Gray Matters and Puccini for Beginners: Love Triangles and All

I can’t resist dipping into what’s now quite a catalogue of lesbian-themed movies, even though most of them are light fluff or portentous melodrama. I find these films by reading about them in scattered reviews, sometimes in the Times or sometimes The Advocate, or I find them in queer browsing sites like Wolfe Video (http://www.wolfevideo.com/, which also offers a weekly email update on new LGBTQ DVD releases and entertainment industry queer gossip).

I recently rented Gray Matters (2007, http://www.graymattersmovie.com/), for instance, which stars Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh, and Bridget Moynahan in a slight, but diverting lesbian date comedy. I've also watched Puccini for Beginners (http://www.strandrel.com/In_Theaters_Details.asp_Q_id_E_227), a 2007 Official Selection at Sundance, which also opened the 30th annual Frameline [Gay] Film Festival this year in San Francisco. Gray Matters was conceived and executed by Sue Kramer, who notes in the DVD bonus tracks that her sister is a lesbian; Puccini was written and directed by out lesbian Maria Maggenti.

Maggenti garnered mainstream attention with The Fabulous Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995), the film that launched the queer career of Laurel Holloman, who’s now playing Tina Kennard on The L Word. Puccinif, like Gray Matters, is another slight and diverting lesbian “date comedy” (two words I never thought would modify “lesbian” in films).

Gray and Puccini share a common plot thread: a love triangle among a lesbian, a straight woman, and a man. In Gray Matters, our heroine, Gray, and her brother, Sam, are so close they live together and are often misrecognized as a couple. Clearly, this arrangement is too queer to sustain, so it’s time to find Sam a “real” girlfriend. With Gray’s help, the siblings stumbled upon the androgynously, bi-friendly named “Charlie,” walking her dog in Central Park. Sam’s attraction is immediate, but Gray, too, and winds up falling in love with her.

In Gray’s critical “recognition” scene the night before Sam and Charlie’s (inevitable) wedding, Charlie insists on the old-fashioned ritual that Sam not see her until they meet at the altar. Charlie spends the night in a hotel with Gray. After a long evening of girls-only drinking, the two women exchange a series of physically affectionate gestures that escalate into a rather passionate kiss, after which Charlie promptly passes out.

Gray spends all night pacing the hotel room floor trying to figure out what happened; Charlie’s utter amnesia the next morning doesn’t help. When Gray confesses to Sam than she loves his wife, the siblings are temporarily estranged, until Gray lets go of her crush on their mutual object of affection and drifts off to ply her newly found lesbian desire farther from home.

In Puccini for Beginners, the unlikely but entertaining plot revolves around two love triangles, one among a lesbian and a straight couple, the other among two lesbians and a man. Here, Samantha (Julianne Nicholson) abruptly leaves our heroine Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser) to return to her boyfriend, because Allegra, her girlfriend of nine months, can’t commit.

Commitment-phobic though she is, Allegra soon meets Phillip (Justin Kirk), a Columbia philosophy professor with whom she begins a surprising affair. Shortly after, Allegra also meets and beds Grace (Gretchen Mol), the woman whom (unbeknownst to Allegra, but already clear to us) Phillip has been seeing for six years and recently left because of her insistence on marriage. Phillip, a stereotypically commitment-phobic man, finds a “man” like himself in Allegra and pursues his attraction.

Maggenti offers a prologue to preview the eventual recognition scene, letting the audience know well before Allegra that she’s sleeping with a former couple, after which a series of farcical set ups inspired by this triangle proceeds as only screwball film comedy can. The antics are interspersed with wry but supportive commentary from Allegra’s two best friends (Molly, a straight woman, and Nell, an ex who majored in German philosophy at Yale and pronounces her opinions in suitably fierce, uncompromising intellectual terms).

Both Phillip and Grace attach to Allegra quickly, and she jumps in and out of bed with both, fielding inopportune cell phone calls from one or the other as she tries to keep her lovers straight (and separate). She doesn’t realize until the film’s third act (each act title serves as a convenient, rather theatrical transitional device) that Phillip and Grace were/are involved.

Like any good farce, all the plotlines and characters come together in the final revelation scene that was previewed at the film’s beginning. This one happens at a party for Samantha and her fiancé, whom Phillip and Grace just happen to know. Allegra, despite being a writer who was a runner-up for the New York Critics Circle Book award, has been persuaded to work the party as wait staff for a loathsome gay caterer. In a classic “She’s my girlfriend”; “No, she’s my girlfriend” scene, Allegra’s gig is up and the competing relationships dissolve with her and resolve with each other. Phillip and Grace, mutually humiliated over Allegra’s betrayal, are thrown back together. Samantha, fondly recalling her love and appropriately impressed by how Allegra has (supposedly) changed, ditches her fiancé and returns to her girlfriend, and everyone, we assume, lives happily ever after.

Puccini recalls Woody Allen’s Manhattan, as its New York-set scenes brim with affection for its West Village locations and long shots of the Met at Lincoln Center, where Allegra takes her dates to share her love for the grand passions of opera (which here seem wonderfully, intentionally queer). The apartments in which the characters live (and in which the film was presumably shot) are realistically small, if set-decorated in saturated colors, off-kilter art, and objects tastefully arranged to provide shorthand character detail.

Maggenti films many scenes in public places—delis, restaurants, subways, benches in Central Park—where ever-opinionated, eavesdropping New Yorkers provide a Greek chorus for Allegra’s on-going dilemmas and don’t hesitate to tell her what she should do. Anonymous diners and wait staff turn to offer Allegra unsolicited advice. The sushi chefs at a place she frequents observe Allegra’s comings and goings with soap opera zeal and the insight of committed fans; their hilarious remarks are spoken in Japanese and displayed in English subtitles, which helps comment on the clueless spectacle of white folks in love.

Maggenti’s eye for New York character demonstrates a smart wit—the diners are “types,” including, among others, Babs Davy of the Five Lesbian Brothers playing, in a striped baseball shirt, an advice-wielding member of a dyke softball team arrayed at a nearby four-top in a restaurant. On the subway, the voice of an African-American woman stop announcer interjects her own reading of Allegra’s fortunes, and at the deli, a Latino cashier offers to take her out but looks on approvingly when Grace arrives and embraces her.

That people of color in the film only appear in these subsidiary cameos is unfortunate; what good progressive artist/writer/intellectual like Allegra in Manhattan in the 21st century would only associate with white people?

If it stints on the possibilities of racial diversity, Puccini does represent its characters as smart people who think about their emotions and their politics. Allegra and Phillip lie in bed talking about marriage, which Allegra articulately dismisses as a bourgeois institution of property, whether for heterosexuals or queers. Phillip and Nell joust about Kant. The opinionated diners describe the fluidity of gender, the pros of bisexuality, and the queerness of opera. When Samantha leaves Allegra, she heads to the bookcase to retrieve her belongings. Allegra and her friends go to the Met together (even though most of them hate opera, while Allegra swoons). They escape into bookstores and cinemas when they’re depressed, and come out with enthusiastic analyses of black-and-white films. Idle shoppers at bookstores interject observations from Freud into Allegra’s private conversations.

Allegra becomes a kind of lesbian everywoman, someone strangers want to steer and guide and help to find her way. The film’s affection for her warms the narrative and lets you appreciate the one-liners and sight gags that pepper each frame and fondly skewer upper-middle class white intellectuals like its characters while it moves through Allegra’s plight.

Puccini wouldn’t be half as affecting without Reaser’s subtly sexy, easy-going charisma. Reaser had her own plot line on Grey’s Anatomy last season as the amnesiac patient who falls for Alex during her long hospital stay. In Puccini, she invests Allegra with just enough self-deprecation to make her appealing, balanced with just enough sardonic self-knowledge and sophistication to balance what could have been a mopey, self-indulging role. Reaser’s Allegra is bright and adorable and appealingly open to the parade of New Yorkers with whom she effortlessly, casually shares her intimacies. Through Maggenti’s recurrent joke about the omnipresent and omnipotent New Yorker runs a vein of happy humanism, a vision of the city in which people are entwined in each other’s lives for a moment then move on, all gracefully touching one another with care and humor before they go.

Maggenti also offers a New York in which it’s easy to be a lesbian (even a lesbian sleeping with a man). None of the city’s talkative denizens—straight or queer—blink at the gender of Allegra’s attachments. In Gray Matters, the heroine only begins her search for lesbian love as the credits roll. At the end of Puccini for Beginners, Allegra and Samantha walk off together through Central Park, hands in each other’s back jeans pockets.

If Puccini needed to establish that male-female love triangle, at least it wasn’t to enable the heroine’s coming out through her attraction to her beloved brother’s desire. Allegra’s affairs with Phillip and Grace are instructive, just like those profitable Fill-in-the-blank for Beginners books from which the film adapts its title (Puccini could also be sub-titled Lesbianism for Dummies). Her relationships let her (and Maggenti) sort through the differences between men and women, not only as lovers, but as life partners.

Still, the repetition of the three-way love triangle (one lesbian, one straight man, and one alluring, mostly straight woman) bears noting in popular lesbian film. I’m not sure, finally, what to make of it: On one hand, lesbians have historically been vulnerable to the advances of bi-curious straight women, and many lesbians who suffer a dearth of safer objects of desire find themselves attracted there. Straight women are, in fact, a “type” or a “preference” for some lesbians—proselytizing has its attractions.

On the other hand, perhaps this plot structure signifies cultural anxiety about lesbians competing with men. Then again, maybe it’s aimed at straight women, suggesting it’s okay to have sex with girls as long as you go on to marry a man. In fact, a kiss, some sex, even playing at a relationship is kind of cool--for a while. I’m still not sure what the pattern means, but it seems worth tracking.

In Puccini for Beginners, happily, Allegra affirms her choice to be with women, even as no one judges anyone else for making other choices. Her decision to finally accept the potential of a long term monogamous relationship with Samantha seems a bit of a compromise, after her refreshing aversion to commitment (we all know the joke about lesbians bringing U-Hauls to their first dates). Puccini’s message is liberal, for sure, but delivered with a light touch and enough comic verve to make for a fun evening in front of the flat screen TV.

As an old-time (and getting-kind-of-old) lesbian feminist, I’ll keep mining those lesbian DVD catalogues, still amazed that I now have so many choices for amusing pleasures besides Desert Hearts.

Happy for eye candy,
The Feminist Spectator

Revisiting Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer

I’ve been watching The Closer again, which brightened up the summer television season considerably. This year, Brenda Leigh Johnson (the inestimable Kyra Segwick) got some press for sharpening her wardrobe. True, she no longer looks like she shops for clothes at Walmart, but I enjoy that her clothes are still loud and flashy, way off the mark for a professional Deputy Chief (I would suppose). That is, while the men suit up in neutral ties and dress shirts and pants—and even Daniels, the only other woman on the squad, tends to wear dark, somber colors—Brenda Leigh flounces into the office in bold black and white stripes or flowery prints, often wearing the sombrero-style white straw hat that’s become a nearly permanent part of her ensemble. Yet for all her outré fashion choices, Brenda’s not terribly concerned with how she looks, and her outfits don’t get in the way of the professional respect she easily commands in her job.

