I’m just going to put this right out there:  I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.
 
I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.
 
So why did I feel so differently about the musical?  To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.
 
Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood.  And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.
 
Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.
 
Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.
 
So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical,  in a nutshell:  The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.
 
In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of  creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.
 
In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is,  “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.
 
I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.
 
Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him?  Would that have changed your experience of the play?
 
I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.
 
When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to  revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.
 
Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario:  At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.
 
She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”
 
And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.
 
And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.”  They sing about the  time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions. 
 
The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!”  This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes.  Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.
 
Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.
 
Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not.  For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world.  The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.
 
In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?
 
We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.
 
Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

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Thanks to Eleanor Cowan, the author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer, for her feedback on this blog. Click here for my blog about her book. I have several blogs on the subject of child sexual abuse and incest.

I want to talk about theatre today—how I see it and my understanding of how it works to change people’s lives.
 
So bear with me, because I’m going to present three little stories which may seem to have nothing to do with each other. Then I’m going to connect them. And then, I am going to… well…  wait and see.
 
So here are the three things that don’t seem connected:

ONE: The Busking Drummer
 
Years ago, I read an interview with a woman drummer. I am sorry to say that I did not take note of her name at the time, because I did not know that her story would take root inside me and become so central to my understanding of my own craft. This drummer was talking about a period of her life when she was busking—playing on the sidewalk for donations. She explained how a passer-by would come and stand in front of her, listening, and how she would start trying to “read” them, rhythmically. She would begin to drum the rhythm and patterns that she was picking up from them. And she said that when she did that, their energy would change almost immediately. In a good way.  Okay. That’s the first story.

TWO: A Slogan
 
There is this slogan, "The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance."  Much as folks fear and resist change,  the accepted wisdom is that the first two steps are actually the most challenging. Once awareness and acceptance are achieved, often the change just happens organically. Because change is a law of nature.

THREE: The Tuning Fork
 
A tuning fork is that thing that folks use to tune a piano and other instruments. It looks like a long, skinny, two-pronged fork that’s not pointed on the ends. When the piano tuner takes the tuning fork and strikes it against a surface, it vibrates, giving off a very pure musical tone. This tone is a much more reliable standard for tuning an instrument than human guesswork.
 
Sympathetic vibration is a phenomenon that can be demonstrated with a tuning fork: Take two tuning forks and mount them upright on separate wooden boxes. Strike one of the forks, and once you hear the tone, silence it… probably by grabbing it. You will hear the second fork—the one that you did not strike—giving off the tone!  Magic, right? No, sympathetic vibration. Wikipedia defines it as, “a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness.” Hold that thought.

So… we have a busking drummer. We have a recovery slogan. And we have a tuning fork with sympathetic vibration going on.
 
What does this have to do with theatre?
 
Well, like the busking drummer, theatre has an audience. It has people sitting in front of the performers, giving them their attention.  As the slogan says, awareness and acceptance are a sequence or process that lead to change.  And finally, theatre tells as story with characters, situations, and themes—and all of these have a resonance, like a tuning fork that has been struck.  And—stay with me—I am going to make a daring suggestion. I am going to suggest that audiences, like that second, unstruck tuning fork, are “vibratory bodies.” They may have been passive when they stepped into the theatre, but, if there is anything in the play (character, situation, theme) which resonates with their own inner truth (in physics lingo “sufficient harmonic relations”), they are going to respond to those vibrations with their own vibration. And, just like the people facing the drummer and hearing their own rhythms reflected in her drumming, they will change. They become aware; they accept; they change.

One of my most recent plays is about a woman who is attempting to maintain a professional persona in the face of intrusive post-traumatic memories and affect. I wrote it because it offers strong and interesting work for a solo actor, and I also wrote it because I believe it can offer healing to survivors in my audience.
 
This play, Miss Le Gallienne Announces the Season, puts something on stage that is rarely seen and even more rarely discussed. It puts something on the stage that goes against the grain in a patriarchal, rape culture. It shows that “getting right back up on the horse” after a traumatic experience is not a path to healing and a pretty risky way to signal recovery.

This little ten-minute play whacks the stage like a tuning fork, sending out a strong, counter-cultural, taboo vibration. I visualize the strings in the “vibratory bodies” of the audience resonating with sympathetic vibration.  I visualize that vibration traveling up to their brain, activating sympathetic synaptic connections that awaken consciousness of post-traumatic affect that is being denied or minimized. Finally, I visualize, after a period of disturbance and rearrangement, an acceptance of the truth that trauma changes everything, often permanently.

My job as a playwright is done. The change is not my job.

CW: Today I am interviewing Dr. Janice Liddell, author, playwright, and retired professor and Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Coordinator of Faculty Development at Atlanta Metropolitan College. She also served on faculty at Clark Atlanta University for nearly 35 years, as a professor of English, department  chairperson and director of faculty development. So...  Janice, you and I met online about fifteen years ago, I believe… on an international chatlist of women playwrights.  And I remember you wrote a play titled Who Will Sing for Lena?  This is a one-woman play that gives voice to Lena Baker, a black woman who killed her abusive white employer in self-defense. Using the actual actual trial transcripts, you wrote a play that would enable audiences to understand her background and her motivation. That play has had a strong track record… and even a film?

JL: Yes, Carolyn we met on the ICWP chatlist and, as I recall, we left the chat about the same time for some similar small “p” political reasons related to our respective identities as minorities on the list. I guess it would be in bad taste to go into any more detail. (lol)
 
CG: Well, not to keep readers in suspense, we were frustrated in our respective efforts to confront racism and homophobia. And, in fairness, it was fifteen years ago.
 
JL: And yes, I had written Who Will Sing for Lena? around that time and since then, it has done fairly well in various places. But the film was a totally different project; it was, of course, related to Lena Mae Baker, but not at all related to my play. Believe it or not, the two are very different perspectives, even of Ms Baker. But as I have always said, Lena helped me to write my play and I told it the way she told it to me.

