I have a friend named Elliott, who is a disabled, radical, working-class, Jewish, lesbian-feminist activist. She wrote an interesting article about the political implications of the contents of the supplemental dictionary of her word-processing program. The supplemental dictionary is a file that allows the user to customize the spell-check program by adding words that are not in the default dictionary that came with the program. Here is a partial list of words from Elliott’s file:
ableism
ableist
accessibility
Ashkenazic
assimilationist
batterer
classism
classist
clit
dyke
Eurocentric
feminisms
futon
heterosex
heteropatriarchal
homelessness
ism
lesbophobia
miso
mythologize
sephardic
sizeism
tampax
tempeh
therapism
yiddishe

Obviously, the words that are critical to Elliott’s defining her experience—not only her day-to-day reality, but also her identities and her oppressions—are missing. The point of Elliott’s article was to make visible the usually invisible process of marginalization. What does it mean when “tits” is in the dictionary, but “clit” is not? What does it mean when there is a term for hating queers, but not one specific to the combination of homophobia and misogyny? What does it mean when “ablebodied” is in the dictionary, but “ableism” is not? What does it mean when every conceivable category for christian sects and denominations is included, but the words descriptive of Jewish ethnic origins are not? What does it mean when all the pejorative terms for poor people are in the dictionary, but “classism” is not?

Elliott’s printout of the contents of her supplemental dictionary file makes visible a process that is usually hidden. The printout not only exposes a mechanism of exclusion, but it also suggests connections and patterns of oppression among her diverse identities.

What is missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature? Turning to the supplemental file of my own canon of plays, I find that nearly all of the archetypes I use are absent from the traditional canon: the avenging mother, the survivor of sexual assault who is believed, the angry young woman, the ambitious winner, the fiercely loyal sisters, the venerated crone, the lesbian lover. My archetypal narratives are also missing: the sanctioned patricide, the woman’s resurrection through rage, the recovery of memory, the shifting of paradigms, the de-colonization of the body, the furious re-invention of the self, the reconstruction of the ruptured mother-daughter bond.

There are many archetypes in my lesbian-feminist culture that are missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature. As with Elliott’s supplemental dictionary, I find it instructive to examine these omissions for what they reveal about that mainstream canon. These archetypes include the rejected older woman who, instead of becoming consumed with revenge like Medea, liberates
herself joyously from the entire heterosexual paradigm that would put her out to pasture at menopause. In the patriarchal canon, the archetypal survivor is Cassandra, whose ability to predict the future is seen as a curse, not a strategic advantage, because no one will believe her. In my culture, the survivor of male atrocities uses her second sight to heal herself and to rescue and recruit other victimized women. In our epic dramas, the daughter, unlike Elektra, sides with the mother against a perpetrating father, and our goddesses, unlike the motherless Athena, endorse the patricide of the perpetrator, not the matricide of the avenging mother. Our Antigones, longing for a voice in the political process, are not satisfied with impotent and self-martyring protests against a sadistic, misogynist system, but seek out the alliances with other powerful women. We have a literature
replete with warrior women from long lines of unbroken matrilineal bonding. Why are these rich roles and archetypes missing from a canon that purports to be universal?


I suggest that it is because of the censorship of incest as a subject fit for inclusion in the canon. If we believe the statistics that tell us one third of all girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, usually by a male caregiver, the case could be made that incest is the central paradigm for women in patriarchy. Incest is the template for a woman’s experience of betrayal by her fathers and her brothers. When the mother is forced to choose between the interests of her male partner or male offspring, and the interests of her daughter, she will most often align her interests with what will give her the most stake in a male-dominated system. Sadly, most mothers will reject their sexually abused daughters. And here we see the Cassandra who cannot erase her memory of trauma, but who cannot find the women—or the men—who will believe her. Here we see the Clytemnestra, who, in
avenging the murder of her daughter, falls victim to another daughter and a son who identify with the perpetrating father. Here is Medea who avenges her sexual rejection on the younger woman and on her own children. Here is Athena, defining the father as the true parent, the one who provides the “seed,” and the mother as only the empty carrier, the borrowed womb.