Brenda’s also been eating a little less candy this season, although when her doctor recently suggested she’d feel better if she gave up sugar, Brenda’s face was a study in panic and defiance. Early onset menopause is her current idiosyncrasy, a condition that could have provided grist for plenty of low comedy, but instead has prompted Brenda’s humanization and a new performance of intimacy and respect between her and the crew.

Sergeant Daniels was conveniently out of the office, training for Homeland Security detail, when Brenda’s hot flashes began, leaving her male co-workers to scratch their heads over Brenda’s instantaneous mood swings, her irritability, and her prodigious sweating. Even Brenda has been flummoxed and outraged by her frequent spells of apparent heat stroke.

Accepting this story-line requires just a little leap of faith—who wouldn’t assume that a woman in her 40s (even her early 40s) might be feeling hormonal changes, especially given Brenda’s symptoms? But holding off on her doctor’s diagnosis allowed the writers to play out the huge effect her body has on her comportment (and her company), if never her on-the-job performance. She might snap at her squad and complain when information doesn’t come at her fast enough, but she solves her cases as efficiently and effectively as ever.

Brenda’s physical suffering illustrates how attuned the men are to her moods and maneuvers. Although they’re respectful of her power and bewildered by her swirling emotional currents, it’s clear they care about her. In a recent episode, Brenda and Lieutenant (I think that’s his rank) Gabriel drive a news crew through a deserted neighborhood and find themselves shot at by unseen, unsuspected snipers. As bullets riddle the car, the frenetic camera cuts again and again to Gabriel, throwing himself over the floundering Brenda to protect her. At the station, when Brenda finally confronts the sniping suspect, alone with him in a stopped elevator, she bawls him out, furious that he almost killed not just her, but her friend, Gabriel.

Gabriel hears her protestations through the technology that allows the show’s characters to snoop frequently on one another and the people they interrogate. In the sniper case, a video hook up to the squad’s audio/visual room shows Brenda and the perp on the elevator’s camera. Her crew gathers round the monitor to watch Brenda chew him out, exchanging murmurs and glances of admiration at the confession she extracts. When Gabriel hears Brenda call him her “friend,” he’s embarrassed but also proud. Declaring her affection for a co-worker doesn’t diminish the command she continues to maintain over her position and her staff.

In fact, the male detectives (and Daniels) often listen in and watch as Sedgwick grills a suspect, either sitting beside her at the table or from the technological remove of the a/v room where “Buzz” works the monitors, capturing images and speech. The constant watching establishes the men as Brenda’s spectators, as well as her colleagues; that they so often watch her on television monitors makes palpable the direction and intensity of what once might have been called their “male gaze.”

But in The Closer, these male spectators gaze, always impressed, always a little jealously, always with great generosity and even pride, at Brenda’s agency, at her ability to articulate her accusations and deftly manipulate a suspect’s emotions to pry out the confession they all expect is forthcoming. Brenda makes people talk not by employing empathetic feminine wiles but by challenging her suspects, shrewdly invading their psychology, and composing sharp, unassailable narratives of their own guilt. How could the men not be in awe? No objectification going on here.

My only hesitation with The Closer this season is Brenda and Fritz’s inevitable march toward marriage. Seeing them cautiously commit to their relationship has been a pleasure, as their choices provide a domestic counterpart to Brenda’s life in the police department that emphasizes her refusal to distinguish the personal from the professional (in fact, Fritz, her fiancé, is an FBI agent who works closely with the squad).

Where other women television characters relax into what too often seem to be “given” roles as mothers or wives, Brenda’s scattershot approach to home-making leaves Fritz to pick up the slack. She’s always relieved when her cell phone rings to fetch her to a crime scene, always eager to put her work above everything else, despite her obvious feelings for Fritz. The yoke of marriage, then, comes as a bit of a surprise and a bit out of character. Likewise, mourning her female fertility, when she thinks she’s suffering early-onset menopause, treads a bit too closely to stereotype.

On the other hand, when’s the last time a popular, critically acclaimed television series followed a story arc about a menopausal woman? And even though her wedding will most certainly end the season (as weddings always do, in television, theatre, and film), Brenda still seems pragmatic, rather than romantic, about the whole thing. When her visiting mother slips and shares Brenda and Fritz’s wedding news with the squad, Provenza gives Brenda a big, back-slapping hug. But instead of happily showing off her ring, Brenda grits her teeth, eager to get back to the problem at hand.

That’s my kind of woman.

Happily hot flashing,
The Feminist Spectator

Feminism Redux: Attacked, Again

Shortly after my post on The Bourne Ultimatum, I received the following comment. I moderate incoming comments, to avoid spam, and usually post everything that comes through. This one, however, I mused over for almost two weeks, debating whether to post it and respond, or to just reject it and move on.

Finally, given my recent post about reconsidering feminism, I decided to share this in the blog proper:

8/8/07 Carol Smithers has left a new comment on your post “The Bourne Ultimatum”: My god you’re a pompous thing. Your editorials are so biased at their core that reading them makes me angry. The only problem with men is women like you who alienate and destroy them. As a self-proclaimed superior force on this planet your writings are tainted. I'm all for feminism if it is coupled with hominism, or better yet, let’s just call true search for equality and fairplay as humanism and forget the splinter self-interest groups of neuroses and damaged psyches that pro-female or pro-male groups promote. The editorial disseminates an unbalanced view of the world under the veil of being sophisticated, enlightened, and thus “politically acceptable,” all the while it is just so much dribble.

I receive a fair number of letters like these, occasionally on the blog, frequently when I write letters to the editors of various publications, and of course more subtly in the classroom. (At UT, a colleague who’s since left the department once wrote me an angry email in which he called me a “feminazi” simply because I’d circulated an email announcement citing dismal statistics about women in professional theatre that asked people to take action.)

I know my skin should be thick enough to slough off these comments. I know I should have just rejected this comment on the blog and forgotten about it. But somehow, each of these attacks, so inconsequential in the larger scheme of things, winds up smarting. I’m always surprised to receive these communications, nearly all from strangers, nearly all worded like the one here: mean-spirited, ad hominem, not terribly thoughtful or reasonable, but vicious and self-righteous, from people who are clearly mad enough to take the time to write.

Partly what's hard is that people forget they're writing to someone, to a person with feelings. I am a "critic," but I do try to write in a spirit of critical generosity in the hopes that real dialogue might come from respect and caring. Calling someone "pompous" and their writing "dribble" is just so haughty and mean--I'm always, literally, physically and emotionally shocked to read these comments.

Carol Smithers misreads my Bourne post (if that’s the one she read; she implies that she’s read others). I don’t believe I’ve ever suggested that women are a “superior force on this planet,” nor have I suggested that men are the problem. But for writers like these, it most likely doesn’t matter what I really write. They see “feminism,” and bring to what they read their own prior assumptions, then damn a perspective they conjure, rather than one that really exists.

As a writer, I’ve long accepted that people understand what they will about what they read. Part of writing is being misread. We speak knowing that what we say may or may not be truly understood; that’s part of the contract, I think, of public exchange and commerce. I wouldn’t maintain a blog if I wanted every reader to agree with me, and in fact I relish debate and disagreement.

But Smithers’ attack is an entirely different thing. Hers are words that those of us who teach feminist subjects or methods often hear—the knee-jerk, willful misreading, drenched in stereotypes of feminism propagated by the media and fearful conservative politicians. The pain in receiving posts like these comes from the writer’s unwillingness to engage in real dialogue, and her eagerness to damn a stranger based on something she already thought about feminism.

The comment reminded me of the conference panel on feminism about which I recently wrote. This kind of angry, self-righteous presumption is what feminist teachers regularly confront in their classrooms. I think about the young women who organized the panel and spoke so eloquently about their commitments, and it pains me to know that they, too, will suffer these attacks for trying to consider theatre and performance from a gendered, activist perspective.

This is why our pedagogy and our writing and our thinking, spectating, and reading is so important.

In sad solidarity,
The Feminist Spectator

The Bourne Ultimatum

For an action-hero fantasy flick, The Bourne Ultimatum offers head-spinning editing and thorny plot complications along with a savvy political parable about the outrageous arrogance of our present administration. Bourne, as we know from the first two installments in the trilogy (The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy) is a killer-for-hire out to retrieve his real identity, which has so far lead him right back to the government protection agencies like the CIA, FBI, and NSA that here look as nefarious as they probably are but much more efficient and effective. Bourne is on the run—although through much of the film, he actually walks remarkably slowly, for a man with killers breathing down his neck—from the “assets” of these agencies, hired guns charged with obliterating Bourne before he uncovers the secret operation through which he was trained and set loose by a loose-cannon organization as a US-backed agent of terror in his own right.

Our man Bourne walks/runs through the film riddled with regret for his occupation, suffering frequent and debilitating flashbacks that hint at the brutality of the training that turned him into an assassination machine. Across Matt Damon’s face run subtle hints of regret, from a man haunted by the ethics of a person he doesn’t even really know he is. Because of Damon’s nuanced, always interesting performance, the film becomes less about state-sponsored terrorism and more about a man intent on avenging the obliteration of his own soul. Every fight Bourne engages brings him a step closer to his own morality, to the ethics of being truly human.

The film’s villains represent government agents who take power way too far into their own hands. Much as our current president, who just succeeded in muscling through legislation (however temporary) that increases his powers of warrantless surveillance, these CIA spooks are outfitted with computers connected to listening and covert spying devices that cancel the presumption of privacy. They harness surveillance video cameras trained on street corners, in stores, and in stairways to instantly create ever more precise and clear pictures of Bourne and his allies trying to escape their gaze and their control.

Nearly on demand, director Paul Greengrass (director of United 93, about which I blogged last year, and The Bourne Supremacy) implies, the CIA and FBI can track a subject’s intimate movements in public or private places, and access cell phone records whether or not a subject’s placed a call (in fact, a powered down cell phone leads them to the source who leaked information about Bourne’s true past to a British journalist). This micro-access to a man’s movements, the film argues, robs him of his soul, but because Bourne’s super-intelligence (honed by those he now defies) outwits his handlers, he’s able to preserve not only his physical but his psychic integrity.

Psychology, too, falls into the wrong hands in Ultimatum. A villainous psychologist (his PhD from Stanford highlighted in one shot) originally conceives the training that breaks Bourne down into a lethal, remorseless assassin. The psychologist in the service of evil, like most men who break the ethical rules of scientific inquiry, gets back some of his own when Bourne retraces his past and arrives where he began, in the doctor’s oily, imperious presence.

