Compared to the wealth of compelling theatre on hand at last year’s festival, the four offerings I managed to see this year disappointed in both content and form. Three of the four were simple realism, so unadorned with theatrical flair they could easily have been written for low-grade television. The fourth was a solo hip hop piece that included some representational video art, which also failed to exploit the possibilities of the medium and its mix with live performance.
All four were domestic relationship dramas with very little concern for a world beyond couples or families, giving the four-play focus a rather parochial if not claustrophobic effect. Their preoccupations seemed predictable, their outcomes prosaic, their insights few. Since Humana remains a breeding ground for plays that go on to be produced in regional theatres (and sometimes further up the mainstream theatre food chain), this year’s offerings (with the exception of Becky Shaw, which I saw last) don’t give theatre-goers across the country much to anticipate as they move from their trial runs forward.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s oddly presumes to introduce audiences to hip hop’s form, style, and preoccupations, as though this sort of performance is new. Perhaps it is, at the Humana Festival in Louisville, but it’s certainly not on the larger landscape of American theatre. Hip hop performance festivals have been produced annually in New York and other cities around the country, and the performance art form that it embellishes and expands is a staple even in regional theatre seasons. Joseph’s style mixes movement along with the dj sampling and percussion punctuations that underscore his amped up storytelling, and his energetic, charming presence makes his an appealing act. But hip hop’s critical engagement with questions of race and authenticity are given only slight treatment here, as Joseph seems too quickly to try then shy away from interrogating the political meanings of the form and his own stories.
To warm up the audience, his drummer wandered the pre-show audience with a cordless mike, posing questions that were later repeated in pre-taped video segments intercut with Joseph’s monologue. The questions—“What do you think of white people in hip hop?” “What one question would you ask Jay-Z?” “Name a demographic.” “If jazz is the broom that African Americans jumped, what is hip hop?” “What do you think about women in hip hop?”—could be probing, but the answers elicited from the mostly white and mostly middle-aged audience the night I saw the show were vague, uninformed, and uninteresting. When more poignant and insightful answers were presented later in the video clips, they enhanced the earlier conversations and, cross cut with stories Joseph told, gained new resonances and meanings. But the evening ended without pursuing their true complexities.
Some of Joseph’s anecdotes and vignettes were thoughtful and provoking, such as his trip to Senegal, where he wound up working with a white American woman who was agitating against female genital mutilation. He sheepishly described her facility with the local language, and her ability to reach people who embraced her by calling her an “African American,” where Joseph was only recognized as a “Black American.” The irony of his position made his own trip toward authenticity complex and suspect, and positioned the audience to see race and nation drawn in more complicated ways than usual. At the same time, Joseph shied away from the dicey politics of female genital mutilation, letting the story stand without parsing its layers of cross-cultural ethical quandaries.
The story that framed the break/s, and to which he repeatedly returned, addressed Joseph’s ambivalence about his relationship with this white girlfriend. She wants to marry him; he has commitment issues. On four large video screens angled out from the theatre’s flies, black and white fingers intertwine then slip away from each other, literalizing the story’s progress from intimacy to estrangement. Although the failed relationship might have been about racial difference, Joseph doesn’t make it seem so; it’s more of a man thing than a black man/white woman thing in his performance, which reduces the tale to something more quotidian and ubiquitous than might be expected from a performer with some of Joseph’s insights.
A long vignette about meeting Prince and touring his art collection seems finally to be about nothing but Joseph’s access to someone as rich and visible as the artist-once-known-as-etc. Ironically, Joseph’s very charm and virtuosity seems to get in the way of the performance’s import, as he works harder to be liked than to employ hip hop’s critique of racial inequities and unequal social distributions of power.
Perhaps his presence as a young African American man centered on stage for 75 minutes, telling his own stories through intelligent perceptions and a boundless athleticism, is radical enough for an occasion like the Humana Festival. But my theatre-going companions and I weren’t as captivated or impressed as we’d hoped, especially since we’d heard that Joseph is a galvanizing teacher and that other work he’s presented has been much more successful than we found the break/s.
Lee Blessing’s Great Falls began our smorgasbord of three consecutive realist family dramedies. This one-act, two-hander begins obliquely, as a middle-aged man and teen-aged girl share the front seat of a car he’s driving across the country. She’s sullen and alienated; he’s needy and garrulous without making much sense, covering over the awkwardness between them. We soon find out that he’s taken the girl on this trip against her will; for the first fourth of the play, Blessing lets us teeter on an uncomfortable edge, unsure if the man is a pedophile with ill-intent or a moral man whose protestations to the girl’s mom, when the teenager insists on calling her, that he means no harm, that they just have things to talk about, can possibly be true.
Although Blessing gradually reveals who the two characters are to each other, the man (called “Monkey Man” in the script, never by his name) never clarifies his urgent need to solicit the girl’s forgiveness for his infidelity to her mother. Although the rather elliptical exposition made me want to follow along to see how the relationship would play out, why this young girl matters to this man remains mysterious. Blessing’s refusal to provide a back-story means that ultimately, the audience has a hard time caring about whether or not they reestablish their trust and intimacy.
As they drive across the upper mid-West, with him retracing memories of his childhood family vacation for unexplained, apparently unjustified nostalgic reasons, the girl (unfortunately and significantly called only “Bitch”) begins to get the upper hand in their emotional tussle. After she elicits his confession and explanation for how and why he hurt her and her family, she manipulates his feelings so that he’ll help her have the abortion she finally (halfway through the play) reveals she needs.
It turns out she decided to lose her virginity, not to her boyfriend, as she was afraid that would bring on an unseemly panic attack, but to a boy she barely knew, who turned out to be a brutal rapist. After he violently deflowered her, he called a friend to share her, and the two took turns violating her. When she finally got away and turned to her boyfriend for comfort and support, they, too, had sex. She explains to “Monkey Man” that she doesn’t know which boy is the baby’s father.
As he gets increasingly distraught—whether out of love and concern for her or some more abstract moral outrage unfortunately isn’t clear—the girl reminds him of her childhood abuse at the hands of her father and her “recovery” through prolonged psychiatric care. While she uses these facts of her sorry life to shore up his resolve to take her to Planned Parenthood, he finally extracts what Blessing suggests is the real reason she wants to abort the fetus: because she’s found out it’s a boy, and men, you see, can’t be trusted.
The play sounds worse in my description than it actually was, but its ambivalence about whether it means to be a morality tale or a coming-of-age drama kept it from being satisfying. Great Falls held my interest, perhaps more to see what new outrages Blessing would add to this poor girl-child’s past and present than anything else. But the play finally dismisses the girl and ennobles the cipher of a man. He cares for her when a Chlamydia infection nearly kills her after the abortion, then drives her an hour away from her home, leaves her with his car, and severs her from his life. The girl winds up as no more than a sorry tool of the man’s self-understanding, and the violence reportedly done to her slight body, related in prurient, gratuitous detail, is grotesque not because it’s her character’s experience, but because Blessing uses it only to make the audience feel sorry for the man.
The characters are rather thankless, but Tom Nelis brings a kind of awkward, self-righteous searching quality to Monkey Man’s journey that calls your attention, if not your empathy. Halley Wegryn Gross, as Bitch, overplays teenage apathy, so that she seems a careless, rather lazy performer, rather than an actor who’s putting specific, precise energy behind the choice to play at being disaffected. Still, when she started smiling later in the play, her face lit up with an entirely new quality that could have been pursued to more vivid effect. The director, Lucie Tiberghien, makes good use of an awkward theatre-in-the-round with hydraulic lifts that deliver seedy motel and barren abortion clinic settings through the stage floor. The actors stay in character as they move between scenes, accomplishing shifts of locale, costume, and attitude with a grace sometimes more interesting than the dialogue.
Great Falls can’t generate enough ethical insight or emotional nuance to make us care either way about either character. I wound up feeling complicit in a rather pornographic voyeurism, forced to listen to the girl recite her history of indignities, at best, and victimization, at worst, without being guided thoughtfully by the playwright in what to make of or do about these events or the man’s own bid for forgiveness for participating in her history of pain and abuse.
Carly Mensch’s All Hail Hurricane Gordo tries to take its characters on a similar journey toward self-knowledge, but its central figures are too trapped in their own abandonment to choose freedom for themselves against each other. Two young brothers, now in their early 20s, were inexplicably left in a parking lot when they were small by Hippie parents who couldn’t be burdened with children. One brother, Chaz (Matthew Dellapina), is competent and responsible; the other, Gordo (Patrick James Lynch), acts as though he has a social and emotional disorder like autism. He bangs his head against the wall when he’s under stress, touches strangers inappropriately, acts like a child even though he’s a man, and suffocates his brother with his energetic, unfocused need.
Chaz tried to go to college, but Gordo's needs kept him home. He now holds down two jobs at which you never see him work so that he can pay the rent on the house their parents left to them. At the same time, he collects phone books from cities around the country; we find out very late in the play that he sifts through them looking for people who share his surname, writing them letters in an effort to track down his wayward parents. Gordo, on the other hand, is quite content with things as they are, even though the house and its furniture totter and crumble from neglect, and even though their lives are circumscribed and small. Chaz’s thoughts run to larger things, but his guilt-provoking sense of obligation keeps him from pursuing his own desires.
Although the theme is insistently American—it’s the conflict between Blanche and Stella over leaving Belle Rive, played out on two brothers instead of sisters—Hurricane Gordo offers no new angle from which to study its permutations and effects. Naturally, a girl (Tracee Chimo) comes to stay with the boys, drawn by their ad for a boarder. She’s soon revealed to be a colorful fraud, pretending to be a drifter but really a comfortably middle-class teen-aged runaway whose irritated father comes to drag her back to Manhattan where she belongs. She tries to seduce Chaz into running away with her to California, the paradigmatic land of freedom and opportunity for pioneers and dreamers.
But once again, the girl only provides the fulcrum on which the men play out their conflicts. Hurricane Gordo isn’t her story; it belongs—from the overly precious pre-show basketball game between the two actors until the predictable ending—to the brothers, whose vaguely homoerotic connection never gets mined for more interesting dramatic or characterological tensions. The girl leaves and the boys stay, giving up their fantasy of reassembling their biological family, but finding enough between the two of them and their rotting homestead to preclude adventure in the wider world.
The play’s suffocating aura seeps out into the audience. Nothing changes here; no one really learns anything at all, not the characters or the spectators. The set doesn’t change from one act to the next; the costumes change a little, but not enough to brighten the scene or reverse the characters’ fates. Little of the outside penetrates the detritus of their small lives. But instead of offering insights from such shuttered existences, or inspiring emotions that might make spectators feel something meaningful about our own lives and choices, we just feel tired by the brothers’ stasis, by Gordo’s prattling and prowling, and by two young white men’s insufferable self-involvement. One of my companions noted how the play converses with True West, another story of brothers caught in a vicious cycle of familial and social abuse. But this play pales in comparison to Shepard’s provocative and lastingly satisfying drama.
After these three productions, my friends and I were feeling a bit depressed about the state of American theatre. Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw lifted our spirits, at least because the play knows exactly what it is and what it means to do. The writing, direction, and acting were assured, confident, and precise—no word, movement, or emotion was wasted through the whole often hilarious evening.
Although Becky Shaw, too, is a realist family drama, these characters are sharply drawn and complicated, contradicting themselves with surprising desires, and catching us unaware with unexpected shifts in motivation and strategy. The story plays out a bit like a competition, in part because its driving force, Max Garrett (David Wilson Barnes), is a financier who’s always working angles. He’s a fixer, someone who not only makes people rich, but corrects their mistakes and rewrites their self-scenarios to make them come out right. Max is both astute and blinkered; he can diagnosis someone else’s neuroses at first glance, but his particular emotional deficits keep him from overcoming his own.
Becky Shaw raises questions about fidelity, family, and the future, all through characters who collide and cajole, trying to work angles for reasons none of them can truly fathom. Max’s mother died of cancer when he was 10; his dissolute father allowed the Slater family to adopt and raise him. Suzanna Slater (Mia Barron), his erstwhile sister, becomes his best friend and sparring partner; she speaks his language, can keep up with his rapid, biting observations, and can match his mordant, sometimes wounding wit. He’s protected Susie their whole lives, not by coddling her but by teaching her to be tough, to be what he calls “the biggest dick in the room,” so that she’ll win, as he does, at mergers and acquisitions in banking and in life.
When the Slater patriarch dies, Max steps in to clean up the mess, bartering a truce between Susie and her imperious, physically handicapped but emotionally powerful mother (also called Susan, flawlessly played by Janis Dardaris). The play’s compelling mother-daughter dynamic doesn’t waste a word on fake affection between the two women, and its plot doesn’t move them toward a treacly, fake reconciliation. Instead, the mother is left with a kind of impervious dignity, often delivering insights that sound more rabbinical than maternal. She’s a woman of a certain age, who’s learned to make her compromises to get what she needs to sustain her; her pragmatism is both admirable and chilling.
The younger Suzanna doesn’t know herself half as well as her elder, and allows herself to be buffeted about emotionally and professionally by Max and her erstwhile husband Andrew (Davis Duffield), whom Gionfriddo uses as the yin and yang of contemporary masculinity. For each of Max’s bullying barbs, Andrew rebounds with a conciliatory, “radical feminist” protestation of injustice and healing. Max is a warrior; Andrew is a caretaker, who finds his own self-worth in healing women whose emotional damage attracts him like sirens’ songs. The two men despise each other; Susie, caught between them, is pulled toward Max’s strength and feels obligated to Andrew's succor.
Into this already complex set of relationships walks the eponymous Becky Shaw (Annie Parisse), who at her first entrance appears such an outré version of femininity that she seems like a drag queen. She’s flighty, jittery, doesn’t know at whom to look, or where to put her hands, yet in her first scene, she observes Max and Susie and Andrew with clear knowingness and insight.
One of the play’s deficits is that rather than playing off Becky’s implicit, rather uncanny emotional strength, it cuts her down to size. Each of her scenes finds her appearing physically smaller and smaller, until by the last scene, I wondered how I ever could have mistaken her for a man-dressed-as-a-woman-playing-a-female, so fragile and wispy does she finally become. Her trauma and overwhelming need drive the plot and the characters’ changing reactions to one another, but her own back-story (which is vaguely, gratuitously racist) never fully explains why she becomes so important and defining in their lives.
Becky Shaw makes a good drawing room comedy of slightly more than errors. Gionfriddo is on to something about contemporary heterosexual relationships; she’s an MFA graduate of Brown, and enjoys sending barbs back at her alma mater for its politically correct reputation and its production of gentle feminist men and ecologically-minded anti-corporate women. Her characters move through the world, recognizing the necessity of compromise, the constraints of what appear to be infinite choices. They’re self-conscious enough about their privilege to be guilty when Becky protests her poverty; they’re self-reflexive enough to know that however flawed their nuclear family, they’re fiercely loyal to each other at a primal, tribal level that will carry them through to the kind of social victories for which they’ve all been groomed.
Becky, the outsider, has to use her wiles and wits to get what they have. If she wants Max to be her entrée into the world of wealth and power, she’ll use her own keen intelligence to manipulate his vulnerability and emotional failings enough to prey on his delusions. Finally, she’s the meek outsider come to make her place in a world that the rich have only appeared to inherit. Her ultimate malevolence is her meal ticket.
A feminist role model she’s not. But at least Becky Shaw sketches the complications of relationships, the compromises and costs, the dark ways in which we’re all instrumental to one another. These characters rub against the world, and the heat of their friction throws off a rather illuminating light, if only onto the heterosexual relationships that always already seem doomed, functional, and short-sighted from the start in this crop of new American plays.
At least at Becky Shaw, it was really nice to spend a few hours laughing out loud.
The Feminist Spectator
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Dynasty Handbag
New York-based performance artist Dynasty Handbag is the "solo music/video/voiceover/comitragic performance vehicle created and executed by Jibz Cameron," according to www.dynastyhandbag.com. She visited Austin recently to perform a benefit evening for the local queer DIY performance space CampCamp, and also offered a one-night show at the Vortex Theatre in East Austin. Word-of-mouth primed me for her performance—Dynasty Handbag got raves at the “WOW and Now” cabaret staged at Joe’s Pub during the Performance Studies International Conference at New York University in November 2007.
I can see why. In the small café that serves as a casual lobby off the Vortex's theatre, Dynasty set up a tiny platform stage under a few even tinier lights and proceeded to seduce the audience with her casual, quirky charm. In a talk after the short show, she positioned herself within overlapping music and performance practices, describing her work with various bands as well as her training in theatre at ACT in San Francisco.
The multiplicity of styles and talents shines in her work. She performed an interactive conversation with her own recorded voice, played from a laptop perched beside an amp just off the small stage, selecting numbers from a playlist on the screen, assisted only by a friend who reached out to adjust the volume during each piece. Dynasty reminded me all at once of a singer, a stand-up comic, a performance artist, and a dancer, as her mobile face and flexible body seemed to register each nuance of emotion that crossed through her.
Physically, Dynasty Handbag performed like a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin and Gumby. Her “costumes” were outrageous arrays of clothing layered like non-sequiturs—a leotard over sweat pants, a cut off t-shirt worn over a long-sleeve shirt. She seemed dressed for mobility, if not for speed; the queer (meaning “odd”) look of her outfits enabled the herky-jerky movement of her arms and legs, as thoughts and questions and answers hurtled across her body in spastic, but supremely controlled, finally dancerly style.
In many ways, Dynasty mostly plays reaction shots, responding physically to her taped voice as it prompts her movement through each piece. But what for a less talented, less confident performer would look like mugging, in Dynasty’s rendition seemed like a symphony of considered, meaningful, even moving response. For instance, I’ve never noticed the complex of emotions available in a raised eyebrow. Dynasty lets us see differently things we think we've seen before.