When incest is not named, when the incest story is not told, it becomes the accepted paradigm, part of the default lexicon for defining accepted reality.
In preparing this paper, I asked the members of my theatre newsgroup for titles of plays that dealt with child sexual abuse/incest. I say “child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest,” because, in my experience of working with survivors, the two are most often synonymous, or, at least, very closely related in terms of scenarios and syndromes.

The first thing I noticed from the list of titles was that the “slash” has disappeared. There is almost no connection at all between the portrayal of incest and child sexual abuse in the majority of these plays. Incest as a titillating scenario of adult desire is a recurrent theme. Child sexual abuse is all but absent.
A sampling of incest titles from the traditional and contemporary canon include: Oedipus Rex, Phaedre, Pericles, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Desire Under the Elms, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ghosts, Fool for Love.

Lots of stepmother-stepson adult attraction, lots of half-brother-half-sister adult attraction, and a couple of cases of adult parent-child, mistaken-identity attraction. I know and have worked with hundreds of incest survivors, and not one of our stories even remotely resembles any of these. In fact, I don’t know anyone whose story resembles these. The popularity of these models for incest must be attributable to either the fantasies or the subconscious fears of the male playwrights who employ them as plot devices.

Moving away from incest to plays that deal with child sexual abuse, we find the field thins out considerably. Almost all of the plays in this category are recent ones. One of the oldest is Turn of the Screw, with its suggestions of sexual abuse by a tutor and a governess. Part of the much-touted mystery of this play, however, is the fact that audiences never know if the story is true or just the neurotic, projected, sexual fantasies of a frustrated spinster. There are two contemporary plays about child sexual abuse set in all-male environments, focusing on the fate of the perpetrator in prison communities: Lilies and Short Eyes.

Two of the suggested titles finally dealt with experiences of child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest. The first is Nuts, a play by Tom Torpor that was made into a feature film starring Barbra Streisand—a film which, unlike other Streisand films, received almost no critical attention. The protagonist is a prostituted woman who has murdered a john. During the course of her trial, she recovers repressed
childhood memories of paternal incest.

And then there is How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which has just won a Pulitzer. In this play an older girl is sexually abused by her uncle. What does it mean that a play on the traditionally taboo subject of incest has been officially recognized by being awarded the Pulitzer? Is this a sign that the silence about incest is being broken, or just a subtler form of censorship. In order to answer
that question it is important to look carefully at the depiction of the survivor in How I Learned to Drive, and it is also important to understand something about the process of a child when she is sexually abused, especially by a trusted adult or caregiver, as is the case in Ms. Vogel’s play.

The experience of the sexually-abused child is this: “This can’t be happening to me” and “This is happening to me and I can’t stop it.” There is a variation on that second part: “This is happening to me and it’s going to keep happening to me, night after night, for years and years and years, and I can’t stop it.” Obviously, “This can’t happen” and “This is happening” are mutually exclusive propositions. To accommodate them in one body, the mind splits off the second part--the
unthinkable, the unspeakable part. Some children literally experience themselves rising up to a corner of the room and watching it all from the ceiling. Others spontaneously repress the memory as it happens. In the case of Marilyn Van Derber, a former Miss America who was raped by her father for years, she had a “day child” and a “night child” identity. The “night child” had no communication with the “day child,” until Van Derber was in her 30’s and began to recover her
memories, the recovery apparently triggered by her daughter having reached the age at which her own abuse had begun.

Some children experience displacement. A typical episode of displacement involved a child who was raped by a friend of her father’s while her father held her down. During the rape she focused on a poster of a rock star that was on the wall, and afterwards she “remembered” the abuse being perpetrated by someone whose description tallied with that of the rock star. She successfully displaced the identity of the rapist to protect herself from information too dangerous to access.
In some cases, the child does not travel to the corner of the room, but instead, she merges her identity with that of the perpetrator. In this syndrome, referred to as “fusion with the perpetrator, “ the child identifies with him during the abuse, adopting a pornographic perspective toward her own body as “other.” Because of her complete lack of agency, it is safer to identify with the experience of the perpetrator than with her own. The child who experiences fusion during the trauma learns, as a survival skill, to become aroused by her own pain, fear, and humiliation.