One of the pleasures of Ultimatum is watching Bourne outmaneuver his enemies with little more than his hands and his head. For a contemporary action film, this hero carries very few toys. His hands, of course, are weapons enough, but he accomplishes most of his escapes with quick, creative thinking (and a cell phone or two) instead of violence, simply outsmarting his competitors. The fight scenes, though, are choreographed with a balletic style (apparently, Greengrass meant them to look dancerly) that makes them seem much more about skill and precision than about violence.

In a scene close to the film’s end, the man sent to kill Bourne has apparently been badly hurt in a car accident. Bourne, who (miraculously) wiggles free of his own wrecked vehicle, limps to the assassin’s car window, stares at him with something that might be compassion, and walks away. When, of course, the killer revives and returns for one final face-to-face confrontation with Bourne, he asks why Bourne didn’t kill him. Instead of answering, the hero asks, facing the muzzle of the killer’s gun, “Do you even know why you’re killing me?”

It’s a poignant, rather than cheap, moment, partly because Damon asks with just enough irony and intelligence, and partly because this assassin-for-hire is man with swarthy skin and a perpetual shadow of a beard, which makes him look vaguely Middle Eastern. As he and the white hero confront each other on a rooftop, perched at an edge ten stories above the East River, the man is unable to answer Bourne’s question, and slowly lowers his gun. Although the exchange provides a necessary plot point, it also inevitably refers to US involvement in the Middle East, in which so many men have no idea why they’re killing each other, except that they’ve been sent to do the dirty work by other men with more power. When they stop being cogs in someone else’s wheel, they recover their humanity and their empathy.

There’s something almost feminine in Bourne’s woundedness and perpetual grief (his girlfriend, another agent, was murdered in the first film), despite the thoughtful virility with which he eludes those who would kill or capture him. His real name, in fact, turns out to be David Webb, not a bad choice for an individual who single-handedly confronts the Goliath of the US intelligence community. Jason Bourne (named perhaps for Jason, the Greek god whose mother saved his life as an infant by pretending he was dead, who grows up to retrieve the Golden Fleece) is consigned to history, the once new-born progeny of an evil machine intent on winning at all costs. Webb prefers the connectedness of history to the eternal present of psycho-military techno-industry that created Bourne.

If Damon/Webb proves strangely feminine, the film forces its actual women to demonstrate their masculinity or be killed themselves. Joan Allen, playing a capable high-level officer from another agency, finds herself set up by those she’s come to assist, so that if their effort to stop Bourne fails, she’ll take the fall. Striding through her scenes in sensible slacks and sweaters, Allen’s perpetually pinched expression keeps her thinking but also makes her look rather comical. She’s obviously the ethical center of the film, but she’s given nothing to do but wait for Bourne to deliver the goods she needs to uncover the agency’s misdeeds and get the villains arrested. That she finally testifies before a panel of senators in an empty legislative chamber underlines that she can’t truly be visible and powerful in this eternally male world, even though she’s succeeded in rooting out corruption.

Likewise, Julia Stiles walks (and runs) smartly through a throw-away part as Bourne’s temporary helpmate, turning against the agency that employs her to help him move. The couple narrowly escapes death and soon part ways. Stiles’s only effective action seems to be cutting and dying her hair over a stained and rusty bathroom sink, finishing with a surprisingly chic new cut in which to board her train for elsewhere.

But then, as all the excessively patriotic, masculine, testosterone-driven trailers before Ultimatum emphasized, these action hero movies really aren’t about the women, and at least here, the film forces neither Stiles nor Allen to bear the indignity of being Bourne’s romantic interlude or simply eye candy.

So I’ll take the flick for what it is, and be happy to embrace its brilliant photography and kinetic editing along with its refreshingly pointed allegory about the imminent downfall of powerful, headstrong men who think they can get away with anything. Would that it were true.

Bourne again,
The Feminist Spectator

Feminism Reconsidered

Do excuse the long silence for the month of July. During my absence from this site, I attended, among other things, two different theatre conferences. I spent a week at the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference, held this year in Stellenbosch, a small town in the wine country outside of Cape Town, South Africa. At the month’s end, I spent 24 hours at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s annual conference, held this year in New Orleans.

The IFTR feminist working group (see www.firt-iftr.org) focuses on diverse performance practices, histories, and theories of international feminist theatre-makers and academics. While the constituency varies yearly, depending on the meeting’s location, the group tends to attract women from countries around the globe. This year’s group was small, but participants hailed from the US, the UK, Korea, South Africa, and Sweden.

Papers addressed various topics, from plays about immigrant women performed in Germany, to African-American/Jewish relations represented in the musicals Caroline, or Change and Parade, from representations of feminism in Eve Ensler’s The Good Body as performed by a new generation of feminist women in Seoul, to reconsidering American playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s contributions to feminist thought in the mainstream, Broadway forum—and much more.

The working group meetings addressed the status of feminism as a practice and a theory around the world, as represented through theatre and performance. Since my current work addresses Wasserstein’s oeuvre, I’m interested in rethinking the tools of feminist criticism of the 1980s and 1990s. The “feminisms,” which parsed the ideological and practical differences among liberal, cultural, and materialist feminists, now seem to me limiting, and in retrospect, steered feminist critical thought away from more “popular” playwrights toward more subaltern, avant-garde, subcultural performance artists and collectives.

Thanks to the group’s internationalist perspective, I was lead to expand my thinking about these binaries. In Korea, for example, the mainstream/alternative dichotomy doesn’t hold, and in the EU, it’s difficult to single out gender without considering how immigration, race, and ethnicity influence funding decisions that determine a production’s fate. Participants also pointed to Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, Elfriede Jelinek, and Timberlake Wertenbaker as non-American playwrights who’ve achieved a certain prominence outside of the hegemonic American distinction between mainstream and alternative.

The South African theatre-makers present at the meetings—from Themba Interactive Theatre and from Mother Tongue, the only registered women’s theatre collective in South Africa—suggested that there’s little distinction between applied theatre, community-based theatre, and professional theatre in their country. Mother Tongue, in fact, sees their work on a continuum between mainstream and applied theatre, although both groups suggested that their primary goal is not to entertain people but to bring to the forefront stories that aren’t visible in the cultural mainstream (see http://www.mothertongue.co.za/).

HIV/AIDS persists as a health and social crisis in South Africa. The one conference-wide performance presented at IFTR, in fact, was a Forum Theatre piece about the pandemic performed by a national company. Although the group didn’t usefully frame the event for international theatre educators—sticking instead to a structure they use to present the issues to school children—watching them use Boal’s methods to address the social stigma around HIV/AIDS was compelling and important.

During my short stay at the ATHE conference, I caught a Women and Theatre Program-sponsored panel called “The Future of Feminist Scholarship.” Chaired by J. Ellen Gainor (Cornell), the roundtable discussion featured seven graduate students—Gwen Alker (NYU), Lisa Hall (UC-Boulder), Diana Looser (Cornell), Adrienne Macki (Boston College), Jennifer Popple (UC-Boulder), and Meghan Brodie and Megan Shea (both Cornell), who organized the panel, which proved a provocative, thoughtful conversation about the status of feminism in theatre and performance studies. (See www.athe.org and www.athe.org/wtp.)

I’m surprised that in this and in other venues (such as Elaine Aston and Gerry Harris’s edited volume Feminist Futures? out recently from Palgrave, see http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=270197) so much time is spent contemplating the definition of feminism. While I agree that its meaning has and should change, some of this debating seems to stall, rather than advance, the discourse. As Deb Margolin told her students, in an inspirational class on feminist theatre I watched her teach at Yale this spring, if you think that women deserve to be equal in every way, then you’re a feminist. On some level, simplicity serves us best.

Nonetheless, the ATHE roundtable’s discussion advanced some important points about feminist theatre and performance scholarship. The foundational texts of the field are still those that were published in the mid-80s and the 1990s. And while, as the discussion stressed repeatedly, feminist concerns have now been woven inextricably into the larger field, explicit feminist projects seem to be on the wane. At the American Society for Theatre Research conferences, for one example given, only one working group is called “Feminist Historiography.” Many other groups and seminars address theatre and social change or politics and performance, but without doing so under a specifically feminist rubric.

Gwen Alker pointed out that the effects of feminist scholarship have been “omnipresent and subterranean,” and that the institutionalization of the field (witnessed most recently by Routledge’s decision to adopt Women & Performance Journal, the journal of feminist performance theory that I actually helped to found at NYU in 1981) means that it has “solidified” as a method and “infiltrated” the field as a viable approach. I wonder, though, what the pros and cons of such institutionalized status might be. Meghan Brodie pointed out that feminism is being subsumed by its own interdisciplinarity, which I find a very valid point. What does this mean for the future of the field? Why do we feel the need to name feminism explicitly in our work? On the other hand, why don’t we? How and why might we bring feminism back to the surface of critical thought in performance?

Much of the roundtable addressed teaching feminist theatre and performance. Many participants worried about their students’ refusal to proclaim themselves “feminists” despite their obvious commitment to gender equity. But what does such naming do to advance our inquiry? Is it necessary to cajole students into calling themselves feminists? What does such identifying achieve? Isn’t it more important to stress feminism as a critical practice rather than an identity, as bell hooks challenged us to do a decade or more ago?

The damage done to feminism by the mainstream media can be felt and observed most keenly perhaps in our classrooms, when students think they know something about us when they can attach us to a feminist label. How our identities as teachers are seen remains something of a knee-jerk reaction from our students, one in which identity is always suspect as political advocacy. For instance, in our large (400-student) Introduction to Theatre class here at UT, a gay/lesbian theatre unit is regularly offered by the graduate students who teach the course. But the instructors who are heterosexual receive much less grief for this content than those perceived or self-admitted to be lesbian, gay, or queer. As much as we try to unloosen identity from essentialism, our students still equate our choice of plays as advocacy if we appear to be teaching “about ourselves.”

The roundtable drew a healthy audience at the ATHE conference (mostly of women, but also a few committed men, including the esteemed theatre scholar Marvin Carlson, who has always been a promoter of the subfield). Spectators offered their own cautions and concerns. Sara Warner (Cornell), the president of the Women and Theatre Program (WTP) of ATHE, reminded us that feminism as the panel articulated it is a western notion, and urged us to reconsider feminism as a transnational and post-colonial project, as the WTP has done so deftly in its recent pre-conferences.

Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (Miami University of Ohio) offered that feminism tends to be a liability in community-based theatre work and “engaged” scholarship, which I find fascinating. Why wouldn’t a method that should illuminate these endeavors be found suspect to them? Is it because feminism implies a specificity of inquiry that CBT theatre and “progressive” scholarship wants to belie? On the other hand, is “feminist” explicitly or implicitly activist, as many roundtable participants seemed to imply? Or is it a method among others, without an activist social corollary?