The evening’s highlight was her interaction with a series of discarded plastic and paper bags that littered the small platform. As each bag pestered her to be noticed, Dynasty approached them warily, with resignation, and let herself be commanded by their needs and desires. Her face and her body registered the humiliations of succumbing to instructions delivered by inanimate objects, yet her generosity with her attention became strangely heartwarming.
Far from cynical, her irony seemed shy rather than coy, hopeful rather than debased. As she pet one of the rumbled plastic bags, pleasuring it with the nearly sexual abandon it demanded, her face moved into and out of confused expressions of embarrassment and willingness, as her body just went with the flow. As each bag called to her in turn, Dynasty acknowledged the publicness of her interactions with these objects; she knows we’re watching, and goes through her motions with a wink and a nod to how ridiculous and yet necessary her exchanges seem to be. When the last bag—an upright, rather imperious brown paper one with handles—called her attention, she sighed, “I’m tired of talking to bags.” The line resonated as loudly and deeply (if much more comically) as Willie Loman setting down his sales cases and telling his wife he’s tired of traveling.
In another number, Dynasty sat in a chair, playing an artist deciding the content of her next piece. The number was a tour-de-force of affectionate self-satire, as the stream-of-conscious monologue spooled off the laptop while she sat responding with her face and body, pen poised over an open notebook turned to a blank page (this after she borrowed the pen from someone in the audience).
Dynasty’s talent, perhaps, lies in how fresh her reactions seem, how persuasive she is in convincing us that she’s never heard these thoughts before (and neither have we). At the same time, she crafts a knowing, intimate connection between herself and her spectators, bringing us into this wry, slightly askew world where your own voice gets literalized (auralized?) outside your head, and you judge each choice of action, and respond to what you hear yourself telling yourself. It’s the super-ego come to life in a very public place, jousting with the body-as-id, as the ego just tries to hold it together and proceed, knowing that its contradictory, ambivalent, and finally deeply humane actions are under gentle (if pre-disposed to be generous) scrutiny.
Dynasty Handbag’s appearance might have been mediated through apparatus of her laptop and that amp, but the intimacy she creates carries a lovely current of liveness. We hear along with her the outrageous demands of things, the cacophony of others’ judgments and needs, the absurdity of trying to negotiate questions and comments that press at us from everywhere and nowhere.
In the process, she predisposes us to identify with her disidentifications, with her cautious acquiescence and delicious resistance to the nameless forces that be, which sound an awful lot like, well, Dynasty Handbag. Far from solipsistic, the performance externalizes a conversation we can recognize and to which we can relate: the ambivalences and doubts that prompt our hopeful, finally graceful actions, and the generosity with which we all go about believing in the possibilities of our interconnected lives.
The Feminist Spectator
I can see why. In the small café that serves as a casual lobby off the Vortex's theatre, Dynasty set up a tiny platform stage under a few even tinier lights and proceeded to seduce the audience with her casual, quirky charm. In a talk after the short show, she positioned herself within overlapping music and performance practices, describing her work with various bands as well as her training in theatre at ACT in San Francisco.
The multiplicity of styles and talents shines in her work. She performed an interactive conversation with her own recorded voice, played from a laptop perched beside an amp just off the small stage, selecting numbers from a playlist on the screen, assisted only by a friend who reached out to adjust the volume during each piece. Dynasty reminded me all at once of a singer, a stand-up comic, a performance artist, and a dancer, as her mobile face and flexible body seemed to register each nuance of emotion that crossed through her.
Physically, Dynasty Handbag performed like a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin and Gumby. Her “costumes” were outrageous arrays of clothing layered like non-sequiturs—a leotard over sweat pants, a cut off t-shirt worn over a long-sleeve shirt. She seemed dressed for mobility, if not for speed; the queer (meaning “odd”) look of her outfits enabled the herky-jerky movement of her arms and legs, as thoughts and questions and answers hurtled across her body in spastic, but supremely controlled, finally dancerly style.
In many ways, Dynasty mostly plays reaction shots, responding physically to her taped voice as it prompts her movement through each piece. But what for a less talented, less confident performer would look like mugging, in Dynasty’s rendition seemed like a symphony of considered, meaningful, even moving response. For instance, I’ve never noticed the complex of emotions available in a raised eyebrow. Dynasty lets us see differently things we think we've seen before.
The evening’s highlight was her interaction with a series of discarded plastic and paper bags that littered the small platform. As each bag pestered her to be noticed, Dynasty approached them warily, with resignation, and let herself be commanded by their needs and desires. Her face and her body registered the humiliations of succumbing to instructions delivered by inanimate objects, yet her generosity with her attention became strangely heartwarming.
Far from cynical, her irony seemed shy rather than coy, hopeful rather than debased. As she pet one of the rumbled plastic bags, pleasuring it with the nearly sexual abandon it demanded, her face moved into and out of confused expressions of embarrassment and willingness, as her body just went with the flow. As each bag called to her in turn, Dynasty acknowledged the publicness of her interactions with these objects; she knows we’re watching, and goes through her motions with a wink and a nod to how ridiculous and yet necessary her exchanges seem to be. When the last bag—an upright, rather imperious brown paper one with handles—called her attention, she sighed, “I’m tired of talking to bags.” The line resonated as loudly and deeply (if much more comically) as Willie Loman setting down his sales cases and telling his wife he’s tired of traveling.
In another number, Dynasty sat in a chair, playing an artist deciding the content of her next piece. The number was a tour-de-force of affectionate self-satire, as the stream-of-conscious monologue spooled off the laptop while she sat responding with her face and body, pen poised over an open notebook turned to a blank page (this after she borrowed the pen from someone in the audience).
Dynasty’s talent, perhaps, lies in how fresh her reactions seem, how persuasive she is in convincing us that she’s never heard these thoughts before (and neither have we). At the same time, she crafts a knowing, intimate connection between herself and her spectators, bringing us into this wry, slightly askew world where your own voice gets literalized (auralized?) outside your head, and you judge each choice of action, and respond to what you hear yourself telling yourself. It’s the super-ego come to life in a very public place, jousting with the body-as-id, as the ego just tries to hold it together and proceed, knowing that its contradictory, ambivalent, and finally deeply humane actions are under gentle (if pre-disposed to be generous) scrutiny.
Dynasty Handbag’s appearance might have been mediated through apparatus of her laptop and that amp, but the intimacy she creates carries a lovely current of liveness. We hear along with her the outrageous demands of things, the cacophony of others’ judgments and needs, the absurdity of trying to negotiate questions and comments that press at us from everywhere and nowhere.
In the process, she predisposes us to identify with her disidentifications, with her cautious acquiescence and delicious resistance to the nameless forces that be, which sound an awful lot like, well, Dynasty Handbag. Far from solipsistic, the performance externalizes a conversation we can recognize and to which we can relate: the ambivalences and doubts that prompt our hopeful, finally graceful actions, and the generosity with which we all go about believing in the possibilities of our interconnected lives.
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
THE L WORD's LATEST HIGH
Season Five on The L Word continues to be its best since the series began. Producer Ilene Chaiken and friends have returned to the fast and funny satirical premise that made the lesbian dramedy so appealing in the first place, and the characters have settled into their quirks and peccadilloes with an easy charm. The actors seem more comfortable with each episode, plying their trade with a wink and a nod to spectators as if we’re all now in on The L Word's best joke: the fantastic hubris that lets it aspire to be a cable tv show about “lesbian lives and loves.”
That The L Word has always in some ways been a parody of itself is no longer an open secret, but now overtly delivered with delicious self-mockery through Jenny’s vanity film project, Les Girls. With the once tortured, traumatized nouveau-lesbian cutter now fully in bloom as dyke diva, Jenny muddles her way through directing her script, adapted from her eponymous novel. That Les Girls is itself a not-so-thinly-veiled, not-so-fictionalized version of stories told in the first season of The L Word makes the references even more fun. The show’s winking allusions to its own excesses make it even easier to forgive its interim few seasons of labored, unconvincing dramaturgy.
In last night’s episode (#6, see http://www.sho.com/site/lword/previous_episodes.do?episodeid=130341 for clips and on-line viewings), Jenny and company fly to Vancouver to scout locations. Jenny quickly denounces the city as a poor excuse for Los Angeles, and demands she be allowed to shoot in California. Since The L Word itself shoots in Vancouver, the producers poke fun at spectators’ early objections to the unrealistic Canadian locations that substitute for the city in which the show takes place. Les Girls moves its shoot to the very LA street on which Bette and Tina and Jenny and Shane live, mixing up the layers of reference and reality as The L Word's characters meet the Les Girls actors who play them.
Jenny’s moment coaching the women playing “Bev” and the film’s version of Tina through their first sex scene is a hysterical parody of the straight actors of The L Word rumored to have been tutored in the fine points of lesbian sex by Chaiken and her crew. Jenny gives the two embarrassed, befuddled actors an elaborate set of sexual instructions, to which they respond with terrified, awkward ineptitude. Frustrated, Jenny barks to her no-longer-so-abject assistant, Adele (Malaya Rivera Drew), that they need to hire a lesbian sex expert to teach the actors a thing or two, an obvious reference to The L Word employing Susie “Sexpert” Bright to instruct its performers while the first season was being shot.
Creating narrative stand-ins for the regular cast of characters lets the audience see how far Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, and the rest of the cast have come with their roles. And the utterly satisfying consummation of Bette and Tina’s re-simmering passion proved them once again the most believable, compelling couple on the show. Beals and Holloman’s affection for each other seems real, and their comfort with one another’s bodies makes their sex scenes convincingly erotic. When Bette, in the throes of desire, tells Tina that she’s missed her, the audience can only agree. After three seasons of watching other characters' much less expert sexual fumbling, it’s good to have Bette and Tina back in action (and especially nice to watch Tina take control of their moves).
Even Kate Moennig seems to be loosening up as Shane (could it be those newly buff abs she’s now sporting?). While her hair still looks like a disaster (but then, what do I know?), her three-way with the SheBar girls and its aftermath has given her new spunk, as she stands up to defend The Planet and poor Kit’s reputation. Elizabeth Keener (Catherine’s look-alike sister) plays a mean jealous lover, and the conflict over lesbian capitalism is both funny and relevant, as the two establishments fight for the dyke dollar.
The ensemble of actors playing the core group of friends--Holloman, Moennig, Pam Grier, and Leisha Hailey--show their affection for each other with real conviction, their repartée and teasing now finely honed, warm, and easy. Hailey might have lost Rose Rollins’s Tasha to Alice’s dubious decision to out a famous African American football star, but Alice’s budding career as a talking head (now being prepared to audition for The L Word's version of The View, with sarcastic references to Alice taking Rosie O’Donnell’s “lesbian” place) promises more subtle political commentary from the always vivacious character. Alice might bear the burden of the show’s queer politics, but she handles her role as spokeswoman pretty well (except for her inexplicably naïve and ignorant jibes at transman Max, whose sole purpose these days seems to be videotaping Alice and figuring out what’s up with the suspicious, covertly ambitious Adele).
Cybil Shepard continues her run as Phyllis, the out Chancellor of “California University” where Bette serves as the art school dean. The plot’s recent controversy over “extreme” art proves that Bette’s become more conservative in her very responsible administrative position. Bette’s erstwhile lover, artist Jodi, now sings the anthem for free expression in the arts, defending her student’s right to put a gun to his head as part of his performance. Bette worries about donors and the school’s board of directors, a far cry from the Bette who mounted “Provocations” at the LA museum where she was the curator (in the far more politically progressive Season One).
If Phyllis’s lack of concern over the controversy isn’t believable, her new-found lesbian identity continues to serve The L Word as a source of both pedagogy and parody. Phyllis’s freshly introduced daughter, Molly (played by Shepard’s actual daughter, Clementine Ford), promises new sexual tensions and possibilities for the irrepressible Shane (whose recent vow of celibacy didn’t even last an episode).
Given that network television has been a wasteland these last few months while the writers’ strike ensured that the best scribes in the business will get the income they deserve, it’s been a pleasure to follow The L Word's more accomplished scripts, well-paced directing, musically evocative scores (fabulous to hear Joan Armitrading last night), and capable, relaxed, committed performances. Since the future of Friday Night Lights (my other favorite) seems in doubt post-strike, at least we’ve got the girl crew in Vancouver—rather—“LA” to entertain us. How nice that some of the best television available these days is by and about lesbians.
Indulging happily,
The Feminist Spectator
That The L Word has always in some ways been a parody of itself is no longer an open secret, but now overtly delivered with delicious self-mockery through Jenny’s vanity film project, Les Girls. With the once tortured, traumatized nouveau-lesbian cutter now fully in bloom as dyke diva, Jenny muddles her way through directing her script, adapted from her eponymous novel. That Les Girls is itself a not-so-thinly-veiled, not-so-fictionalized version of stories told in the first season of The L Word makes the references even more fun. The show’s winking allusions to its own excesses make it even easier to forgive its interim few seasons of labored, unconvincing dramaturgy.
In last night’s episode (#6, see http://www.sho.com/site/lword/previous_episodes.do?episodeid=130341 for clips and on-line viewings), Jenny and company fly to Vancouver to scout locations. Jenny quickly denounces the city as a poor excuse for Los Angeles, and demands she be allowed to shoot in California. Since The L Word itself shoots in Vancouver, the producers poke fun at spectators’ early objections to the unrealistic Canadian locations that substitute for the city in which the show takes place. Les Girls moves its shoot to the very LA street on which Bette and Tina and Jenny and Shane live, mixing up the layers of reference and reality as The L Word's characters meet the Les Girls actors who play them.
Jenny’s moment coaching the women playing “Bev” and the film’s version of Tina through their first sex scene is a hysterical parody of the straight actors of The L Word rumored to have been tutored in the fine points of lesbian sex by Chaiken and her crew. Jenny gives the two embarrassed, befuddled actors an elaborate set of sexual instructions, to which they respond with terrified, awkward ineptitude. Frustrated, Jenny barks to her no-longer-so-abject assistant, Adele (Malaya Rivera Drew), that they need to hire a lesbian sex expert to teach the actors a thing or two, an obvious reference to The L Word employing Susie “Sexpert” Bright to instruct its performers while the first season was being shot.
Creating narrative stand-ins for the regular cast of characters lets the audience see how far Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, and the rest of the cast have come with their roles. And the utterly satisfying consummation of Bette and Tina’s re-simmering passion proved them once again the most believable, compelling couple on the show. Beals and Holloman’s affection for each other seems real, and their comfort with one another’s bodies makes their sex scenes convincingly erotic. When Bette, in the throes of desire, tells Tina that she’s missed her, the audience can only agree. After three seasons of watching other characters' much less expert sexual fumbling, it’s good to have Bette and Tina back in action (and especially nice to watch Tina take control of their moves).
Even Kate Moennig seems to be loosening up as Shane (could it be those newly buff abs she’s now sporting?). While her hair still looks like a disaster (but then, what do I know?), her three-way with the SheBar girls and its aftermath has given her new spunk, as she stands up to defend The Planet and poor Kit’s reputation. Elizabeth Keener (Catherine’s look-alike sister) plays a mean jealous lover, and the conflict over lesbian capitalism is both funny and relevant, as the two establishments fight for the dyke dollar.
The ensemble of actors playing the core group of friends--Holloman, Moennig, Pam Grier, and Leisha Hailey--show their affection for each other with real conviction, their repartée and teasing now finely honed, warm, and easy. Hailey might have lost Rose Rollins’s Tasha to Alice’s dubious decision to out a famous African American football star, but Alice’s budding career as a talking head (now being prepared to audition for The L Word's version of The View, with sarcastic references to Alice taking Rosie O’Donnell’s “lesbian” place) promises more subtle political commentary from the always vivacious character. Alice might bear the burden of the show’s queer politics, but she handles her role as spokeswoman pretty well (except for her inexplicably naïve and ignorant jibes at transman Max, whose sole purpose these days seems to be videotaping Alice and figuring out what’s up with the suspicious, covertly ambitious Adele).
Cybil Shepard continues her run as Phyllis, the out Chancellor of “California University” where Bette serves as the art school dean. The plot’s recent controversy over “extreme” art proves that Bette’s become more conservative in her very responsible administrative position. Bette’s erstwhile lover, artist Jodi, now sings the anthem for free expression in the arts, defending her student’s right to put a gun to his head as part of his performance. Bette worries about donors and the school’s board of directors, a far cry from the Bette who mounted “Provocations” at the LA museum where she was the curator (in the far more politically progressive Season One).
If Phyllis’s lack of concern over the controversy isn’t believable, her new-found lesbian identity continues to serve The L Word as a source of both pedagogy and parody. Phyllis’s freshly introduced daughter, Molly (played by Shepard’s actual daughter, Clementine Ford), promises new sexual tensions and possibilities for the irrepressible Shane (whose recent vow of celibacy didn’t even last an episode).
Given that network television has been a wasteland these last few months while the writers’ strike ensured that the best scribes in the business will get the income they deserve, it’s been a pleasure to follow The L Word's more accomplished scripts, well-paced directing, musically evocative scores (fabulous to hear Joan Armitrading last night), and capable, relaxed, committed performances. Since the future of Friday Night Lights (my other favorite) seems in doubt post-strike, at least we’ve got the girl crew in Vancouver—rather—“LA” to entertain us. How nice that some of the best television available these days is by and about lesbians.
Indulging happily,
The Feminist Spectator
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Come Back, Little Sheba on Broadway
William Inge was one of the notables of mid-20th-century American playwriting, often mentioned in the same breath as Williams and Miller, even though his relatively slimmer output garners him fewer words in history surveys (or might that be because he was gay?). After the success of his second play, Come Back, Little Sheba, on Broadway in 1950, Inge went on to write Picnic (1953), which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize, Bus Stop (1955), and Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). He won an Academy Award for his first screenplay, Splendor in the Grass (1960), which starred Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. According to the Inge Center web site (www.ingecenter.org), the playwright became depressed after two plays he wrote in the early 60s were unsuccessful. He left New York for LA, where he committed suicide in 1973.
