Visiting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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

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

The Importance of Being Earnest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Winter’s Tale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Feminist Spectator

Catching Up with Culture

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

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

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

My Name is Rachel Corrie Postponed at NYTW

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brokeback Mountain’s Best Picture Loss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I guess we’ll have to keep waiting.

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

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

The Feminist Spectator

Utopia in Performance

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

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

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

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

My best,
The Feminist Spectator

Wendy Wasserstein, In Memoriam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Feminist Spectator

Back to the Movies . . .

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

Match Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My best,
The Feminist Spectator

The Delicate Balance of Criticism, II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year.
My best,
The Feminist Spectator

Holiday Films: Mainlining Popular Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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

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

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

Capote

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

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

Brokeback Mountain

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

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

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

King Kong

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

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

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

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

The Squid and the Whale

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

Walk the Line

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

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


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

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

Warm wishes,
The Feminist Spectator

Sarah Schulman Redux: The Delicate Balance of Criticism, I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes,
The Feminist Spectator

Sarah Schulman and the Plight of Women Playwrights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Different Media

These last three weeks and a couple of days in between posts only mean that life has been hectic lately as the fall semester geared up and got underway. As much as I want to be able to comment regularly on all the culture I absorb, I find my observations flying by, while I'm left in the road waving at their shadows.

Today, then, is an effort to simply share some preliminary impressions on three different representations that have struck me in the last few weeks: David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a film given rave reviews in the mainstream press; Zadie Smith's On Beauty, a book given rave reviews in the mainstream press; and Grey's Anatomy, a television show that entered its second season this fall, also garnering rave reviews.

Americana Run Amok

After the fluff of the summer film season, I was instantly drawn to the reviews of A History of Violence. All of the various newspapers and magazines I read regularly heralded this film as the most riveting, ethically and even intellectually gripping film of the year to date. How disappointing, then, to see a film that proved so retrograde and old fashioned, politically and narratively. Why don't mainstream reviewers pick up on the values that movies broadcast so baldly? Why did none of them notice how the film reviles "northern" values, represented by stereotypical characterizations of mobsters, and valorizes small town (white) living, applauding Americans' ability to start their lives over, if they commit to ages old ethical systems that rely on Mom and Pop and literally apple pie to anchor their new existences?

The Viggo Mortensen character, a stalwart family man who walks to the diner he owns from his clapboard house on his Indiana homestead, isolated on a rural road far from other social intercourse, is quiet and upright, the kind of man who greets his regulars and knows their preferences and desires without being told. He keeps the coffee brewing; he's kind to his help; and he focuses in a simple, resolute way on the tasks at hand. Until, that is, two wayward killers come to town, dissolute drifters whose cold-blooded practices have been set up over the credits. In the only scene in the film that could be parodic, the killers enter the diner and begin to rattle at the cage of its complacency, figuratively spitting in the coffee and sneering at the pie. They go too far, however, when they threaten the diner owner's waitress. He goes into high physical gear and becomes, himself, a killing machine, neatly dispatching the villains and quickly becoming a hero on the local news.

And so the character's cover is blown. Rather than the simple, kindhearted mid-western stereotype he appears to be, this man has in fact his own history of violence. He's run to Indiana from Philadelphia, which becomes, in the narrative, shorthand for everything wrong with America, the site of all moral rot and evil. In the process of remaking his life, he's changed his name and has convinced himself that he's changed his soul. When the tentacles of his old life reach out to recapture him, he resists fiercely, killing the mob emisssary who's come to track him down, and wreaking havoc on his henchmen. Knowing that there's more where they came from, he finally travels back to Philly to take out the mob boss who wants him back; the boss turns out to be his own brother (William Hurt in a wonderfully campy turn that might have lent the movie some irony if his scenes were longer).

Meanwhile, back on the home front, Mortensen's wife--played by Maria Bello as a woman equally strong and lightweight, whom we see carrying a briefcase but doing no work, who's disturbed when she realizes the rumors about her husband are true and at once repelled and turned on by his past and his new, virile, violent power--tries to come to terms with the truth of her husband's identity. While he appears to beg not for forgiveness but for her to become complicit with his willed amnesia, she can't decide if her own lust should outweigh her own sense of ethics. The film ends a bit ambiguously, with the Mortensen's character's teenage son tentatively passing him the vegetables at the metaphorically weighted family dinner table. Will the family welcome the killer in the man they know as their gentle father and husband?

