Victor & Gord and 565+ in Ireland

Úna McKevitt conceived and directed the companion pieces Victor & Gord and 565+, which were performed together at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Ireland, last weekend.  Seeing the performances under the auspices of the Synge Summer School in County Wicklow, which is directed by the Irish theatre and performance scholar Patrick Lonergan, the evening raised a host of issues for our students and the other Synge School participants about what makes “theatre.”  Both performances are devised works.  McKevitt openly admits an interest in making theatre from everyday life.  Her method is basically to interview friends and relatives and then ask them to perform their stories.

565+, the evening’s first piece, is a monologue by Marie O’Rourke, McKevitt’s cousin, a middle-aged, ordinary Irish woman with a story to tell.  As the piece opens, Marie sat in the audience, happily ensconced in the front row, where she described why she loves to sit so close when she’s at the theatre.  I was seated beside her that night, having just purposefully moved from the back of the house to the front for similar reasons, so I thoroughly enjoyed Marie’s explanation.  After she confessed her obsessive love for the theatre, she mounted the stage to spin a loosely organized story about her life’s trajectory.

Marie got pregnant when she was rather young, and was surprised to find that her boyfriend, Tom, wanted to marry her.  Although Tom and his family were delighted by their union, Marie’s family never approved.  Marie reconstructs how she walked down the aisle at her wedding, wearing Janus-faced emotions depending on whether she was greeting Tom’s family or her own.  Her family’s reaction proved prophetic.

Marie is never happy in the marriage, but conventional mores that insist women should perform happiness in domestic situations mean that she can’t tell anyone about her misery.  She’s entrapped in a domestic space in which she’s lonely and bored, and she falls into a depression from which she can’t disentangle herself through any typical means.  Although she describes various kinds of therapy—psychological and physical—she ultimately and unexpectedly finds solace at the theatre.

Marie becomes a compulsive theatre-goer, seeing everything she possibly can, because it’s only while hearing other people’s stories and watching other people’s bodies inhabiting them that she can both forget herself and better understand herself.  She becomes something of a local hero—theatres hold the curtain for her if she’s running late, and local police don’t mind if she’s driving a bit above the speed limit to get to a performance on time.  565+ turns out to be the number of performances she’s seen . . . and counting.

Úna McKevitt performed with Marie the night we saw the performance, although it seems sometimes Marie is on stage alone and sometimes with a few more people.  McKevitt sat mostly silent, watching Marie with a wry smile.  The director seemed to efface her own presence for Marie’s, but seemed somehow active and important nonetheless.  Wearing aqua jeans and sneakers, and sporting bright red hair, McKevitt sat on a trunk across from Marie for most of the performance, witnessing her story.  She served as something of an on-stage prompter, marking the story and their place in it; sometimes, she seemed to offer Marie a cue to help her remember her lines, and other times, McKevitt herself seemed to forget the order of things.

At other moments, McKevitt seemed to serve as Marie’s conscience or companion.  In a monologue about loneliness and its abatement, it might have been painful to watch Marie alone on stage.  McKevitt’s presence lent her monologue a warm protection; that is, because the story addressed the vulnerabilities of a middle-aged woman with few options, Úna’s stolid, quiet presence projected the confidence that Marie would finally come out of her crisis into something else, something simply better.

At one point, it was clear Marie and Úna had lost their way through the story.  They had a bit of a comical exchange about where they were, what they’d forgotten, and where they should pick up.  Úna left the trunk on which she’d been sitting stage right, and moved to the worn red chaise on which Marie sits through most of the hour, saying, “I’m going to come over here with you.”  Marie moved to make room for her and continued her story-telling as Úna continued her listening.

I found this simple moment moving and somehow true.  Úna’s was a gesture of intimacy, of wanting to be closer, of lending physical as well as emotional support that seemed impulsive and right, rather than calculated or “representational.”  In fact, in the discussion after both pieces, Úna admitted that she has something of an obsession for reality television shows.  Her interest in how real lives are represented seeps into these two live performance pieces.  Marie relates her story without much regard for chronology or even coherence, although it has the semblance of a beginning, middle, and end.  Slides are projected behind her as if in a photo album, digitized snap-shots of Marie’s personal history:  Marie in her wedding gown beside Tom in his tux; Marie and her children; and the occasional motto or phrase.

As the performance begins, the words “I find pain in the truth and truth in pain” are projected, handwritten in capital letters, as a kind of epigraph.  Marie’s story is indeed painful—she lost a twin sister when they were born; her marriage was loveless; her life was mostly unmoored, solitary, and unpleasant.  But it’s delivered with a light touch, with a sense of irony, and with the comfort of retrospection in which we know, as Marie’s presence on stage testifies, that everything turns out more or less all right.  Marie has found—in a place of dissembling, unreality, and untruth; that is, at the theatre—a way to survive her own life.

Marie O’Rourke is not a professional actor.  Our students were dismayed by the performance’s lack of virtuosity.  They were appalled when Marie and Úna forgot their lines, and by their general lack of actorly command.  That Marie told her story under the auspices of theatre—given the professional venue, the use of lighting instruments, the stage furniture and the theatre programs scattered around Marie’s chaise like props—seemed to heighten their expectations that what they saw would meet their standards for “proper” theatre.  Instead, they were frustrated by what seemed Marie and Úna’s casual disregard for theatre conventions.  And they fretted over their sense of the director and designers’ apathy about whether, for instance, the projections were visible and legible.

But the students’ very disgruntlement seems to me an indication of the performance’s success.  McKevitt admits that hers is an anti-theatre project and that the last thing she aims to create is a well-made play.  In fact, she said in the talk-back that the actors don’t work from written scripts for 565+ or for Victor & Gord.  The performers tell her their stories, and then rehearse them together, but they don’t fix a text.

At the Synge School, Irish theatre scholar Fintan Walsh said in a seminar he lead on queer performance in Ireland that McKevitt’s work should be read within the history of the nation’s theatre as intensely literary, not to mention only white, male, and of course straight.  In this context, McKevitt’s rejection of a fixed text is a resistant choice.  She dissents from a history of Irish theatre that refuses to narrate the likes of her and those whose stories she helps frame.  By rejecting the literary, she asks us to pay attention to stories that historically don’t get written down.  She’s committed to staging stories that haven’t been heard before in the public forum of the stage.