This Manhattan Theatre Club-produced revival of Inge’s 1950s realist drama was first staged in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre (see http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/come5744.htm). The production opens on Broadway on January 24, 2008, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, affectionately known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the long-running, original Law and Order television series. Merkerson plays Lola, the apparently desperate and deluded housewife whose attempt to keep her marriage intact and “normal” drives the plot.
Sheba is a conventional play, to the extent that it’s rife with all the tropes of realism: the “secrets” that sour its relationships; the repressed desires that wind up exploding and ruining its characters; the compromises that make the lives it portrays ones of rue and regret. But in this production, rather than providing a recipe for the obvious, director Michael Pressman and his leading woman find nuances and depths to these familiar stories that make Sheba vital and resonant.
James Noone’s soaring set quotes the claustrophobic domestic spaces that Jo Mielziner captured in his original 1949 design for Death of a Salesman. The home in which Lola’s unhappiness unfolds is a multi-level, multi-room space with doors and stairs and furniture backed up against imaginary walls, a physical embodiment of the porousness between a family’s private and public lives. Lola’s kitchen is a bright but strangely empty space, with none of the hominess usually ascribed to the nerve center of nurture and sustenance. The living room, at the opening curtain, is furnished with mis-matched pieces and a threadbare rug, and strewn with the detritus of careless lives: newspapers and magazines, fresh laundry and dirty clothes.
The boarder’s room off the living room is decorated in detail, as renter Marie’s love life is as central to the plot machinations as the room’s location suggests. Up the stairs, balanced precariously over the action, is the shared bath and master bedroom, suggested with doors but revealed by the bedroom’s lack of walls, where an always disheveled bed figures the entanglements of thwarted desire that thread through the story.
The set changes, which require reorienting props and pieces of the décor in between scenes, are directed as part of the play’s life. As stagehands come on to attend to various objects, the actors move around the set in character, making transitions in the play’s timescape. The dream-like simultaneity of the play’s action and the production’s logistical needs let you see the characters in even more of their quotidian reality as they move pensively from one room to the next in the half light.
The set suggests both the home’s solidity and its precariousness, just as Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes lend the characters both dignity and disrepute. Merkerson wears the housedresses that encaged 1950s housewives, all ties and bows and cheap cloth wrapped around the loosening figures of female middle age. Doc (Steppenwolf’s Kevin Anderson) wears suspenders to hold up already high-waisted trousers tightly pulled over his expanding waist-line, foiling his attempt at style and leaving him slightly ridiculous looking. This is a couple playing at the conventions of 1950s domesticity, and failing, badly.
Shirley Booth originated Lola on Broadway and in the subsequent film version, for which she won an Academy Award. Her simpering, foolish flibbertigibbet of a woman haunts the character, and provides a sharp contrast for Merkerson’s reinterpretation. In the play’s first act, she puts her own spin on what appear to be Lola’s self-delusions about her relationship and her life, playing the woman as more languid and dreamy than Booth’s always bustling, high-pitched fussbudget.
But as the second act moves through its devastating unraveling, Merkerson reveals Lola as a surprisingly strong but trapped woman trying frantically to hold onto a marriage she knows was a mistake from the start, struggling to be a partner to a husband whose alcoholism destroys them both.
The secrets alluded to at the beginning find the harsh light of day at the end, as Doc’s hatred for the woman whose pregnancy trapped him into a loveless marriage explodes in violence. Lola’s attempt to hang on to the innocence that let her trust her young lover 25 years ago becomes more and more painful, as it’s clear their liaison produced only loss. The baby they inadvertently conceived died when they used a substandard doctor to attend to the delivery; their shotgun wedding was obviated by the disappearance of their progeny, its unhappiness exacerbated by the couple’s inability to bear another child. Lola calls Doc “Daddy,” underlining ironically (although she always says it earnestly) the emptiness of their union.
Marie, their boarder (Zoe Kazan), inflames an already fraught relationship with her flirtatious presence, taunting Doc with casual intimacies that quicken his step. When Marie flaunts 1950s propriety by sleeping with Turk, the young man with whom she cheats on her out-of-town boyfriend, Doc’s carefully manufactured moral code falls apart and knocks him off the wagon of sobriety he’s maintained for one uneasy year.
The language of Alcoholics Anonymous's 12-step program (still relatively new to American culture in 1950, and much more stigmatized than its commonplace presence today) to which Doc and Lola cling barely holds his bitterness and incipient rage in check. Even though he attends meetings and sponsors other alcoholics, helping them through brutal visits to the local hospital’s drunk tank, and even though Lola asks him to repeat his daily affirmation, neither Lola nor Doc truly believe his nature has changed. Director Pressman gradually builds the production’s impending doom, letting spectators recognize that what we see as Lola’s inanity is really her frantic attempt to shore up the façade of her relationship’s normalcy.
In 2008, that façade already seems cracked. The production suggests that the conventions of heterosexual marriage were already rotten in the 50s, even as American ideology worked so hard to construct the nuclear family living happily in the suburbs as the sine qua non of such relationships. Both Lola and Doc suffocate in the confines of their home, fabricating intimacy and performing normalcy as they suffer their emotional and social isolation.
Doc is jealous of Marie and Turk, and funnels his repressed desire into flirting with her under the guise of paternalism. Lola likes to watch the young couple’s romantic couplings; she openly admits that she spies on them. While the audience can read her voyeurism as benign longing for her own lost beauty and youth, her watching also reeks of sexual perversion, as though she’s doomed to lurk about the corners of other people’s passion, feeding her own desire vicariously.
Their neighbor, Mrs. Coffman (Brenda Wehle), who’s suspect enough that Lola first wonders if she has poisoned the missing old beloved dog, Sheba, becomes the play’s reproving Greek chorus, stepping into and out of their home and the action with her thin lips pinched, tsk tsking her way through their lives as she first judges Lola’s inadequate housekeeping and then pities her victimization.
Inge suggests that even those with the most in common—lonely housewives chained to deadening routines—must invest in appearances of decorum instead of reaching out to each other with sympathy and agency. When Mrs. Coffman inadvertently visits after Doc’s rampage, she wordlessly helps Lola right the overturned furniture and clean up broken glass, replacing the vestiges of her dignity without suggesting that Lola change anything.
The Marie/Turk subplot offers interesting feminist resonances. Temporarily separated from her socially upstanding boyfriend, Marie embarks on an affair with a man who’s all brawn and no brains, whose only option for social intercourse is sexual. Marie clearly feels something for Turk, but she tells Lola that he’s “not the marrying kind.” Inge neatly reverses the charge usually leveled against “loose” women, painting Marie as the sexual opportunist who knows she’ll soon settle down with a more appropriate man.
When her boyfriend Bruce appears at the house, he’s straitlaced, dull, and judgmental, impatient with Lola’s fussing and already puffed up by the obligations to which he’s carefully calibrated his life. His appearance on the scene underlines Marie’s compromises and Inge’s intimation that social propriety requires emotional and spiritual sacrifice.
Merkerson is a revelation as Lola. Casting an African American woman in the wife’s role without changing a word of the text and casting the rest of the characters as white (with the exception of one of Doc’s AA friends, played by African American actor Keith Randolph Smith) layers the play with racial nuances unavailable when a white woman performs the part. In many ways, Lola’s servitude is more readily apparent; in one key scene, when Lola’s made a fancy dinner for Marie and her visiting boyfriend to which Doc, out on a bender, fails to show, Lola announces that she won’t eat with the couple, but will be their “butler.”
Her declaration productively underlines Lola’s indentured servitude, as Merkerson’s race (and her maid-like adornments) suddenly becomes evident in ways it doesn’t through the rest of the production. This color-blind casting in fact underlines gender commonality across race. We’re no doubt meant to see this choice through a 21st century perspective, since in fact, a mixed-marriage in the 1950s would have been scandalous.
Merkerson slows Lola’s tempo, reading her lines with a drawling, southern-inflected cadence that points up her race more than trying to obscure it. Her voice is lovely and wistful, rich and warm, while her face seems frozen with her effort to make something nice out of a life wasted in a loveless lie of a relationship. Where Booth seemed convinced of her own revisionist history, Merkerson’s performance reveals the labor required to construct such stories, and the psychic and spiritual toll they take.
Instead of hiding her sadness behind relentless movement and meaningless domestic busyness, Merkerson’s Lola is almost indolent in her melancholy. When we first see her, she’s lying in bed in that upper room, wearing a cream-color full slip and staring quietly into space. There’s something erotic and charged about Merkerson’s lassitude; she could be a heroine from the steamier bloodlines of Williams’s oeuvre.
In another scene, left alone in the house, Lola turns on “Taboo,” a radio program that promises covert seductions to its lonely-hearted listeners. Lola drapes herself on the couch, preparing to luxuriate in some physical fantasy; her guilt is palpable when she’s startled by Doc’s unexpected return from work.
Merkerson’s performance is fully embodied and sexually charged. Her invitations to the milkman and the mailman and even to Mrs. Coffman to come sit, stay, have a cup of coffee, listen to a story, to just be with her, all have unsettling, slightly unseemly sexual overtones. And yet over the course of the play, the men who first reluctantly enter her home glancing at their watches and rolling their eyes gain affection and respect for Lola.
As her domestic strife becomes more obvious, they begin to see her as someone real, rather than a caricature of the happy housewife she once performed for them so aggressively. The mailman writes her a letter just so that she’ll get one, and the milkman proudly shows her his picture in a physique magazine (shadings of Inge’s homosexuality, as such rags were notorious as the gay porn of their time).
Although Mrs. Coffman would be a highly unlikely sexual liaison for Lola, Lola’s situation echoes that of the much more respectable middle-class housewife of the same era Julianna Moore plays in the film version of Michael Cunningham’s book The Hours. The emptiness and indignities of heterosexual domesticity fan Moore’s character’s lesbian longing and propel her out of the family nightmare.
No such redemption is possible for Lola. Her boredom is stultifying (Doc prevents her from going to work), and she’s utterly dependent on others in her version of house arrest. Her estranged family won’t take her back, now 25 years after her sexual indiscretion, even though her drunken husband has threatened her life, brandishing a machete in their living room, calling her names, and promising to “cut the fat off” of her with his weapon.
When drink lets Doc drop his mask, the audience sees the horror Lola has put up with for 25 years, and suddenly, her behavior makes a terrible kind of sense. She’s terrorized in her own home, with no way to escape. She has no means, no skills, nowhere else to go. Yet as Merkerson plays her, Lola’s unflinching resolve to survive outweighs her terror. When Doc returns, chastened, from his short rehabilitative hospital stay, he’s pink and pitiful, helpless as a mewling newborn, and begs Lola not to leave him.
With one look in response, Merkerson’s devastating expression takes in her present and her future, chained to a mercurial alcoholic who will descend into madness and claw his way back to temporary redemption again and again, leaving her to fend off his murderous rage and to soldier through a fake life. She walks Doc to their kitchen table and proceeds to cook for him as they glance at each other warily, pretending, again and always, that their suburban prison houses something real and nourishing.
Pressman’s wrenching production makes the realist conventions of Inge’s play critical of the very domestic story they structure. This revival is one of the most progressive realist dramas I’ve ever seen produced, not because the director deconstructed it, but because he and his cast fight their way to the horrible core of the situations it describes. They don’t blame their characters, regardless of their ethical or moral failings, but instead indict a culture that insists that heterosexual, coupled, suburban domesticity is the best way to live.
No wonder second wave American feminism asserted itself a decade after this play was first produced.
The Feminist Spectator
This Manhattan Theatre Club-produced revival of Inge’s 1950s realist drama was first staged in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre (see http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/come5744.htm). The production opens on Broadway on January 24, 2008, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, affectionately known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the long-running, original Law and Order television series. Merkerson plays Lola, the apparently desperate and deluded housewife whose attempt to keep her marriage intact and “normal” drives the plot.
Sheba is a conventional play, to the extent that it’s rife with all the tropes of realism: the “secrets” that sour its relationships; the repressed desires that wind up exploding and ruining its characters; the compromises that make the lives it portrays ones of rue and regret. But in this production, rather than providing a recipe for the obvious, director Michael Pressman and his leading woman find nuances and depths to these familiar stories that make Sheba vital and resonant.
James Noone’s soaring set quotes the claustrophobic domestic spaces that Jo Mielziner captured in his original 1949 design for Death of a Salesman. The home in which Lola’s unhappiness unfolds is a multi-level, multi-room space with doors and stairs and furniture backed up against imaginary walls, a physical embodiment of the porousness between a family’s private and public lives. Lola’s kitchen is a bright but strangely empty space, with none of the hominess usually ascribed to the nerve center of nurture and sustenance. The living room, at the opening curtain, is furnished with mis-matched pieces and a threadbare rug, and strewn with the detritus of careless lives: newspapers and magazines, fresh laundry and dirty clothes.
The boarder’s room off the living room is decorated in detail, as renter Marie’s love life is as central to the plot machinations as the room’s location suggests. Up the stairs, balanced precariously over the action, is the shared bath and master bedroom, suggested with doors but revealed by the bedroom’s lack of walls, where an always disheveled bed figures the entanglements of thwarted desire that thread through the story.
The set changes, which require reorienting props and pieces of the décor in between scenes, are directed as part of the play’s life. As stagehands come on to attend to various objects, the actors move around the set in character, making transitions in the play’s timescape. The dream-like simultaneity of the play’s action and the production’s logistical needs let you see the characters in even more of their quotidian reality as they move pensively from one room to the next in the half light.
The set suggests both the home’s solidity and its precariousness, just as Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes lend the characters both dignity and disrepute. Merkerson wears the housedresses that encaged 1950s housewives, all ties and bows and cheap cloth wrapped around the loosening figures of female middle age. Doc (Steppenwolf’s Kevin Anderson) wears suspenders to hold up already high-waisted trousers tightly pulled over his expanding waist-line, foiling his attempt at style and leaving him slightly ridiculous looking. This is a couple playing at the conventions of 1950s domesticity, and failing, badly.
Shirley Booth originated Lola on Broadway and in the subsequent film version, for which she won an Academy Award. Her simpering, foolish flibbertigibbet of a woman haunts the character, and provides a sharp contrast for Merkerson’s reinterpretation. In the play’s first act, she puts her own spin on what appear to be Lola’s self-delusions about her relationship and her life, playing the woman as more languid and dreamy than Booth’s always bustling, high-pitched fussbudget.
But as the second act moves through its devastating unraveling, Merkerson reveals Lola as a surprisingly strong but trapped woman trying frantically to hold onto a marriage she knows was a mistake from the start, struggling to be a partner to a husband whose alcoholism destroys them both.
The secrets alluded to at the beginning find the harsh light of day at the end, as Doc’s hatred for the woman whose pregnancy trapped him into a loveless marriage explodes in violence. Lola’s attempt to hang on to the innocence that let her trust her young lover 25 years ago becomes more and more painful, as it’s clear their liaison produced only loss. The baby they inadvertently conceived died when they used a substandard doctor to attend to the delivery; their shotgun wedding was obviated by the disappearance of their progeny, its unhappiness exacerbated by the couple’s inability to bear another child. Lola calls Doc “Daddy,” underlining ironically (although she always says it earnestly) the emptiness of their union.
Marie, their boarder (Zoe Kazan), inflames an already fraught relationship with her flirtatious presence, taunting Doc with casual intimacies that quicken his step. When Marie flaunts 1950s propriety by sleeping with Turk, the young man with whom she cheats on her out-of-town boyfriend, Doc’s carefully manufactured moral code falls apart and knocks him off the wagon of sobriety he’s maintained for one uneasy year.
The language of Alcoholics Anonymous's 12-step program (still relatively new to American culture in 1950, and much more stigmatized than its commonplace presence today) to which Doc and Lola cling barely holds his bitterness and incipient rage in check. Even though he attends meetings and sponsors other alcoholics, helping them through brutal visits to the local hospital’s drunk tank, and even though Lola asks him to repeat his daily affirmation, neither Lola nor Doc truly believe his nature has changed. Director Pressman gradually builds the production’s impending doom, letting spectators recognize that what we see as Lola’s inanity is really her frantic attempt to shore up the façade of her relationship’s normalcy.
In 2008, that façade already seems cracked. The production suggests that the conventions of heterosexual marriage were already rotten in the 50s, even as American ideology worked so hard to construct the nuclear family living happily in the suburbs as the sine qua non of such relationships. Both Lola and Doc suffocate in the confines of their home, fabricating intimacy and performing normalcy as they suffer their emotional and social isolation.
Doc is jealous of Marie and Turk, and funnels his repressed desire into flirting with her under the guise of paternalism. Lola likes to watch the young couple’s romantic couplings; she openly admits that she spies on them. While the audience can read her voyeurism as benign longing for her own lost beauty and youth, her watching also reeks of sexual perversion, as though she’s doomed to lurk about the corners of other people’s passion, feeding her own desire vicariously.
Their neighbor, Mrs. Coffman (Brenda Wehle), who’s suspect enough that Lola first wonders if she has poisoned the missing old beloved dog, Sheba, becomes the play’s reproving Greek chorus, stepping into and out of their home and the action with her thin lips pinched, tsk tsking her way through their lives as she first judges Lola’s inadequate housekeeping and then pities her victimization.
Inge suggests that even those with the most in common—lonely housewives chained to deadening routines—must invest in appearances of decorum instead of reaching out to each other with sympathy and agency. When Mrs. Coffman inadvertently visits after Doc’s rampage, she wordlessly helps Lola right the overturned furniture and clean up broken glass, replacing the vestiges of her dignity without suggesting that Lola change anything.