CG: I just want to tag onto that last comment. YES! Working with historical figures, and especially those in what I call “unquiet graves,” I have had that experience of a presence outside of myself standing by my side and nudging me to tell her story. Practicing theatre as a sacred art… full of miracles. So I just want to say that this recent play of yours, The Talk, is absolutely brilliant, and I would like to see every community in this country mount a production of it. It’s packed with so much… history, politics… but the characters are believable, the dialogue is spot-on, and I had chills over and over reading it…  Beautiful craftsmanship, deep humanity…  just an amazing piece of theatre… but also a tool, a social justice project, a  powerful, powerful way to bring communities together. I was so deeply moved by it.
 
JL: Wow, coming from you as a brilliantly successful playwright yourself, that is quite an endorsement. I am glad it affected you because, truth be told, it affected me even as I wrote it. But I’m sure you know that experience—of being carried away by the work as though you are channeling it. That’s a bit how it was for me.
 
CG: So…  “the Talk”…  First off, before we get into talking about the play specifically, can you tell us to what “the talk” refers?

CG: In The Talk, you have four generations of an African American family, on a Saturday morning… and there is a lot of conflict, because the two youngest members of the family, a brother and sister, want to attend a Black Lives Matter march and their parents don’t want them to go.  Can you talk a little bit about that conflict. They even make their son take off his Black Lives Matter tee shirt.
 
JL: This is a highly successful Black middle-class family and in their eyes, as in the eyes of many “highly successful Black middle-class families,” their success has resulted from them pulling themselves “up by their bootstraps.” They would likely never admit they went to university on an Affirmative Action program (as did I), for example. Additionally, they desire to separate themselves from the more “common” element of Black folks—separate themselves in every way they can. In fact, they tend to look down on the experiences of Black folks who, in their middle-class eyes, are financial, intellectual, educational, etc. failures in life. These parents have tried to shelter their children from these “failures” and serve as models for the successful route of Black people from poverty to wealth; from the ghetto to the suburbs. However, their middle-class Black children are highly influenced by the world outside of their “burbs.” Quincy Jr. is in college with youngsters from all walks of life; Miranda is so attached to her tablet and research on it that there is nothing that gets by her. The children and their parents are in totally different “realities”—and at this point, never the twain shall meet.
 

CG: But the whole power dynamic shifts when the grandparents and great grandmother show up for the brunch.  We see such a panoply of African American history in this family. It’s just wonderful.  Four generations… up from poverty to affluence… but the lynching remains a constant.  Can you talk a little about your process in writing this? Where you got the idea? Early drafts that needed changing? Is any of this autobiographical?

The play is a tad autobiographical in that my Mom is 94 years old and has dementia. My Mom’s parents were sharecroppers, and Daddy and one of my uncles served for a short time as Pullman Porters travelling from Ohio to Canada. One of Dad’s cousins was a career Pullman Porter and we were awed by the few stories we heard about their work on the train. Also, Dad and Mom’s families both migrated to Ohio from Mississippi, but not at all under this kind of duress in the play. So, some parts of the play come from stories I’ve heard or read and much from the tapestry of the Black experience and some just from my imagination.
 
CG: So you have a production coming up in January in Brooklyn… MLK Day, right?  What’s going on with that? 

JL: I am so fortunate to have had my play chosen for a coveted slot in the NYC Frank Silvera Writers Workshop. Of course, true to form, I didn’t do much to get it there; I have my dramaturg and now director, Byron Saunders, to thank for that. He is good for me. He pushes me to do more with my plays beside just finishing them and exerting that proverbial sigh of relief that they’re done. In fact, we have spoken about publishing a collection of all my plays… We’ll see how that goes. Initially The Talk was selected as the first play of the monthly Workshop series (I think there are only five in the series), but I had already made international travel plans for that date. We couldn’t find any other date for 2018 that would fit, so they came up with January 14. Of course, I found this selection very fortuitous when we realized it was MLK Day. To commemorate Dr. King’s birthday with a focus on the progress and process of Black protest movements seems so appropriate. God works in mysterious ways. I certainly hope we can fill the Billy Holliday Theatre (Brooklyn) for that one-day free performance/reading. Of course, I’ll be travelling to NYC as playwright to participate in this exciting spectacle. I can’t wait!!
 
CG: I would like to see this play done in every community… Maybe see about getting some touring productions that are funded to go to different cities.  What are your plans for marketing the work, and do you have any plans to film it? 

CG: Can you tell us about your other plays?  In the past, African American playwrights have had a difficult time getting mainstream productions, unless they were August Wilson and it was Black History Month…  Have things changed? How? Do you feel it is more difficult being an African American female playwright?
 
JL: Well, I have about six completed plays, including one for children, so I guess you can say I actually have “a body” of work. All of my plays are located on the New Play Exchange (shout out for NPX!). So anyone can review them and contact me if they are interested in seeing a full script. Putting them on NPX might be called my one passive stab at marketing (lol). Regarding being an African American playwright, I can’t speak for African American playwrights generally, but of the ones I know up close and personally, it’s rough out here. What I and my playwright friends lament about is that there are so few theatres interested in Black plays or plays written about the Black experience. And the ones that exist seem to want recognizable names or plays that have already proven their value. There are a few stars—August Wilson, of course, and a few others like Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori Parks, the recently deceased Ntozoke Shange and a precious few others. So, I do think it is difficult being an African American playwright, especially an African American woman playwright primarily because our experiences are just not considered universal enough to give theatres confidence that their audiences will turn out for them.

My experience as a playwright is further complicated by two factors: one is that I am 70 years old. I wrote my first play when I was 50--Hairpeace –and it earned a spot at Atlanta’s Horizon Theatre’s New Plays for the New South Theatre Competition and Workshop. I loved the writing experience, the workshopping and hearing my words on a stage; I had found a new love! But I’m a senior citizen and nobody knows my name. Further, the second factor connects directly to that one--I didn’t come through an MFA program or some other training ground that connects one to the powers that be in the field. I learned the art and craft of writing plays from reading plays and teaching plays. I was an educator—an English professor, chair of an English Department, a university administrator and wrote plays in my “free-time” so as far as the theatre community is concerned, I guess I haven’t earned my stripes in the field; maybe I don’t even exist. Actually, it took me a decade and three or four plays before I could call my own self a playwright, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the perceptions within the theatre community. I believe my work is good and at this point, I guess I’ve been satisfied with that comfort. When my work is produced, I actually feel I have hit a huge bonus. However, thanks to Byron and now you, I must admit, I’m pretty excited about The Talk and its future.