Victor & Gord, like 565+, came from McKevitt’s interest in a relationship she’d never seen detailed on stage before.  Her sister, Áine McKevitt, and her childhood neighbor, Vickey Curtis, have been friends forever, maintaining a diffident, complicated relationship in which they both love and dislike one another in the manner of people who have and will know each other their entire lives.  Áine relates that Úna saw a picture of her and Vickey that inspired her to ask the two to tell stories about their friendship, which in turn became the performance.  Victor and Gord greet the audience:

VICTOR:  Hi, how’s it going?  I’m Victor, born Victoria Elizabeth Margaret Mary Jessica Curtis, and this here is Gord. . . . Gord is short for Gorgeous.  I’ll let yiz make your own minds up about that one, though.  Her real name is Áine McKevitt.

GORD:  The reason we’re here tonight is because my sister, Úna, who christened us the names Victor and Gord, had seen a picture of us in my bedroom in our school uniforms when we’re about sixteen . . . and thought it would be interesting to explore further our friendship, which she describes as frustrated, constipated, and intense.  (266, Queer Notions)

An early version of the play, which included two other performers (Ali and Michael) is now collected in Walsh’s edited book, Queer Notions:  New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork University Press, 2010).  But the published script is really just an archival trace, rather than the formal blueprint for subsequent performances.  Úna originally directed the show in 2009 as a devised “durational work in progress” for Project Brand New 3 at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre.  The show then went on to run at the Queer Notions Festival in Dublin and at Dublin’s Fringe Festival.

Like 565+, Victor & Gord is an affecting, happily formless story about three people whose lives usually don’t merit the kind of attention that the theatre provides.  Áine and Vickey grew up as neighbors.  Their comfort with one another is based on proximity rather than desire; that is, they’re related by place rather than by choice, although their long history makes them unable to sever their established bond.  Áine wears a red hoodie that frames her curly blonde hair; Vickey wears a cap, and long shorts, and sneakers, and sports various piercings and buttons that read as “queer.”  She relates stories of changing her name to suit her self-performance, and of lesbian conquests and consorts.

Because for whatever reason, Vickey and Áine have trouble looking one another in the eye, most of the performance is played frontally, with the two women speaking to the audience and only glancing at one another.  But their wry observations and anecdotes about their adjacent lives detail a contiguous intimacy that means regardless of how far apart they stand, their lives are linked in a rhythm of history that extends into the future.

Neither is a professional performer, and like Marie and Úna, they sometimes forget their place in the story or laugh together at a mistake they make in the blocking.  But the two women boast an easy stage charisma that no amount of actor training can provide.  Victor and Gord talk about their lives in off-handed ways without giving one anecdote more power or emphasis than another.  They reminisce about growing up together, sharing details of what they remember from one another’s homes.  They talk about Free Love, when they and their friends “would get together for a night of drinking and snogging; the girls would kiss the girls, the boys would kiss the boys, but not too many boys kissed the boys.”

Gord says, “We actually only did Free Love once but talked about it so much it seemed like we did it every weekend.”  Part of the fun of the performance, in fact, is measuring the relative import of an event against its reality; that is, framed as “theatre,” we expect to imbue everything we hear with a cumulative importance.  Victor & Gord pulls that particular rug from under us.  After the Free Love exchange, Victor admits, “And I actually wasn’t there; I was in Amsterdam making my own kind of Free Love.”  This refusal of narrative power felt rather freeing to me.  Instead of working to put together a coherent narrative arc, I was content to rest in the moment, enjoying each exchange for what it was, as the performers’ affect encouraged me to do, instead of working to write some broader importance into the story.

In this version of the piece, Vickey and Áine are joined by Jason Breen, who replaced Ali and Michael Barron, the sister and brother who appear in the published play.  Jason is a solid, working-class man, who was abused by a hard-drinking father; cared for his mother until she died of cancer; had a younger brother he protected from abuse; and now has a cherished daughter of his own.  Jason is trying not to drink his way into his father’s footsteps.  He shares his stories with the same matter-of-fact bemusement as Victor and Gord, as if wondering who really cares about his experiences.

Jason wears blue jeans and white t-shirt, and delivers most of his lines facing front, rocking on his heels while a small smile plays over his lips.  When he’s not performing, he watches the women and vice versa.  Sometimes, their three stories overlap and they speak lines consecutively, looking out in the audience with patient, expectant, but not particularly urgent expressions.  As non-actors, they focus lightly on the task at hand, and betray none of the vaunted “concentration” for which professionals strive so hard to achieve.  The performers are simply there, with us in the moment of story-telling.  They seem to enjoy one another’s presence and they’re large enough, on stage, to project out into the house in appealing ways.  But they lack conventional actors’ more calculated desire to please, to be seen, or even to be acknowledged as somehow important.

I found this one of the most productively “queer” aspects of the evening.  Only Victor is a lesbian; Áine remarks at one point that people think she’s “gay” because she’s in this performance, but she’s not.  But Victor & Gord refuses to play to the audience or to fulfill our expectations of “good” theatre.  It prevents spectators from easily seeing themselves reflected in the performance; although some of us might identify and empathize in all sorts of ways, that seems not to be McKevitt’s point.  The piece also refuses to make the performance “about” the audience or, in fact, “about,” necessarily, anything at all.

At the same time, despite McKevitt’s rejection of the well-made play tradition, Victor & Gord does perform its connection to Irish theatre conventions.  Although the script might not be written down, it’s been rehearsed and constructed in a way that does make poetry from the three performers’ lives.  The rhythm of the lines; their overlap and repetition; the images they evoke; and even the general shape of the evening all do evoke the canon of Irish drama, even as Victor & Gord productively twists those conventions.  (And as Stacy—FS2—and Fintan Walsh and Patrick Lonergan suggested, Jason Breen serves in this production as rather a Christie McMahon figure, a Playboy of the Western World in his own right, with his appealing swagger and his pub-style relating of the story of triumphing over his own personal demons.)

Still, I found the production's resistance to generic convention an interesting queering of this tradition.  We’re asked, over the course of this innovative performance, to witness, just as Úna does for Marie.  We’re invited to listen to, perhaps to enjoy, and to observe people we might never otherwise look at, if we passed them on the street or in the market.  McKevitt’s achievement with both of these pieces is to pull the ordinary out from the crowd, even if just for a moment, to celebrate the quirkiness and resilience and indeed importance of lives usually lived out of the spotlight.

The Feminist Spectator

Victor & Gord and 565+, conceived and directed by Úna McKevitt, Mermaid Arts Centre, County Wicklow, Bray, Ireland, July 2, 2011.