The Marie/Turk subplot offers interesting feminist resonances. Temporarily separated from her socially upstanding boyfriend, Marie embarks on an affair with a man who’s all brawn and no brains, whose only option for social intercourse is sexual. Marie clearly feels something for Turk, but she tells Lola that he’s “not the marrying kind.” Inge neatly reverses the charge usually leveled against “loose” women, painting Marie as the sexual opportunist who knows she’ll soon settle down with a more appropriate man.
When her boyfriend Bruce appears at the house, he’s straitlaced, dull, and judgmental, impatient with Lola’s fussing and already puffed up by the obligations to which he’s carefully calibrated his life. His appearance on the scene underlines Marie’s compromises and Inge’s intimation that social propriety requires emotional and spiritual sacrifice.
Merkerson is a revelation as Lola. Casting an African American woman in the wife’s role without changing a word of the text and casting the rest of the characters as white (with the exception of one of Doc’s AA friends, played by African American actor Keith Randolph Smith) layers the play with racial nuances unavailable when a white woman performs the part. In many ways, Lola’s servitude is more readily apparent; in one key scene, when Lola’s made a fancy dinner for Marie and her visiting boyfriend to which Doc, out on a bender, fails to show, Lola announces that she won’t eat with the couple, but will be their “butler.”
Her declaration productively underlines Lola’s indentured servitude, as Merkerson’s race (and her maid-like adornments) suddenly becomes evident in ways it doesn’t through the rest of the production. This color-blind casting in fact underlines gender commonality across race. We’re no doubt meant to see this choice through a 21st century perspective, since in fact, a mixed-marriage in the 1950s would have been scandalous.
Merkerson slows Lola’s tempo, reading her lines with a drawling, southern-inflected cadence that points up her race more than trying to obscure it. Her voice is lovely and wistful, rich and warm, while her face seems frozen with her effort to make something nice out of a life wasted in a loveless lie of a relationship. Where Booth seemed convinced of her own revisionist history, Merkerson’s performance reveals the labor required to construct such stories, and the psychic and spiritual toll they take.
Instead of hiding her sadness behind relentless movement and meaningless domestic busyness, Merkerson’s Lola is almost indolent in her melancholy. When we first see her, she’s lying in bed in that upper room, wearing a cream-color full slip and staring quietly into space. There’s something erotic and charged about Merkerson’s lassitude; she could be a heroine from the steamier bloodlines of Williams’s oeuvre.
In another scene, left alone in the house, Lola turns on “Taboo,” a radio program that promises covert seductions to its lonely-hearted listeners. Lola drapes herself on the couch, preparing to luxuriate in some physical fantasy; her guilt is palpable when she’s startled by Doc’s unexpected return from work.
Merkerson’s performance is fully embodied and sexually charged. Her invitations to the milkman and the mailman and even to Mrs. Coffman to come sit, stay, have a cup of coffee, listen to a story, to just be with her, all have unsettling, slightly unseemly sexual overtones. And yet over the course of the play, the men who first reluctantly enter her home glancing at their watches and rolling their eyes gain affection and respect for Lola.
As her domestic strife becomes more obvious, they begin to see her as someone real, rather than a caricature of the happy housewife she once performed for them so aggressively. The mailman writes her a letter just so that she’ll get one, and the milkman proudly shows her his picture in a physique magazine (shadings of Inge’s homosexuality, as such rags were notorious as the gay porn of their time).
Although Mrs. Coffman would be a highly unlikely sexual liaison for Lola, Lola’s situation echoes that of the much more respectable middle-class housewife of the same era Julianna Moore plays in the film version of Michael Cunningham’s book The Hours. The emptiness and indignities of heterosexual domesticity fan Moore’s character’s lesbian longing and propel her out of the family nightmare.
No such redemption is possible for Lola. Her boredom is stultifying (Doc prevents her from going to work), and she’s utterly dependent on others in her version of house arrest. Her estranged family won’t take her back, now 25 years after her sexual indiscretion, even though her drunken husband has threatened her life, brandishing a machete in their living room, calling her names, and promising to “cut the fat off” of her with his weapon.
When drink lets Doc drop his mask, the audience sees the horror Lola has put up with for 25 years, and suddenly, her behavior makes a terrible kind of sense. She’s terrorized in her own home, with no way to escape. She has no means, no skills, nowhere else to go. Yet as Merkerson plays her, Lola’s unflinching resolve to survive outweighs her terror. When Doc returns, chastened, from his short rehabilitative hospital stay, he’s pink and pitiful, helpless as a mewling newborn, and begs Lola not to leave him.
With one look in response, Merkerson’s devastating expression takes in her present and her future, chained to a mercurial alcoholic who will descend into madness and claw his way back to temporary redemption again and again, leaving her to fend off his murderous rage and to soldier through a fake life. She walks Doc to their kitchen table and proceeds to cook for him as they glance at each other warily, pretending, again and always, that their suburban prison houses something real and nourishing.
Pressman’s wrenching production makes the realist conventions of Inge’s play critical of the very domestic story they structure. This revival is one of the most progressive realist dramas I’ve ever seen produced, not because the director deconstructed it, but because he and his cast fight their way to the horrible core of the situations it describes. They don’t blame their characters, regardless of their ethical or moral failings, but instead indict a culture that insists that heterosexual, coupled, suburban domesticity is the best way to live.
No wonder second wave American feminism asserted itself a decade after this play was first produced.
The Feminist Spectator
Thursday, January 17, 2008
THE L WORD: Season Five Begins
The L Word's fifth season began January 6th with a tepid episode full of exposition. Some of it explained the absence of last season’s key characters (the “manny” played by Dallas Roberts, now dumped and gone, who’d fallen in love with Kit and then summarily cheated on her with some low-life babysitter) and some of it didn’t (what happened to the sexually irrepressible Papi)? Written by Ilene Chaiken, the series’ creator and head producer but not its most talented scribe, the forgettable episode heralded a new low for the lesbian comic soap opera. (See the official show site at http://www.sho.com/site/lword/home.do).
Even director Angela Robinson, who usually brings a light touch and firm sense of humor to her vision of the show, couldn’t rescue the script from its burdensome task of resolving old issues and setting up new conflicts to drive this season forward. Jodi returned to LA with no explanation; Bette screwed up yet again, decorating Jodi’s new loft and demonstrating her infinite capacity to be controlling. In the show’s continuing campaign to beat Bette down, Jodi retaliated by blindfolding her lover and topping her sexually (in one of the least erotic interactions Jennifer Beals has ever performed on film).
In fact, most of the first episode’s relationships felt flat and perfunctory. Alice fretted about Tasha, watching images of the Iraq war on CNN with increasing distress, as she presumed her girlfriend had shipped out for her latest tour of duty. At the episode’s end, Tasha somehow appears at Alice’s door, still in LA, still alive, still ready and willing as Alice pulls her into the apartment, strips off her clothes, and lowers her to the floor for another desultory sex scene.
Shane immediately got into trouble, revving up this season’s sexual escapades with a realtor who had just shown her and her erstwhile girlfriend Paige a possible apartment. Shane’s inability to just say no to any pretty old thing, and her utter incapacity with the appropriately placed white lie (she can’t tell Paige she’s “in love” with her) infuriates Paige, so she sets Shane’s salon/skateboarding rink on fire. Noble, guilty, uninsured Shane refuses to press charges.
Meanwhile, Tina pined for Bette as they played house with their adorable little daughter, Angie, trying to get her enrolled in the best nursery school programs on the tony side of LA. Their pseudo-domestic moments stirred my nostalgia for the days when Bette and Tina really were a couple, flaws and all, but their tentatively rekindling interest in each other bodes well.
In one of the episode’s few highlights, Shane, Tina, and Alice visit poor Helena, who’s been thrown in jail because of her botched betting fiasco from last season. The visiting trio parade down the hall between the cells—a hilarious catwalk in which Shane flirts with the women behind bars, as though Clarice Starling had been played by an out Jodie Foster. When they meet Helena, to school her in appropriate prison decorum, the three warn her not to “drop the soap,” a tip she utterly fails to understand.
Pam Greer as Kit gets her own perp-style walk between the prison cells, doing her best Foxy Brown as she arrives to meet Helena in the visitors’ room. Kit’s instructions are more precise than the white girls’; she tells Helena to get a “daddy,” quick.
The best moment of the first episode comes as Jenny writes her screenplay for her ridiculous roman à clef, Les Girls. As Jenny rewrites history, Beals, Holloman, and Moennig act out her script in a fantasy sequence with perfect satirical irony, a winking campiness aimed directly at the viewer. The L Word itself has come to approximate Jenny’s bad writing, and the actresses seemed to be signaling that they know where it’s all headed through the flames of the show’s debacle.
But happily, Episode Two—directed by Jamie Babbit (of the lesbian films But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee fame, see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0044803/)—turned things around enough to make The L Word worth loving to hate again. The show even seemed to wink at its own self-seriousness; writer Cherien Dabis piled on rapid, richly obvious allusions to other filmic melodramas. Jenny’s new star-struck assistant, Adele, brings with her clear shades of All About Eve; it’ll be fun to watch as the obsequious side-kick develops into a threat to the entirely self-absorbed, profoundly insufferable, completely oblivious diva.
Likewise, Shane’s escapades at the wedding of the daughter of the unbelievably wealthy, fawning entrepreneur (played by Wallace Shawn, of all people) funding Jenny’s film echo with allusions to Warren Beatty’s Don Juan hairdresser in Shampoo. Shane arrives at the wedding to help put the bride’s locks in place, and winds up having sex with her, each of her bridesmaids, and finally, the mother of the bride, in a revolving door of farcical pre-matrimonial Sapphism.
Personally, I can’t see Shane’s appeal, and have to accept her as the resident lothario more on faith than on Moennig’s charisma. She’s supposed to be a hair stylist, but her own mop often looks like a rat’s nest. Moennig’s boyishness is appealing, but her flat, rail-thin body and her awkward sex scenes make her purported allure dubious. Shane goes through the sexual motions with each of her conquests in Episode Two, pumping their breasts without a hint of even fleeting desire. Then again, Warren Beatty wasn’t falling in love with his clients, either; he was servicing them, just like Shane.
Meanwhile, back in the prison showers, Helena does drop the soap and finds herself instantly accosted by two lumpy female inmates who press a knife to her beautiful long white neck. She’s saved by her cell mate, Dusty, whom Helena thinks is a vicious murderer (no doubt because the woman is butch, of color, inarticulate, and chows down the inedible prison food). Dusty thwarts the shower attack by claiming that Helena is “hers.”
When Helena and her new “daddy” wind up having sex soon after, Helena learns that Dusty’s doing time for tax fraud, not homicide, comically underlining Helena’s implicit racism. As silly as it all is, at least Rachel Shelley has settled into her performance, refining her comic timing every season. She’s given up the femme fatale role for the soubrette, and surprisingly, it works.
Bette and Jodi don’t quite make sense as a couple, but they do have art (and age) in common. As the more mature pair on The L Word, they dispense wistful, cheap wisdom. The clueless, eager Phyllis (toothsome, always game Cybill Sheperd) complains that her paramour, Joyce—played with a cocky old-fashioned butch strut by Jane Lynch—won’t get lost. Bette tells Phyllis patiently, “Some lesbians you have to break up with more than once.” Because Jodi’s deafness requires frequent translations, Bette and Jodi become The L Word's Greek chorus, commenting on the action with a eyes rolling and eyebrows arched.
There’s already plenty to be arch about this season. Tasha’s about to be investigated under the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” for active homosexuality. Alice’s liberalism clashes with her girlfriend’s patriotism; that Tasha is played by the gorgeous African American actor Rose Rollins offers a hint of the racism through which the military is populated. (A recent article in The Progressive describes how high schools in East LA are targeted for military recruitment, while white, middle-class schools elsewhere in the city never host recruiters.)
But the politics of the war and the military’s policy on gay soldiers are addressed obliquely, as one of many loosely motivating subplots. The relationship between Tasha and Alice, while sightly (Rollins has gorgeous eyes), doesn’t generate a hint of chemistry. I miss the old days, when Erin Daniels and Leisha Hailey seemed to have so much good old erotic fun.
Likewise on the political front, Max, the transman, has so far this season been relegated to the wings. He decided not to have top surgery; in this episode, he offers Phyllis and Alice a pedagogical disquisition about how some transmen don’t need surgery to feel like guys. Phyllis’s earnest naiveté about lesbianism provides an excuse for The L Word’s many flat-footed explanations about queer girl life. (“U-hauling,” Phyllis murmurs, jotting the definition in her handy notebook of lesbian lore. “Transman,” she repeats, as Max tells his tale, as if she's listening to a Berlitz tape.) Where the show takes Max’s masculinity remains to be seen; for now, he’s only an adjunct to the main story.
Regardless of their titillation value, the photos I see of The L Word cast celebrating their new season and the plot teasers I read in Entertainment Weekly and People and other magazines thrill me. I still can’t get over that the show is mainstream enough to be widely noticed, even though its very popularity is what makes it pander to the lowest common (presumed) denominator of audience taste. From what I’ve read, a subplot about female Turkish oil wrestlers (whatever that means) is coming up soon.
Waiting with bated breath,
The Feminist Spectator
Even director Angela Robinson, who usually brings a light touch and firm sense of humor to her vision of the show, couldn’t rescue the script from its burdensome task of resolving old issues and setting up new conflicts to drive this season forward. Jodi returned to LA with no explanation; Bette screwed up yet again, decorating Jodi’s new loft and demonstrating her infinite capacity to be controlling. In the show’s continuing campaign to beat Bette down, Jodi retaliated by blindfolding her lover and topping her sexually (in one of the least erotic interactions Jennifer Beals has ever performed on film).
In fact, most of the first episode’s relationships felt flat and perfunctory. Alice fretted about Tasha, watching images of the Iraq war on CNN with increasing distress, as she presumed her girlfriend had shipped out for her latest tour of duty. At the episode’s end, Tasha somehow appears at Alice’s door, still in LA, still alive, still ready and willing as Alice pulls her into the apartment, strips off her clothes, and lowers her to the floor for another desultory sex scene.
Shane immediately got into trouble, revving up this season’s sexual escapades with a realtor who had just shown her and her erstwhile girlfriend Paige a possible apartment. Shane’s inability to just say no to any pretty old thing, and her utter incapacity with the appropriately placed white lie (she can’t tell Paige she’s “in love” with her) infuriates Paige, so she sets Shane’s salon/skateboarding rink on fire. Noble, guilty, uninsured Shane refuses to press charges.
Meanwhile, Tina pined for Bette as they played house with their adorable little daughter, Angie, trying to get her enrolled in the best nursery school programs on the tony side of LA. Their pseudo-domestic moments stirred my nostalgia for the days when Bette and Tina really were a couple, flaws and all, but their tentatively rekindling interest in each other bodes well.
In one of the episode’s few highlights, Shane, Tina, and Alice visit poor Helena, who’s been thrown in jail because of her botched betting fiasco from last season. The visiting trio parade down the hall between the cells—a hilarious catwalk in which Shane flirts with the women behind bars, as though Clarice Starling had been played by an out Jodie Foster. When they meet Helena, to school her in appropriate prison decorum, the three warn her not to “drop the soap,” a tip she utterly fails to understand.
Pam Greer as Kit gets her own perp-style walk between the prison cells, doing her best Foxy Brown as she arrives to meet Helena in the visitors’ room. Kit’s instructions are more precise than the white girls’; she tells Helena to get a “daddy,” quick.
The best moment of the first episode comes as Jenny writes her screenplay for her ridiculous roman à clef, Les Girls. As Jenny rewrites history, Beals, Holloman, and Moennig act out her script in a fantasy sequence with perfect satirical irony, a winking campiness aimed directly at the viewer. The L Word itself has come to approximate Jenny’s bad writing, and the actresses seemed to be signaling that they know where it’s all headed through the flames of the show’s debacle.
But happily, Episode Two—directed by Jamie Babbit (of the lesbian films But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee fame, see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0044803/)—turned things around enough to make The L Word worth loving to hate again. The show even seemed to wink at its own self-seriousness; writer Cherien Dabis piled on rapid, richly obvious allusions to other filmic melodramas. Jenny’s new star-struck assistant, Adele, brings with her clear shades of All About Eve; it’ll be fun to watch as the obsequious side-kick develops into a threat to the entirely self-absorbed, profoundly insufferable, completely oblivious diva.
Likewise, Shane’s escapades at the wedding of the daughter of the unbelievably wealthy, fawning entrepreneur (played by Wallace Shawn, of all people) funding Jenny’s film echo with allusions to Warren Beatty’s Don Juan hairdresser in Shampoo. Shane arrives at the wedding to help put the bride’s locks in place, and winds up having sex with her, each of her bridesmaids, and finally, the mother of the bride, in a revolving door of farcical pre-matrimonial Sapphism.
Personally, I can’t see Shane’s appeal, and have to accept her as the resident lothario more on faith than on Moennig’s charisma. She’s supposed to be a hair stylist, but her own mop often looks like a rat’s nest. Moennig’s boyishness is appealing, but her flat, rail-thin body and her awkward sex scenes make her purported allure dubious. Shane goes through the sexual motions with each of her conquests in Episode Two, pumping their breasts without a hint of even fleeting desire. Then again, Warren Beatty wasn’t falling in love with his clients, either; he was servicing them, just like Shane.
Meanwhile, back in the prison showers, Helena does drop the soap and finds herself instantly accosted by two lumpy female inmates who press a knife to her beautiful long white neck. She’s saved by her cell mate, Dusty, whom Helena thinks is a vicious murderer (no doubt because the woman is butch, of color, inarticulate, and chows down the inedible prison food). Dusty thwarts the shower attack by claiming that Helena is “hers.”