Gay Gibson Cima (Georgetown) reminded us of the establishment of “feminisms” as a critical discourse, which was one of the most important contributions of the 1980s and 90s, as it allowed us to make distinctions between various feminist ideologies and practices. And yet in my own recent critical thinking, it’s seemed to me that those feminisms at the same time installed a hierarchy of value against which feminist work was measured that perhaps hasn’t served us over time. For instance, “liberal feminism”—defined as an ideology that seeks equity for women within existing social and government structures—was derided as accommodationist, which left many women playwrights writing for mainstream forums outside the “rightful” purview of more incisive feminist thought.

Likewise, as another roundtable participant suggested, the critique of essentialism, which derogated the achievements of “radical” or “cultural” feminism, left many women dazed, confused, and alienated from the feminist critique. While social constructionist theories of gender, race, and sexuality offer trenchant, necessary analyses of identity and its ideological operations, how might we reopen the discussion of specifically women’s work in theatre without denying the importance of how even the term “women” is historically and socially contextual, paving the way for considering globalization’s effects on feminist work transnationally?

I found myself quite cheered by the ATHE roundtable, mostly because I worry that feminism is passé in the academy and in progressive social movements. Listening to smart, committed young academic women try to tease out the necessary complications of doing this work, and hearing them parse out the themes feminism has forwarded and how they’re being taken up across fields, gave me great hope for the future of the field.

The academy is, of course, a place of commodification, in which scholars continually seek out the next cutting edge on which to make their reputations and their contributions to contemporary thought. Feminism, some might say, had its moment. But if we truly believe in the importance of a critique that seriously considers gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, class, and other identity markers as viable sites of cultural generation and critique, feminism needs to be continually reinvigorated as a method and a movement.

Yours, in sisterhood, still,
The Feminist Spectator

A Reminder of Why We Do Theatre

A number of television shows and films beckon me lately, and once I’ve seen them, I hope to write about them. There’s the blockbuster Knocked Up, about which I’m entirely suspicious, given its pedigree and given what I’ve heard about the choices—or non-choices—Katherine Heigl’s character makes around her unexpected pregnancy. And then there’s the recently opened Evening, based on the book by Susan Minot, which I read years ago and found very moving. With a cast so full of talented women, that film must be worth seeing, regardless of how well they adapt Minot’s non-chronological, elegiac story.

I’ve also recently started watching Rescue Me, Dennis Leary’s FX-broadcast dramedy, which I find I like despite the incessant boy-banter among him and his firefighter buddies. Too soon to discuss it here, but I’m getting hooked by original plot lines and characters (the gay son of Jerry, the stressed out fire chief; the beautiful, baby-faced young Mike, debating his sexuality and whether or not to kill his terminally ill mother; and Leary’s Tommy, with his fluid moral code and his 9/11-survivor’s guilt), by the confident and easy ensemble acting, and by the writing, which cuts way above network tv.

I’ve also tuned in to the new season of The Closer, which I’ve written about in this blog before. Brenda’s new style—less garish make-up and clothes, which I suppose means she’s assimilating to LA—and Kyra Sedgwick’s impeccably committed performance attracted me instantly, although a recent episode in which she worried about her father finding out that she and her FBI agent boyfriend were living together didn’t make sense to me. I might have missed some back-story, but I can’t imagine why a woman as tough as Brenda would be so concerned about parental approval. But maybe that’s one of her rich contradictions.

Sadly, because of other commitments—work, play, travel—I’m missing more theatre in Austin than I’m seeing. I was unable to catch Sharon Bridgforth’s Love Conjure/Blues, the next version of the performance novel that she continually reshapes and restages, much to the delight of Austin’s audiences (see www.sharonbridgforth.com). I utterly admire Sharon’s passion, and her luscious language, inflected with poetry and spinning into stories of love and betrayal and wily tricksterisms that please the ear and the imagination alike. I’ve heard that the most recent version was a video installation in which Sharon interacted with taped performers. The large-hearted generosity of Sharon’s vision, I’m sure, remained intact and inspiring throughout.

I’m also missing a production of Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show, which I’ve never seen performed by anyone but Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney. Produced in Austin by the City Theatre Company, Breanna Stogner and Kathleen Fletcher take on these roles, which require them, I assume, to play Kathy and Mo, as well as all the characters they cycle through in their performance/play, which addresses, with affectionate humor, the travails of everyday life for women in the 20th (and now 21st) century. I’d be curious to see how local actors handle performing performers performing multiple roles (see http://www.nowplayingaustin.com/index.php?app=eventDetail&id=74152).

An event I was lucky enough to attend at Zach Scott Theatre last Tuesday night, however, reminded me why I’m a theatre person in the first place. Ann Ciccolella, who served since 1999 as the Managing Director of the theatre, recently opted to end her tenure at Zach to pursue other local arts opportunities (see http://www.zachscott.com/about/MD_Release.pdf). During her eight years with Zach, Ann directed, among other things, a remarkable production of Cabaret, in which she cast singer Susanne Abbott as the emcee, a brilliant decision that opened up all sorts of new gender meanings in the musical. Abbott’s performance was as (if not more) sexy and sly and riveting as Alan Cumming’s on Broadway, and her gender brought with it new implications about the erotics of power when it circulates among women (even if those women are primarily the Kit Kat girls).

Ann also directed the best production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf I’ve ever seen, finding in the play more layers of menace and malice, vulnerability and veracity than I thought possible to retrieve. With the inimitable Fran Dorn (a nationally known actor who came to Austin from the Shakespeare Theatre in DC to head the MFA Acting Program at UT), as Martha, a full partner in the play’s movement and mood and style, the intricate, lengthy play was tragic, crystal clear, and awfully quick.

In addition to these two unforgettable productions, Ann directed The Vagina Monologues with rotating cast of local luminaries, including beloved local theatre doyenne Karen Kuykendall, the Austin City Manager Toby Futrell, and Fran Dorn. Adopting the casting scheme that kept the play running in New York for many years, Ann managed to invigorate the event and keep audiences coming for more lessons about what women call their female parts. With her cagey creative intelligence, Ann fashioned a sharp production of a play that’s been long overdone by college students celebrating Eve Ensler’s “V-Day,” her own canny anti-domestic violence activist/artistic creation.

With these memories of Ann and many more to chew on, the theatre hosted a send-off that itself proved memorable and moving. Although I’ve only been in Austin for eight years, I’ve found the theatre community warm and welcoming, taking care of long term denizens of the scene as well as us newbies. As some indication of the eclectic, ecumenical bent of the community, the crowd at Ann’s party boasted administrators from the Long Center (the new performing arts complex that’s slowly unfolding its stages just across Town Lake from downtown Austin); members of Zach’s board of directors and its staff (from front of house folks to techies, designers, and performers); local arts writers from the Austin American-Statesman and The Chronicle; fundraisers and philanthropists; other theatre-makers and performers; and numerous FOAs (Friends of Ann).

After a bit of circulating in Zach’s hot, increasingly loud lobby, we were ushered into the theatre for an hour of testimony and performance in Ann’s honor. The chair of Zach’s board talked about being a Jew in Texas and broke a glass under his foot, a ritual performed in Jewish weddings for luck. A board member told a story about meeting Ann for the first time during his interview, and wrapping up the hour feeling pleased with their conversation. When he stuck out his hand to shake, Ann said, “No-no-no-no-no, in the theatre, we hug,” and warmly embraced this more or less stranger.

Ann’s assistant, Barbara Chisholm, who also performs regularly at Zach and around Austin, spoke of what it’s like to work with someone who’s also a friend. Robert Faires, the arts editor of The Chronicle, honored Ann with his reminiscences. And Toby Futrell, the city manager whom Ann had cajoled into taking a role in The Vagina Monologues, related what it felt like to make her stage debut under Ann’s auspices. As Zach’s Artistic Director Dave Steakley remarked, the list invited speakers ranged from the theatre into the community, representing the reach of Ann’s influence across the city.

While these remarks were always amusing and apt, the performances interspersed with speeches moved me even more. Austin is the kind of theatre town where performers who work regularly become known to audiences, where you can see the extent of an actor’s range and the breadth of her creativity. Zach employs a stable of performers who I look forward to watching in every production, and four of them presented at Ann’s party. Jill Blackwood, who recently played Julie Jordan in a TexArts production of Carousel, and who performed as the prostitute living in Cliff and Sally’s boarding house in Cabaret, sang a Sondheim number from Into the Woods, which Ann directed for another theatre earlier in her career.

Meredith McCall, who played Sally Bowles in Ann’s Cabaret, sang “The Waters of March,” the poignant bossa nova written by Antonio Carlos Jobim. She sang with such warmth and affection and hope for Ann’s future, the catchy tune couldn’t help but be infectious and inspiring. Martin Burke, a Zach regular who played Prior in Steakley’s production of Angels in America, which Ann dramaturged after local playwright/critic/theatre professor David Mark Cohen died suddenly, performed Prior’s final monologue, the one in front of the fountain of Bethesda where he looks forward to the future with hunger and wonder.

Helen Merino, a local actor who moved to New York after playing Honey in Ann’s Virginia Woolf, Antigone in Ann’s adaptation of Sophocles, and many other parts, performed a monologue after surprising the audience (and Ann) by appearing live.

But here’s the thing about those four performances: The performers offered each of those speeches or songs as a trove of love and respect for Ann. Whatever their original context, they all took on new meaning in the performers’ address, and in the context of tribute, of memory, and of hope for Ann’s future. Through performance, Jill, Meredith, Martin, and Helen clarified how often and how intimately Ann touches people’s lives.

In a theatre, but without the typical mediations of text and character, set or direction, these four actors marshaled their craft and polished their emotions to deliver lyrics and melodies that struck just the right chord. Without a play or a musical to guide them, they used their art to deliver other art, wrapped with bows to Ann. What better way for an artist to receive the gift of people’s admiration but in art, as art, through art?

The evening shored up my faith in theatre’s power to rally us. Plied with deliciously plentiful food and bellinis, the audience flew high on Ann’s tribute. But the cocktails only enhanced an evening that was already magical, bringing together a hard-working, supportive, committed theatre community to toast one of its own and send her on her way to her next adventure in the arts. Moments like these provide milestones for people like Ann, who are moving on, and touchstones for the rest of us, who receive the gift of connection with the things that matter, and are moved and reminded of why we we’re people of the theatre.