CG: To get a review copy of The Talk, email Dr. Liddell. She is in the process of publishing it, but can send a PDF copy until such time—hopefully by January. She says, of course, she's waiting now for that World Premier. Producers, go for it! It's going to be The Talk of the town!

This week there are lots of folks weighing in on the hearings about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court… political pundits, women’s rights advocates, lawyers, and so on. So I thought I would throw in my two cents as a professional actor. Because it was quite a performance.
 
So, one of the first principles of acting is “Don’t play the problem. Play the adjustment to the problem.”  In other words, don’t worry about impressing the audience with what your character is feeling. Focus instead on solving the character’s problem. That’s what makes a performance believable, because that is what people do in real life… and audiences recognize that.
 
Let’s say you want to portray an innocent person who is being accused by a powerful group of people of something they did not do. That’s a serious problem. It’s a dangerous situation. The innocent party needs to tread carefully, be thoughtful, weigh her words. Because she is innocent, she has the truth on her side, and her best defense is a straightforward presentation that allows the facts of the situation to come through, untainted by emotions or editorializing.

Seriously? This is just plain bad acting. Kavanaugh is showing us indignation, attitude, and outrage, instead of taking the actions to solve the problem. Why? Because, unlike Anita Hill, he is actually guilty. He imagines what an innocent person in his shoes might do. In his mind, that person would be feeling angry and oppressed, and so he is showing us that. Again… the difference between a trained professional and an amateur. I have no doubt that Anita Hill felt angry, facing that brotherhood of wealthy, arrogant, white men… men who had passed specific legislation to grant themselves, as Senators, indemnity from sexual harassment charges.  But, as I said, she was focused on solving the problem. Displaying her outrage was only going to taint the presentation of her facts and be seen as evidence that she was unstable. It would have been counter-productive. Displaying outrage is a function of privilege, and a luxury that few falsely accused folks can afford.
 
But Kavanaugh chose to perform indignation, attitude, and outrage, because the truth was not on his side and also because he was vulnerable to fear, guilt, and shame.

And here let me interject a word about outrage. It can be very, very useful in overriding and masking less flamboyant emotions. Outrage pretty much trumps them all. I learned this hitchhiking. If I was in a car with a driver who began to behave in a threatening manner, I would erupt into an emotionally violent tirade against a fictional boss, and I would keep this rant going until I was able to get away. It kept those icy fingers of fear from making inroads into my psyche. It gave me the floor. It shut down whatever scenario he was attempting to initiate. Let me be clear: a performance of outrage would not work on a Ted-Bundy-type predator, but, at least in my experience  with more garden-variety potential perps, I found it effective.
 
So Kavanaugh played outrage. And so did Lindsey Graham. In fact, Graham’s performance was even more transparent, as he used the display of anger to derail a specific line of questioning that was not going well for Kavanaugh. Because outrage carries the overtones of emotional violence, it disrupts discourse.  People confronted with outrage have a visceral response. Their choices become “escalate” or “appease.”
 
Kavanaugh’s display of outrage worked to solve his problem:  that of a guilty man attempting to defend himself when the facts do not support his case, when he is under oath and afraid to lie, and when he is fending off tell-tale emotions of guilt, shame, and fear. To a trained actor, Kavanaugh's performance of outrage was an admission of guilt, pure and simple.

I am thinking about children being torn away from their mothers this week. And I remembered a story told by one of my playwriting colleagues, Eva Knowles Johnson.
 
I met Eva in 1989 at the second conference of the newly-formed International Centre for Women Playwrights. It was in Toronto.
 
Eva got up to speak in a large auditorium filled with women playwrights and lined with representatives of the international press. The first thing she did was demand that all the men leave the room. She said that the story she was about to share was “women’s business.” She would not tell it in the presence of men.

I have never forgotten that moment. I had never seen a woman exercise so much authority in my life. She ordered the men out of the room. And they went.
 
Eva Johnson is an Aboriginal Australian poet, actor, director and playwright. She belongs to the Malak Malak people of the Northern Territory, and she is a member of what is known as the “Stolen Generations” in Australia.
 
Between 1910-1970, the Australian government forcibly removed indigenous children from their families as part of a policy of “assimilation.”  Some of the children were adopted by white families, and many remained in institutions. They were taught to reject their heritage and forced to adopt white culture. Eva was taken from her mother at the age of two and placed in a Methodist mission where she was kept for eight years. At the age of ten, she was transferred to an orphanage in Adelaide.

After the men had left the room, Eva told a harrowing story of her abduction. She remembers, as a toddler, her mother running through the bush, holding her in her arms. An Australian soldier on a horse was pursuing them. He bent down and grabbed her, and she did not see her mother again for three decades.
 
She told us about this reunion. The children from the Stolen Generations were never intended to reunite with their families. Neither the parents nor the children were given information about each other, and the children had been renamed.
 
Eva’s mother was in a nursing home watching television, when she saw Eva on television. She may have been watching the acclaimed series “Women of the Sun,” about the lives of four Aboriginal women in Australian society from the 1820s to the 1980s. Eva recognized her daughter on the screen. Even though she had not seen her daughter since that day in the bush, she recognized her. That was the story of how they found each other.

Eva wrote a poem about this reunion, “A Letter to My Mother.” The poem has been widely published and is included in curricula of Aboriginal literature.

“A Letter to My Mother”
 
I not see you long time now, I not see you long time now
White fulla bin take me from you, I don’t know why
Give me to Missionary to be God’s child.
 
