitying her, under cover of emotional support, seems cheap.

Jodi’s “explosive” unveiling of her new “sculpture” in the last episode was a gratuitous attack, a gleefully performed humiliation of the woman The L Word loves to bash. Why does Bette have to take another one right between the eyes? Because she's so smart? Her speech at Jodi's premiere was elegant and eloquent, her intellect and her (fabricated, of course) insights into art-making keen and original. The show inevitably undercuts these admirable public performances by so openly dragging her through the mud of her private life.

And since when does a sculptor use two-dimensional multi-media to make her art? The scene at the gallery felt unnecessary, a public shaming of Bette that didn’t further the plot any more than letting Jodi exit with uncharacteristically vindictive self-righteousness.

I’m left wondering what will become of Max’s affair with Jodi’s interpreter, and who will be the next temporary standard-bearer for the show’s more radical (although in the context of The L Word, “radical” is relative) artistic and sexual practices. Tune in next February.

The Feminist Spectator

The L Word Season Five Finale

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

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