Thank you, Zach,
The Feminist Spectator

Summer Theatre in Austin: "Constellation" and "Jesus Christ Superstar"

Constellation

Although the hot humid days in Austin rarely turn into cool comfortable summer nights, we got lucky a week ago when we saw choreographer Sally Jacques’s company Blue Lapis Light present their “site-specific aerial dance performance” Constellation between two federal buildings downtown. The typically enervating humidity lifted, caught between the storm systems that have kept the city green this spring and early summer. A soft breeze rustled our programs and flicked through our eyelashes, open in wonder at dancers stepping off the sides of buildings to soar into the air above us.

The audience sat rapt on the plaza between two completely quotidian government buildings, their impersonal, unaesthetic 1960s architecture suddenly transformed by the presence of bodies rigged to ropes, costumed in flowing, gossamer materials that draped and flattered their movement through the air. With sleeves and leggings fluttering behind them like wings, the dancers took leaps of faith off the tops of these buildings, diving, catching themselves, swinging into the air, pushing off window ledges to keep up their momentum, and reaching out towards each other as the air streams moved them first closer then farther away.

Resonant, crystal clear music—from soulful arias to resounding instrumentals, from classical turns to vaguely New Age stylings—lifted the performers’ spirits and our own as the rich sound seemed part of the current that held the dancers in the air. They flew in unison and in counterpoint to each other, complementing one another’s movement with their own strength and grace. I was riveted by the shear feat of their actions; what kind of courage does it take to trust your harness and cables enough to step off the roof of a building, lit like an angel, into a void, hoping this lowly technology will catch you as the audience tries to hold you up with its collective breath?

Part of the evening’s stimulating energy, in fact, comes from such shared adrenalin. The audience comes to trust that the performers are safely held by their harnesses, ropes, and carabiners, and strong enough to negotiate the space between themselves and the building, and the building and the ground, with the grace and style of dancers performing on the ground. Constellation changes your perspective. The vertical side of a building comes to seem horizontal; the wall begins to look like the floor, as the dancers careen gracefully about. The giddy feeling of losing all sense of foreground/background, floor/ceiling, or performer/audience transported me into a weightless, freeing sense of utter, communal presence in time and space.

The brief performance toggles between two sets of performers commanding the sides of the two facing buildings. One is considerably taller than the other. When dancers first approach the higher roof’s edge and make their leap off the side, they’re accompanied by tiny bright pin-lights, each attached to its own miniature parachute. These lights descend alongside the dancers, marking the distance between them and the roof and the ground below. The light breeze picked up these little stars and carried some of them toward the audience and dropping others, unseen, into what would be the wings of the stage, if this weren’t an exposed, outdoor plaza.

In fact, part of the pleasure of watching the dancers fly comes from seeing their colleagues standing on belay below them, supporting their movements while firmly rooted on the ground. The technology of the dancers’ flying is always exposed, but that doesn’t diminish the apparent miracle of flight we witness above. The belayers’ presence underlines a structure of support that’s necessary, if hidden, in any performance.

Nonetheless, fear and daring outline the dancers’ beautiful images. Much of the movement simply concerns the trajectory of their flight, as they swing back and forth across the building’s face. Pairs of dancers fly toward each other, not quite close enough to touch; the only plot or action concerns their subtle effort to gather the momentum they need to swing closer, to finally grasp a finger or a hand as they connect momentarily through space. Coming together and swinging apart with a grace that seems strangely human, even quotidian—given the virtuosity and courage such aerial dancing must require—forms a metaphor for human relationships: our desire to connect as each of us flies through our own biosphere, sometimes making contact, sometimes flying apart.

The tallest building’s honeycombed façade reminded me of the fallen World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. Constellation rewrites the tragic image of people falling from the burning buildings. Instead of plummeting desperately to certain death, the dancers leap from the buildings and find themselves caught, suspended in an acrobatics of hope that eases my memory of those other, desperate falls to earth.

In Constellation’s last act, two dancers catch each other in the air, and intertwine their limbs across a cable that bisects the plaza diagonally from one building to the other. Slowly, inexorably, followed by a cautious spotlight, the dancers lower themselves down the cable toward the ground. They end in a vertical drop into the center of the plaza, holding each other as they touch down. The other dancers run to surround them and the audience stands to applaud, captivated by the magic of their flight and their return.

Constellation and earlier site-specific Blue Lapis Light productions (see http://www.bluelapislight.org/) is public art at its best, transforming public space used to service impersonal and sometimes oppressive government systems into hopeful, beautiful, aesthetic, and emotional scenes of joy.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Dave Steakley, the artist head of the Zach Scott Theatre here in Austin, consistently demonstrates his talent as one of the most creative, well-rounded directors I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch working. As the director of eight of the nine show in his eclectic season, Steakley’s boundless energy and imagination always deliver, and his willingness to take political stands with his production concepts always impresses. In 2006 – 2007 alone, Steakley directed a rousing production of Rocky Horror Picture Show; an entirely campy, spot-on funny Noel Coward with Present Laughter; Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning Take Me Out, and will soon direct the stage version of the Disney film hit, High School Musical. Only An Almost Holy Picture, Heather MacDonald’s moving one-man play meditation, will be directed by someone else (Robert Faires, the arts editor of the local weekly The Chronicle and a regular Austin actor in his own right). (See http://www.zachscott.com/ for details on the season and the theatre.)

Zach’s latest show, Jesus Christ Superstar, is another risky Steakley extravaganza that somehow manages to get everything right, providing a transporting, breathtaking, thought-provoking evening of theatre. He sets the musical in contemporary Mexico City, and employed a translator (Álvaro Cerviño) to create Spanish lyrics for about 50% of the show. Steakley tries admirably to speak to the widest possible local audience (and Austin’s Latin/a and Chicano/a and African-American population is significant), not by presenting token plays by people of color, but by bringing new perspectives to any production he undertakes. He often uses color-blind casting, but also always casts with an eye toward how race and ethnicity might make a difference in a production. All-white casts are rare at Zach, which demonstrates Steakley’s commitment to an inclusive theatre for the city.

Steakley’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar (Jesucristo Superestrella) utterly rocks, from its score to its dance numbers to its interpretations of the story and its contemporary resonances. The first of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s megamusicals, the sung-through show tells the story of Jesus’s rise and fall, including Judas’s betrayal and the machinations of various religious statesmen who for political reasons needed him dead. Transported to Mexico City, the story becomes a parable about the personal and political costs of celebrity in an age when politicians compete for visibility with galvanizing leaders from all walks of life. In Steakley’s vision, the production also addresses the pressing social need for belief and for faith (which is in fact the theme of Zach Scott Theatre's season this year). He captures the zeal for leaders who will galvanize a population that wants change to happen, and the ease with which public hopes are raised and dashed.

Played by the handsome, soulful Joseph Melendez, Jesus in this production is a Mexican with a following. A panoply of people attends to his homilies, hanging on his words as he treats them with warmth and compassion. The crowd includes a Chicano in a zoot suit and another in the straw hat, white undershirt, and jeans of the farm worker; a young white woman in the zippers and black leather and harshly died black hair of a Goth or a punk; another young woman whose look resonates with 60s American hippies; and other performers, men and women, white and of color, who cycle through variously costumed incarnations of Mexican history, ritual, and iconography. The scene reads as global and transnational (and a bit transhistorical), while firmly rooted in the specifics of Mexican culture.

Judas is a white man here, played with raw, cutting energy by John Pointer. Pointer is a musician and composer, rather than an actor. Steakley uses his performance experience as a “human beatbox” to great effect here; Pointer uses his mouth as a percussion device to create sound effects that punctuate his scenes and bridge to his songs. His modified Mohawk haircut (his head isn’t shaved but a thicker band of hair stands up along the middle of his head) and his pasty white face contrast nicely with Melendez’s rich carmel-colored skin tones and his rich black hair and short beard.

The two render the high stakes of Judas’s friendship with Jesus more tenderly and passionately than in any production I’ve seen. When Judas accuses Jesus of setting up his betrayal, Judas shares torrents of pain that somehow never seem overplayed. Losing his friend as well as his leader, Pointer renders Judas’s emotions immediate, unrefined, and unfiltered, capped with a kind of howl of male passion for a brother/friend. Melendez, too, acts with physically invested expressions of pain, capturing Jesus's doubt in his abilities and the meaning of his ministry.

Theresa Medina performs Mary Magdalene with open-hearted, watchful intelligence. Her beautiful rich voice captures all the soulful melancholy of "Everything's Alright" and "I Don't Know How to Love Him," the two songs that grace her role. Medina sings the second song entirely in Spanish, yet for an English-speaker (even one, I'd venture to say, not familiar with the show), her confusion, helplessness, and fear are completely clear. Rather than the ethereal or hyper-sexualized version of the role offered by other performers, Medina makes Mary Jesus's shelter, his rock, his home, without losing the strenght of her own presence. All three leads create nuanced, original, unforgettable performances.

The whole production requires taxing physical commitments from its cast. For example, when Jesus is beaten after his arrest, Pilate’s henchmen stretch his arms across the stage with rope, leaving him at the center of a large, tall, rectangle white box of fluorescent light topped with a black ladder, which serves variously as Jesus’s cross and Judas’s perch, from which he cynically watches the action. With Jesus's arms outstretched to his side and his torso and legs bare, the rest of the cast runs on from the voms to slap Jesus with red “blood,” as the musicians create the sound of whips lashing his body. Like so many of Steakley’s choices, the effect is both efficient and effective, implicating the apostles and his followers in Jesus’s suffering, while the blood they slap across his body comes to resemble the beaten pulp of his flesh.

Steakley directs with almost gestic vision. When Judas betrays Jesus to Caiaphas, he receives a coin that he fingers disdainfully, knowing that money is hardly compensation for his pending private loss and the upcoming public cataclysm. As Judas sits center stage, contemplating the suicide that eventually follows, more coins fall on him from the catwalks, raining down one by one, single raindrops laden with the cost of his action. Somehow, the coins fall in tempo with the music, emphasizing the melody of Judas’s plaint in “Damned for All Time/Blood Money.” It’s a stunning theatrical moment.

The equivalences carry the production’s political grace-notes. When Jesus is arrested, two men costumed as border patrol agents carry him away. Pilate wears a conventional Western business suit and tie, and gives the thumbs up sign smugly to the audience as he and Caiaphas plot Jesus’s end. Pilate looks a lot like Bush the 2nd here, or any other politician who’s easily corrupted by power and pragmatism. Herod’s vaudeville-style number is staged as a campy theatrical performance by a popular Mexican wrestling star and his court of bodacious women in bathing suits and sashes. When Jesus dies, the company surrounds his body wearing the black clothing and white skeleton masks that signify the Day of the Dead. The production is rich with the semiotics of Mexico and its relationship with the US, as well as with references to contemporary celebrity and the empty hysteria of fandom across entertainment, political, and religious spheres.