New Titles in Feminist Performance

In the category of shameless self-promotion, let me call your attention to two forthcoming titles, one by my partner, Stacy Wolf (or "Feminist Spectator 2") and the other a collection of performances by Peggy Shaw, which I edited for the University of Michigan Press.


Stacy's book, Changed for Good:  A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, can be found on the Oxford University Press web site or on Amazon.


The book is a terrific feminist engagement with musicals from the Golden Age to the present, written for a trade and academic audience in readable prose with keen insights.  Stacy is particularly good on the difference between how a musical's book might position its female characters (that is, in often derogatory ways) and how a female star's power in performance often works against her disempowerment by the text.

A Menopausal Gentleman:  The Performances of Peggy Shaw, for which I was honored to write the introduction and to edit, is available for pre-order on Amazon.  It can also be ordered at the Michigan web site.  The book collects Shaw's You're Just Like Your Father; Menopausal Gentleman; To My Chagrin; and Must:  The Inside Story, on which Peggy collaborated with the UK-based Clod Ensemble.  It also includes interstitial pieces from Peggy's work with Split Britches and her own introduction.

At the ATHE conference at the Palmer House in Chicago this August, Peggy and Lois Weaver will perform their two-hander Lost Lounge and we'll celebrate the publication of Stacy's book and Peggy's collection.

Enjoy both books and join us for the celebration if you're at the conference.

The Feminist Spectator

Theatre in Ireland: Give Me Your Hand and The Cripple of Inishmaan

I’ve been living and teaching in Galway, Ireland, since the beginning of June, working with my co-teacher Stacy Wolf, 15 Princeton students, and five local students in a Princeton Global Seminar called “Performing Irishness:  Performance and Theater in Modern and Contemporary Ireland.”

Galway is a lovely, small university town on the west coast of the country, boasting a modest city center with twisting medieval-style streets lined with pubs and shops, and buskers with guitar cases or hats in front of them, looking for spare euros.  The docks are crowded with pleasure boats and colorful old wooden fishing vessels, and the row houses that line the harbor are quaint and low.

In Ireland, work that would be considered “mainstream” in the U.S. centers on three central institutional theatres:  The Abbey in Dublin, where we’ll be seeing a production of Brian Friel’s Translations at the beginning of July; to a lesser extent, the Gate, also in Dublin, where we hope to see a production of Friel’s Molly Sweeney; and the artistically adventurous and politically-minded Druid Theatre here in Galway.

Druid’s artistic director Garry Hynes was one of the first women ever to win a Tony Award for Best Director (in 1998, for Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.  Julie Taymor also won that year for her direction of the musical The Lion King).  Hynes has lead Druid for most of its existence. The company began in 1975, started by Hynes and two other then-university students, and has built a reputation in the last 35+ years as a major incubator for Irish artists.

The company’s home is a former tea warehouse, a structure with stone walls that dates back to the 14^th century.  The performance space is a small black box, fronted by a crowded rectangular lobby.  A second floor rehearsal room with a wood floor and a cathedral ceiling has square windows that look out over the narrow alley Druid calls home.

Tim Smith, the company’s British managing director, told us when he met with our class that Druid actually gentrified Galway’s city center when they started the company and took over the warehouse.  The mostly abandoned area has grown into a vibrant tourist magnet with a lively pub culture.  Druid uses Galway’s nearby 400-seat Town Hall, a producing venue with ever-changing fare, for larger productions, since it’s financially more viable than their home base, which seats just over 90.

We were lucky enough to see Give Me Your Hand on June 21^st in Druid’s space.  The two-person performance is a lovely evening of reader’s theatre based on Irish poet Paul Durcan’s poems, in which he uses famous paintings in London’s National Gallery as prompts for stories.  The performance’s web site quotes Bryan Robertson’s introduction to Durcan’s collection:  “He glides in and out of the subject or content of each painting that inspires him.  He projects himself into the personages, the situations, treats the paintings like kites in the gusty air of his imagination.”  This succinct description captures the spirit of the performance, too.

The inventive poems are brought to life by the eminent Irish actors Dermot Crowley and Dearbhla Molloy, who read them from music stands poised across from one another.  They face the audience underneath pictures of the paintings that the poems they read bring to life.   Projected from a laptop that Crowley controls remotely, the images cross-fade and dissolve after each story, which imagine the relationships the paintings depict in funny, often anachronistic ways.

The poems and the conceit are instantly charming and delightful.  Each painting presents new characters, which Crowley and Molloy imbue with new accents and attitudes without ever moving from behind their stands.  The two consummate actors establish a basic warmth between them and the audience that carries the stories into the short evening.  Each little tale is unique and sweet, sometimes funny, sometimes a bit sad or moving.

The evening is a testament to simple creativity, to the evocative sounds and stories of well-written words, and to the embodiments of actors who can create place and character with simple shifts of tone, voice, and dialect.  The delicious performance toured a few U.S. cities in 2011; the web site provides chunks of the poems as teasers and images of the paintings used as inspiration.

Druid’s production of McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan has just returned home after a six-month tour through the U.S. and Ireland, during which they visited nine American cities.  The Hynes-directed production, performed for hometown audiences at Town Hall on an imaginative set designed by Hyne’s frequent collaborator, Francis O’Connor, received a rapturous response in Galway before the cast and crew headed out to the Aran Islands, on which the play is set, to perform for locals on Inishmaan itself last weekend as the tour’s final flourish.

Although local news coverage suggests the production was well-received (and significant enough that Ireland’s president attended, along with McDonagh and his parents), Cripple doesn’t exactly flatter the Aran Islanders.  Set in 1934, the play slices off a moment in the lives of a colorful collection of odd and salty Irish types, all united by their reactions to “Cripple Billy.”

Billy Claven (Tadhg Murphy) is a young man who was orphaned when his parents drowned under mysterious circumstances and was taken in by spinster sisters Kate (Ingrid Craigie) and Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy), who’ve cared for the unfortunate, physically misshapen but spiritually dreamy boy ever since.

McDonagh propels the plot around the moment when Hollywood filmmakers came to Inishmaan to make Man of Aran, a pseudo-documentary about the locals.  The crudely sexual Slippy Helen (Clare Dunne) and her hapless brother, Bartley (Laurence Kinlan), bribe BabbyBobby (Liam Carney), a local fisherman, to take them to the nearby island of Inishmore to audition for the film.

Hearing their plan, Billy, too, decides to try his luck, concocting a scheme to persuade BabbyBobby to take him along, despite the superstitions against “cripples” on the sea, to meet the Hollywood producers.  Ironically, it’s Billy who’s selected to come to Hollywood to continue his audition, leaving his friends and his aunts behind to grouse about his lack of communication and gratitude.