When Helena and her new “daddy” wind up having sex soon after, Helena learns that Dusty’s doing time for tax fraud, not homicide, comically underlining Helena’s implicit racism. As silly as it all is, at least Rachel Shelley has settled into her performance, refining her comic timing every season. She’s given up the femme fatale role for the soubrette, and surprisingly, it works.
Bette and Jodi don’t quite make sense as a couple, but they do have art (and age) in common. As the more mature pair on The L Word, they dispense wistful, cheap wisdom. The clueless, eager Phyllis (toothsome, always game Cybill Sheperd) complains that her paramour, Joyce—played with a cocky old-fashioned butch strut by Jane Lynch—won’t get lost. Bette tells Phyllis patiently, “Some lesbians you have to break up with more than once.” Because Jodi’s deafness requires frequent translations, Bette and Jodi become The L Word's Greek chorus, commenting on the action with a eyes rolling and eyebrows arched.
There’s already plenty to be arch about this season. Tasha’s about to be investigated under the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” for active homosexuality. Alice’s liberalism clashes with her girlfriend’s patriotism; that Tasha is played by the gorgeous African American actor Rose Rollins offers a hint of the racism through which the military is populated. (A recent article in The Progressive describes how high schools in East LA are targeted for military recruitment, while white, middle-class schools elsewhere in the city never host recruiters.)
But the politics of the war and the military’s policy on gay soldiers are addressed obliquely, as one of many loosely motivating subplots. The relationship between Tasha and Alice, while sightly (Rollins has gorgeous eyes), doesn’t generate a hint of chemistry. I miss the old days, when Erin Daniels and Leisha Hailey seemed to have so much good old erotic fun.
Likewise on the political front, Max, the transman, has so far this season been relegated to the wings. He decided not to have top surgery; in this episode, he offers Phyllis and Alice a pedagogical disquisition about how some transmen don’t need surgery to feel like guys. Phyllis’s earnest naiveté about lesbianism provides an excuse for The L Word’s many flat-footed explanations about queer girl life. (“U-hauling,” Phyllis murmurs, jotting the definition in her handy notebook of lesbian lore. “Transman,” she repeats, as Max tells his tale, as if she's listening to a Berlitz tape.) Where the show takes Max’s masculinity remains to be seen; for now, he’s only an adjunct to the main story.
Regardless of their titillation value, the photos I see of The L Word cast celebrating their new season and the plot teasers I read in Entertainment Weekly and People and other magazines thrill me. I still can’t get over that the show is mainstream enough to be widely noticed, even though its very popularity is what makes it pander to the lowest common (presumed) denominator of audience taste. From what I’ve read, a subplot about female Turkish oil wrestlers (whatever that means) is coming up soon.
Waiting with bated breath,
The Feminist Spectator
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Desert Hearts Forever
In a pique of nostalgia, I watched Donna Deitch’s lesbian classic Desert Hearts (1985) again the other night, then trolled on line to find out that it’s recently been re-released as a “vintage” DVD with additional footage and cast interviews. In fact, YouTube now features footage of Deitch shooting the film’s love scene (famous as the first on mainstream film to treat lesbian sexuality seriously). Various interviews with Deitch and stars Patricia Charbonneau and Helen Shaver are also available in short clips on line. And in an odd coincidence, the same evening I watched the DVD, I turned on a (thankfully) new episode of Law and Order: SVU to find that Charbonneau was among the guest stars and that Shaver had directed. A cosmic link indeed, and nice to see that they’re still working together after cooking up all that on-screen chemistry 23 years ago.
Meanwhile, the film itself holds up very well as the prototypical lesbian coming-out comedy/melodrama. Shaver plays Columbia English professor Vivian Bell, who arrives in Reno, Nevada, from New York for a no-fault divorce in 1959. She emerges slightly less than fresh off her train, wearing a glorious fitted 1950s-style suit that Shaver carries off, along with the rest of her costume wardrobe, with great style and beauty. Picked up by the alcoholic ranch-owner Frances (Audra Lindley, vivid as the inadvertently butch rancher), Bell reluctantly settles in to the slow cadence of life on the ranch as she waits the compulsory six weeks for her divorce to be final.
I’d forgotten how beautiful Reno appears in the film. The red soil, rolling hills, and desperately blue sky practically blind the bookish Vivian and immediately lure the viewer into the story. One of the film’s pleasures is watching Shaver open up to the environment, as well as to the idiosyncrasies of life on the ranch. While the other visiting divorcées wait for their paperwork by gossiping about their soon-to-be-exes, Vivian writes lectures at her desk and walks alone in the chaparral. Only Cay, Frances’s unofficially adopted daughter, draws her out of her head and introduces her to sensual pleasures unimagined in Vivian’s old life with her well-respected scholarly husband.
Cay Rivers offered Charbonneau her first film role, and it shows. Although she’s physically stunning, with rich dark hair that frames a gamin face, and a lithe, athletic figure she shows off to seductive effect, Charbonneau’s acting is earnest but two-dimensional. Sometimes, her naiveté works for the role; she’s supposed to be 25, ten years younger than Shaver’s Vivian, and that puppy-dog panting affect she adopts to chase after the older woman comes off convincingly. In the more serious scenes, Charbonneau’s acting deficits cost the film more; her line readings, especially in that infamous sex scene, only underline the film’s melodrama.
Shaver, on the other hand, finds deeper levels and more subtle, nuanced emotional responses in Vivian Bell, developing a portrayal of pain, confusion, and longing that makes the actress herself irresistibly sexy. When the film was released in the mid-80s, some of my lesbian friends laughed off the film’s sex as unrealistic and too “straight.” But I continue to think that Shaver and Deitch (and Charbonneau) achieved a moving understanding of Vivian’s sexual awakening with Cay. Shaver’s face registers the slightest shivers of desire, and fear mingled with excitement shudder through her at Cay’s touch. Cay’s coltish advances land awkwardly, but Shaver as Vivian feels each one as a physical tremor of Richter scale import.
Even in more mundane scenes, Shaver peels off Vivian’s protective layers in impeccable emotional detail. Deitch shoots montages of Vivian’s life on Frances’s ranch and her growing attraction to Cay. The first time she smiles in the film, Shaver’s beauty is sudden and shocking. Although the professor who lets down her hair is a narrative stereotype, in Desert Hearts Shaver makes it fresh and somehow true. Trying on western-style clothing with Cay becomes an occasion for hilarity; rolling dice in the casino establishes new horizons of chance and luck. Shaver moves through it all with an affecting wonder, her beauty looser and more unwittingly seductive in each scene. Watching Shaver open Vivian to her future continues to offer real viewing pleasure.
Desert Hearts documents some of mainstream films’ first strong female friendships, in addition to its first lesbian affair, which makes it as remarkable for its feminism as it is for its sexuality. Deitch recreates Reno in 1959 as a woman-centered world. Cay’s friend Silver (Andra Akers), who works with her at the casino where Cay is a change-girl, is a failed singer turned card dealer about to marry a good Italian man from New Jersey. Silver is both strong and fragile as she embarks on her own romance, and her friendship with Cay is full of real warmth, affection, and respect. A bathtub scene, in which Cay and Silver loll together in bubbles while Silver’s fiancée brings them martinis, evokes girlfriends’ physical closeness and the erotic connections that bubble between them, even when they remain platonic.
Likewise, Cay and Frances’s relationship rides its own complicated erotic currents. Cay’s father was Frances’s married lover; when he died, and Cay’s mother abandoned the girl, Frances took her in, making Cay both a surrogate daughter and a constant reminder of her doomed romantic affair. Frances loves Cay for how she inspires her memories, but her jealousy over Cay’s sex life keeps their relationship tense. Still, the two women talk in bed like girlfriends, and enact the intensity of their relationship through a casual but volatile physical intimacy.
Nancy Cooper’s script portrays Vivian as a stereotypically aloof, abstract, intellectual whom the other women both envy and scorn. Cay is a sculptor, the most physical of artists, who molds things (clay and obviously women) with her hands. Vivian’s and Cay’s orbits would barely intersect outside the bedroom in which they find solace in each other, and Reno is worlds apart from Manhattan. But Desert Heart’s utopian fantasy is that these two can make a go of it romantically; perhaps the film remains a perennial favorite because Deitch makes just that leap of faith.
Rather than chalking her experience up to divorce-inspired madness, Vivian invites Cay to come to New York, to try out a different way of life, to test the potential of escaping from a Nevada in which she’s singular and illegible as a lesbian (one of the ranch hands, watching various women come and go from Cay’s cottage, mutters, “I don’t know how you get all that traffic without no equipment”).
Cay’s free-spirited generosity lets her laugh off such comments, and her courage, as a lesbian in 1950s rural northwest America before Stonewall, is palpable as she moves through the film as out as she can possibly be in such an environment at such an historical moment. But Vivian invites her to escape, to come to a city where together, they could participate in the crucible of feminist and lesbian sexual revolution in the decade just ahead. Vivian’s 11th hour offer, made from the steps of a moving train, gives not only Cay but the film a glowing sense of hope and possibility.
It helps, of course, that Patsy Cline and other country western crooners grace the Desert Hearts sound track. Schmaltzy doesn’t begin to describe the film, but Deitch manages to both embrace and transcend the romantic style by choosing background ballads like Cline’s “Crazy,” then tempering it with satirical visual details like the rodeo scenes sewn into Frances’s leather couch.
The director respects the kitschy charms of 1950s Reno, dignifies her female characters’ ambivalence and heartache, shades them all with the steely resolve necessary to be strong women before Second Wave American feminism, directs a steamy lesbian sex scene, and persuades us that this odd couple of misfit artist/intellectuals might have a chance to be happy together.
Prior to the 1980s, lesbians in film typically committed suicide or, if they stayed alive, ended their narrative trajectories humiliated and alone. A short 23 years ago, Desert Hearts broke important new ground. I remember seeing the film for the first time in 1985 on the Upper West Side of New York when it opened, amazed at what it felt like to follow the travails of a lesbian character, and Cay and Vivian’s dawning attraction, and their consummated sexuality in a widely marketed, Sundance-sanctioned film at a mainstream cinema. Every critical faculty I’d ever exercised waited for me at the popcorn stand while I watched, completely cathected, jaw dropped, eyes misted.
When my then-partner and I had a drag down fight some days later, I ran back to the theatre by myself to watch the movie again, as I could think of no better way to make myself feel less alone. Just like many other women I’ve now watched online attest, Desert Hearts meant the world to me then, and captures my heart even now.
For a classic film in which same sex attraction and love propels women toward each other and into new lives of greater social and emotional potential, Desert Hearts remains unparalleled.
Here’s to the late, great, lesbian novelist Jane Rule for first telling the story,
The Feminist Spectator
Meanwhile, the film itself holds up very well as the prototypical lesbian coming-out comedy/melodrama. Shaver plays Columbia English professor Vivian Bell, who arrives in Reno, Nevada, from New York for a no-fault divorce in 1959. She emerges slightly less than fresh off her train, wearing a glorious fitted 1950s-style suit that Shaver carries off, along with the rest of her costume wardrobe, with great style and beauty. Picked up by the alcoholic ranch-owner Frances (Audra Lindley, vivid as the inadvertently butch rancher), Bell reluctantly settles in to the slow cadence of life on the ranch as she waits the compulsory six weeks for her divorce to be final.
I’d forgotten how beautiful Reno appears in the film. The red soil, rolling hills, and desperately blue sky practically blind the bookish Vivian and immediately lure the viewer into the story. One of the film’s pleasures is watching Shaver open up to the environment, as well as to the idiosyncrasies of life on the ranch. While the other visiting divorcées wait for their paperwork by gossiping about their soon-to-be-exes, Vivian writes lectures at her desk and walks alone in the chaparral. Only Cay, Frances’s unofficially adopted daughter, draws her out of her head and introduces her to sensual pleasures unimagined in Vivian’s old life with her well-respected scholarly husband.
Cay Rivers offered Charbonneau her first film role, and it shows. Although she’s physically stunning, with rich dark hair that frames a gamin face, and a lithe, athletic figure she shows off to seductive effect, Charbonneau’s acting is earnest but two-dimensional. Sometimes, her naiveté works for the role; she’s supposed to be 25, ten years younger than Shaver’s Vivian, and that puppy-dog panting affect she adopts to chase after the older woman comes off convincingly. In the more serious scenes, Charbonneau’s acting deficits cost the film more; her line readings, especially in that infamous sex scene, only underline the film’s melodrama.
Shaver, on the other hand, finds deeper levels and more subtle, nuanced emotional responses in Vivian Bell, developing a portrayal of pain, confusion, and longing that makes the actress herself irresistibly sexy. When the film was released in the mid-80s, some of my lesbian friends laughed off the film’s sex as unrealistic and too “straight.” But I continue to think that Shaver and Deitch (and Charbonneau) achieved a moving understanding of Vivian’s sexual awakening with Cay. Shaver’s face registers the slightest shivers of desire, and fear mingled with excitement shudder through her at Cay’s touch. Cay’s coltish advances land awkwardly, but Shaver as Vivian feels each one as a physical tremor of Richter scale import.
Even in more mundane scenes, Shaver peels off Vivian’s protective layers in impeccable emotional detail. Deitch shoots montages of Vivian’s life on Frances’s ranch and her growing attraction to Cay. The first time she smiles in the film, Shaver’s beauty is sudden and shocking. Although the professor who lets down her hair is a narrative stereotype, in Desert Hearts Shaver makes it fresh and somehow true. Trying on western-style clothing with Cay becomes an occasion for hilarity; rolling dice in the casino establishes new horizons of chance and luck. Shaver moves through it all with an affecting wonder, her beauty looser and more unwittingly seductive in each scene. Watching Shaver open Vivian to her future continues to offer real viewing pleasure.
Desert Hearts documents some of mainstream films’ first strong female friendships, in addition to its first lesbian affair, which makes it as remarkable for its feminism as it is for its sexuality. Deitch recreates Reno in 1959 as a woman-centered world. Cay’s friend Silver (Andra Akers), who works with her at the casino where Cay is a change-girl, is a failed singer turned card dealer about to marry a good Italian man from New Jersey. Silver is both strong and fragile as she embarks on her own romance, and her friendship with Cay is full of real warmth, affection, and respect. A bathtub scene, in which Cay and Silver loll together in bubbles while Silver’s fiancée brings them martinis, evokes girlfriends’ physical closeness and the erotic connections that bubble between them, even when they remain platonic.
Likewise, Cay and Frances’s relationship rides its own complicated erotic currents. Cay’s father was Frances’s married lover; when he died, and Cay’s mother abandoned the girl, Frances took her in, making Cay both a surrogate daughter and a constant reminder of her doomed romantic affair. Frances loves Cay for how she inspires her memories, but her jealousy over Cay’s sex life keeps their relationship tense. Still, the two women talk in bed like girlfriends, and enact the intensity of their relationship through a casual but volatile physical intimacy.
Nancy Cooper’s script portrays Vivian as a stereotypically aloof, abstract, intellectual whom the other women both envy and scorn. Cay is a sculptor, the most physical of artists, who molds things (clay and obviously women) with her hands. Vivian’s and Cay’s orbits would barely intersect outside the bedroom in which they find solace in each other, and Reno is worlds apart from Manhattan. But Desert Heart’s utopian fantasy is that these two can make a go of it romantically; perhaps the film remains a perennial favorite because Deitch makes just that leap of faith.
Rather than chalking her experience up to divorce-inspired madness, Vivian invites Cay to come to New York, to try out a different way of life, to test the potential of escaping from a Nevada in which she’s singular and illegible as a lesbian (one of the ranch hands, watching various women come and go from Cay’s cottage, mutters, “I don’t know how you get all that traffic without no equipment”).
Cay’s free-spirited generosity lets her laugh off such comments, and her courage, as a lesbian in 1950s rural northwest America before Stonewall, is palpable as she moves through the film as out as she can possibly be in such an environment at such an historical moment. But Vivian invites her to escape, to come to a city where together, they could participate in the crucible of feminist and lesbian sexual revolution in the decade just ahead. Vivian’s 11th hour offer, made from the steps of a moving train, gives not only Cay but the film a glowing sense of hope and possibility.
It helps, of course, that Patsy Cline and other country western crooners grace the Desert Hearts sound track. Schmaltzy doesn’t begin to describe the film, but Deitch manages to both embrace and transcend the romantic style by choosing background ballads like Cline’s “Crazy,” then tempering it with satirical visual details like the rodeo scenes sewn into Frances’s leather couch.
The director respects the kitschy charms of 1950s Reno, dignifies her female characters’ ambivalence and heartache, shades them all with the steely resolve necessary to be strong women before Second Wave American feminism, directs a steamy lesbian sex scene, and persuades us that this odd couple of misfit artist/intellectuals might have a chance to be happy together.
Prior to the 1980s, lesbians in film typically committed suicide or, if they stayed alive, ended their narrative trajectories humiliated and alone. A short 23 years ago, Desert Hearts broke important new ground. I remember seeing the film for the first time in 1985 on the Upper West Side of New York when it opened, amazed at what it felt like to follow the travails of a lesbian character, and Cay and Vivian’s dawning attraction, and their consummated sexuality in a widely marketed, Sundance-sanctioned film at a mainstream cinema. Every critical faculty I’d ever exercised waited for me at the popcorn stand while I watched, completely cathected, jaw dropped, eyes misted.
When my then-partner and I had a drag down fight some days later, I ran back to the theatre by myself to watch the movie again, as I could think of no better way to make myself feel less alone. Just like many other women I’ve now watched online attest, Desert Hearts meant the world to me then, and captures my heart even now.