Give me new language, give me new name
All time I cry, they say—‘that shame’
I go to the city down south, real cold
I forget all them stories, my Mother you told
 
Gone is my spirit, my dreaming, my name
Gone to these people, our country to claim
They gave me white mother, she give me new name
All time I cry, she say—‘that shame’
 
I not see you long time now, I not see you long time now.
I grow as Woman now, not Piccaninny no more
I need you to teach me your wisdom, your lore
 
I am your Spirit, I’ll stay alive
But in white fulla way, you won’t survive
I’ll fight for Your land, for your Sacred sites
To sing and to dance with the Brolga in flight
 
To continue to live in your own tradition
A culture for me was replaced by a mission
 
I not see you long time now, I not see you long time now.
One day your dancing, your dreaming, your song
Will take my your Spirit back where I belong
 
My Mother, the earth, the land—I demand
Protection from aliens who rule, who command
For they do not know where our dreaming began
 
Our destiny lies in the laws of White Man
Two Women we stand, our story untold
But now as our spiritual bondage unfold
We will silence this Burden, this longing, this pain
When I hear you my Mother give me my Name

I not see you long time now, I not see you long time now.
 

Eva spoke about her work as a director in Australia. I remember her talking about producing a play about the colonization of her people. In her production, all the white male roles were performed by Aboriginal women. She told us that she had been challenged for this casting choice. I have never forgotten her explanation, when she asked who better understood the mind of the white male colonizer than the indigenous woman.
 
Eva Johnson’s work reflects her identity as part of the “Stolen Generation,” and it also addresses cultural identity, Aboriginal Australian women's rights, land rights, slavery, sexism and homophobia. An out and proud lesbian, she lit up the conference with her joy and her exuberance, which was inextricably connected to her awareness of her history. She is a living embodiment of Alice Walker’s affirmation, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prize-winning classic, is headed to Broadway… or, at least, it was headed for Broadway.
 
The author’s estate has just filed a lawsuit against the producer, Scott Rudin. At issue is his adaptation for stage. The estate attorney claims that it deviates too much from the novel and that this is a violation of their contract, which specifies that they shall not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel nor alter its characters.”
 
As a playwright, I find this case fascinating. As a lesbian, I think that both sides are overlooking the obvious.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, was considered radical in its day. The protagonist, Atticus Finch, is a white attorney who stands up to the prejudice in his small Alabama town, defending an African American man who has been falsely accused of rape by a white woman.

Today, however, the book is seen—rightfully—as exemplifying the racist trope of the Great White Savior.  In a silent tribute to their white champion, they rise spontaneously as Atticus leaves the courtroom. His head bowed in defeat, he neither sees nor acknowledges them.
 
This was the book that Harper Lee wrote. It is an artifact of its time. Although African American authors were writing and publishing, the white-dominated mainstream market was not ready to identify with their perspectives. Lee’s book was an immediate bestseller. It’s my opinion that the popular embrace of the book is contingent on the fact that Atticus loses his case and that the defendant is killed in attempting to escape. Like the trope of the dead lesbian, this reification of the status quo invites self-satisfied expressions of compassion from mainstream readers who are spared the more difficult work of embracing an ending that signals social change.
 
Today the Great White Savior narrative is widely acknowledged as offensive, and one not likely to repay the investment that goes into mounting a Broadway production. This is why, in this dramatic adaptation by Aaron Sorkin, Atticus is portrayed at the outset as a man in denial about the racism of his town—an apologist for prejudice, unwilling to believe that an innocent man can be found guilty.  The role of Calpurnia, the African American woman who cooks for the Finch family, has been rewritten as the agent for Atticus’ awakening. Through a series of confrontations with her employer, she manages to win over the white attorney, mentoring him into the reality of Southern rural racism in 1936. By the end of the play, he has become the Atticus with whom we are familiar, the righteous hero standing against the masses for social justice… but he owes it all to a woman of color.

Actor/musician Evadne Bryan-Perkins notes that this rewrite swaps one racist trope for another--that of the "Magical Negro." This trope relies on a supporting stock character coming to the aid of the white protagonists, helping them discern the error of their ways. (This term was popularized by African American film director Spike Lee in 2001, during his lecture tour of universities, where he was criticizing the unrealistic and stereotyped depictions of African American men in Hollywood cinema.)

But Rudin, the producer, is not just responding to the datedness of the Great White Savior narrative. He also knows his dramaturgy. In theatre, the main character needs to have what is called a “narrative arc.” The protagonist must go on a journey of transformation, starting out at Point A and, two hours later, ending up—ideally—at Point Z. (A dramatic trajectory from Point A to Point B is not likely to carry a play with the gravitas of To Kill a Mockingbird.) The Atticus of the book, tried as he is by circumstances, nevertheless begins with sterling character and social conscience and ends in the same state of  grace. He goes from Point A to Point A.
 
As a playwright, I sympathize with the producer.  He wants a play that is going to work. However, as a playwright who is zealous about her own copyright protections, I have to side with the Harper Lee estate: It is clear that, in giving Atticus a narrative arc, the producer has deviated substantially from the character in the book. In rewriting the role of Calpurnia to be a major voice in the play, the producer has essentially created a new character.

As of the writing of this, neither side is making concessions.  Rudin, from his corner, maintains, “I can't and won't present a play that feels like it was written in the year the book was written in terms of its racial politics: It wouldn't be of interest…. The world has changed since then."
 
Attorney Tonja Carter, representing the Harper Lee estate fires back that the new Atticus “is more like an edgy sitcom dad in the 21st Century than the iconic Atticus of the novel.”
 
So that is the current standoff.
 
But I think both sides are missing something. It’s not about Atticus. It’s never been about Atticus. The voice of the narrator in the book is a gender-non-conforming girl named Scout. Atticus is her father. Harper Lee, a lesbian, has created a character that is her alter-ego, telling a story that was inspired by an actual event that occurred near her hometown in Alabama when she was ten years old. The plot and observations in the book are loosely based on her own experience. The model for Atticus was her own father.

Scout has a huge dramatic arc. In fact, Scout’s coming-to-consciousness about the socials evils of the adult world is the point of the book. She goes from being a naive child who has absorbed the prejudices of her peers, to someone who can break away, incorporating perspectives of the under-represented and standing with the outsiders of the world. Scout watches the trial, literally, from the colored section of the segregated courtroom. At the end of the book, she has traveled from fear of a developmentally disabled neighbor, to recognizing him as an ally and friend.
 