JohnnyPateenMike (Dermot Crowley) is the local town gossip, who eavesdrops at doorways and around corners to collect people’s personal news, which he trades with neighbors for canned goods or other comestibles.  JohnnyPateen lives with his ancient, alcoholic mother, Mammy O’Dougal (Nancy E. Carroll), who’s sharp as a whip but immobile except for the arm that lifts her bottle of potcheen, an old-fashioned Irish rot-gut liquor much like moonshine.  The fussy JohnnyPateen expects quite a lot from Kate and Eileen in exchange for his information (which they mostly find useless), but his constant prattling brings a comforting kind of company.

Young Slippy Helen’s job is to deliver eggs, despite her preference for throwing them at people or breaking them over her brother’s head.  She enlivens the local atmosphere with mean accounts of her sexual ministrations for the island’s men (although mostly, she admits, its priests whose private parts she’s seen most of, letting McDonagh draw blood from one of his favorite targets—the Catholic Church).

Cripple is a dark comedy, boasting the biting satire and sometimes cruel humor for which McDonagh is known (and often considered controversial).  Although he was raised and lives in the U.K., his Irish-born parents brought him to summer in Ireland’s Connemara throughout his youth.  Whether or not this gives him leave to boldly (or viciously) parody local mores is an open question.  Cripple achieves its comedy through a rather absurdist use of language and pacing, especially under Hynes’s precise direction and the actors’ well-honed and finely timed delivery.

In Cripple’s opening scene, for instance, Kate and Eileen stand behind the counter of the local store they own, staring into the distance, hands idle, eyes never meeting, repeating one another’s sentences as they wait for Billy to arrive.  The two performers execute the hilarious scene beautifully.  Later, once Billy’s left for America, a similar scene uses the same style to repeat the phrase “not a word” more times than one would ever think possible, with growing levels of intense, comic, resentment for Billy’s disappearance from Kate and Eileen’s lives.

As played by Murphy, Billy is a soulful, sensitive young man, whose physical disabilities prevent him from fully taking part in the life of the town.  His ill-formed arm and his hobbled leg give him a shuffling gait, but his face is much sweeter than his aunts initially suggest, and there’s nothing wrong with his mind or his emotions.  The other characters, McDonagh suggests, need Billy’s difference to secure their own normalcy, even though they, too, are far from typical.

Billy’s struggle for dignity is told through his interactions with the others, for whom his escape to Hollywood proves something of a catalyst.  But we hear no more from him than we do from the others, resisting the impulse to make him anything of a hero.  McDonagh renders Billy’s actions and his future ambiguous, ending the play on a cruel irony.  But he suggests that in many ways, everyone in Inishmaan is crippled—only Billy’s handicap manifests physically.

The Druid production boasts the settled confidence of one that’s toured on and off since 2008.  The acting is sure and easy; you can tell how much fun the actors have together, and how lived-in their characters feel.  In a talk-back after one of the three performances presented at Town Hall this week, managing director Smith facilitated a conversation with Craigie (who played Kate), Dunne (who played Helen), and Carroll (who played Mammy), who described the various reactions to the production in Ireland and in the U.S.

Although they outlined the cross-national differences in response, Smith and the actors declined the production’s status as a national export that “represents” the country abroad.  Smith says that Druid’s mission is to do good work by Irish writers, but aside from that simple criterion, they don’t seem partisan to what “Irishness” might mean.

Aside from a bit of vocabulary, the dialect and syntax of the language, and the Aran Islands setting, the play resonates with a perhaps universally western understanding of life in a small town circa 1930, suffocating to some and comforting to others, where everyone knows one another’s business and the choices to enlarge one’s life are few.  Seeing the play on the islands, however, might bring it new colors and meanings.

In the second act, the villagers watch the film Man of Aran together in a public place, perplexed over what the fuss is about.  The Cripple program relates that the documentary, directed by the American filmmaker Robert Flaherty in 1934, “depicted the supposed ‘daily life’ of characters living on the Aran Islands . . . Many situations were fabricated, such as one in which fishermen are almost lost at sea on a shark hunt.”

Watching the film with ill-concealed apathy, Helen and the others focus comically on whether or not the fishermen have caught a shark (and whether, in fact, sharks swim in Irish waters).  They clearly don’t for a second imagine that the film has anything at all to do with their lives, even though it was meant to faithfully represent their “otherness.”

In McDonagh’s sly account, the film might be a metaphor for his own play.  Seeing that scene on Inishmaan, among islanders who the film and McDonagh’s play purport to be about, was probably deliciously layered and complicated.  (An account of the production on the RTE news features Ireland’s President’s attendance and solicits post-show comments from well-heeled spectators.  It’s not clear whether the more rural residents of Inishmaan were part of the audience.)  Whatever Druid intends about performing Irishness in Ireland and abroad or not, the enactment of identity and the impossibility of fixing a national character should be palpable.

The Feminist Spectator

Commentaries: Women in Theatre and Film and the Tonys . . .

I recently had the good fortune to have an op-ed piece on the dearth of women playwrights nominated for Tonys this year picked up by the Huffington Post.  (Thanks to all of you who saw the piece and sent me notes.)


Turns out, I'm not the only critic thinking along these lines as the awards are handed out this evening.  Christopher Isherwood posted his own thoughts about the lack of meaty roles for women on Broadway in his ArtsBlog on June 9, 2011.  His thoughts about roles for actresses dovetail nicely with my complaints about the lack of notice for deserving women playwrights.


Isherwood notes that good roles for women are disappearing especially from Broadway musicals.  He also remarks, as I did, that "of the four Tony nominees for best play, only one, David Lindsay-Abaire's 'Good People,' featured a leading female role."  Isherwood says that although this year was particularly dismal for women, it's not anomalous, and goes on to worry that "theater may be heading down an unhappy path pioneered by Hollywood . . . [where] fulfilling leading roles for women have been in eclipse on movie screens for a couple of decades now."  He goes on to say, "Given the evidence of the past couple of seasons, I worry that Broadway has come to share this unspoken bias against the idea of women's stories and defining women's roles as commercially viable."


I'm delighted that Isherwood took time to notice and comment on this turn of events.  At the same time, per my op-ed, I wish that Isherwood and other first-string male critics would take more responsibility for how they tend to write about those "women's stories."  I can think of too many examples of Isherwood's own reviews in which he seemed to condescend to or take less seriously plays by women, compared to how he (and his colleague Ben Brantley) writes about plays by men.   I continue to think that the predominantly male critical discourse in this country has something to do with the very problem Isherwood's ArtsBlog observes.