Cronenberg doesn't say. But what he does say instead is even more disturbing than the notion that vigilantism will go unpunished, or that one man can clean up his past with a gun. What the director implies in his romantic vision of the mid-West is that Americans can remake themselves if they subscribe to the foundational values of a country that prides itself on being self-made: heterosexuality, reproductivity (two kids, a boy and a girl), whiteness, cowboy masculinity, and middle-classness (the mobster brother's palatial home is photographed as if it's pornographic, while the slightly ramshackle country house in Indiana is filmed through soft lenses with a kind of homey charm). Mortensen teaches his erstwhile ironic, would-be intellectual son that expressing yourself in violence is more effective than expressing yourself in thought--over the course of the film, the son learns to fight back at the two boys who bully him, and saves his father from certain death by shooting his nemesis (Ed Harris, with a strangely comic disfigured eye) dead with a shotgun and not flinching when his father hugs him with a shirt full of the man's blood and brains.

This isn't fabulous moviemaking--this is Bush propaganda from a Canadian director who should know better. I longed for a point of view here that would lend an edge to this whitewash; I longed for commentary that would let me know, David Lynch-style, that something in fact was rotten in this prototypically American town, something beside the stink of the past that comes to ruin the diner's fragrance. But instead, Cronenberg holds out hope that the heartland can be reestablished, better, even, for the evil it's expunged. One last righteous murder spree, he seems to imply, can clear the killer's heart and let him keep the girl and the kids and the house with a clean spirit, forever. Chilling indeed.

Academia Run Wild

Zadie Smith's On Beauty, on the other hand, is a lovely meditation on American values, filtered through the strange and wondrous world of the academy, as told by a Black British author with a fine eye for the workings of race and class. The novel is an academic satire in the David Lodge vein, one filled with knowing references to the excesses of academic behavior when it's not constrained by real life. On Beauty paints a somehow loving picture of a world that's both separate from the rest of culture and intensely reflective of it, while at the same time shaping it by teaching values, modeling for students how to be in the world. That none of the models really work only underlines Smith's point, which seems to be that forgiveness and even faith are necessary to get along in the world at all. Nothing goes unpunished here, but all the chastisements are meant to make the world better, to inspire a kind of hope that we might find our best selves in the core of our worst, rather than pretending that we can outrun who we are by returning to a mythic American middle where hiding is living.

The novel pits two families against each other, and traces their unpredictable overlaps and alliances. One family includes a white British father who's a Rembrandt scholar of post-modernist critical leanings, who lectures on the instability of meaning in the artist's paintings and refuses the trappings of conventional aesthetics. A Black Britian of Caribbean descent heads the other family; he's a Shelby Steele kind of academic who rails against affirmative action and preaches Dinesh D'Souza's party line. The two men come to blows when they wind up teaching at the same institution, a privileged liberal arts college in the northeast that sounds a lot like Harvard or Wesleyan.

Smith parodies academic pretensions, but she also somehow gets the complications of trying to believe in things in a world that's too cynical to navigate. The white father is married to an African American woman who won't truck with intellectual pretension, but who searches for meaning in her own life through an unlikely alliance with the Black British father's wife, a fragile, wise woman whose death prompts the plot's crisis and its eventual denouement. Both father's daughters are troubled young women looking for love and relationships in the wrong places, too assured of their intellectual power and ultimately only further unmanned by their attempts at sexual intrigue and agency. The sons fare no better; one is rigidly dogmatic, another insecure and ambivalent, and his biracial brother a kind of minstrel who's trying to achieve a presumptive sort of African American authenticity by mouthing hip hop pieties and salutations that don't fool any of his "brothers" on the street.

None of the book's characters provide a clear moral center, although the African American mother comes close. But they all have luminous moments of self-understanding and insight that gave me hope for myself and for all of us, that in our most self-deluding illusions about ourselves and our worlds, we might still learn something, might still find a kind of faith that will let us not just get through our lives, but get through to each other, let us love each other just a little better and more truly. I laughed at Smith's book, and recognized myself and many academic types I know in her characters. But she moved me, too, with the ultimate generosity of her observations and her vision of how we might resolve our differences. The villains here are punished not with violent exile, but only with having to live with themselves and their mistakes until they can see their way through to change them. That's not redemption, exactly, but it's hopeful. And it works for me.