Most survivors split off not only the incest, but also various emotional affects associated with the experience. The child whose natural instinct would be to fight off or even kill her assailant is obviously in a dilemma if this assailant is a primary caregiver on whom her survival depends. In cases of incest, normal healthy emotional responses can jeopardize the life of a child and she may develop completely various dissociative states to store these taboo and life-threatening emotions and behaviors. Rage at her rapist and grief at the betrayal are two of the strongest and most taboo emotions for the survivor, and it may be very difficult for the victim to access these, even later in life, because of her early association of these emotions with life-threatening conditions.

Getting back to How I Learned to Drive and the Pulitzer… Ms. Vogel’s play is an accurate depiction of a certain type of incest, in which the girl is older and the perpetrator is not violent and poses as someone supportive of her interests. In situations like these, it is common for the victim to feel complicitous, to mistake the perpetrator’s predation for a “relationship,” and to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. Her confusion stems from the still-necessary repression of rage and grief.

Does this have anything to do with its official recognition? I maintain that it has everything to do with it. The key to that Pulitzer lies in what is missing from the canon: the incest play from the perspective of a recovered survivor—the survivor who has integrated her rage and her grief and who understands her experience in the context of a male-dominant culture dependent on the sexual subordination of women.

Ms. Vogel’s play was praised for the “humanity” with which she treated her subject. She was also praised for depicting the “complexity” (read “mutuality?”) of incest, the fact that is not always so “black and white.” They praised her even-handedness in the sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrator, the confusion of the victim. In other words, the majority of the critics were not noticing that the point-of-view was pathological, that the victim was still deeply dissociative. But in order to
notice this, they would have to notice the lack of anger or grief. I submit that her critics did not miss the anger or grief at all, and, furthermore, I submit that she received the Pulitzer precisely because that anger and that grief were missing. She told an incest story in which there is not political context, in which the act itself is as isolated as a tree falling in the woods, in which the perpetrator is not a sadistic predator, but “merely” a loser. Her survivor is resigned, superior, moving on. How poignant, how handy.

How I Learned to Drive is not the only dissociative narrative being valorized as the whole story. There are several well-known performance artists, women and self-declared survivors of horrendous sexual abuse, who tour to colleges and universities where they take their clothes off and even recreate scenarios of sexual abuse in the name of sexually liberating themselves or protesting the
objectification of women. Performance art critics have written tomes of theory about these artists, none of which incorporates a shred of theory about trauma and recovery.

What if these “radical porn feminist activists” are actually partially-recovered survivors still in the “acting out” phase of early recovery? What if the replication of traumatic scenarios under these more controlled and therefore subjectively more empowering circumstances (no pimps, no johns) is part of their process in integrating? What if the audience is watching an unrecovered survivor
parade her pathologies in front of us in an articulate, but still incoherent attempt to tell her story and integrate? What if these are not sexually liberated adult women at all, but women who are still slaves to their traumatized childhoods?

One sure way of finding out would be to compare their performances and their narratives to the work of recovered survivors, whose narratives incorporate anger toward the perpetrator and a full sense of the lost entitlement of safety and agency, with the cultural context in which their abuse occurred as subtext. But these narratives are conspicuous in their absence. The story of the fully integrated
survivor is missing, even as the survivor who sentimentalizes her perpetrator or who recreates her own abuse for mass consumption receives the official endorsement of the mainstream.