For a classic film in which same sex attraction and love propels women toward each other and into new lives of greater social and emotional potential, Desert Hearts remains unparalleled.
Here’s to the late, great, lesbian novelist Jane Rule for first telling the story,
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Juno: Teen Feminism
Juno is a refreshingly smart movie about an articulate, precocious young person with a clear sense of herself and her nascent place in the world. Written by the also precocious new screenwriter Diablo Cody, the film stands as a corrective to all the mass-marketed teen movies that engage the tired, ideologically destructive story of girls’ inhumanity to girls. Cody paints instead a portrait of a kid at a young age whose bon mots stand with the best of them, offering an ironic but warm, wise but not at all weary view of her world’s minor calamities and major achievements (see http://www.foxsearchlight.com/juno/).
Juno resembles My So-Called Life for the 21st century, as Juno (the multiple awards-nominated Ellen Page, delivering a brilliant, witty, unself-conscious performance as the calm and collected 16-year-old) comments in a sophisticated-beyond-her-years voice-over on her inadvertent pregnancy and her plan to give the baby to a childless yuppie couple she finds in the local penny-saver circular. The slightly off-kilter situations (who, after all, would arrange to find her offspring adoptive parents in the small-town equivalent of craigslist.com?) deliver an affectionate, respectful view of the travails of a rather ordinary (if extremely wry, kind, and generous) cobbled-together family coming to terms with the indiscretions of their oldest child.
When Juno delivers the news to her father and step-mother, instead of reacting with the disapprobation popular culture has lead us to expect of conventional parents, the couple resign themselves to helping Juno follow through on her plan without judgment. Her father is played with great warmth, forgiveness, and verve by J.K. Simmons, a terrific character actor who’s turned in detailed, knowing, and realistic portraits on everything from HBO’s Oz—as a fascist inmate—and Law and Order: SVU—as the observant police shrink—to The Closer—as Brenda’s rather hapless superior and one-time lover. The sublime Allison Janney plays Juno’s dog-loving step-mom with sardonic wit and empathy (this role is a happy corrective to the catatonic wife/mother she played in Alan Ball’s American Beauty some years back). She delivers one of the film’s best monologues when she berates the prim, judgmental ultra-sound technician who comments on Juno’s pregnancy. Although the two aren’t happy about it (after her confession, they privately admit that they’d been hoping she was on hard drugs or had been expelled from school), and although they wonder why she’s chosen not to have an abortion, they’re willing to support Juno’s choice.
The politics of choice in Juno are rather complicated. While the movie’s less conventional take on teenagers works very well, Cody and Reitman could be more progressive in how they address abortion. Juno plans an abortion first thing, but on her way into the clinic, a mopey school friend holding a lonely picket sign and demonstrating alone in the parking lot informs her in passing that her embryo has fingernails. The image resonates too loudly for Juno to go through with the procedure. Her reconsideration seems a bit too easy, and lets the film avoid a frank confrontation with abortion as a real choice.
On the other hand, before she backs out, Juno finds the abortion clinic front desk staffed by an extremely pierced young woman whose apathy and attitude renders it common-place instead of controversial. The receptionist’s response to Juno’s appearance makes going for an abortion as mundane as picking up a packet of birth control pills. Juno chooses to deliver her baby not from some religiously inspired moral epiphany, but because she just can’t shake the image of those growing fingernails on the tadpole she carries.
Where other teen girl flicks set up obvious conflicts between the cool kids and the nerds, Juno forgoes the obvious to imagine high school life on a more level playing field, in which even the heterosexual gender tensions are more humor-filled than angst-ridden. Controlled by her hormones and teenage curiosity, Juno seduces her best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera), distracting him from running practice and track events. Neither kid is conventionally cool; Juno is wordy and ironic without being nihilist or superior, and Bleeker is inarticulate but sweet, masking his feelings with the armor of his color-coordinated, team-branded running shorts and sweat bands.
Loving her with a hang-dog, puppy-eyed sweetness and vulnerable innocence, he haplessly follows Juno’s lead and her advice, never questioning that her choice about the baby (or their relationship) are hers alone to make. Girls rule, but boys don’t drool here—they’re thoughtful, kind, and supportive (underlining, perhaps, the film’s fairy-tale effect).
Juno’s best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), also thwarts teen-flick conventions. Leah is a cheerleader, but rather than hanging with jocks (who make virtually no appearance in Juno), Leah crushes out on her teachers (including a dowdy male English teacher). She’s Juno’s stalwart companion, by her side when Juno tells her parents she’s pregnant, and holding her hand through her ultra-sound and her delivery. Leah plays Pancho to Juno’s Quixote, admiring her plans, eager to help, along for the ride. Leah might be pretty and athletic and Juno might be artsy and intellectual, but in this film, their differences don’t prevent a fast friendship.
The yuppie couple Juno chooses to raise her child live in an anonymous, cookie-cutter subdivision dripping with wealth and privilege, which intimidates Juno and her heat-and-cooling-system-maintenance-man father not at all. They drive their outmoded royal blue van into the yuppie couple’s driveway and march to the door for their first meeting, in which Juno proceeds to set the terms of arrangement to the couple’s surprised and rattled lawyer.
The Lorings (Vanessa, played by a radiant and sad Jennifer Garner, and Mark, played by an ambivalent and sad Jason Bateman) worry that Juno will back out of the deal, an idea that never occurs to Juno (in another of the film’s refusals to follow traditional narrative tracks). Instead, their own tenuous bond breaks during Juno’s pregnancy, as Mark decides to follow his own dreams instead of supporting his wife’s romantic race toward her nesting destiny.
Juno could have resolved in a number of conservative ways, and could have painted the baby’s potential futures in several colors of moral judgment. Instead, the screenplay resists tradition and follows its complexly-drawn main character’s nuanced heart, arriving at the more progressive of possible endings without sacrificing the edgy, humor-tinged realism in which it trades.
Director Jason Reitman films Juno with the same wry comic touch that infuses the screenplay, selecting details in each scene that complement screenwriter Cody’s fusillade of smart words. Critics have unanimously remarked on Juno’s hamburger phone, with which she calls Leah and the abortion clinic. But the film is also littered with other visual comments and treats, like the pictures of beloved dogs that Juno’s step-mom cuts out of magazines; the ballerina outfit Juno’s step-sister “Liberty Belle” wears out of the house when the family rushes to the hospital after Juno’s water breaks; the complex piece of machinery on which her father works, spread out across the kitchen table; the dessert-named paint colors Vanessa experiments with on the walls of the baby’s nursery; the guitars and sound equipment that litter Mark’s room, his chaotic sanctuary from the ordered but empty, monied adult world his wife so meticulously creates; and even the gold- and rust-colored running outfits that adorn the long-distance boys running team, decorated with their “Dancing Elks” team name, all of which lend Juno its warmth and richly observed character.
For all Juno’s smart bravado, she’s ultimately still a teenager, a state of bliss (if not innocence) captured in the film’s last scene, when she flies out of her house onto her bicycle with a guitar strapped to her back to pedal off to visit her friend.
A movie like this gives me hope that popular culture can deliver more complicated stories about choice, about girls, and about the ethical ways we choose to live, without sacrificing humor and depth. Some critics call Juno post-feminist; I’d just call it feminist.
The Feminist Spectator
Juno resembles My So-Called Life for the 21st century, as Juno (the multiple awards-nominated Ellen Page, delivering a brilliant, witty, unself-conscious performance as the calm and collected 16-year-old) comments in a sophisticated-beyond-her-years voice-over on her inadvertent pregnancy and her plan to give the baby to a childless yuppie couple she finds in the local penny-saver circular. The slightly off-kilter situations (who, after all, would arrange to find her offspring adoptive parents in the small-town equivalent of craigslist.com?) deliver an affectionate, respectful view of the travails of a rather ordinary (if extremely wry, kind, and generous) cobbled-together family coming to terms with the indiscretions of their oldest child.
When Juno delivers the news to her father and step-mother, instead of reacting with the disapprobation popular culture has lead us to expect of conventional parents, the couple resign themselves to helping Juno follow through on her plan without judgment. Her father is played with great warmth, forgiveness, and verve by J.K. Simmons, a terrific character actor who’s turned in detailed, knowing, and realistic portraits on everything from HBO’s Oz—as a fascist inmate—and Law and Order: SVU—as the observant police shrink—to The Closer—as Brenda’s rather hapless superior and one-time lover. The sublime Allison Janney plays Juno’s dog-loving step-mom with sardonic wit and empathy (this role is a happy corrective to the catatonic wife/mother she played in Alan Ball’s American Beauty some years back). She delivers one of the film’s best monologues when she berates the prim, judgmental ultra-sound technician who comments on Juno’s pregnancy. Although the two aren’t happy about it (after her confession, they privately admit that they’d been hoping she was on hard drugs or had been expelled from school), and although they wonder why she’s chosen not to have an abortion, they’re willing to support Juno’s choice.
The politics of choice in Juno are rather complicated. While the movie’s less conventional take on teenagers works very well, Cody and Reitman could be more progressive in how they address abortion. Juno plans an abortion first thing, but on her way into the clinic, a mopey school friend holding a lonely picket sign and demonstrating alone in the parking lot informs her in passing that her embryo has fingernails. The image resonates too loudly for Juno to go through with the procedure. Her reconsideration seems a bit too easy, and lets the film avoid a frank confrontation with abortion as a real choice.
On the other hand, before she backs out, Juno finds the abortion clinic front desk staffed by an extremely pierced young woman whose apathy and attitude renders it common-place instead of controversial. The receptionist’s response to Juno’s appearance makes going for an abortion as mundane as picking up a packet of birth control pills. Juno chooses to deliver her baby not from some religiously inspired moral epiphany, but because she just can’t shake the image of those growing fingernails on the tadpole she carries.
Where other teen girl flicks set up obvious conflicts between the cool kids and the nerds, Juno forgoes the obvious to imagine high school life on a more level playing field, in which even the heterosexual gender tensions are more humor-filled than angst-ridden. Controlled by her hormones and teenage curiosity, Juno seduces her best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera), distracting him from running practice and track events. Neither kid is conventionally cool; Juno is wordy and ironic without being nihilist or superior, and Bleeker is inarticulate but sweet, masking his feelings with the armor of his color-coordinated, team-branded running shorts and sweat bands.
Loving her with a hang-dog, puppy-eyed sweetness and vulnerable innocence, he haplessly follows Juno’s lead and her advice, never questioning that her choice about the baby (or their relationship) are hers alone to make. Girls rule, but boys don’t drool here—they’re thoughtful, kind, and supportive (underlining, perhaps, the film’s fairy-tale effect).
Juno’s best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), also thwarts teen-flick conventions. Leah is a cheerleader, but rather than hanging with jocks (who make virtually no appearance in Juno), Leah crushes out on her teachers (including a dowdy male English teacher). She’s Juno’s stalwart companion, by her side when Juno tells her parents she’s pregnant, and holding her hand through her ultra-sound and her delivery. Leah plays Pancho to Juno’s Quixote, admiring her plans, eager to help, along for the ride. Leah might be pretty and athletic and Juno might be artsy and intellectual, but in this film, their differences don’t prevent a fast friendship.
The yuppie couple Juno chooses to raise her child live in an anonymous, cookie-cutter subdivision dripping with wealth and privilege, which intimidates Juno and her heat-and-cooling-system-maintenance-man father not at all. They drive their outmoded royal blue van into the yuppie couple’s driveway and march to the door for their first meeting, in which Juno proceeds to set the terms of arrangement to the couple’s surprised and rattled lawyer.
The Lorings (Vanessa, played by a radiant and sad Jennifer Garner, and Mark, played by an ambivalent and sad Jason Bateman) worry that Juno will back out of the deal, an idea that never occurs to Juno (in another of the film’s refusals to follow traditional narrative tracks). Instead, their own tenuous bond breaks during Juno’s pregnancy, as Mark decides to follow his own dreams instead of supporting his wife’s romantic race toward her nesting destiny.
Juno could have resolved in a number of conservative ways, and could have painted the baby’s potential futures in several colors of moral judgment. Instead, the screenplay resists tradition and follows its complexly-drawn main character’s nuanced heart, arriving at the more progressive of possible endings without sacrificing the edgy, humor-tinged realism in which it trades.
Director Jason Reitman films Juno with the same wry comic touch that infuses the screenplay, selecting details in each scene that complement screenwriter Cody’s fusillade of smart words. Critics have unanimously remarked on Juno’s hamburger phone, with which she calls Leah and the abortion clinic. But the film is also littered with other visual comments and treats, like the pictures of beloved dogs that Juno’s step-mom cuts out of magazines; the ballerina outfit Juno’s step-sister “Liberty Belle” wears out of the house when the family rushes to the hospital after Juno’s water breaks; the complex piece of machinery on which her father works, spread out across the kitchen table; the dessert-named paint colors Vanessa experiments with on the walls of the baby’s nursery; the guitars and sound equipment that litter Mark’s room, his chaotic sanctuary from the ordered but empty, monied adult world his wife so meticulously creates; and even the gold- and rust-colored running outfits that adorn the long-distance boys running team, decorated with their “Dancing Elks” team name, all of which lend Juno its warmth and richly observed character.
For all Juno’s smart bravado, she’s ultimately still a teenager, a state of bliss (if not innocence) captured in the film’s last scene, when she flies out of her house onto her bicycle with a guitar strapped to her back to pedal off to visit her friend.
A movie like this gives me hope that popular culture can deliver more complicated stories about choice, about girls, and about the ethical ways we choose to live, without sacrificing humor and depth. Some critics call Juno post-feminist; I’d just call it feminist.
The Feminist Spectator
Monday, December 31, 2007
Once: More with Feeling
Once is a lovely independent film (mentioned in several Best Films of 2007 lists) that tells a simple, affecting story of two people who find each other through music, love each other and what they express, and mutually, wordlessly agree to follow the path their lives have already established (see www.foxsearchlight.com/once). Their choices take them away from each other, yet leave them with the poignant, wistful residue of their musical intimacy and affection.
Named only “Guy” and “Girl,” as though they’re an archetypal heterosexual couple playing out a tale that’s both mythic and utterly, appealingly ordinary, the couple is played by non-actors in simple and appealing performances. Both performers—Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who were friends before filming began—are actually musicians, an appropriate casting choice, since music is what unites them and drives the film.
Writer/director John Carney is also a musician, whose understanding of how music moves people suffuses his unobtrusive filmmaking. Shot with mostly hand-held, low tech cameras in natural light situations, Carney paints the movie with an atmospheric earnestness that enhances the casual pleasure of the couple’s relationship.
Once feels like a casual documentary recording of a few weeks in the life of an Irish street musician and the young Czech immigrant to Dublin who’s attracted to his music when she hears him playing on a deserted street in a commercial area at night. During the day, the guy panders to the crowd he hopes will fill his open guitar case, but at night, he takes advantage of the flattering acoustics of his chosen alley (between a Laura Ashley store and another boutique) to howl his own music, filled with the heartache and ambivalence of his girlfriend’s recent sexual betrayal.
Girl is attracted by something she mutual hears in his lyrics, something primal, unguarded, and familiar in his tone, in the way he closes his eyes when he sings, and later, in the way his battered guitar seems an extension of himself, whether slung from a strap around his neck or carried like a talisman in a nylon case on his back.
To support his music habit, Guy works in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop, a fortuitous coincidence that Girl exploits by asking if he can fix her broken machine. The visually charming first few scenes follow the couple through Dublin streets as she pulls the canister cleaner along by its hose.
Carney establishes the cozy, quotidian domesticity of the girl’s life, which she shares in a small, cramped apartment with her two-year-old daughter and her widowed mother, who barely speaks English, but sews continually and cooks heartily.
The girl and her mother share their television—which she proudly tells Guy is the only set in their apartment building—with various young men who cram together on their couch to watch soccer and soap operas. Carney films these scenes, too, like home movies with non-actors, which gives them a guileless, irresistibly sweetness.
Guy and Girl’s mutual loneliness and their love for music draw them together. She drags him to a music store where the generous proprietor lets her play the piano when the shop isn’t crowded. Though they barely know each other, and though her English is accented with her Eastern European origins, they speak the common music of language. He talks her through his song’s chord changes and transitions, which she absorbs without a question, and they play a lovely duet, their voices blending beautifully. Their mutual respect and understanding, as well as the pure joy of making music together, shade their expressions.
Early on in the film, Guy makes a casual sexual pass, inviting Girl to spend the night with him. She’s offended for reasons that become clear only when she reveals that she’s married to a man who stayed behind in the Czech Republic. She feels emotionally as well as geographically far from her husband, and intimates that he doesn’t understand her music or her needs.
Guy, too, struggles with his feelings for his absent lover; she’s moved to London after betraying him with another man. All of his songs seem written for her, and all of Girl’s songs seem addressed to her husband. Yet in their partners’ absence, the couple’s music seems more and more to speak to one another, as their intimacy and affection grows.
The two settle into a warm friendship that begins to more gradually take on erotic overtones. He takes her to a dinner party where a motley assembly of people eat and drink and finally set aside their plates and pull out instruments, crowding around the makeshift kitchen table to strum guitars, bow violins, pick at basses, and sing to music that expresses something communal and personal yet public and urgent for them all.
Although Guy is older, Girl is savvier, and her street smarts and precociousness clearly helps her and her family survive a working class existence with few creature comforts. When Guy decides to make a demo CD, Girl negotiates the studio rental at a bargain price. To secure financing, they visit a loan officer, watching carefully as he listens to their rehearsal tape. The interview ends when the officer borrows Guy’s ubiquitous guitar and serenades them with his own music. In this utopian world, everyone is sympathetic to artists; everyone, in fact, is an artist, committed to supporting one another and their dreams.