Anatomy Lessons

Grey's Anatomy, an ABC television show produced by an African American woman named Shonda Rhimes, has become a new guilty pleasure for me and my partner every Sunday night. We started watching summer reruns, after hearing rumors of smart writing and compelling characters. Despite the formulaic plots and rather stock personalities--a group of interns competing with themselves and each other at a teaching hospital--the acting and the writing make it a consistently compelling hour of television. The plot's driven by a love story; it's the rare network television show that can forego romance as its motivator and engine. But the love story here is complicated by ethical issues of power and nepotism--one of the interns, whose mother happens to be a famous neurosurgeon, has what she thinks will be a one-night stand with a handsome man who turns out to be her supervising doctor. His Romeo good looks and soulful, wounded expression set him apart from the more macho, preening male characters who've come to define the genre. The central couple grapples constantly with their desire for each other and their desire to do the right professional thing

The show twists all the medical story stereotypes in slightly new directions, often by changing the character's gender or race from the more typical. For instance, the head of this hospital (or at least the head of surgery, I'm not sure of his administrative position) is a smart, kindly African American man; the resident who oversees the interns is an African American woman with exacting standards and exasperated but ultimately human expressions; one of the interns is an Asian American woman blithe about her own ambitions who finds her emotions more complicated than she predicted; another is a slightly paunchy white man with a hangdog expression but a kind and determined soul. There are more doctors and nurses and hospital personnel, all running into each other's egos, all having sex, eating together, living together, feeling exhausted together.

But somehow, they're all smart, articulate, and seem to have an eye on their futures, on an elsewhere to which the show implicitly refers. That is, most tv dramas become claustrophobic, because the very intensity of the plots each week make the situations and characters quickly feel hermetic and self-referential. In Grey's Anatomy, these people seem fleshed out enough to have dreams, to hanker after positions outside this hospital, to have choices to make about their fictive lives, now, not when the series finale is being planned and shot. Their fraught but somehow respectful and even tender interactions seem compelling, moving, because there's more to them than fancy fake medical language or cheap and bloody shock shots.

There seems much more to see and to read and to watch and react to. Hopefully, in due time, I will.

Meanwhile, your comments are always welcome and thanks for reading.

The Feminist Spectator
October 14, 2005

The Luminous Laurie Carlos and her Nourishing Pork Chop Wars

Last Friday, September 16th, I heard Laurie Carlos give the opening lecture of the Fourth Annual Performance as Public Practice Distinguished Lecture series at the University of Texas at Austin where I teach. Carlos is an Obie award-winning artist whose work has long influenced American theatre: she was the first woman to perform “The Lady in Blue” in Ntozake Shange’s foundational choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. She was a collaborating founder of Urban Bush Women, and performed with Jessica Hagedorn and Robbie McCauley as Thought Music in the 1980s. She received a Bessie award for White Chocolate for My Father in the 1990s, and continues her career as a writer, choreographer, performer, and all around inspiration. Introducing Carlos’s lecture, Prof. Omi Osun Olomo/Dr. Joni Jones said that when she’s around Laurie Carlos, she feels her “humanity is expanded.” Carlos’s lecture, “Walking the Edge with Instructions from Conversations with Robbie,” offered one of the most thoughtful, immediate, moving artist’s lectures I’ve heard in some time.

Carlos wove food metaphors throughout her talk, suggesting that the hybridity of the American palate stands for the diversity of our lives. She described growing up on the Lower East Side of New York, where life bombarded her with flavors, smells, and tastes of the neighborhood’s immigrant culture. This she juxtaposed with her current life in St. Paul, Minnesota, where putting mayonnaise, for example, on corn beef and rye might not be considered the culinary faux pas it would be in New York.

Food metaphors also ground her art-making. Carlos says that her ritual-like, improvisatory process of creating performance is like cooking and offering nourishment, a method both public and private. We often make food for others, but cooking can also be a singular, musing event. Likewise, her “performance novel” The Pork Chop Wars, a third of which was presented last weekend in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UT, co-sponsored by the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS), is like a plate of food that she’s cooked up in the moment, some of which the audience might like, some of which they might have to develop a taste for, some of which they might not like at all. Her work, Carlos says, is intensely personal, but she hopes other people will accept and be nourished by parts of the repast she spreads.

The “performance novel” is an art form with which Austin-based playwright/poet Sharon Bridgforth first experimented in Love Conjure Blues (Redbone Press, 2004), premiered by CAAAS at UT last year. The novel, on the page, plays with typography, attempting to evoke in words, letters, type, and line what on stage becomes the nuances and idiosyncrasies of character and relationships. On the page, Bridgforth’s story jumps through space, teasing and seducing the eye; on the stage, the story jumps through space and time, conjuring overlapping stories through simultaneous histories and multiple voices and bodies presenting their versions of the same tales.