Why not make Scout the central figure in the Broadway show?  In the book, she is six, but she was older in the film. If the play is refracted through the adoring eyes of a child, wouldn't that explain her idealized experience of her father? In the book, Scout accompanies Calpurnia to a Black church, where she has a massive awakening as she sees Calpurnia's transformation of status among members of her own community. No need to violate the contract. Just allow the woman the full and radical context of that scene.

Can a Broadway audience identify with a gender-non-conforming little girl. Why not?  It wouldn’t be the first time. Member of the Wedding, another best-seller by a Southern lesbian author, was adapted for Broadway. It opened in 1950 and ran for more than five hundred performances. A historic production, the cast included Ethel Waters and a young Julie Harris. What is significant here is that the author adapted the book herself, and the character of the tomboy, Frankie, remains as central and unaltered on the stage as she was in the book. 
 
Yes, there will be a problem if Aaron Sorkin stays on to attempt a Scout-centric adaptation. Sorkin’s writing credits include the television series The West Wing, and a roster of tough-talking, political films including A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. He has already been questioned about his ability to write dialogue for Harper Lee’s juvenile characters. Asked if they will be expected to “speak Sorkin,” he responded, "Well, they're gonna have to, because I didn't write their language like they were children."
 
As a solution to this author-producer deadlock, I would like to put my name forward as an alternative writer. My credentials include thirty years of creating and performing lesbian roles for the stage, including more than a dozen gender-non-conforming roles for little girls. I invite Mr. Rudin to the webpage for my Butch Visibility Project. I really believe this might work.

The #MeToo campaign is causing a revolution, and I want to make sure that the other, huge percentage of women impacted by these sexual predators are not forgotten. I call us the "#MeNeither women." Read on!

In October of last year, the online #MeToo campaign went viral on international social media sites. The hashtag phrase was created by Tarana Burke, an African American civil rights activist, who coined it in 2006 to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in the culture. Last fall, white actress and activist Alyssa Milano boosted the signal by posting a message on her Twitter account, encouraging survivors of sexual harassment and assault to post #metoo as a status update. She did this as a supportive response to the actresses who were coming forward with their stories of harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

t#MeToo marks a cultural watershed. In a nutshell, women are being believed.
 
Suddenly immediate action is being taken to remove and replace these predators, without the women needing to win a case in court. For decades powerful men have gotten away with rape and harassment, because they could count on their victims having fewer resources and connections. They could tie up these women in court for decades with costly litigation, as well as smearing their names and destroying their careers. In fact, Weinstein hired private security agencies to collect information on the women who accused him and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. These agencies included Black Cube, a business run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, with branches all over the world. According to the New Yorker Magazine:

But in October, all of this changed. Women are being believed. We celebrate their courage as well as the international housecleaning that is going on as these predators are being fired and replaced.
 
But there is a hidden side of #MeToo. I call it #MeNeither, to include the victims who are currently not being included in this historic moment. Not all the victims have been assaulted or verbally harassed. In fact, the #MeNeither victims, like myself, are the ones the predators would not touch with a ten-foot pole.

The men who were/are busy raping, coercing, groping, and blackmailing their victims were/are not going to green-light any films about strong women standing up to perpetrators and winning. They were/are not going to fund narratives in which men like themselves are depicted as the bad guys. They were/are not going to foster a culture where they will be called out for their criminal appetites and activities. They did/do promote pornographic narratives where women are objectified, raped, tortured, and mutilated. They did/do promote romantic comedies where the heroine will sacrifice all to stand by her man. They aggressively have/do propagate male supremacy in their enterprises. These predators have colonized our collective imaginations.
 
Here is a partial list (out-of-date the day after posting!) of these mogul predators who have been busted just since October. It speaks for itself. These are men at the highest echelons of the top entertainment and media institutions in the US. Some are also in our government:

So most of these are gone or on their way out. What's next? Nature abhors a vacuum, so let's make sure that their replacements are not just "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Let's make sure that their replacements are drawn from the vast #MeNeither pool, packed with women whose talents have gone unnoticed for lack of opportunity and lack of resources. #MeNeither women have the narratives that are currently missing... and these narratives hold the promise of saving the planet.

This was orginally written for Jamie Anderson's Blog in 2015! Check it out!


Music is powerful. That’s why I like to write musicals. I think of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, and how, in 1949, its themes of interracial marriage were considered too risky for Broadway — until after the show had proven itself in London! I think of how nearly every song in that show made it to the Hit Parade on the radio: “Bali Ha’i”, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”, “Some Enchanted Evening”, “There Is Nothing Like a Dame”, “Happy Talk”, “Younger Than Springtime” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy.” The entire nation, racists and all, hummed happily along to the score of this musical.

What about the time? By 1948 soldiers returning home from the war were increasingly unwilling to accept the lack of freedom and equality in their homeland— a country that held itself up to the world as a bastion of democratic process.

The year before South Pacific premiered, segregation in the military and discrimination in civil service jobs were declared illegal, and the stage was set for one of the most powerful and violent civil rights movements in history. Did South Pacific reflect a collective readiness to confront racism, or did it actually serve as a cultural wedge to pry open the doors of consciousness?  Audiences could not take those lush melodies and haunting lyrics to heart without also letting in the message of the play: Life is too short and too precious to waste it on artificial boundaries that prevent us from loving.

A lyricist has responsibilities. Music, if it’s good, will lodge itself in the brain of the listener. It will seduce us with rhythms and syncopations. It will manipulate us emotionally with a melody that can soar and plunge, hold us in suspense, and release us with closure. The brain will forever associate the lyric with the music — hence the phrase “earworm.” Wikipedia defines “earworm” as “a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person’s mind after it is no longer playing.” Synonyms include “musical imagery repetition,” “involuntary musical imagery,” and “stuck song syndrome.”

Let’s look at Springsteen’s “Blinded By the Light.” Manfred Mann altered one simple lyric, changing “cut loose like a deuce” to “revved up like a deuce,” and forever after millions have wondered what it means to be “wrapped up like a douche.” Springsteen jokes that the song did not achieve popularity until Mann rewrote it to be about a feminine hygiene product.

Responsibility, people.