In the Times film pages, critic Manohla Dargis (the paper's second-string film critic), in an essay called "The Living is Easy; the Women are Missing" (to be published in hard copy June 12, 2011), suggests that only women who write films for themselves and other women will fare well in the glut of summer movies, where big blockbusters invariably star and concern men and boys.  Dargis says, "From now through August, American films will again be almost all male, almost all the time (the decorative gal pal notwithstanding) as this year's boys of summer . . . invade the multiplex, seizing media-entertainment minds and your dollars."


Dargis notes that the women who do appear in bigger summer films, like Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, are framed in sexy clothes and provocative poses.  Dargis suggests that to find substantive stories about women, spectators need to seek out "smaller dramas and romances from studio divisions and independents" in which talented women artists provide themselves or other actresses juicier roles.


Yet Dargis points out that Bridesmaids, the decidedly female-centered Kristin Wiig comedy (blog post on the film coming soon from me), is holding on to fifth position in the box-office sweepstakes, with $100 million of tickets tallied by its third week.  Dargis asks, "Is there a lesson here for those big-studio executives who even now are reading the latest iteration of the three-men-and-a-monkey story (but no women) [Hangover Part II] and believe the current state of American cinema--separate and unequal--will continue to fly?"


How timely that Dargis and Isherwood are using their powerful public forums to call attention to this issue.  But the dearth of good parts for and stories about women in popular culture and theatre isn't at all new.  These two critics sincerely wonder why this is the case, but after nearly 30 years of feminist activism demanding more notice for women in the arts, it seems time to stop simply pointing out the problem.


Critics need to share their burden of the responsibility and make sure that they consistently write about 1) the very issue both Isherwood and Dargis take time to note this week; 2) the continuing problem of how women are represented in film and theatre or, worse yet, remain invisible as significant characters; 3) how the gender inequality of American culture is not just reflected in these art forms, but helps to shape and teach what we know of gender and other aspects of identity.


I'm glad to be the "feminist spectator," but I don't need a monopoly on this perspective.  Would that all first- and second-string critics for major news outlets would consistently think about gender as an important aspect in whose stories get told and how in film, theatre, and the other arts.


The Feminist Spectator

The FS Saw . . . The Shaggs

I saw The Shaggs Philosophy of the World at Playwrights Horizons on Wednesday (May 25, 2011), in its second preview performance.  Based on a true story, The Shaggs describes how Dot, Betty, and Helen Wiggins, sisters from Fremont, NH, were coerced into becoming a band by their mercurial, rather psychotic father, Austin, whose plan for his daughters’ musical career came to him as a vision from his dead mother.  The three young women had no musical training or interest before he pulled them out of high school, bought them two electric guitars and a drum set, and ordered them to learn to play.  The musical traces their reluctant artistry and his increasingly crazy designs on their futures.

Austin uses all the family’s money to cut an album that gets no airplay, and tries to book gigs that take them nowhere, essentially because no one but him thinks his daughters are talented.  The musical traces how each of the daughters suffers differently from the way his dreams constrain their own. 

With a story by Joy Gregory (who wrote the book and lyrics), Gunnar Madsen (also music and lyrics), and John Langs (who also directed), The Shaggs is a fascinating, affecting show.  The story would be entirely unlikely if it weren’t true.  The frame puts Austin (Peter Friedman) in conversation a bit too often with his deceased mother to deliver the requisite exposition.  But scenes among the sisters are full of nuance and heart, of hope for the potential of what they might become and sadness over what they know they really are.  The family’s interactions with the amateur and professional music world convey the awkwardness of people from a small town in the 1960s trying to achieve stardom, a goal that only Austin truly desires.

Because the girls are teenagers when Austin’s plan begins to take shape, The Shaggs also illustrates how difficult it was for them to maintain normal childhoods.  Betty (Sarah Sokolovic) tries to play up her feminine wiles but her advances are rejected by Kyle (Cory Michael Smith), the young man whose dream is to be, as he describes it, a cosmonaut.  Kyle’s affections run to Helen (Emily Walton), the youngest Wiggin daughter, who’s infatuated with him in return.

Helen can’t quite see anything distinctive in her future.  Even before her father sets them on their wrong-headed musical path, she decides she’ll distinguish herself by refusing to speak.  Dot (Jamey Hood), the oldest, is most determined to please her father and bend to his will.  Her ambivalence about his strange notions conflicts with her loyalty.  (Her one solo is called “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Dad.”)

That each of the sisters is so clearly different from one another provides part of the musical’s charm.  Hood, Sokolovic, and Walton do a beautiful job individually and as a trio, finding complicated allegiances and friction among the sisters while they suffer together their father’s sometimes harsh and isolating, utterly ineffectual training regimens.

In a repeated sight gag that describes how desperate Betty and Helen are to free themselves from their father's tyranny, they leave the family home through a bedroom window, throwing themselves head first over the ledge and being whooshed out into the night.  When Austin realizes their escape route and boards it up, their suffocating imprisonment is horrifying.

The Shaggs is a small show with a very consistent narrative and pop-musical tone.  It evokes the stultifying environment of small town life, with its hierarchies and affectations and its community and camaraderie.  Annie Golden is lovely as the beleaguered mother who wants to help her husband pursue his dreams, but can’t fathom his obsession with making their daughters famous.  Walton brings sweetness to Helen’s silence and makes her mute expressions full of meaning and appeal.  Smith is affecting as the earnest Kyle, who suffers his own injustices at Austin’s hands.  Kevin Cahoon and Steve Routman, who rotate through various supporting male roles, bring just the right level of affectionate caricature to each one.

As Austin, Peter Friedman stretches out of his more typical abject characters into that of a forceful patriarch whose madness drives his family over the brink of disaster.  Unfortunately, Austin's obsession and brutality make him rather one-note; the daughters' scenes are more compelling than those in which their father stokes his insanity.

Gregory, Madsen, and Langs also creatively solve the challenge of how to create a good musical about talent-poor musicians.  The audience hears The Shaggs rehearsing and understands their unfortunate limitations.  But when the girls enter the recording studio and Austin listens to them cut their demo tape, we hear them as he does, as sparkling, charismatic talents who can sing and play and even dance.