Both Bridgforth’s and Carlos’s work comprise what Omi Osun Olomo/Joni Jones calls a “jazz aesthetic,” a living, breathing, embodied narrative performance form that riffs in unexpected ways like music, and equally depends on the careful, collaborative ensemble work of each musician. Watching Love Conjure Blues last year and The Pork Chop Wars last week, I was struck by the importance of listening, as the performers, texts in hand, both performed their own pieces and paid vigilant attention, honoring each other’s words and presence. The performers in these pieces look like jazz bands, in how they compose their presences around each other, waiting to riff, to pick up a line like a melody and blend it, shout it, make it sing.

Omi Osun Olomo/Joni Jones heads The Austin Project, a local performance ensemble that has experimented with “performance in a jazz aesthetic” for the last several years. The Austin Project is a “collaboration of women of color artists, scholars, and activists” who “use art and art-making for social change,” performing autobiographical narrative choral pieces. Omi Osun Olomo/Joni Jones is writing a book that will theorize the jazz aesthetic’s roots and influences and will predict its future; performer/poets like Bridgforth, Carlos, and Daniel Alexander Jones have been part of the process of originating the form. As Carlos said in her lecture, “We don’t even know if it’s even a form except between seven of us, but here we are.”

The Pork Chop Wars finds ten women of various races assembled in a semi-circle on a stage adorned with flowers, pictures, the artifacts of a life of family and work. A musician sits at the end of their row, punctuating their speech with his tenor sax, occasionally walking behind the women to second their words with his voice and his presence. The women read, together and separately, stories of Carlos’s multilingual, international family, evoking in words, movement, and the depth of their feeling the complexities of a history both public and private.

While some of the stories resonated for me more than others, I found myself appreciating the tenor and texture of the experience, listening for rhythms and patterns in movement and speech as well as content. I took seriously Carlos’s injunction to experience what I want from the piece. She says her art serves her own purposes; she doesn’t feel obligated to her audience. She creates performance because, she says, “I’m good at what I do,” and so that audiences can “watch it happen this way” instead of another way. To that extent, watching The Pork Chop Wars became an exercise in meeting the artist halfway, and in letting myself create my own internal dialogue with the work.

Carlos spoke again at the performance’s end, in dialogue with director Deborah Artman, a longtime collaborator, Sharon Bridgforth, who served as dramaturg, and the ensemble cast. Her eloquence and generosity as an artist are offset by the clarity of the reasons she does her work. She feels no need to convince people of its value or validity; her refusal to kowtow to dominant cultural standards of meaning-making or aesthetic significance is admirable and inspirational. “What is it you want to do as an artist,” she asked her audience, enjoining us to cast out the institutional voices that inhibit or censor what we want to say (“The editor bitch has to die,” Carlos said, referring to the voice of the institution she hears in her head and constantly rejects). An artist is compelled, Carlos insists, to say what she has to say despite the possibility of censorship and danger.

Carlos’s own history exemplifies her credo. She sees her art in an arc, as a long-term conversation with a group of collaborators who’ve both challenged and sustained her for over 35 years. When she first started working in the 70s, Carlos said there was no where for people like her to be. Women of color were cast as maids, as mammies, as prostitutes in American theatre. To escape the constraints of convention and racism, Carlos worked in bars, jazz clubs, dance halls to express herself with other performers and musicians who were also resisting the dominant discourse of the time. Carlos, Shange, performance artist Robbie McCauley (the absent presence throughout Carlos’s talk, whom she credits as her “spirit guide”), and other women constantly created rituals that dressed their own experience in symbolism, action, costume, and smells. She said that her artistic foremothers are “piles of renegades” with no funding for what they wanted to say, but the urgency of their need to speak changed forever the contours of American performance.

Then, Carlos said, they “invaded” the Public Theatre in New York, and Joe Papp gave them a new artistic home. Papp nurtured For Colored Girls, even though Carlos said that eventually it became a tenth of what it was in the bars. The piece had developed through an interracial, organic process of creating work from ritual, in which looking at each other, touching each other, and loving each other in performance was as important as the words and the movement for which For Colored Girls is known. In current productions of the play, Carlos says she most misses that original impulse among the performers, and regrets that the piece is too often reduced to the tragic story about Bo Willy Brown.

Carlos insists that artists have to make their work. You have to “go into the house and make a mess, pour the cornmeal on the floor, and then we can talk.” She said these are slave strategies, subtle ways of resisting hegemony and ownership. Carlos dances in her seat when she speaks, punctuating her language with gestures and short responses to her own calls. “Hmm,” she’ll say after a phrase, or “yeah,” after another, the rhetorical flourishes of a woman who knows exactly what she wants to say and wants only to make sure you’re listening.