I grew up knowing all the words to the original cast album recording of Jesus Christ Superstar, the one Lloyd Webber and Rice released before they ever mounted a production. More than 35 years later, I still remember each verse and refrain, each of its many shifts in tone and musical style. Hearing half of the lyrics in Spanish in the Zach Scott Theatre production deepened my experience of the musical, adding a moving poignancy to a visually awe-inspiring, physically commanding, emotionally and politically resonant production.

This, thankfully, again, is the joy of theatre: watching talented artists transform what we thought we knew into something both differently familiar and strange, into something we’ve seen before, offered to us in a completely fresh way. That’s my kind of theatre.

Proud to live in Austin, Texas,
The Feminist Spectator

Loving Annabelle

For some time now, Loving Annabelle has sat in the top five list of videos rented by lesbians according to Wolfe Video’s web site (see www.wolfevideo.com). It’s a small indie film, written and directed by Katherine Brooks, who according to the DVD shorts and extras, watched the classic lesbian film Maidchen in Uniform and decided to make her own teacher-student love story in which, instead of deferring the romance to longing, unrequited passion, and inevitable suicide, something actually happens between the two women. To paint the context for her version of the old story, Brooks creates a standard series of girls’ boarding school types: Colins (Laura Breckenridge), the slightly crazy lonely girl, who cuts herself and hides a rescued porcupine in a cage in her room; Cat (Gustine Fudickar), the aggressive, brash, brusque type, who is no doubt deeply emotionally wounded, but covers her emotions with nonchalant hostility; and Kristen (Michelle Horn), the more sexually experienced girl (who’s in fact had a child that her parents now call their own) who’s along for the ride in the awkward threesome these girls comprise.

Annabelle (Erin Kelly) is new to the strict Catholic school, brought to the isolated estate somewhere outside of LA by her mother, a wealthy, self-important senator. In the opening, Annabelle rides beside the senator in a stretch limousine, looking sadly out the window while her mother, talking into her cell phone and holding a sheaf of papers, ignores her. The two women are surrounded by white men in black suits, the entourage of government security that keeps Annabelle even further from maternal intimacy. We learn quickly that Annabelle has already been expelled from two previous schools, and that if the high school’s imperious nuns can’t break her free spirit, she’ll be sent next to military school.

The teacher in charge of corralling Annabelle is Simone (Diane Gaidry), herself a former pupil of the school who teaches poetry and lives as the housemistress in the girls’ dorm. She’s a wiry, lithesome woman, with the stooped stance that signals both barely repressed sexuality and a tragic past. Annabelle doesn’t take long to learn that Simone was once just like her—rebellious, passionate, and, of course, queer. Simone’s lover Amanda committed suicide, not strong enough—her final note confesses—to withstand the public condemnation (in the late 20th century?) of a lesbian life.

Simone pines for her lover, while she lets herself get involved with a perfectly nice, awfully boring male teacher from a nearby private school. As he presses for a commitment, her attentions and affections wander toward her young charge. Annabelle feels their mutual attraction first and fast. She comes on strong, practically stalking the older woman in her quest for Simone’s affections. But Annabelle is preternaturally sophisticated for her age (which would be, at most, 17). Once she learns of Amanda’s suicide, Annabelle understands Simone’s pain and sets about helping the older woman release her past.

Annabelle is smart and mature, which keeps the plot from plummeting into utter incredibility (and perhaps, to some, although I have to say not to me, moral ambiguity). Annabelle not only has the intellectual chops to attract Simone, she’s also emotionally articulate. One would think that a kid who’s been expelled from two previous schools would be a hellion, a shut-down wall of aggression and hostility (much like Cat, who expresses her fear and insecurity through harmful, destructive sarcasm and emotional manipulation). But Annabelle simply knows herself and her sexuality, and refuses to conform to social expectations that would make her heterosexual and in every other way straight. She empathizes with the marginalized and ostracized, comforting Colins when Cat strikes out at her, and otherwise shows herself as a young woman of strength and character.

Annabelle refuses to remove the Buddhist prayer beads she wears around her neck, given to her, she tells Simone, by the first “person” with whom she fell in love. (When Simone inquires after “him,” Annabelle corrects the pronoun.) The head nun, Sister Immaculata (played with campy parody by Ilene Graff) forces Annabelle to wear heavy crosses hung from chains over the beads, burdening the girl with the signs of a religion in which she doesn’t even believe. Simone persuades Annabelle to carry the beads in her pocket instead, so that she can keep her ex-lover close without incurring Immaculata’s wrath.

Annabelle, in turn, helps Simone take off the small gold cross Amanda gave her, which Simone fingers constantly at her neck, reminding her of what she, too, has lost. This is only one of several overly neat plot contrivances, but Kelly and Gaidry carry off these heavily parallel symbolic acts with aplomb. In fact, the women’s growing attraction works mostly because the two actors flesh out the characters’ emotional lives, and let their eyes and their faces communicate a seductive, credible intimacy that the dialogue sometimes flattens.

Annabelle and Simone’s attraction somehow remains sweet and pure; their age difference never seems to matter, because Annabelle’s worldly experience compensates for Simone’s sheltered Catholic girls’ school existence, balancing out whatever chronological age might otherwise mean.

Brooks builds the sexual tension between Annabelle and Simone, finally bringing them together after Annabelle witnesses Simone cajoled into dancing with her erstwhile boyfriend at the school prom. Taking off her dress and letting down her hair, Annabelle mounts the dance floor stage in a red slip with her guitar and a song, obviously written for and about Simone. When Simone flees in emotional confusion, Annabelle leaves the stage and runs after, catching up with her in the rain outside, where the two women finally kiss and return to Simone’s room to make love.

And pretty good love it is, too. Brooks, in the extras, describes how she wanted to film a love scene that would palpably represent the heat of the two women’s desire, rather than cutting away at some key moment or only intimating their physical intimacy. The scene is well-choreographed; Simone and Annabelle’s sexual connection is one of the most believable in the film. They share the lead in taking off each other’s clothes, in the first exploratory touches, and in the building passion that takes them to Simone’s bed where Brooks actually does show them having a pretty convincing, pretty hot, pretty moving simulation of lesbian sex.

Because of the storm, Simone’s alarm clock doesn’t ring the next morning. Tipped off by the jealous Cat, Immaculata finds the lovers in Simone’s room and promptly calls the police. The officers lead Simone out of the school, Annabelle tearfully running after them to toss Simone her Buddhist prayer beads, which the older woman catches and to which she clings as she’s driven away in a car ride that mirrors Annabelle’s arrival. Annabelle turns back into the school, running past the girls lined up to witness the spectacle. She returns to Simone’s room, where she finds the art photos Simone took of her on their day at the beach and smiles, loving Simone and not regretting it for a minute.

Brooks is careful not to judge the characters for their affair, despite the age difference. Unlike, for instance, the recent heterosexual version of a similar story, Notes on a Scandal (see my earlier blog entry), the teacher-student affair isn’t presented as the ruin of the nuclear family, or as a cruel manipulation of a vulnerable teacher by a horny, handsome teenaged boy or girl. Although the officers arrest Simone for her apparent indiscretion, until that moment, neither woman has suffered guilty misgivings about their obvious desire. Simone hesitates more because of the emotional wounds of her past than the prohibitions of the present. The film doesn’t sensationalize the story, either; in some ways, it’s just an old-fashioned lesbian movie that insists desire should be seized wherever it’s found. Loving Annabelle makes it clear that denying need and lying about love can disintegrate your soul.

Why am I so attracted to these stories? Why do these images linger for me for so much longer than those from other films, even though I know Loving Annabelle is a melodramatic diversion? Could it be that at 50-years-old, I’m still entranced by images of women falling in love against the odds, still starved to see this particular, predictable plot enacted? Is it because I, too, like director/writer Brooks, want to see consummated the desire that so many films of my own youth only suggested (even though Brooks is 20 years my junior)?

Does Loving Annabelle linger because in my own life, I seem to have moved from identifying with Annabelle’s precocious emotional sensitivity to Simone’s more painfully guarded passions? Is it because I came of age knowing that my sexuality and my own desire was illicit, so that watching the enactment of a forbidden teacher-student relationship reminds me that the erotics of sublimation and transgression are hard-wired into my own psyche? Or is it because the subtextual necessity of Annabelle and Simone’s flirtation recalls for me the necessity with which I lived for so long, of signaling to other women in the dark, hoping they could read what I was trying to tell them, hoping to find companionship, if not passion, with women who might truly know me?

When Annabelle finds Amanda’s suicide note in the astonishingly beautiful ocean-side condo Simone’s parents have left her, Simone is furious at the breach of her privacy. But Annabelle knows she’s found the key to Simone’s defenses. Struggling against Simone’s arms as the older woman tries to push her away, Annabelle insists that she intends to hold her and not to let her go. They tussle for a moment, then Simone surrenders to Annabelle’s embrace, sobbing on her shoulder as the younger woman holds her tightly, their hands entangled in each other’s hair.

As I describe the scene, I know how cheesy it sounds—I can’t even keep that hint of breathless sensation from my prose. And yet the moment was also very true and, for me, very moving. Here was the offer of understanding, the offer to care, to love, a living young woman wrapping her arms around Simone to comfort and sympathize. How many times, in my later teens and early 20s, just before and just after coming out, did I want someone to just “get it” like this, to use their body to tell me so, not to force me to talk about it, but just to let me feel it, whatever “it” was.

And honestly, “it” was mostly the complicated pain of being a lesbian before it was even marginally okay, as it is now, when it was still forbidden, taboo, perverted, misunderstood, when my attachments were to straight girls who could never reciprocate because I didn’t know any other would-be lesbian girls. I remember too well the inarticulate despair that came from not being able to express my desire openly, from being isolated without the words for what I felt and what I wanted, from being gripped by powerful hormones that sent my passion driving in the “wrong” direction, and not being able to do a thing about it.

I wanted to be Annabelle, but instead, I was Simone. Even though the film doesn’t illuminate anything new about this now-stereotypical story, Loving Annabelle still reminds me of my own coming of age.

When the Annabelle and Simone finally do give in to their desire, the film captures well the release of that instance, the combination of terror and depth of passion it inspires. Kelly and Gaidry bring something fresh and truthful and sincere to the moment, registering that there’s no turning back from transgression, and at the same time, that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks or says or what the consequences are—you just have to join your flesh with hers, you can’t deny it a second longer. When the harridan Immaculata confronts her with outrage, after finding Simone and Annabelle in bed together, Simone says simply, “I love her.” To make that declaration should be enough; in Loving Annabelle, as in my own life, indeed it is.

Sentimentally, perhaps,
The Feminist Spectator

Springtime Theatre in New York, Pre-Tony Awards

[Note: For any readers who might have caught an earlier, briefly posted version of this installment, please discard that one and read this one! It's been further edited, tightened, and considerably trimmed (although it's still a rather lengthy post). With thanks, the FS]

Although the recently announced Tony Award nominations held few surprises, my recent spate of New York theatre-going allowed me to see some of the performances/productions vying for the upcoming distinctions. Here are my own biased opinions on a few of this season’s shows.