When the scene cuts to the recording engineers, listening to the band through the studio monitor, they hear them as they are—off key, uninspired, and performatively flat.  Maintaining these two spheres of their musicianship throughout The Shaggs—the fantasy and the reality—allows the story to be told through the very idiom the band couldn’t quite master.

Ironically, Lester Bangs, writing for Rolling Stone, rediscovered The Shaggs in 1980, when punk rock created a context in which their atonal, affectless music made sense and even seemed radical.  But in The Shaggs, for the Wiggins sisters, their father’s control over their lives can’t be redeemed.  Even after his early death of a heart attack, they can’t shake loose his damaging legacy and the humiliation they suffered from his misbegotten dreams.

The Feminist Spectator

The Shaggs Philosophy of the World, Playwrights Horizons and New York Theatre Workshop, at Playwrights Horizons.  Opens June 7, 2011.

A Note from The Feminist Spectator

For the last nearly six years (since August 2005), I’ve mostly used the occasion of this blog to indulge in long-form essays about theatre, film, performance, television, and anything else that catches my fancy.

But lately, I’ve become aware that because I take some time to draft and craft these posts, I wind up commenting on much less than I actually see.  Time goes by and I lose the opportunity to write about many more of the things that capture my imagination or simply catch my eye.

So, in addition to my typical essay-length posts, I’m going to start trying to incorporate shorter writing in The Feminist Spectator, under these general rubrics (since I’ve always loved alliteration):

The Feminist Spectator Saw, which will let me write shorter posts about worthy productions or cultural events; The Feminist Spectator Seethes, which will offer opportunities for sounding off about things that make me angry; and The Feminist Spectator Suggests, which will let me call your attention to various events, groups, performers, writers, playwrights, and more that I haven’t been able to get to, but that seem interesting and worthy.  I often get invitations to see or write about work that time prevents me from accepting.  But there’s no reason I shouldn’t use this blog to get the word out.

Thanks, as usual, for reading.  And don’t hesitate to be directly in touch at jsdolan@Princeton.edu.

The Feminist Spectator

Feminist Performance Festival, Chicago

On Friday, May 20, 2011, I moderated a panel discussion on feminist performance at Northwestern University's "Feminist Performance Festival," organized by E. Patrick Johnson, Ramon Rivera-Servera, and Ann Orloff for the Departments of Performance Studies and Gender Studies. E. Patrick asked me to discuss the history of feminist performance, and to offer contextualizing remarks prior to a conversation with Lenelle Moise, Holly Hughes, and Rhodessa Jones, all of whom also performed during the three-day festival on campus. I'm sharing my remarks here, which are followed by some of the questions I posed to the artists. Holly Hughes taped our conversation; we're hoping to make the recording or a transcript available soon.

The history of feminist performance is of course inextricably bound to the political movement in which it began. Most people point to its genesis at the beginning of second wave American feminism in the late 1960s and early 70s. As many of you know, second wave feminism developed in part from a growing awareness that women were step-children of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the moment. As it grew from intimate consciousness-raising into a broad-based social justice activist movement, feminism splintered into different ideological camps. Those “discourses of the feminisms,” as they came to be called, were roughly characterized this way:

“Liberal” feminists were intent on making change within existing social and political systems and on achieving women’s equality. “Cultural” feminists believed in the distinct and often innate, binary differences that gender makes to culture, so that men, for instance, were considered warriors and women pacifists.

“Materialist” feminists saw gender and identity markers like race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity as historical, changeable, and fluid, determined by convention rather than biology. And “third world” or “womanist” feminists emphasized the intersection of race and gender in their political and ideological interventions. (The great writer Alice Walker coined the term “womanist.”)

These categories were always much more porous, fluid, and multiple than I’ve made them sound in this broad and necessarily generalized taxonomy. But these various strands of feminism were acknowledged by 1980s academics as those most visible and prevalent in the social movement and in the growing discipline of women’s and gender studies.

Early in the history of feminist performance and its attendant criticism and scholarship, these distinctions among feminists seemed salient and important to enumerate and theorize. In the 1980s, when much of this critical work was popularized, feminism was mobile and visible enough that distinctions among its strands seemed necessary.

The goal for those of us determined to parse these differences was to prevent “feminism” writ large from becoming hegemonic. We wanted to insure that all feminist work wouldn’t be mistaken for liberal feminism, the most often white, straight, middle-class, college-educated brand that seemed to dominate the movement. Those determined to spark more profound social change considered liberal feminism too accommodationist and not nearly radical enough.

Different kinds of feminist performance at the time were also categorized by way of these distinct feminisms. Liberal feminist theatre came to describe work by women playwrights and directors determined to make their way through conventional avenues of production. They hoped to work on and off Broadway, at regional theatres, and other mainstream locales that often provided stepping stones to film and television.

Playwrights like Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, Diana Son, Lynn Nottage, and Theresa Rebeck come to mind here, as women whose plays have been produced across a spectrum of mainstream theatre and who’ve also worked frequently in other forms. Many women theatre-makers continue to strive toward visibility and success in these contexts. And why shouldn’t they? These conventional theatre venues offer one of the only ways to survive economically as a theatre person.

Cultural feminist theatre and performance was distinguished in the 1980s by its attention to a “feminine aesthetic” or to “women’s forms.” At the Foot of the Mountain Theatre in Minneapolis and the Women’s Experimental Theatre in New York distinguished themselves by creating ritual theatre. They rejected realism and conventional dramaturgy as confining and “male-oriented.” They turned instead to oral histories, rewritings of mythology, and story circles to create more collective, experience-based, sometimes confessional genres and styles.

Critics later accused this work of literally white-washing feminism by privileging commonalities among women at the expense of their differences. But these ritual forms provided a trove of cultural interventions. Cultural feminist theatre in the ‘80s was a part of a thriving “women’s culture,” which developed subcultural venues for a host of women-organized ventures. For example, it promoted women’s music, at large-scale, women-only gatherings like the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, as well as through recording companies like Olivia Records, and music distribution structures like the Ladyslipper mail-order catalogue.

The subculture supported neighborhood women’s bookstores and women’s coffeehouses and performance spaces around the country. It also promoted women’s publishing houses. And most of these projects operated on anti-capitalist business models. (Which is why many of them no longer exist!)

The arrival of French post-structuralist theory in American colleges and universities, however, meant that cultural feminism and its alternative commerce were quickly dismissed as “essentialist.” Post-structuralist theorists like Foucault and Derrida influenced feminism’s shift towards a healthy suspicion of fixed ideas and master narratives, and proposed a hearty skepticism about claims to truth. Experience, which early second wave feminism had presumed as a foundational truth, was now considered only partial, and dubious in its claims to power. Post-structuralist-inflected feminism insisted on fluidity, relativity, and the inevitability of change.