But deuces/douches aside, what’s up with 99% of popular music being about sex or compulsion? Popular music appears to be one endless booty call. What effect does this have on us, that every earworm would direct our attention toward lust or codependency? And … as a true child of the sixties, I have to ask the question “Who benefits from that?”

Well, heterosexuals would appear to, because I rarely hear a song on the radio about lesbian or gay couples. Yes, there are gender ambiguous songs, like Melissa Etheridge’s “Come To My Window,” but the more explicit ones never seem to get on the national radar. In fact, the only one I can think of in the moment is “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” by Paul Simon. 1972, nearly a half-century ago. It was a song about boys caught fooling around, doing something that mama saw that was against the law. Asked by Rolling Stone, “What is it that the mama saw? The whole world wants to know,” Simon replied “I have no idea what it is… Something sexual is what I imagine, but when I say ‘something,’ I never bothered to figure out what it was. Didn’t make any difference to me.” His indifference was radical at the time.

Okay, but sexual orientation aside, these ubiquitous sex-and-compulsion songs appear to me to be written to reflect male fantasies. Female sexual empowerment is equated with a woman’s ability to play into these fantasies.

But, seriously, orientation and gender aside, who benefits from a nation whose earworms are obsessed with sex?  Aren’t there other things we could be singing about?

Well, yes. In country music, we have mama, trucks, and prison. In folk music, we have a wide array of social justice issues.

But… musicals… ah, musicals. This is a lyricist’s playground. Songs that reflect character, that move the plot forward, that are true to the dramatic moment. Songs that capture the feel of an era, or the flavor of a culture. And all of this filtered through the experience and personality of the lyricist.

Take The Sound of Music. Oscar Hammerstein was dying when he wrote the lyrics for the show. In fact, he wrote some of it from his bed. The last song he ever wrote was “Edelweiss,” which was inserted late into the second act. “Small and white, clean and bright…”  A simple, simple lyric, but one that focuses attention on a wildflower when an evil world of fascism is rapidly bearing down on a small country, when the “Anschluss” of chronic physical pain is launching an assault on all the senses.

The Sound of Music is a musical about appreciation of life, with lyrics by a man who was about to leave it. Here is Hammerstein right from the heart: “My days in the hills have come to an end, I know / A star has come out to tell me it’s time to go / But deep in the dark green shadows are voices that urge me to stay / So I pause and I wait and I listen for one more sound, for one more lovely thing that the hills might say.”
 
And he goes on to write about favorite things, about climbing every mountain, about having confidence, about having done something good in one’s life, about how love can survive…. And then he sums it all up with that single, simple white flower… “Small and white, clean and bright/You look happy to me…”
 
Hammerstein writes the songs that he is needing to hear. Romance, as opposed to lust. Romance — that feeling of excitement and mystery toward what one loves, in this case the natural world and its simple wonders.

Miss Snooks was really awfully nice
And never wrote a poem
That was not really awfully nice
And fitted to a woman,

She therefore made no enemies
And gave no sad surprises
But went on being awfully nice
And took a lot of prizes.
---Stevie Smith
 
Stevie Smith’s poem is on my mind this week, because I just had a meeting with a New York producer about a musical for which I wrote book and lyrics. He told me that the lead character was “unlikeable” and  “off-putting,” and that it was impossible for him to care about what happened to her. Same feedback I got from a Broadway producer, and before that, from a top theatre critic in the state where it was workshopped.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about male lead characters in musicals—the ones that make big bank. There’s that man with such a hideously deformed face he has to wear a mask. He has an out-of-control sexual obsession with an opera singer, stalking and abducting her. There is a carousel barker who is an alcoholic wife-beater and a thief. Oh, and what about the scam artist whose racket is selling non-existent band instruments to innocent children? There is the pederastic older man, arguably also a pimp, who trains his band of street urchins in the art of picking pockets. The colonial plantation owner on the lam for committing murder who has fathered a couple of children with his native concubine—who was too much of a social inferior for him to marry. The patriarch who rejects his daughters for marrying without his permission. And, of course, the demonic barber who slits the throats of his customers.
 
Well, you get the picture. No one has ever asked me if I found any of these male characters unlikeable or off-putting… or if I found it impossible to care about what happened to them. In fact, if they had, I would have answered in the negative. Not because I have not known and loved women who have been stalked, battered, pimped, sexually abused as children, exploited by colonialism, rejected by their fathers, and attacked with knives and razors. I have. And I have worked with these women, written for them, lobbied on their/my behalf, and loved them.

But that’s real life, and this is theatre. There is that “willing suspension of disbelief,” which for women in the audience translates into a willingness to believe that these onstage male stalkers, wife-beaters, slashers, etc. are nothing like their real-life counterparts. These men are not dangerous and scary…  Well, okay… but scary in a good way. They burst into song, and so do their victims. Whatever the nature of their perpetrations, we understand them to be idiosyncratic dissipations custom-tailored to enhance our fascination and augment our empathy. It goes without saying they had terrible childhoods.
 
Women are smart enough not to spoil our own fun by too literal an interrogation of our responses to these musicals, and only the most paranoid man-hater could read into them sinister ulterior motives.

Well, if throat-slashers and exploiters of children still warrant the patronage of Broadway producers and critics, then what horrendous atrocities has my character committed that have placed her beyond the pale of “likeability?” Fair enough. She cheated against her teammates in the 1932 Olympics. That’s it. Doesn’t beat anybody up, maim or kill anybody.

It would appear that there exists a significant double standard for what is deemed acceptable behavior for male protagonists and female ones. Could this have some bearing on why women playwrights are so notoriously underrepresented on Broadway, and especially in musical theatre?
 
People come to the theatre for spectacle, for something larger than life. These male reprobates are certainly larger than life, and because of this, their narrative arcs can be huge. They are not excoriated for their hubris; it’s the very diving platform for the dramatic plunge we’ve paid to see. These men can be reformed, or they can sink deeper and ever-more-colorfully into the abyss of their depravity. Because of their flaws, criminality, perversions, vices, addictions, dementia, and so on, there can be a sweep to their trajectory, and a catharsis or an exorcism for the audience. And when their personal arc meshes gears dramaturgically with the larger historical or sociological arc, such as the Pacific arena in World War II or the French Revolution, the result can be an epic musical.