Why aren’t more women noticing and protesting this absence, this censorship? Well, let’s imagine we are at a play right now. And let’s assume that those of you who are listening to this paper are the audience. Let’s break it down: Half of you are women. For every three women in the audience, one will have been sexually abused as a child, most likely in a situation involving incest with a male
perpetrator. Let us consider that those women, those women who comprise one third of the female audience. Do they remember at all? Many will not. If these women do remember, how have they dealt with it? More to the point, with whom are they sitting? Probably with family. Would those seat companions be there if she remembered, if she told? If the companion is a spouse, would he welcome the inevitable disinheritance, the stigma, the disruption of childcare arrangements, the
awkwardness at family gatherings? Is he up for the financial and emotional demands of the healing process? If she’s there with parents, would she lose one? Both? And how many siblings? Most of these women will have tried to forget or ignore. Frequently they are helped out in this by dissociative disorders which keep the memory conveniently disconnected from the emotions, which have been hermetically sealed off in other parts of the psyche. And here How I Learned to Drive, with its deeply dissociative heroine, will provide reassurance and validation. This play will be much more comfortable for the woman in denial than a play about a recovered survivor.

If these survivors in our audience are inclined to be religious, they can mistake this dissociation for forgiveness or transcendence, as did the critics of How I Learned to Drive. Forgiveness and transcendence are both endorsed as feminine virtues in ways that anger or a sense of entitlement are not.

But maybe these women in our audience have forged an entire identity from their fusion with the perpetrator. Maybe they experience themselves as sexually liberated, because they revel in the recreations of scenarios of their abuse. Certainly a pornographically-inclined partner will not be likely to complain. In fact, mainstream culture will endorse the woman who enjoys acting out sexually against herself. One could, in fact, make the case that this is the point of incest. If this third
of our female audience is still experiencing fusion with the perpetrator, they might enjoy the work of performers who treat their own bodies as “other,” and who arouse themselves with self-violation.

But what if this audience is not identified with the perpetrator? Then they are likely to react to this kind of “performance art” with sexual shock, retreating into the various dissociative states to which they have become habituated. Or maybe they are further along in their healing than the performer and they are feeling anger toward the rest of the audience for their exploitation of an obvious survivor. But if these women express this opinion, if they protest what is going on, or if they walk
out of the theatre, they will be labeled puritans, members of the sex police, feminazis. They are greatly at risk of calling attention to themselves as survivors, which is very dangerous in a situation where sexual predation is being encouraged. She may feel trapped with dangerous perceptions she
cannot articulate. If she is on a road to integrating, she may be forced back into splitting, and this is tremendously destructive of the healing process.

What is my point?

My point is that the canon is skewed, that the depictions of child sexual abuse that are allowed serve an agenda to marginalize the voice of the recovered survivor. My point is that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing on the stage, nor can we theorize about it, until we have allowed all the voices of incest survivors to be heard, and especially the voices of those who have integrated
their experience and who can make the larger connections between a culture that looks the other way when girls are raped and then turns around and markets their damaged sexuality as role models for all women.

[Originally presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, Toronto, 1999.]

There are two things to keep in mind when adapting historical material for the stage: 1) Tell the truth. 2) Entertain. These are not as easy as they sound. Real life is often incoherent and boring. It does not follow a neat dramatic arc, and few us ever gain closure for the big tragedies in our lives. Misfortune is arbitrary, injustices are seldom redressed, and very few of us end up with what we think we deserve. The bad guys do appear to win, and all kinds of folks get away with murder.

Theatre, as playwrights know, cannot make allowances for the disorderliness of real life, because it has its hands full with a reality of its own: real people in real (often uncomfortable) seats, observing performances with real actors that are taking place in real, contemporaneous time. For this reason, a play must do certain very specific things, and it must do them within relatively rigid time frames. For example, within the first few minutes, the audience must have a very clear understanding of what they are watching and why. If, after ten minutes, they are still struggling for context, they are likely to become frustrated or bored—unable to invest themselves in the game of “let’s pretend,” which is what puts the “live” in “live theatre.”