As a result, the subaltern female utopianism of women’s culture, and its commitment to changing patriarchal and white supremacist social structures, was deemed unproductively mired in binary gender commitments that replaced a male master narrative with its female counterpart. What had been the celebratory, empowering productions of women’s culture became instead the butt of jokes delivered by the dominant class and by post-structuralist-inspired feminists alike.

In addition, “post-feminism,” the “movement” of the 2000s that dismissed early feminist activism while taking full advantage of its achievements, also played a role in diminishing many of cultural feminism’s projects. The harsh critique landed with stinging condemnation. Women’s subcultures and their idealistic community-building moved farther underground when they didn’t disappear altogether.

Materialist feminist theory and practice tempered post-structuralism’s tenets with a Marxist-socialist attention to real effects and actual cultural productions. Collectives like Split Britches and playwright/performers like our very own Holly Hughes, as well as Robbie McCauley, Coco Fusco, Carmelita Tropicana, and many others, exploded old forms with new contents. They pointed to the apparatus of theatre and called attention to how they constructed their representations so that no one could mistake them for “the real."

In the process, these artists foregrounded the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality as historical and ideological assemblages that could be played with, their meanings changed in performance and then, hopefully, in the world.

A lot of important work was generated under the many categories of feminism. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, women’s studies programs and departments established themselves in universities and colleges. Forming these academic locations was in itself a deeply activist project, meant to build knowledge about women, gender, race, and sexuality fully into the academic curriculum. But ironically, the new visibility of the courses and research these programs produced made them ripe for the backlash that Susan Faludi described so well in her 1991 book of that name.

By the mid- to late-1990s, feminism’s momentum as a wide-spread, diverse political movement had waned considerably. It was defanged largely by its derogatory treatment in the media and by the public platform newspapers and broadcast outlets gave to anti-feminist white women like Camille Paglia, Nora Vincent, and Christina Hoff Summers. Feminism took such a beating that by the turn of the 21^st century, many people had actively disaffiliated from the movement.

Few students, especially, called themselves “feminists” anymore. Thanks to the media’s stereotypes, to “be” a feminist meant claiming a radical “man-hating,” hairy-legged agenda that would—so feminism’s detractors proclaimed—end single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms as we knew them.

Of course, feminism also contributed to its own decline. The social movement’s various strands fractured and few leaders could rally large, coalitional activist communities. Without a public attention-getting feminist retort, the ridiculous media stereotypes hardened and claimed the popular imagination. Feminism began to diffuse rather than build strength from its distinctions, and to lose political power in the most visible public forums.

The debate about pornography, which began in the early 80s and continued into the 90s, also created a bitter divide among feminists. Activists such as writer Andrea Dworkin and lawyer Catherine McKinnon created legislation around the country to ban pornography, spurred on by groups like Women Against Violence Against Women. At the same time, other activist groups, like FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, railed against what they saw as Dworkin and McKinnon’s alliance with right-wing anti-porn advocates who also agitated against abortion, LGBT rights, and racial equality.

The anti-porn debates also widened the rift between heterosexual and lesbian feminists. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin’s foundational essay “Thinking Sex” went so far as to suggest that the “sex-gender system” she had once ably theorized through feminism couldn’t completely account for sexual variation. Rubin argued that lesbians, “queers,” and those we now call “LGBT” folks needed a new explanatory paradigm that would consider sexuality as distinct from gender.

Meanwhile, in theatre and performance, by the 2000s, women working in mainstream forms and contents had reached a kind of stasis. A study sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts in 2002 and an economics thesis by a Princeton graduate in 2009 suggested that the status of especially women playwrights was the same or worse than it had been much earlier in the 20^th century.

Artists who’d attempted the liberal feminist goal of achieving parity in existing forums were stymied by entrenched power structures that tokenized them, rather than fully enfranchising their work. The number of women playwrights produced on Broadway and in other mainstream forums hovered at a woeful 17%.

Advocacy groups like the League of Professional Theatre Women and 50/50 in 2020 have recently determined to redress this imbalance once again. But frankly, the power-brokers of American culture seem unwilling to shift these intractable percentages. Women and people of color (and those who are both, and/or LGBT) remain under-represented in the most visible theatre and performance venues.

But what of the subcultural, alternative, community-based contexts where feminist theatre has continued to thrive, branching out from its cultural, materialist, and third-world feminist or womanist roots? The picture here—which Lenelle, Holly, and Rhodessa so wonderfully represent—is more hopeful, as a wealth of artistic mediations into dominant ideology continue to be made through feminist solo performance and collective and devised theatre. These forms determine to tell new stories in new ways, and to make visible people and experiences who mainstream contexts continue to erase or exoticize.

Playwright/performer Deb Margolin once said that as soon as a woman opens her mouth to speak on stage, she’s performed a radical cultural intervention. Deb is right. We still aren’t accustomed to women taking up space, to women filling our visual fields, to women holding our attention with their stories.

Solo performance is a richly evocative genre that does all of these things with clarity and power. It’s also a fast and dirty, usually cheap and expedient mode of production (and I mean that as a compliment). Solo performance typically requires one, unadorned body on stage, normally without a lot of spectacle. And its narrative style gets directly to the political heart of whose stories are being told, by whom, to whom. This, I think, is why it’s been so popular in feminist theatre.

In addition, academic feminist theories of what was once called “the male gaze” argued that women’s bodies are the ones at which theatre, performance, film, television, and other media encourage us to look. Feminists like Laura Mulvey, in 1975, suggested that the psychological pleasure derived from spectating objectified women’s bodies by centering them under the male gaze.

Performed only to-be-looked-at, they were prohibited from being the subjects of their own stories and the engines of their destinies and desires. Much politically-conscious feminist performance of the last three decades has worked against the tradition Mulvey described, to empower women as full human agents in front of audiences.

But even so: At whose bodies are we still asked to gaze on a regular basis, inside the theatre and out? Think about it. In my everyday life, the people in power are still usually male. Men—and usually white men, at that—deliver the speeches and the radio and television sound bites. White men convene the meetings, calling us to attention with their power and authority.

I’m shocked and pleased when this isn’t the case. In fact, the president of Princeton is a woman, and every time she gives a speech or runs a meeting, I pinch myself because I still can’t believe that this is who I get to pay attention. I still can’t take a woman’s power and presence for granted, at work or at the theatre.