Guy invites three fellow street musicians to join him and the girl as his band for his studio session, communicating with them in the same musician-speak that’s the film’s lingua franca. The five hole up in the rented recording studio with a reluctant hired engineer, whose initial sneer turns to more than grudging respect once he hears them play. A montage demonstrates that once again, music connects them all in a proto-familial group of support and affection.
The girl’s mother and daughter join them, bringing food and companionship during a break; they play together easily, with dedication and commitment, each one a part of the transformative whole. At the end of the rigorous few days, they pile into a car to hear how the CD sounds outside the studio, and wind up playing Frisbee at the beach, chasing each other as the music they’ve just created together provides the warm background.
Once is filled with subsidiary characters, a large cast of non-actors who comfortably, unobtrusively, convincingly fill out the frame. The guy’s father is a singular, supportive presence; the two of them work together in the vacuum repair shop like surgeons in an operating room, the son handing the father his tools with the long familiarity of an assistant who can predict the older man’s needs.
Each of the film’s characters is named for who or what they are and nothing else. In addition to “Guy” and “Girl,” the others are “guys on the stoop,” “guys watching television,” “mother,” “daughter,” and “old woman on the bus,” ordinary people graced here by sharing the music being made around them.
Once is a generous, humanist film, in which art lets people forge a connection, however brief and tenuous, that enhances their lives. Music makes them generous and kind with one another and lets them feel their lives in all their poignant pain and happiness. Singing and playing together becomes a model for a collective, utopian “as if.”
The film dignifies the ordinary without romanticizing it. What could be sentimental and sappy culminates instead as moving and persuasive, a slice of lives that remind us of how good our own can be when we listen for the lyrics and let ourselves be transported by the melody.
Happily singing to the soundtrack,
The Feminist Spectator
Named only “Guy” and “Girl,” as though they’re an archetypal heterosexual couple playing out a tale that’s both mythic and utterly, appealingly ordinary, the couple is played by non-actors in simple and appealing performances. Both performers—Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who were friends before filming began—are actually musicians, an appropriate casting choice, since music is what unites them and drives the film.
Writer/director John Carney is also a musician, whose understanding of how music moves people suffuses his unobtrusive filmmaking. Shot with mostly hand-held, low tech cameras in natural light situations, Carney paints the movie with an atmospheric earnestness that enhances the casual pleasure of the couple’s relationship.
Once feels like a casual documentary recording of a few weeks in the life of an Irish street musician and the young Czech immigrant to Dublin who’s attracted to his music when she hears him playing on a deserted street in a commercial area at night. During the day, the guy panders to the crowd he hopes will fill his open guitar case, but at night, he takes advantage of the flattering acoustics of his chosen alley (between a Laura Ashley store and another boutique) to howl his own music, filled with the heartache and ambivalence of his girlfriend’s recent sexual betrayal.
Girl is attracted by something she mutual hears in his lyrics, something primal, unguarded, and familiar in his tone, in the way he closes his eyes when he sings, and later, in the way his battered guitar seems an extension of himself, whether slung from a strap around his neck or carried like a talisman in a nylon case on his back.
To support his music habit, Guy works in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop, a fortuitous coincidence that Girl exploits by asking if he can fix her broken machine. The visually charming first few scenes follow the couple through Dublin streets as she pulls the canister cleaner along by its hose.
Carney establishes the cozy, quotidian domesticity of the girl’s life, which she shares in a small, cramped apartment with her two-year-old daughter and her widowed mother, who barely speaks English, but sews continually and cooks heartily.
The girl and her mother share their television—which she proudly tells Guy is the only set in their apartment building—with various young men who cram together on their couch to watch soccer and soap operas. Carney films these scenes, too, like home movies with non-actors, which gives them a guileless, irresistibly sweetness.
Guy and Girl’s mutual loneliness and their love for music draw them together. She drags him to a music store where the generous proprietor lets her play the piano when the shop isn’t crowded. Though they barely know each other, and though her English is accented with her Eastern European origins, they speak the common music of language. He talks her through his song’s chord changes and transitions, which she absorbs without a question, and they play a lovely duet, their voices blending beautifully. Their mutual respect and understanding, as well as the pure joy of making music together, shade their expressions.
Early on in the film, Guy makes a casual sexual pass, inviting Girl to spend the night with him. She’s offended for reasons that become clear only when she reveals that she’s married to a man who stayed behind in the Czech Republic. She feels emotionally as well as geographically far from her husband, and intimates that he doesn’t understand her music or her needs.
Guy, too, struggles with his feelings for his absent lover; she’s moved to London after betraying him with another man. All of his songs seem written for her, and all of Girl’s songs seem addressed to her husband. Yet in their partners’ absence, the couple’s music seems more and more to speak to one another, as their intimacy and affection grows.
The two settle into a warm friendship that begins to more gradually take on erotic overtones. He takes her to a dinner party where a motley assembly of people eat and drink and finally set aside their plates and pull out instruments, crowding around the makeshift kitchen table to strum guitars, bow violins, pick at basses, and sing to music that expresses something communal and personal yet public and urgent for them all.
Although Guy is older, Girl is savvier, and her street smarts and precociousness clearly helps her and her family survive a working class existence with few creature comforts. When Guy decides to make a demo CD, Girl negotiates the studio rental at a bargain price. To secure financing, they visit a loan officer, watching carefully as he listens to their rehearsal tape. The interview ends when the officer borrows Guy’s ubiquitous guitar and serenades them with his own music. In this utopian world, everyone is sympathetic to artists; everyone, in fact, is an artist, committed to supporting one another and their dreams.
Guy invites three fellow street musicians to join him and the girl as his band for his studio session, communicating with them in the same musician-speak that’s the film’s lingua franca. The five hole up in the rented recording studio with a reluctant hired engineer, whose initial sneer turns to more than grudging respect once he hears them play. A montage demonstrates that once again, music connects them all in a proto-familial group of support and affection.
The girl’s mother and daughter join them, bringing food and companionship during a break; they play together easily, with dedication and commitment, each one a part of the transformative whole. At the end of the rigorous few days, they pile into a car to hear how the CD sounds outside the studio, and wind up playing Frisbee at the beach, chasing each other as the music they’ve just created together provides the warm background.
Once is filled with subsidiary characters, a large cast of non-actors who comfortably, unobtrusively, convincingly fill out the frame. The guy’s father is a singular, supportive presence; the two of them work together in the vacuum repair shop like surgeons in an operating room, the son handing the father his tools with the long familiarity of an assistant who can predict the older man’s needs.
Each of the film’s characters is named for who or what they are and nothing else. In addition to “Guy” and “Girl,” the others are “guys on the stoop,” “guys watching television,” “mother,” “daughter,” and “old woman on the bus,” ordinary people graced here by sharing the music being made around them.
Once is a generous, humanist film, in which art lets people forge a connection, however brief and tenuous, that enhances their lives. Music makes them generous and kind with one another and lets them feel their lives in all their poignant pain and happiness. Singing and playing together becomes a model for a collective, utopian “as if.”
The film dignifies the ordinary without romanticizing it. What could be sentimental and sappy culminates instead as moving and persuasive, a slice of lives that remind us of how good our own can be when we listen for the lyrics and let ourselves be transported by the melody.
Happily singing to the soundtrack,
The Feminist Spectator
Friday, December 14, 2007
Jodie Foster Comes Out
The lesbian blogs and web sites are buzzing today with news of Jodie Foster’s long awaited, much desired coming out. On the occasion of a women’s power meeting in LA (the 16th annual Women in Entertainment Power 100 breakfast), Foster received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award and, for the first time, referred to her partner, Cydney Bernard, thanking “my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss” (see http://www.afterellen.com/people/2007/12/jodiefoster).
The web site “After Ellen” (named in reference to Ellen Degeneres’ coming out) reports that people in the audience were visibly moved by Foster’s declaration. Ironically, Queen Latifah and John Travolta, both of whom are also rumored to be queer, keynoted the breakfast.
I found myself also moved by Foster’s gesture, and have spent some time after first reading about her speech trying to tease out why it’s politically and emotionally important to me to be able to claim Foster as a lesbian. I’ve long relished the rumors about her sexuality. The first I can remember hearing was that she and Kelly McGillis were involved in some sort of same-sex love triangle on the set of The Accused (1988), the film for which Foster went on to win an Academy Award for playing the working class victim of a brutal, public bar rape. McGillis played her lawyer, whose emotional response moves from indifferent judgment to empathy and respect as the story plays out.
After that, the rumors circulating (at least the ones that caught my ear) were less specific but always enticing, as we presumed that Foster’s sexuality was an open secret waiting to be told. She gave birth to two children, father undeclared; she never appeared publicly with a man at her side; she socialized with Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order: SUV (also rumored to be a lesbian, or perhaps that’s just my own wishful thinking); she looks at once butch and femme, tough and powerful, and supremely in control.
When we learned of Foster’s announcement yesterday, I asked my partner if she thinks younger lesbians and younger queer women will be as moved as we were by this public knowledge. I wondered whether the more (grudgingly) acceptable and public face of lgbtq culture means that these gestures of mainstream acknowledgement don’t matter as much as they did before Ellen, before gay characters dotted the landscape of network TV, before The L Word and Queer as Folk graced the premium channels, before Logo and Here gave those of us with good cable selections our own queer channels to watch, before Glenn Close played retired lesbian Army Colonel Margaret Cammermeyer in a made-for-TV movie.
Does Foster’s sudden willingness to stand publicly behind her private identity register as palpably for people who grew up with Out Magazine, or with Bitch, Bust, Curve, and On Our Backs, publications that play (or played) to a generation of women, lesbians, and queers with an already critical but committed relationship to popular culture, publications that regularly comment on queer sexuality not as aberrant, but as an acceptable part of the public landscape?
Does it matter to a generation for whom the political conversation about gay and lesbian lives plays out around our right to serve in the military (for those of us who want it) and our right to marry (for those of us who find matrimony a necessary benchmark of equality)?
Or does a public statement like Foster’s matter more for those of us who remember searching the public landscape and finding only veiled references to “deviant” sexuality, for those of us old enough to recall our own mortification and shame at how easily politicians could refer to the evil influence of “queers” (before that word was reclaimed with pride)?
Does it make a bigger impression on those of us who remember driving to marginal neighborhoods to find unmarked doors behind which stood the temporary, moveable feast of lesbian bars and nightclubs, places found only through word-of-mouth, doors that required screwing up your courage before you raised your hand to knock, peepholes that required a stalwart stillness as the eye peering out sized up your authenticity and decided whether or not to let you inside?
That appraising gaze implied that something could be seen about us that certified our lesbianism, whether it was the indifferent, perhaps masculine way we stood as we were scrutinized, or the clothes we wore, pointedly chosen to reject dominant culture’s assignment of femininity. We performed for that eye something resistant, something performative; that is, something that as we did it, made us who we were to those who could read the signs of our difference.
Isn’t that what we’ve been projecting onto Foster for the many years before this moment? Weren’t we studying how she stood, how she walked (in the dramatically high heels of the Hollywood glitterati, in the shimmering gowns of the red carpet in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), how something wonderfully tough and unyielding and non-compliant (that is, something butch) graced her beautiful performance of femininity?
Didn’t we scrutinize all her film roles for surreptitious signs of her lesbianism? Didn’t we note how toughly she played her characters, how she chose roles in which she was a strong, significantly single mother (with no reference whatsoever to the absence of a male mate) battling invading malignancies to keep her child safe (see Panic Room, 2002, and Flightplan, 2005)? Didn’t we notice that her recent roles were getting tougher and smarter and somehow more wry, while retaining that aloof, single and singular allure (see Inside Man, 2006)? Didn’t it seem that her beautiful smirk hinted at secrets we thought we knew?
I’m not fetishizing a difficult past, but I do wonder if the experience of being what Sarah Schulman so rightly called the last painfully instructed generation (I’m paraphrasing her here, but see her important collection, My American History [1994]) means that Foster’s announcement sounds different to ears that from long habit continue cautiously to hope and yearn for statements like hers?
I still can’t believe that I can see casual same-sex PDA (public displays of affection, of course) on network television. I remember so keenly what it felt like to watch That Certain Summer (1972), the first made-for-television movie about gay relationships, in the same “family” room as my parents, holding my breath as I tried to hide my obvious empathy, my obvious likeness, as I suffered the antipathy they muttered as they watched.
When a friend forwarded news of Foster’s announcement, I emailed it on to family and friends, needing to share with them this “evidence.” I told them that I was moved by Foster’s acknowledgement. But I wonder if I wasn’t also sharing the news to reaffirm for my wondering self that a life like mine is touched, by virtue of our sexual practices and our choices of who and how to love, by a life like Foster’s. Thirty years after I came out, I’m still trying to find approving cultural mirrors.
Foster’s now public partnership is protected by the blanket of wealth. My own partnership might resist official sanction, since we don’t want to be married or to stage a ritual of commitment, but it, too, is secured by the privilege of a bourgeois lifestyle, in which neither the plumber nor the pest control man blink an eye at our obviously shared “master” bedroom. In such a forgiving personal and (in Austin) social climate, why does it still matter to me that Foster’s come out?
Perhaps because my life bears indelible marks of my own painfully carried history, I know that lots of people without my access to money, to community, to self respect, to an analysis of our subjectivity, to theory, or to practice could use the example of Jodie Foster to shore up their own courage and pride.
Shortly after I first came out in 1978, I made what only in retrospect looks like a decision. I would always be out, even though as anyone who’s queer knows, coming out is an infinitely repeated process, instigated every time you fill out a form that asks about marital status, every time you see a new doctor, every time someone presumes your heterosexuality. I’ve committed my energy to that always repeated performance, because I remember viscerally how much it mattered to me to see other people be open about their sexual identities.
I’m assailed by fatigue, doubt, and the frisson of potential danger every time I publicly identify myself as lesbian or queer, but I do it because it still matters. A celebrity only has to come out once; after that, everyone “knows” (although who “everyone” is and what they think they know is anyone’s guess; perhaps that’s a subject for another post).
But nonetheless, I think that’s why I’m moved that someone as visible and culturally powerful as Jodie Foster is now willing to make that gesture. We need people like her on our team, because they make it just a little easier for people who aren’t free to do the same.
Maybe Queen Latifah and John Travolta will be next.
Happy that we are indeed everywhere,
The Feminist Spectator
The web site “After Ellen” (named in reference to Ellen Degeneres’ coming out) reports that people in the audience were visibly moved by Foster’s declaration. Ironically, Queen Latifah and John Travolta, both of whom are also rumored to be queer, keynoted the breakfast.
I found myself also moved by Foster’s gesture, and have spent some time after first reading about her speech trying to tease out why it’s politically and emotionally important to me to be able to claim Foster as a lesbian. I’ve long relished the rumors about her sexuality. The first I can remember hearing was that she and Kelly McGillis were involved in some sort of same-sex love triangle on the set of The Accused (1988), the film for which Foster went on to win an Academy Award for playing the working class victim of a brutal, public bar rape. McGillis played her lawyer, whose emotional response moves from indifferent judgment to empathy and respect as the story plays out.
After that, the rumors circulating (at least the ones that caught my ear) were less specific but always enticing, as we presumed that Foster’s sexuality was an open secret waiting to be told. She gave birth to two children, father undeclared; she never appeared publicly with a man at her side; she socialized with Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order: SUV (also rumored to be a lesbian, or perhaps that’s just my own wishful thinking); she looks at once butch and femme, tough and powerful, and supremely in control.
When we learned of Foster’s announcement yesterday, I asked my partner if she thinks younger lesbians and younger queer women will be as moved as we were by this public knowledge. I wondered whether the more (grudgingly) acceptable and public face of lgbtq culture means that these gestures of mainstream acknowledgement don’t matter as much as they did before Ellen, before gay characters dotted the landscape of network TV, before The L Word and Queer as Folk graced the premium channels, before Logo and Here gave those of us with good cable selections our own queer channels to watch, before Glenn Close played retired lesbian Army Colonel Margaret Cammermeyer in a made-for-TV movie.
Does Foster’s sudden willingness to stand publicly behind her private identity register as palpably for people who grew up with Out Magazine, or with Bitch, Bust, Curve, and On Our Backs, publications that play (or played) to a generation of women, lesbians, and queers with an already critical but committed relationship to popular culture, publications that regularly comment on queer sexuality not as aberrant, but as an acceptable part of the public landscape?
Does it matter to a generation for whom the political conversation about gay and lesbian lives plays out around our right to serve in the military (for those of us who want it) and our right to marry (for those of us who find matrimony a necessary benchmark of equality)?
Or does a public statement like Foster’s matter more for those of us who remember searching the public landscape and finding only veiled references to “deviant” sexuality, for those of us old enough to recall our own mortification and shame at how easily politicians could refer to the evil influence of “queers” (before that word was reclaimed with pride)?
Does it make a bigger impression on those of us who remember driving to marginal neighborhoods to find unmarked doors behind which stood the temporary, moveable feast of lesbian bars and nightclubs, places found only through word-of-mouth, doors that required screwing up your courage before you raised your hand to knock, peepholes that required a stalwart stillness as the eye peering out sized up your authenticity and decided whether or not to let you inside?
That appraising gaze implied that something could be seen about us that certified our lesbianism, whether it was the indifferent, perhaps masculine way we stood as we were scrutinized, or the clothes we wore, pointedly chosen to reject dominant culture’s assignment of femininity. We performed for that eye something resistant, something performative; that is, something that as we did it, made us who we were to those who could read the signs of our difference.
Isn’t that what we’ve been projecting onto Foster for the many years before this moment? Weren’t we studying how she stood, how she walked (in the dramatically high heels of the Hollywood glitterati, in the shimmering gowns of the red carpet in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), how something wonderfully tough and unyielding and non-compliant (that is, something butch) graced her beautiful performance of femininity?