Ideally, at the halfway mark, something should occur to substantially raise the stakes. After all, the audience’s investment in terms of time and attention is mounting, and the playwright has an obligation to up the ante. If the audience engagement is everything it should be, they should be needing some kind of “seventh-inning stretch” about three-quarters of the way through. And then, of course, there are those last three minutes, for a definitive resolution or a definitive commitment to non-resolution. (“Game called on account of rain…”)

In fact, thinking about theatre in terms of a spectator sport might be more useful than storytelling. A good play should keep the audience literally on the edge of their seats, like a football game that’s gone into overtime.

So there is this issue of craft. The historical truth must be bent to fit the framework. A tight play that plays fast and loose with historical facts will work far better than a poorly structured play with rigid adherence to biographical chronology.  The playwright must be willing and able to take liberties. These are separate issues. The willingness means being able to step away from the research, to lose the sense of reverence for the literal, biographical truth. The playwright needs to make the character live, and she can only do this by breathing her own life force into the character.

This is dramaturgical CPR is a process. The playwright probably has a passion for the historical subject, and it can feel blasphemous and presumptuous to appropriate the facts.  Sometimes I have to remind myself that a poorly written play will not be much of a tribute to my subject… or myself!

The first few drafts are usually hybrids, lumbering awkwardly down the runway of my imagination, still encumbered by weighty historical detail. The prototypes become lighter, more streamlined, and somewhere around the fourth draft, there is usually dramaturgical lift-off.

Outside permission may also be required, because adapting history can raise legal issues of libel, privacy, or copyright violation. Is the adaptation going to involve text from letters, journals, or other documents? Who owns the rights for these materials? Is the playwright intending to adapt a book? The Dramatists Guild is a great resource for contracts, as well as information about using historical characters. Their website has publications that address a number of pertinent questions.

Adapting does involve special circumstances, but the bottom line is still the same: high stakes and uncertain outcome.


Sample adaptation:

From Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter

CALAMITY JANE: I met Bill when I was still wet behind the ears. Just a kid. See I was orphaned when I was fourteen, and I learned to hustle pretty good… (To herself.) Had to. (After a pause, she turns back to the audience.) First time we met, we was in a poker game together, an’ I beat him. I beat him real bad. Bill don’t like to lose, ‘specially with folks watchin,’ so he rears up an’ calls me a cheater. So I says… (Slowly, savoring the moment.) “Hickok, you play cards so dumb I’d have to cheat to lose!” (Smiling.) Well… everybody’s laughin’ at that one, so he pulls out his gun, an’ then Molly behind the bar yells out… (Imitating a shrill female voice.) “Put that back, Bill! That there’s a gal!” (Smiling.) Well, that done it! He just stands there lookin’ at me like a hog starin’ at a wristwatch. An’ then all of a sudden he throws his gun on the table an’ hollers, “Drinks for the house …!” (Hoisting the bottle.) “… I want all of ya’ll to drink to this here gal—the finest poker player in the Territories!”

[Originally published in Seasons:The Quarterly Journal of the International Centre for Women Playwrights, July 2010.]

There are many challenges in writing lesbian-feminist plays, and today I want to talk about two of them. The first is working without antecedents in the popular consciousness, without a canon of lesbian dramatic work from which to draw. The second is the particular kind of audience response to the work which generally results from this lack of a cultural context.

Playwriting is an intensely compressed art form, taking place in a single location, over a two-hour period of time, with real human beings. Plays rely on narrative and dramaturgical conventions in order to work around these restrictions. Conventions are a form of shorthand, based on common cultural assumptions. They involve familiar paradigms and archetypes, and also stereotypes. Unfortunately, the narrative and dramaturgical conventions I inherited came from 2,000 years of theatre written by, for, about, and serving the interests of men. The lesbian character does not fit into the patriarchal paradigm except as an object of ridicule, pity, disgust, or prurient interest. The lesbian can be the superfluous spinster, or the male sexual fantasy, or the vampiric seducer of women all of whom would otherwise presumably become compliant heterosexual wives and girlfriends. And, of course, the lesbian character can be a tormented outcast who kills herself. Obviously, within this paradigm I could not tell the stories I wanted, the stories that reflected my truth.