This, then, is the pleasure of watching performers like Rhodessa and Holly and Lenelle: to see them literally take the stage, to hold our gazes, to capture our attention, to tell their stories—whether about themselves or others—to gather us as however temporary a community, and to create for us a forum in which to think and feel together in new and hopeful ways.

Although I was one of the early advocates of “the feminisms” and their distinctions, it no longer matters to me what kind of feminism these performers or others like them might espouse. We can no longer afford to parse the feminisms; we’ve lost the critical mass necessary to make fine distinctions. We can look at performance prismatically, from many feminist directions, to tease out its numerous layers of meaning. But it’s important, now, not to privilege one way over another, not to value one feminist intervention at another’s expense.

My own critical project has become admittedly more liberal, after many years of using post-structuralist theory to propose more radical solutions to the problem of women and especially lesbians in representation. Perhaps I’ve just simplified my outlook.

I don’t disparage or deny the work that I and others did on complicated questions of representation. The focus on theatre’s apparatus that drove materialist feminist theory; the questioning truth and authority that post-structuralist feminism instructed; the essentialist ideals and their critique, which cultural feminism promulgated and prompted; the equity on which liberal feminism staunchly insists; all of these continue to influence my own thinking about performance.

In fact, many of these ideas have at this point been absorbed into mainstream thought—just as many students (male and female) really do practice feminism, even if they disparage the term.

But on some basic level, I’ve returned in my critical work to the question of who’s speaking and who’s listening, of who is seen and who is seeing (which, as theatre scholar and director Herb Blau taught me 30 years ago, remain deeply theoretical inquiries). These queries now form the basis for my feminist investigations of performance, along with—the where, when, why, how, and what questions about modes of production we must continue to ask.

I recently learned of graphic novelist and cartoonist Allison Bechdel’s test for gender bias in films, which she published in 1985 in her Dykes to Watch Out for comic strip. Bechdel’s assessment poses three easy questions: Does the movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if so, do they discuss something other than a man?

That’s a good place for a feminist critic to start, especially with mainstream films in which the answer to all three questions is often, “No.” In theatre and performance, perhaps we need a few extended questions, such as these: Does the play or performance tell a story about women equal in import to the one it tells about men? Is everybody straight, white, middle-class, and/or able-bodied here? If so, why is the story so one-sided?

Do I learn something new about how to see the world from this story? Do I learn a new way to tell a story from this performance? Do I feel myself part of an audience community based on this performer’s or performance’s invitation? Do I leave the theatre transformed in some way? And, will the performance persuade me to transform others?

In other words, the questions remain pretty much the same, regardless of which discourse of “the feminisms” they’re filtered through. But the precision with which we ask and answer them makes all the difference. We need to pay attention; we need to speak out when a play or performance doesn’t answer these questions to our satisfaction.

We need to ask, publicly and insistently and constantly, why are there no plays by women nominated for Tony Awards? Why is it so difficult to make a living as an artist unless you’re adopted into the mainstream, where even then, artists often scrape by or migrate toward film and television, which offer more lucrative paychecks? Why can’t artists make a sustainable wage in subcultural or community-based settings?

Why does the government always decrease arts funding while defense spending goes forever up? And why does federal funding mostly just go to elite mainstream arts organizations anyway?

Why are most American theatre and performance critics white men? Why do theatre producers pretend that no one wants to hear stories about women when the statistics say otherwise (although spectators do seem to prefer stories about women that are written by men, like David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People)?

I have so many questions about the way things are, and so many ideas for the way things might be. I see my relationship to theatre- and performance-makers quite differently now. I no longer consider myself an arbiter of varieties of feminist theatre and its meanings, but as an advocate for women’s work and for a feminist perspective on the arts and culture in general.

One of the historically consistent problems in feminist performance is the utter lack of informed critical perspectives in the popular press. I’ve started to proselytize among my students for high quality arts writing from alternative view points, so that we can enhance the public discourse about performance.

I’ve maintained a blog since 2005 called The Feminist Spectator, on which I write, several times a month, critical essays of various lengths on current theatre and performance, as well as film and television. My one rule of thumb is to write only about work that I like. I write about work that I feel deserves my time and critical attention, or work that’s touched a cultural nerve and hasn’t yet been addressed from a feminist perspective (for instance, the films The Black Swan and The Social Network, which I did criticize).

For these past few years, I’ve determined to use a practice of what I call “critical generosity,” very much influenced by my friend and colleague David Román. This is also based on a form called "colleague-criticism," which I developed with Jaclyn Pryor and Paul Bonin-Rodriguez when we worked together at the University of Texas at Austin. To be critically generous means to be responsible for a deeper knowledge of the work you engage; means that you take into account its production context and resources, its history and goals; and means that you consider its players and producers as people laboring to create meaning with the materials at hand.

The terms “good” and “bad” have no purchase here. Feminist criticism shouldn’t produce facile value judgments or consumer reporting; it shouldn’t adjudicate taste. It should strive to consider what theatre and performance might mean, what it might do, and how it might be used in a world that requires ever more and better conversations about how we can imagine who we are and who we might be.

This is the work that Lenelle, Holly, and Rhodessa do for American culture. I’m thrilled that we’ve gathered to hear them talk this afternoon and to see their work, as we did Lenelle’s last night, and as we will Holly’s tonight and Rhodessa’s tomorrow. Each of these women has put themselves on the line to tell new stories in new ways; to give voice to those silenced by dominant culture; and to transform how we imagine social relations between ourselves and one another. I’m delighted to share this panel with them today.

Thanks for listening.

My questions, to start us off:

1. What is your goal as an artist? That is, what do you want your work to do in the world?

2. Do you call yourself a feminist? Does that label refer to a meaningful practice for you? Do you qualify it in some way? Ie., African American feminist? Womanist? Lesbian/queer feminist?

3. Are there other words you prefer to describe your artistic practice?

4. How do you see the politics of what you do? That is, do your politics appear most in the form, content, or context in which you work?

5. How do you see your audiences? Do you “preach to the converted”? Or do you imagine people unlike you—politically, socially, etc.—in your audiences?

6. Is your goal to change people? What do you want audiences to do after your performances? How do you want them to react, emotionally and politically?

7. What stories do you think remain to be told? What do you want to see other performers do on stage and what do you want to do? With whom would you like to work? Which other artists or which communities?

8. For whom would you like to perform who you haven’t yet?

9. How do you fund your work? Where do you look for resources?

10. What gives you hope about feminist performance today?