The Drowsy Chaperone

The Drowsy Chaperone is a wonderful confection of a musical (with lyrics written by my several times removed Canadian cousin, Lisa Lambert, who won a 2006 Tony Award for her work). I was too late to see the show with the original cast; Bob Martin, who also wrote the book, has joined the cast of the London production. But John Glover has ably replaced him in the sweetly fey role of the nameless “Man in Chair,” who invites the audience to “listen” with him to an old-fashioned musical from the 20s called The Drowsy Chaperone. He pops in to comment on the plot and the structure and idiosyncrasies of musicals, speaking directly to the audience about the pleasure of being transported by theatre, which should, he says, always entertain and never be a chore. In fact, the show opens in the dark, with his voice announcing, “I hate theatre.” He goes on to qualify, saying before each curtain goes up, he prays that the show will be good, but is often disappointed.

Drowsy works hard not to disappoint. It’s a bonbon of a show, a box of chocolates sent in honor of the very genre in which it works. Its collaborators clearly love musicals; they know enough about them to send them up flawlessly and affectionately. Each of the characters is purposefully two-dimensional, but played to the hilt of their stereotypes by a troupe of game, talented dancers and singers. The two leading characters in the musical-within-the-musical—the romantic leads—are named after the original lead of the framing production of Drowsy (Bob Martin) and his real-life wife, Janet Van de Graaff. This little not-so-inside-joke is part of the show’s amusing and knowing self-reflexivity, and helps to signal the good humor with which it’s meant to be received.

Glover does a wonderful job with the role of the dithering, but happily transported spectator, who at the end of the play-within-the-play is rewarded for his faith in the power of transformation with an invitation into the fantasy musical that’s crowded his living room throughout the short evening. The performers, conjured alive by his vivid imagination, convert his shabby apartment into places of romance and theatricality, using the refrigerator to make grand entrances and his barred apartment windows to hang draperies that elevate the décor’s élan. His Murphy bed goes up and comes down to reveal an assortment of characters in compromising positions, the bedclothes redecorated for each occasion.

Through Drowsy’s amusing pedagogy, Man in Chair instructs us what to listen for and look at, cheerfully and enthusiastically teaching us how to be appreciative spectators for a musical lollipop that gives him enormous (and infectious) pleasure. Occasionally, the actors appear to get stuck or skip, as they would were we really listening to a record (which Man in Chair holds up at the top of the show, proud that it’s not a CD). The convention is fun, if obvious, and the vaudeville shtick sprinkled liberally through the proceedings also offers surprising amusements, given how stale the jokes should by rights feel.

Casey Nicholaw (who most recently choreographed Spamalot) directs the production to fly through its paces without missing a beat. The show is sharp, visually elaborate and imaginative, nicely choreographed, and managed with assurance and appropriate alacrity. It’s also moving to watch this lonely man (about whom we know nothing but his love for musicals, which is all that matters, in a musical) conjure this cast of characters to keep him company and entertain him.

Race and gender stereotypes abound, as they did in musicals of the era. The actors play them to the hilt, enjoying the buffoonery of the ingénue and leading man as much as the ditziness of the soubrette and her foil. Danny Burstein received a 2006 Tony Award nomination for playing the oily Latin lover Adolpho with thick layers of inspired vocal and physical comedy. Drowsy comments as knowingly on its racism as it does on shopworn musical conventions, and escapes offense because it admits to its excesses and historicizes them as conventions of the musical-within-the-musical’s moment.

The Man in Chair’s innocence, faith, and willing suspension of disbelief rewards him with transformation. He leaves the show carried into the flies on the wing of a biplane (which appears from nowhere, flown by an aviatrix who would now, he tells us, be called a lesbian), allowed into the sacred and sacrilegious world of unreality that’s the pleasure of the musical.

Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening (which lead this year with a total of eleven Tony Award nominations) does more for the musical than offer a valentine to its slightly archaic past. Based on the Wedekind play of almost the same name, the musical—with an urbane, slightly dissonant, but not entirely memorable score by Duncan Sheik and a book and lyrics by Steven Sater, both nominated for Tonys—concerns the angst of a group of high-school boys tightly reined in by teachers and foolish, socially hyperconscious and hypocritical parents. While the story is set in late 1800s in Germany, its contemporary resonances seep through in every moment, as the pop-style music reminds us that students today suffer the same cruel rites of teenage passage.

Spring Awakening clearly means to be the Rent of its generation, and its reviews supported its ambitions. I don’t find the show musically or theatrically revolutionary. Like Rent, Spring Awakening is a coming of age story. But unlike its predecessor, the musical doesn’t divide its situations among a range of contemporary and exemplary bohemian types, but instead focuses more conventionally on the complicated lives of just three of its young characters.

There’s Melchior, the romantic male lead (played with high energy and sweaty passion by Jonathan Groff, who received a Tony nomination for his efforts), and his love object Wendla (Lea Michele), the doomed heroine who doesn’t rise from the dead as Mimi does in Rent, and Moritz (John Gallagher, Jr., also Tony-nominated), an unstable foil for Melchior, whose death is caused by the brutality of his parents and his teachers, who bear responsibility here for everything horrible that befalls the characters.

Played by Christine Estabrook and Stephen Spinella, the adult figures are vile and oppressive, but they’re also comic, especially in Estabrook’s droll renderings. Her schoolmarm quivers with a facial tick that seems to have its own blocking, yet she never appears to be mugging. Likewise, Spinella grounds his vignettes in his characters’ desires and his ultimately good intentions, even if their choices wind up inflicting palpable harm. For instance, he plays Moritz’s father, enforcing the pressure of social norms on a son ill-equipped to acquiesce to them, and feverishly insisting the boy’s failure will blemish the family’s reputation.

Michael Mayer directs Spring Awakening with a powerful attention to emotional detail, crafting moments full of meaning and portent. When Wendla asks Melchior to treat her roughly, so that she’ll feel something deeply, the action builds to a beating that intimately links sexuality and violence.

Propelled by roiling desires they can’t understand, none of the characters are trustworthy, and few are fully known. Instead, they stand for archetypes, generations of Euro-American young people tortured by hormones, social regulations, and existential philosophy that descends on them like lightning with a thunderclap.

The young women are incidental to Spring Awakening. Aside from Wendla and Isla (an enigmatic character whose fate is unclear, although she sings a couple of songs that the actor delivers beautifully), the girls blur into a generic ensemble. They rotate through verses of a chilling song about sexual abuse, but their plaints never sound a major theme or advance the plot.

Mayer handles the production’s brief moment of chaste queer desire with sweet good humor. But that, too, is fleeting and doesn’t forward the characters’ relationships. Unlike Rent, Spring Awakening is more homosocial than queer. Rent’s central intent—however successfully executed—was to imagine new forms of kinship, which included queer and straight couples across a spectrum of race and ethnicity. Here, under cover of Wedekind’s original play and its late 19th century setting, even the all-white schoolboys’ homosociality is muted, while they try to find their way toward the heterosexuality that for the most part seems their destiny.

In Spring Awakening, abortion leads to Wendla’s tragic end, representing a social “problem” that resonates with contemporary politics all too well. Mayer wants Wendla’s plight to echo; he confronts the actors stage left and right with a bank of risers and seats for an on-stage audience, and the small orchestra lines the stage’s bare back wall. The action takes place down stage center, in a relatively small square from which the actors often retreat into the on-stage audience in between their scenes to watch their colleagues perform.

Mayer also plants in the on-stage audience four chorus members wearing everyday (2007) clothing, so that at first, they look like the other spectators. At various moments, however, they pull wireless mics from their shirts or pants, and sing along with the other characters. Then they retreat back into watching the performances from their seats. This rather Brechtian touch brings home the musical’s contemporary resonances.

Spring Awakening's climax in Wendla’s death by back-alley abortion, in fact, seems prescient after the Supreme Court's recent upholding of the so-called partial birth abortion ban, which in its very name ideologically manipulates a standard medical procedure to make it sound like murder. In the musical, Wendla has asked her mother to explain where babies come from, but the woman (played with poignant tragicomedy by Estabrook) is woefully inept, her own fear and timidity prohibiting her from finishing the task.

Her stupidity comes home to roost when her daughter gets pregnant, since Wendla has no idea that heterosexual intercourse can produce life. Nonetheless, her mother blames Wendla for her pregnancy, and takes her to an abortionist she surely knows will kill her. The mother’s hypocrisy, and her insistence that social propriety matters more than her daughter, echoes the religious right’s contemporary activism, which insists that parents ignore their children’s budding sexuality, preach abstinence, and force young girls to bear the consequences if they’re unlucky enough to conceive.

I loved Spring Awakening's calculated informality, which also underlines its relevance. The casually dressed musicians are onstage throughout, watching the action along with the actors when they’re out of character. The stage isn’t dressed; all the décor hangs on the brick walls of the actual stage house. The set resembles the design for I Am My Own Wife—memorabilia tacked up in odd places along with portrait paintings that lend the proceedings a period feel and gravitas, but are mostly decorative.

The lighting design dresses that blank back wall with hanging colored bulbs that move up and down its face, and pinspots that seem to peer out from cracks between the bricks. Lighting effects punctuate moments in sometimes breathtaking ways. For instance, when Melchior crawls onto a platform center stage, it begins to rise, pulled aloft on ropes by the other boys. As Melchior rises, blue light bulbs descend from the flies, making the sky appear to draw closer to the woodsy hideout where he waits for Wendla.

The design creates a sense of space through metaphorical choices like these. Even though young people’s confinement in a soulless, deadening environment sounds Spring Awakening's major theme, the set makes tangible the freedom they seek, which is always somehow just out of reach.

Love Musik

This showcase for the songbook of Kurt Weill artfully arranges many of his songs and plunders his letters to tell the story of his relationships with Lotte Lenya and Brecht. Tony-nominated Michael Cerveris performs practically unrecognizable, wearing padding and wigs to represent the very talented but pedestrian looking Weill. Tony-nominated Donna Murphy plays the talented Lenya, who was a feminist well before her time, in all her Weimar German skinniness. The show portrays Brecht as a womanizer, a rough man who doesn’t change his clothes frequently and who’s petulant about getting credit for his work while he collaborates with Weill.

The show’s vignettes stitch together a plot that moves through time without creating much crisis, conflict, or resolution, which is, in its way, fairly Brechtian. A projected title locates each scene in geography and time, but doesn’t really historicize the story.

The production takes an inordinate amount of time with clunky set changes that slow it down considerably. The story is fascinating, and the actors sublime, but the way it’s told, with its clunky revolving set and lengthy blackouts, suck the excitement out of what could be a vital, emotionally compelling slice of theatre (and world political) history.