Plays with female protagonists are handicapped before the pen ever hits the paper. And it’s an ingenious form of discrimination. Nobody is barring the work of female playwrights. In fact, these days, there is a veritable Greek chorus of critics and producers lamenting our lack of representation in commercial theatre. They want to help us. They share their wisdom with us when we present them with our work. And that wisdom includes what they know personally and professionally about “likeable” heroines. What they know, and what I am learning, is that “likeable” means feminine. Even if the protagonist is the world’s greatest sharpshooter, she must still throw a match to get her man and take a number that says “I enjoy being a girl.”
 
What these helpful critics and producers are not critiquing is the implications of their association of likeability with femininity. What happens to the narrative arc, so dramatic with those deeply flawed male characters, when it is applied to a “likeable” female protagonist? She can travel all the way from “likeable” to “more likeable.” Her dramatic arc becomes a dramatic arc-ette, ladylike and petite, like the half-moons of her perfectly manicured nails. One is reminded of Dorothy Parker’s review of Kate Hepburn: “a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B.”

Ironically, in my musical, the unlikeable female lead complains about a similar double standard in the 1930 rules for women’s basketball:
 
"What do I mean? I mean we’re not allowed to play full court, that’s what I mean. We gotta stop on this center line like it’s a game of “Mother May I” or something. And this business about “travelin’ with the ball?” Three bounces and pass? You don’t see no rule like that in the boys’ game. They get to have the ball as long as they want and go with it as far as they want. Why don’t they come right out with it and tie our shoelaces together? And then people have the nerve to say that girls’ basketball ain’t as interesting to watch, because there ain’t no star players, and that’s ‘cause girls ain’t no athletes. Like to see the boys get to be star players with all that stop-and-start shit."
 
But I haven’t been entirely forthcoming about my musical. The lead character is a butch. There, I said it. And that’s actually why she cheats against her teammates. It’s the 1930’s, and these other girls will go on to have husbands and babies, but the working-class butch, with her Adam’s apple and rippling muscles, is facing a lifetime of marginalized spinsterhood and low-paid women’s work… unless she can figure out a way to become the greatest athlete in the world.
 
And that’s not going to happen by being nice. She is rejected by her mother. She is bullied and ridiculed in high school. She is lesbian-baited by the media. They revoke her amateur status after the Olympics, and they revoke it again when she takes up golf. The catch, of course, is that there are no professional sports for women in that era. For my protagonist her choices are clear: “Get tough or die.” She chose to get tough, and that is why I wrote the musical.

I need that kind of role model, because I, too, am up against a boys’ club. I, too, am needing the emergence of a professional producing organization for women to enable our financial and artistic autonomy in a field where dependence on male producers has resulted in our permanent status as amateurs or tokens. I believe that the Disney princesses, for all their multi-cultural permutations, tell a limited story and one that is largely dependent on magic, coincidence, and luck. I believe there is a powerful untold story in the lives of butch women. It is a story packed with self-determination, analysis and strategy, the identifying of enemies and the locating of allies.
 
I am coming to understand that it is the power of that story that is what is actually so “off-putting” and “unlikeable.” It is a feral story in a world of sexual colonization. The chorus line of fishnet hose and high heel shoes does not hold up on the same stage with a chorus of butch athletes, dressed to maximize human potential. These are mutually exclusive universes. And when two women end up together, how can we tell which one is the princess… and, even scarier, what are the implications for heterosexual romantic narratives when neither of them is “the girl?” If masculinity can be a normal female attribute where does that leave men? The lesbian butch strips away the mystique surrounding male power, unveiling the privilege that it masks.
 
This is how it works. This is how it worked in the sports world in the 1930’s and how it works in theatre today. You can’t build muscle and worry about femininity at the same time, and being an exceptional individual is not enough to change the game. The game changes when a critical mass of exceptional individuals pool our assets, raising our own money to name our own terms. Until that day, my philosophy is this:  As long as they will hang me for stealing a chicken, why shouldn’t I steal a horse? And when I write about the lesbian butch, I take the whole herd.


Originally published in  Howlround: A Journal of the Theater Commons, August 5, 2012.

Interested? Check out Gage's "Butch Visibility Project."

I get it. I do. Shakespeare is brilliant, and— as the world of theatre continues its fatal slide down the rabbit hole of four-person, single-set, and fifteen-minute plays—the Bard is one of the only playwrights with large-cast plays who is still being produced on any kind of regular basis.
 
But, of course, Shakespeare was a man. Not just a man, but a man writing for theatre companies that were all-male.  And, on top of that, his plots often reflect the stories of kings and princes and military leaders. Not surprisingly, the roles for men outnumber those for women five-to-one, with all of the major characters being male.
 
In recent decades, we have seen an increase in women cross-dressing some of these roles, and even all-women productions. Why not? Acting is acting.  If we can pretend to be Lady Macbeth, why not Macbeth himself?  If Shakespeare’s actors could impersonate women, we can certainly have a shot at his male roles.

And there is another way for women to get a larger slice of the Shakespeare pie: cross-gendering the roles. This means Queen Lear, Romeo as a lesbian butch, and so on…. turning the male roles into female ones.
 
This is what I want to talk about—this cross-gendering of Shakespeare.
 
Some celebrate this as a kind of bringing down of the dramaturgical Berlin Wall between the sexes. I actually see it as a form of shoring it up.
 
Before I explain, I am feeling a need to put out some of my credentials in the gender-bending department. My first directing project as a theatre major was an all-female, cross-gendered production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. The actors played the roles of Peter and Jerry as women. I considered this very daring. I remember that I did make one adjustment… small, but significant.  Jerry’s use of pornography did not resonate for me in the landscape of lesbians in the early 1980’s. This was before the Internet and before the rise of lesbian pornography. I switched the reference to romance novels, which women did and still do consume in mindless quantities in order to generate feel-good endorphins. It seemed to me to be the female counterpart to porn.