An even more serious problem with this lack of authentic models is the fact that the lesbian-feminist paradigm, aside from being new and unfamiliar, is also inherently hostile to the patriarchal project. The lesbian experience is hugely shaped by compulsory heterosexuality, which is so pervasive in the patriarchal models that it is just taken for granted. The fish does not know it is wet. But the lesbian looking down into the pool sees the fish, sees the water, feels the hands that, since birth, have been inexorably pushing her toward the edge of the pool, and, knowing she cannot swim or does not want to learn, she must resist. To tell the story of that resistance is to draw attention to the existence of the pool and the hands that push--something that, in my experience, most men and many women are very uncomfortable hearing about. To make explicit, as I do in the play Ugly Ducklings, the negative effects of this pushing on girls who may still be rooted in a world outside the pool is to invite criticism and even censorship.
 
Similarly, the lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs some of the most venerated archetypes of patriarchal theatre, beginning with the patriarch. In this model, which does not disguise the fact that women have historically been barred from positions of power and authority--often by violence--the male hero does not come off looking quite so godlike. The lesbian-feminist playwright sees, notes, and foregrounds the masses of women whose appropriated power props him up. She states how his exercise of power perpetuates her and their oppression. He actually begins to look like an enemy, and a cowardly one at that. In the lesbian-feminist paradigm, women, typically depicted by the mainstream culture as vying with each other for his sexual attention or approval, turn to each other as more empowering, enjoyable, and appropriate companions and partners.

The lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs the patriarchal archetype of the so-called "good" woman, the compliant woman who privileges the interests of others--especially men--at her own expense. Not only does her behavior appear foolish and self-hating, but it also appears immoral in the lesbian-feminist paradigm, because female self-effacement enables the patriarchy that is systematically destroying the planet.

Writing the lesbian-feminist play requires a rejection of the models, assumptions and expectations of the traditional Western canon. This is hard work. It is the work of decolonizing oneself. The resistance to it comes from inside the playwright's own head as well as from the world around her. Necessary disciplines of isolation and attention to one's own experience can translate into anti-social behaviors and self-absorption. Both are occupational hazards, but they are seldom appreciated as suchCeven by the playwright herself, who may be wondering "what is wrong with me?" This has been by far my most serious oppression.

Fortunately for me, even though there was no visible, substantial body of lesbian-feminist dramatic work, there was a huge, vibrant, radical, radiant, life-saving, fire-breathing body of lesbian-feminist fiction, history, theory, poetry, music, and art. I began writing in 1986, and I can honestly say that had I been born ten years earlier or ten years later, I would have never been able to write a play like Ugly Ducklings--or any of my other plays. I feel incredibly blessed to have begun my career when I did, and I am incredibly grieved about the fact that women who came of age in the 1980=s and later are so often completely unaware of this amazing heritage of radical feminist literature from the Second Wave. Much of it is out of print. With the demise of the women=s bookstores and the women-in-print movement during the late 1980=s and early 90=s, there have been fewer and fewer institutions or publications for centralizing the work and facilitating access to it.

One of the books that was foundational for me as a writer was Dale Spender's Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. I recommend it to every woman who wants to write. It explained why I had no role models in theatre and it explains why I am censored today and why you cannot find many of the books that inspired my work. It explains why my work will be lost after I die. Unless, of course, I commit a high-profile suicide. More on that subject later.

In any event, I did have models for my content. I turned to the writings of Andrea Dworkin, Anita Cornwell, Audre Lorde, Christos, Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Daly, Julia Penelope, Phyllis Chesler, Barbara Smith, Cherrie MoragaCas well as the tremendous collections of radical feminist writings by lesbians without big names, lesbians writing about their experiences on the land collectives, women documenting projects, publishing women's newspapers, etc. I was fortunate enough to be living contemporaneously with some of my mentors, and I have had the great privilege of meeting many and even befriending some. The majority of us were banned from the academy just by virtue of being "out," and this was a great class leveler, granting us precious permission to write without fear of ridicule or class comparisons. It also enabled radical thinking. If they're going to hang you for stealing a chicken, you may as well steal a horse. And so we did. Whole stables. Also, the economy was such that few of us had student debt, we could survive on part-time, minimum-wage jobs, and so we had the time and energy to create our own culture. I feel a lot of rage about the fact that working-class women and even some middle-class women no longer have that leisure.
 