Even though it’s directed by Hal Prince, who should know better, Love Musik isn’t very theatrical, and probably would have worked better as an Encores! style chamber musical instead of an elaborate Broadway show.

The Brig

Judith Malina first directed The Brig in 1963 for the Living Theatre, just before she and her husband and collaborator Julian Beck were imprisoned for tax evasion and forced to leave the country. In her recent remount, the play remains sadly relevant, addressing the military’s abuse of its own troops in an army prison in some nameless place that could be anywhere (and probably is everywhere).

The play moves through one long day of dehumanizing, demoralizing rituals that 10 men endure at the hands of lazy, brutal guards. The jailers create arbitrary white lines that the prisoners must ask permission to cross, emblematizing the capriciousness and illogic of power.

The evocative set layers barriers between the performers and the audience and, implicitly, between the prisoners and the world. Five iron bunk beds compose the interior space, surrounded by fencing that encages the men’s sleeping area. Outside the cage, the men access an exercise area, gravel drawing its perimeter. Finally, a barbed wire fence marks the membrane between freedom and constraint, and between actors and spectators.

The soldier/prisoners march with mincing steps, with their hands held up beside their chests. They strip to their skivvies and wear black boots with no socks to march to the showers. They dress and dress again, careful to meet all the picayune sartorial requirements of military style. They leave their cage for the toilets, each handed a razor that they carry high over their heads like flags. They repeat menial tasks while the guards bark orders, and they respond with the ubiquitous “Sir, yes sir,” yelled at the top of their lungs without making eye contact.

The guards call the prisoners “maggots,” which today sounds unmistakably like “faggots.” Although the guards’ epithets are surprisingly free of direct race, gender, or sexuality slurs, the production implies that the brig queers these men, breaking down their personalities and their souls, turning them into creatures far removed from the privileges of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality.

In the second act, one of the prisoners breaks down, rebelling with hysteria against his victimization; he’s carried out in a straitjacket on a stretcher. Another prisoner soon takes his place, and is quickly initiated into the prison rituals. Unlike the other men, who now follow the rules robotically, this new prisoner shows his fear, breathing erratically, unable to pull his face into the blank mask of abjection that the others wear. For that, the second act is more chilling than the first, as it shows more viscerally how men are changed so easily into animals.

The performers (men, all) playing the prisoners achieve the rote ritualistic, fear-inspired behavior of prisoners trying to survive their degradation, sweating at the callisthenic marching and cleaning and bed-making they’re ordered to do at top speed. While none of the performances stand out (appropriately so), the ensemble persuades the audience of the prisoners’ plight by essentially enacting it, live, for the two hours we watch.

The performers who play the guards, however, appear laconic and quiet in their exercise of power, and are never quite believable as brutes following orders from their own superiors. While the prisoners sweat with the exertion required of them as actors as well as characters, the guards don’t seem scary enough to make the situation authentic. If this is a choice, it could be more nuanced; that is, spectators could somehow be lead to see the prisoners as afraid of something less tangible than those who push them around, as oppressed by ideology instead of the man-to-man contact that’s the brig’s stock in trade. But in this production, the guards’ soft-spoken and physically soft appearances and actions seem a mistake of casting or an oversight of direction rather than a meaningful choice, which takes the edge off an evening that could be even more powerful.

Still, seeing The Brig brought out of the archive and knowing that it remains politically relevant over 40 years later makes for a sobering theatre experience. The Living's new basement theatre on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side seats perhaps 75, an intimate space in which ushers pull a curtain to separate the house from the small concession area by which it’s flanked. It’s easy to imagine the Living carrying on its important work here, not only resurrecting its history, but propelling new generations of experimental theatre artists and committed audiences into a meaningful future.

At the performance I saw, Judith Malina, the doyenne herself, mingled with spectators lined up in the narrow hallway before the house opened and happily joined the actors onstage at the curtain call. Seeing her up there—her tiny body clad in tight black stretch pants and a bright white oversized shirt that mirrored the contrasting colors of her hair—reminded me that The Living Theatre is itself an institution. To Malina’s credit, the company has yet to lose its importance to ever-new generations of theatre-goers who see performance as a way to make a difference in what we think about the world.

Stairway to Paradise

This season’s City Center’s Encores! closing performance represented a new choice for a company that typically spends its considerable artistic capital on recreating old musicals from the American archive. Instead, Stairway to Paradise, conceived by Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel and director Jerry Zaks, knit together revue songs from 1900 to the 1950s, foregoing thematic links for a tour through American history via its theatrical music. Written by lyricists and composers from Irving Berlin to Comden and Green, Eubie Blake to Yip Harburg, this perfectly pitched and paced production offered an entertaining, affecting few hours of cracker-jack singing, dancing, and star charisma.

The show alternated songs with the occasional comedy sketch for a bit of theatrical relief, and mixed solo ballads and torch songs with chorus numbers and dance routines that expertly shifted mood and tone. Stairway held the audience’s interest not just by whipping up a nostalgic desire to hear what the artistic team chose for us next, but by inciting our desire to see what performers like Kristin Chenoweth, Kevin Chamberlin, Christopher Fitzgerald, and Capathia Jenkins would do with the material.

The three principals’ infectious, appealing chemistry made watching them do comedy as joyful as listening to them put over the more serious songs. Chenoweth is marvelous, a true star whose presence lights up the cavernous City Center. Her smile literally twinkles. Her presence is ingratiating.

Chenoweth’s generosity with her fellow performers creates a palpable community on stage. She shares her energy not just with the audience but with everyone in the theatre, bringing us all together with her enthusiasm, her love for the moment, and for how she plays a song, a joke, a moment with such grace, precision, and spontaneity.

Stairway to Paradise captured the pleasure of old television variety shows as well as the theatre revues from which they stole their structure. The show moved so smoothly from one act to the next, flattered its talent so well, and selected its numbers with such good sense and care, that it was impossible not to be seduced by this kaleidoscope of song, comedy, and dance.

Deuce

Terrence McNally’s lobbed trifle stars Angela Lansbury and Marion Seldes as veteran doubles partners returning to the U.S. Open to be honored after the current season’s final match. Lansbury and Seldes somehow find nuances in the slight text, and manage to create the semblance of a relationship from a story that gives them only threadbare, stereotypical character impressions.

Lansbury plays the feisty, blue-collar, Pittsburgh-born Leona Mullen, who retired from the game reluctantly when her partner Midge Barker (Seldes) decided she was through. The play intimates there’s been some strife between the two women that’s kept them from seeing one another for the last ten years, but McNally never really details or resolves what’s kept them apart. They’ve weathered the tensions and triumphs of pioneers who played when the Virginia Slims tours that put women on the map of professional tennis were just beginning.

Leona and Midge started on the ground floor of women players’ insistence on being paid equally for their court time (a struggle that continues, as it’s only very recently that Wimbledon and other major tournaments agreed to provide the same prize money for women as for men). They reminisce about wearing make-up and impractical clothing during their matches to persuade fans of their femininity. They remember the lesbian “scare” inflicted on early pros, when any athletic woman was accused of being queer.

The tennis partners speculate aloud about the sexuality of various women on the tour, and express mutual interest in whether or not the other thought she was a lesbian. McNally renders lightly here an issue that nearly rent women’s tennis in two; his characters take the same affectionate, wistful tone to much of women’s tennis history. Midge and Leona recall an exhibition match they played (which turned out to be their last), a battle of the sexes in which they defeated two elderly men 6-0, 6-0, a situation reminiscent of Billie Jean King’s gender-pitched match against Bobby Riggs (which, happily, King won).

The old partners reflect on their respective marriages, their children and grandchildren, and their lives in Maine and Arizona. They reminisce about their careers, choices made and unmade, paths taken and those deferred. Leona regrets that they never won a Grand Slam, in large part because she choked at the Australian Open and double faulted on the match point serve. When the match Midge and Leona watch through the short play ends similarly, with the young player for whom Leona has been rooting double faulting on her own final serve, Leona addresses her publicly during the ceremony, telling her not to hold on to the moment, but to put it behind her, as Leona herself hasn’t quite been able to do. With that benediction delivered to the next generation, Leona seems to come to terms with the failures in her own past.

Two blathering, empty-headed commentators remark on the match and on these much revered doubles partners throughout the play, their scenes of comic relief alternating with Midge and Leona’s fond rememberings. A unnamed narrator lumbers on occasionally like Tom in The Glass Menagerie to create an elegiac tone for the proceedings, but the memorial pitch doesn’t stick because Lansbury and Seldes know they’ll do better playing the sardonic comedy with which McNally, too, seems more comfortable.

Leona remarks at the play’s beginning that she doesn’t “do” wistful. Although McNally tries to help Leona soften her self-critical, crusty edges, Deuce works best as a light comedy of courtside manners than as a poignant meditation on fame and the past.

Watching Angela Lansbury perform provides the evening’s key pleasure. Seldes generously gives Lansbury her due, knowing that she’s onstage mostly to play Lansbury’s straight woman. But the two grand dames work nicely together, with Seldes’s sharp features and prim WASPiness complementing Lansbury’s earthier, more unfettered, foul-mouthed star turn.

Lansbury makes Leona a complicated old broad, unsure what she feels about her own past or her future, ambivalent about growing old, unsettled about her eventual demise. But Leona takes pride in her career as an athlete (aside from that damned double fault), and you can see in Lansbury’s usually regal bearing a new kind of strength, the remains of agility and power, the grace of someone who’s successfully competed in a game that requires mental toughness as well as physical resilience and prowess. She utterly commits to a superficial character. She’s riveting and enormously pleasing to watch, which in turn makes it worth spending an evening with Deuce.

All These Plays, All These Days

I won’t use the occasion of a week in New York to proclaim about the state of mainstream theatre. But it’s worth one final observation. None of these productions cast enough people of color. In roles for which color isn’t necessarily named by theme or plot, it would be easy to select actors across a range of race, ethnicity, and type. Instead, each production presented remarkably, almost uniformly white casts.

The Encores! productions are usually much more racially diverse than Stairway to Paradise, in which Capathia Jenkins and two male dancers were the only obvious people of color onstage. The Brig included one or two men of color, but given the demographics of the U.S. military, could have cast many more. Deuce could have cast a person of color in one of the two commentators’ roles, since the leads were obviously written as star turns for Lansbury and Seldes.

Love Musik, Spring Awakening, and The Drowsy Chaperone could have cast men and women of color in any number of roles, at least adhering to liberal color-blind casting practices, if not to the more ideologically radical cross-casting choices any of these productions could have made. To see Broadway still embody the Great White Way left me bemused and dismayed.

Nourished but queasy,
The Feminist Spectator