Even then, thirty-plus years ago I was aware of the perils of uncritiqued occupation of male narratives. In retrospect, of course, I realize that Jerry’s porn use was intrinsic to the storyline of The Zoo Story. He is cruising, with Peter as his potential hook-up. My simplistic substitution of a few words was inadequate to render the play coherent as a woman’s story. And certainly, the murder/suicide at the end of the play, came from left-field in my production. Sadly, life-threatening violence was and still can be the final act of an evening of attempted anonymous sex in the world of gay male cruising. In Albee’s play, this plotline may have been coded for a privileged group of insiders who understood the play to be about a hustler and a closet case, but there was still a ring of truth to the ending.
 
My production, in spite of my best efforts, lacked integrity. The women’s final choices appeared to be senseless, sensational violence. They had no historical precedent (the class tensions between gay males, with privilege temporarily and superficially leveled by shared outlaw status), and no social context (cruising in a New York City park), and no established archetypes (the middle-class, closeted family man and the youthful, gay street hustler). I liken my cross-gendering of the play to the wearing of “boyfriend jeans.”

“Boyfriend jeans” is a term for clothing made for women, cut intentionally larger and looser to be suggestive of—what else?—the wearing of one’s boyfriend’s clothing. “Boyfriend jeans” are marketed as a status symbol, signifying the confidence of a woman with a boyfriend, whose satisfaction with her appearance is such that she can afford to eschew uncomfortable, tight, traditional female fashions and wear what she damn well pleases. After all, she has already bagged her guy… right? From a marketing perspective, these “boyfriend jeans” are not as liberated as they might appear.  The message is that the  only excuse a woman might have for acquiring comfortable clothing is that her boyfriend is allowing her to wear his. This leads to subliminal associations with recent sexual activity, the careless casting off and the insouciant putting on of clothing left behind… perhaps as a way to extend the limerance of the encounter. But the clothing is not really hers. She does not fill it the way the presumed boyfriend would. It’s not her comfort she’s inhabiting, but his—and on loan at that. And when she steps onto the stage of life in her “boyfriend jeans,” the shadow of the boyfriend is permanently embossed on her image.
 
My production of The Zoo Story was clad in Albee’s “boyfriend jeans.” Yes, my production had a toughness, a sense of daring, a kind of tomboy swagger that was rare in the early 1980’s world of women’s plays. We were not doing a romantic comedy. We were not accepting the roles for women created by male playwrights. We were not doing a Wendy Wasserstein coffee klatsch, or a Megan Terry hippie play. We were hefting beefy chunks of tough male dialogue and heaving them into the gaping maw of our rabid male critics. Or so we thought. In fact, we were prancing around in “boyfriend jeans.” Nobody mistook our production for The Zoo Story… except us.

Fast-forward a few decades… I was hired to coach an actress who was auditioning for the role of Cassius in a production of Julius Caesar where many of the men’s roles were being cross-gendered. It was set in contemporary times. We talked at length about costume—the corporate “power suit,” which is designed to convey the message “tough enough to play with the boys, but feminine enough not to threaten them.” Short skirt, long jacket? Tight across the thighs in front, but with a subtle kick-pleat in the back to allow for mobility? Cleavage—but how much? Knotted scarf or foofy bow? Pockets, not purses. Shoes with a heel, but not too high.  Flats, never.
 
This was territory we both understood. This was the no-woman’s land we had both learned to navigate in our careers. We knew the game completely, but when the conversation shifted to interpretation of the role of Cassius, we lost our footing. Because in this production, the women were supposed to share power with the men. It’s called “gender-blindness.” But we did not have gender-blind words. Cassius’s speech was written by one man for another man, who would be portraying a male character who was in the political elite of an all-male government in a country where women had almost no rights, no financial independence, and no political voice or presence whatsoever.  There was no inner truth, no integrity to the interpretation, because neither of us had any cultural referent for “gender-blindness.”  It is not possible to act political idealism. If it were grounded in any reality that could be embodied, it would not be idealism. Duh. Boyfriend jeans.

I also attended a production of “Queen Lear” done by a local girls’ theater company. All the characters were cross-gendered. These were high-school and middle-school girls. I was uncomfortable throughout the production, because I was aware that what I was seeing was something like “let’s all pretend to be  fish who live on dry land.”  From gills to fins to scales, there is no aspect of a fish that is adapted to life on dry land. Everything that makes a fish recognizable as a fish precludes their presence on dry land.

What are we talking about with Queen Lear? There is no woman, especially of a royal family, and especially as the head of that royal family, who lives outside of patriarchy. There is no mother whose relationships with her daughters has not been shaped by some dance of compliance and resistance to that patriarchy. I felt that the girls were being taught to believe that power was a question of temperament, of personality, and that it existed apart from social systems, historic precedents, political realities. The dreadful unraveling of Lear’s kingdom, family, and sanity are testament to the rigidity and distortions of a patriarch whose will has gone unchecked for his entire adult life. His ownership of his daughters was a legally defined relationship that informed his fatal choices.  Well, I could go on. It was boyfriend jeans again, and the girls were getting a ton of props for parading around in them.
 
The problem I have with cross-gendering these roles is two-fold: They cannot provide powerful material for the actor. That fish-on-dry-land thing. Acting in a vacuum.  Dialogue from a science fiction world that the director fails to establish and that the playwright never intended and that is not the actor’s job to create.
 
The second problem I have is more serious: The masking of the very real patriarchal context that pervades the world of Shakespeare’s plays and which his narratives continually expose and challenge. Hamlet gets in trouble, because the son of a warrior king cannot be allowed the contemplative bachelor life of a poet and philosopher. King Lear is a cautionary tale about even the so-called winners in a patriarchal hierarchy, because old age and impotence catch up to us all. And so on.

I do support women’s desire for more powerful roles. Sadly, the first two thousand years of Western drama were not by us or for us, and there is nothing we can do about that. We can play men and play them as well, or even better, than men. But we cannot do our best work in cross-gendered roles, and that has nothing to with our abilities.
 
The good news—the very good news— is that women have found our voices now, and some of us are actually writing classical dramas with large casts and epic themes. Ahem. I have several, myself. Just ask.