Didn’t we scrutinize all her film roles for surreptitious signs of her lesbianism? Didn’t we note how toughly she played her characters, how she chose roles in which she was a strong, significantly single mother (with no reference whatsoever to the absence of a male mate) battling invading malignancies to keep her child safe (see Panic Room, 2002, and Flightplan, 2005)? Didn’t we notice that her recent roles were getting tougher and smarter and somehow more wry, while retaining that aloof, single and singular allure (see Inside Man, 2006)? Didn’t it seem that her beautiful smirk hinted at secrets we thought we knew?
I’m not fetishizing a difficult past, but I do wonder if the experience of being what Sarah Schulman so rightly called the last painfully instructed generation (I’m paraphrasing her here, but see her important collection, My American History [1994]) means that Foster’s announcement sounds different to ears that from long habit continue cautiously to hope and yearn for statements like hers?
I still can’t believe that I can see casual same-sex PDA (public displays of affection, of course) on network television. I remember so keenly what it felt like to watch That Certain Summer (1972), the first made-for-television movie about gay relationships, in the same “family” room as my parents, holding my breath as I tried to hide my obvious empathy, my obvious likeness, as I suffered the antipathy they muttered as they watched.
When a friend forwarded news of Foster’s announcement, I emailed it on to family and friends, needing to share with them this “evidence.” I told them that I was moved by Foster’s acknowledgement. But I wonder if I wasn’t also sharing the news to reaffirm for my wondering self that a life like mine is touched, by virtue of our sexual practices and our choices of who and how to love, by a life like Foster’s. Thirty years after I came out, I’m still trying to find approving cultural mirrors.
Foster’s now public partnership is protected by the blanket of wealth. My own partnership might resist official sanction, since we don’t want to be married or to stage a ritual of commitment, but it, too, is secured by the privilege of a bourgeois lifestyle, in which neither the plumber nor the pest control man blink an eye at our obviously shared “master” bedroom. In such a forgiving personal and (in Austin) social climate, why does it still matter to me that Foster’s come out?
Perhaps because my life bears indelible marks of my own painfully carried history, I know that lots of people without my access to money, to community, to self respect, to an analysis of our subjectivity, to theory, or to practice could use the example of Jodie Foster to shore up their own courage and pride.
Shortly after I first came out in 1978, I made what only in retrospect looks like a decision. I would always be out, even though as anyone who’s queer knows, coming out is an infinitely repeated process, instigated every time you fill out a form that asks about marital status, every time you see a new doctor, every time someone presumes your heterosexuality. I’ve committed my energy to that always repeated performance, because I remember viscerally how much it mattered to me to see other people be open about their sexual identities.
I’m assailed by fatigue, doubt, and the frisson of potential danger every time I publicly identify myself as lesbian or queer, but I do it because it still matters. A celebrity only has to come out once; after that, everyone “knows” (although who “everyone” is and what they think they know is anyone’s guess; perhaps that’s a subject for another post).
But nonetheless, I think that’s why I’m moved that someone as visible and culturally powerful as Jodie Foster is now willing to make that gesture. We need people like her on our team, because they make it just a little easier for people who aren’t free to do the same.
Maybe Queen Latifah and John Travolta will be next.
Happy that we are indeed everywhere,
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Fiona Shaw in Beckett at the Kennedy Center
I’ve been lucky enough to catch the indomitable Fiona Shaw in most of her recent U.S. touring performances, including her stunning rendition of Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in 1996, at what was then the soon-to-be demolished Liberty Theatre on Manhattan’s 42nd St. She delivered the elegiac prose poem from the edge of the stage apron, crossing its width only occasionally to interact with the ghost light that stood stage center. The theatre itself smelled musty and cold, and at least half of its seats were covered in thick, dusty plastic in preparation for its transformation into an anonymous cinema. But Shaw’s virtuosity and charisma emblazoned the space and mesmerized spectators lucky enough to witness the performance. (She certainly has what Joe Roach might call the “It” factor; see his book, It, just released from University of Michigan Press). In 2000, I saw her perform as Medea in a British import production on Broadway (an occasion about which I write in my book Utopia in Performance).
Last week, I made a pilgrimage to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC to see Shaw in Beckett’s Happy Days in a production imported from the National Theatre of Great Britain, directed by her long-time collaborator Deborah Warner. In the relatively intimate space of the Terrace Theater, Shaw once again captivated audiences, this time with her terrifically mobile, expressive face and torso, and her inimitable command of Beckett’s language.
In front of the curtain (which in this case is a fire wall that lurches a few inches upwards and then back down every few minutes, as we wait for the “action” to begin), the forestage is strewn with the debris of what looks like an explosion or a demolition, which resonates clearly with the post-WTC attack landscape of lower Manhattan. Twisted steel cables thread through concrete rubble in a terrain parched by unfiltered, ungelled white light aimed from intense canned instruments hanging on the extreme sides of the stage.
As the fire wall slowly rises, it’s clear that the wings of the stage are exposed so that the audience can see all the way to the theatre’s walls. When the “curtain” finally rises, it reveals a layer of opaque white plastic hanging from a horizontal steel pipe, which is reminiscent both of the way builders try to mask construction sites and, more prosaically, of a shower curtain pulled around a bathtub. The picture evokes the edgy mix of public/private scene that makes the play so compelling and devastating.
The whole stage remains open, floating within the frame of the theatre’s walls, rather than confined to the edges of the proscenium and its sides. Behind the mound of littered concrete in which Winnie is planted, immobilized from the waist down, a vaguely realist landscape painting of a muted, gray-blue/white-tan desert-like geography provides the backdrop for her monologue, as if a palpable scenographic reminder of a more natural environment that’s imperceptibly fading even as she speaks.
Dissonant, loud, and unpleasantly grating music plays to usher us with some trepidation into the play’s world. Rumbling, rattling sounds that could be the mechanisms of building or the apparatus of destruction echo through the air. By contrast, when the white plastic curtain lifts to reveal Shaw stuck in the mound, her lilting voice seems musical by comparison, projecting one of the many contradictory impressions that make the production so vivid.
Shaw’s Winnie is startlingly flirtatious, given her immobility and existential isolation; she appears to address the audience directly, since Willie—her mostly unseen interlocutor—resides behind the mound, just out of her direct line of sight. Shaw’s characterization at times verges on desperate, while she also plays at a kind of vaudevillian brightness of affect.
Her ability to engage these apparent contradictions demonstrates Shaw’s command of an amazing range of moods, all of which works to make Winnie a strong, layered, powerful presence onstage, instead of the dithering flibbertigibbet as which she is sometime portrayed. With her arms akimbo, wearing a sleeveless black dress and a set of black chunky beads that rest in the hollow of her throat, her gestures approach the operatic and theatrical, as if Winnie literally performs herself into being.
In this production, Happy Days is as much about the theatre as it is about an impossible philosophical condition. Winnie’s ever-present bag looms beside her on the mound like a bag of props. She draws from it the objects that sustain and engage her, personal artifacts that have long lost an external purpose, like her toothpaste and the toothbrush from which she tries repeatedly to read the meaningless words that situate it as both “genuine” and necessary. The revolver she casually pulls from the bag, without comment, although she kisses it rather intimately, signals foreboding; in a realist play from the modernist canon, a gun presented in the first act would inevitably be fired in the third.
But in Beckett’s absurdist world, the gun remains unfired, a potent symbol nonetheless of Winnie and Willie’s inability to assume agency over their lives or deaths. The second act reveals Winnie now buried to her neck in the rocky rubble and debris that seems to encroach further toward her still-moving mouth even as we watch. The gun sits just to the right of Winnie’s vision, an impossibly remote device of her impossible redemption and release.
But in the first act, Winnie’s bottomless bag seems as mysterious and hopeful as the suitcase Hermione carries through much of the last book of the Harry Potter series—as small as it appears, it contains limitless depths and the capacity to hold a whole trainload of stuff. At one point, she drags a mirror from its bottom, which she then cracks on a rock and tosses behind her. Winnie says smugly that it’ll be back in the bag, unbroken, the next day, sure of how unchanging and quotidian her life remains, even when it appears cataclysmic.
For instance, an unexpected, startling fireball appears out of nowhere in the middle of her diatribe, catching her parasol on fire and injecting the stage with a momentary sense of real and present danger and violence. But once the fire recedes, Winnie claims not to know whether the conflagration even happened; reality, here, is a figment of a rich theatrical imagination and little more.
In fact, in the second act, the formerly burnt parasol rests near the revolver, in sight but out of reach, perfectly intact once again, like a trick prop that’s been reset for the next performance of a play. The props mark the passage of time; Winnie parcels out her attention to them as a way of organizing her experience. What Andrew Sofer, in his book of the same name, calls the “stage life of props” are redolent with their own existential theatrical weight.
The theatrical metaphor is underlined when Winnie reports that a couple passed her and disrupted her routine, the man asking impertinently why Willie couldn’t just dig her out. The man wants to know “what it means,” referring disparagingly to her immobility, her metaphysical intransigence, but Winnie reacts to his perplexity with arch superiority, as though her condition should be self-evident. She denies these trifling intruders the satisfaction of an explanation she clearly finds unnecessary. That it’s the man of the couple who interrogates her allows Winnie to assert her own gendered presence against his; she’s no trifling woman, despite her physical disadvantage.
Winnie enacts Beckett’s disregard for his own detractors. Beckett presents Winnie’s effort to interpret the hieroglyphics on her toothbrush handle as equally as important as understanding the meaning of Winnie’s condition (and the meaning of his play). When she finally discerns the faint letters, her joy in putting the words together far exceeds what they mean. But the pleasure she takes in her effort mirrors the spectators’ own pleasure in engaging the possibilities of the play.
Time looms large in Happy Days. Shaw delivers some of her most poignant line readings around “the old style,” her label for time’s days and nights as they used to be delineated, since in this post-apocalyptic moment, when to sleep and when to get “up” is announced by an imperious bell and nothing more. Time is marked by action more than by meaning; in the first act, Winnie shifts uncomfortably and notes that the earth is getting tighter. Yet she soldiers on, always aware that things could be worse, a prophecy born out in the second act, when only Shaw’s rubber face remains free to express Winnie’s indelible presence.
Shaw’s performance is a physical, vocal, and emotional tour-de-force. She carefully marks every word and gesture and scores each nuanced emotional shift, so that Beckett’s repetitions and reiterations seem like a jazz improvisation with recurring themes always presented in surprising new ways. Shaw knows where she’s going each step of the way; her strength as an actor, and her willingness to be so bold and courageous in her performance choices, ameliorates her powerlessness as a character. She renders Winnie peculiarly hopeful (or is she deluded?), capable of creating her own sense when the world makes none at all.
To the end, Winnie’s memory brings her comfort, as she recalls lines from literature that preserve her, even though they seem only absurd. The old lines, like the “old style,” mean everything and nothing, just like Happy Days.
With existential awe,
The Feminist Spectator
Last week, I made a pilgrimage to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC to see Shaw in Beckett’s Happy Days in a production imported from the National Theatre of Great Britain, directed by her long-time collaborator Deborah Warner. In the relatively intimate space of the Terrace Theater, Shaw once again captivated audiences, this time with her terrifically mobile, expressive face and torso, and her inimitable command of Beckett’s language.
In front of the curtain (which in this case is a fire wall that lurches a few inches upwards and then back down every few minutes, as we wait for the “action” to begin), the forestage is strewn with the debris of what looks like an explosion or a demolition, which resonates clearly with the post-WTC attack landscape of lower Manhattan. Twisted steel cables thread through concrete rubble in a terrain parched by unfiltered, ungelled white light aimed from intense canned instruments hanging on the extreme sides of the stage.
As the fire wall slowly rises, it’s clear that the wings of the stage are exposed so that the audience can see all the way to the theatre’s walls. When the “curtain” finally rises, it reveals a layer of opaque white plastic hanging from a horizontal steel pipe, which is reminiscent both of the way builders try to mask construction sites and, more prosaically, of a shower curtain pulled around a bathtub. The picture evokes the edgy mix of public/private scene that makes the play so compelling and devastating.
The whole stage remains open, floating within the frame of the theatre’s walls, rather than confined to the edges of the proscenium and its sides. Behind the mound of littered concrete in which Winnie is planted, immobilized from the waist down, a vaguely realist landscape painting of a muted, gray-blue/white-tan desert-like geography provides the backdrop for her monologue, as if a palpable scenographic reminder of a more natural environment that’s imperceptibly fading even as she speaks.
Dissonant, loud, and unpleasantly grating music plays to usher us with some trepidation into the play’s world. Rumbling, rattling sounds that could be the mechanisms of building or the apparatus of destruction echo through the air. By contrast, when the white plastic curtain lifts to reveal Shaw stuck in the mound, her lilting voice seems musical by comparison, projecting one of the many contradictory impressions that make the production so vivid.
Shaw’s Winnie is startlingly flirtatious, given her immobility and existential isolation; she appears to address the audience directly, since Willie—her mostly unseen interlocutor—resides behind the mound, just out of her direct line of sight. Shaw’s characterization at times verges on desperate, while she also plays at a kind of vaudevillian brightness of affect.
Her ability to engage these apparent contradictions demonstrates Shaw’s command of an amazing range of moods, all of which works to make Winnie a strong, layered, powerful presence onstage, instead of the dithering flibbertigibbet as which she is sometime portrayed. With her arms akimbo, wearing a sleeveless black dress and a set of black chunky beads that rest in the hollow of her throat, her gestures approach the operatic and theatrical, as if Winnie literally performs herself into being.
In this production, Happy Days is as much about the theatre as it is about an impossible philosophical condition. Winnie’s ever-present bag looms beside her on the mound like a bag of props. She draws from it the objects that sustain and engage her, personal artifacts that have long lost an external purpose, like her toothpaste and the toothbrush from which she tries repeatedly to read the meaningless words that situate it as both “genuine” and necessary. The revolver she casually pulls from the bag, without comment, although she kisses it rather intimately, signals foreboding; in a realist play from the modernist canon, a gun presented in the first act would inevitably be fired in the third.
But in Beckett’s absurdist world, the gun remains unfired, a potent symbol nonetheless of Winnie and Willie’s inability to assume agency over their lives or deaths. The second act reveals Winnie now buried to her neck in the rocky rubble and debris that seems to encroach further toward her still-moving mouth even as we watch. The gun sits just to the right of Winnie’s vision, an impossibly remote device of her impossible redemption and release.
But in the first act, Winnie’s bottomless bag seems as mysterious and hopeful as the suitcase Hermione carries through much of the last book of the Harry Potter series—as small as it appears, it contains limitless depths and the capacity to hold a whole trainload of stuff. At one point, she drags a mirror from its bottom, which she then cracks on a rock and tosses behind her. Winnie says smugly that it’ll be back in the bag, unbroken, the next day, sure of how unchanging and quotidian her life remains, even when it appears cataclysmic.
For instance, an unexpected, startling fireball appears out of nowhere in the middle of her diatribe, catching her parasol on fire and injecting the stage with a momentary sense of real and present danger and violence. But once the fire recedes, Winnie claims not to know whether the conflagration even happened; reality, here, is a figment of a rich theatrical imagination and little more.
In fact, in the second act, the formerly burnt parasol rests near the revolver, in sight but out of reach, perfectly intact once again, like a trick prop that’s been reset for the next performance of a play. The props mark the passage of time; Winnie parcels out her attention to them as a way of organizing her experience. What Andrew Sofer, in his book of the same name, calls the “stage life of props” are redolent with their own existential theatrical weight.
The theatrical metaphor is underlined when Winnie reports that a couple passed her and disrupted her routine, the man asking impertinently why Willie couldn’t just dig her out. The man wants to know “what it means,” referring disparagingly to her immobility, her metaphysical intransigence, but Winnie reacts to his perplexity with arch superiority, as though her condition should be self-evident. She denies these trifling intruders the satisfaction of an explanation she clearly finds unnecessary. That it’s the man of the couple who interrogates her allows Winnie to assert her own gendered presence against his; she’s no trifling woman, despite her physical disadvantage.
Winnie enacts Beckett’s disregard for his own detractors. Beckett presents Winnie’s effort to interpret the hieroglyphics on her toothbrush handle as equally as important as understanding the meaning of Winnie’s condition (and the meaning of his play). When she finally discerns the faint letters, her joy in putting the words together far exceeds what they mean. But the pleasure she takes in her effort mirrors the spectators’ own pleasure in engaging the possibilities of the play.
Time looms large in Happy Days. Shaw delivers some of her most poignant line readings around “the old style,” her label for time’s days and nights as they used to be delineated, since in this post-apocalyptic moment, when to sleep and when to get “up” is announced by an imperious bell and nothing more. Time is marked by action more than by meaning; in the first act, Winnie shifts uncomfortably and notes that the earth is getting tighter. Yet she soldiers on, always aware that things could be worse, a prophecy born out in the second act, when only Shaw’s rubber face remains free to express Winnie’s indelible presence.
Shaw’s performance is a physical, vocal, and emotional tour-de-force. She carefully marks every word and gesture and scores each nuanced emotional shift, so that Beckett’s repetitions and reiterations seem like a jazz improvisation with recurring themes always presented in surprising new ways. Shaw knows where she’s going each step of the way; her strength as an actor, and her willingness to be so bold and courageous in her performance choices, ameliorates her powerlessness as a character. She renders Winnie peculiarly hopeful (or is she deluded?), capable of creating her own sense when the world makes none at all.
To the end, Winnie’s memory brings her comfort, as she recalls lines from literature that preserve her, even though they seem only absurd. The old lines, like the “old style,” mean everything and nothing, just like Happy Days.
With existential awe,
The Feminist Spectator
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