The point I am making here is that art is not created in a vacuum. Not even the most brilliant woman can write without precedents. She will either use--and use at her peril--the ones that are hers by default--the mainstream, patriarchal ones that bombard us 24/7, or else she must actively seek out the feminist ones that will enable her to tell the story that empowers her.

But content was not enough. I also needed plays to use for models. Combing through the mainstream canon, I could find no radical feminist models, with the exception of a few highly encoded scenes from Gertrude Stein operas, a handful of one-act Suffrage plays, and a little one-act treasure called Trifles, by Susan Glaspell--and I did direct and produce all of these. But I needed successful, full-length, large-cast plays for models. I was going to have to locate the mainstream plays that most closely resembled the one I was intending to write. I was going to have to close my eyes to the content, and tease out the elements of structure that I could apply to my work. This is a dance familiar to many a native artist whose own tradition has been banned, stolen, corrupted or destroyed. I do experience my lesbian identity as a colonized one.

I found three plays, and I want to take some time to talk about them, because they illustrate so beautifully the problem of assimilation, or attempting to tell a partial lesbian truth without making it radical--"radical" as "down to the roots." All three of these plays were attempting to change attitudes about gender. All three of them, in my opinion, did more to further entrench the stereotypes than they did to challenge them. I have no doubt the hearts of the playwrights were in the right place. But it is the structural mechanics, often relying on those dramaturgical conventions, that undermined the message.

Patriarchal Culture is a shopping cart with a bad wheel. It steers to the right, unless there is an intentional and constant effort to wrench it back to the leftCin order to get it centered. I want to say that again, because it's such a critical point in my survival. I live and work under career house arrest. I can write whatever I like, but I cannot make a living at it. I cannot find venues for it. My work is not allowed to leave the house. Why? Because I am always wrenching to the left. I would not have to do that in a culture that was authentically gender-neutral. I must wrench because the cart is rigged in the direction of male dominance/female subordination.

So I dug out three former Broadway hits that dealt with issues of gender and sexual orientation in same-sex environments for children.

The first play, Tea and Sympathy, was written by Robert Anderson in 1953. It was an attempt to advocate for the so-called effeminate boy at a boarding school--the boy who prefers the company of women to his rowdy male peers, the boy who's artistically inclined, is not an athlete, and has no interest in sex for its own sake. This advocacy backfired, however, because the play never left the sexually colonized paradigm of heteropatriarchy. It never challenged the essentialist notion of manhood. At the very end of the play, the effeminate, scapegoated student is seduced by his macho housemaster's wife, and this act supposedly rescues him from the questions in his own mind--and in the mind of his audience--about his sexual orientation. His so-called manhood is doubly redeemed in this incestuous scenario, because, by his initiation, he not only "becomes a man" but also succeeds in stealing his enemy's wife.
 
In fairness to Anderson, his play went as far as it dared. Within the paradigm of heteropatriarchy, he did manage to make the point that effeminate men might be more courageous, more appealing to women, more heterosexual than the macho, athletic men who prefer the company of males socially. But in winning that battle, the playwright lost the war. Tea and Sympathy increased the marginalization of gay males--affirming through Tom's example, that they just hadn't found the right woman to rescue them yet.

The second play that dealt with sexual orientation issues in a same-sex environment for children was The Children's Hour, written in 1932 by Lillian Hellman. This play was inspired by an actual trial that took place in Scotland in 1810. Two women who ran a school for girls were accused by one of the students, who claimed to have witnessed them engaging in sexual behavior with each other. Hellman was careful to make the point in interviews that the play was not about lesbianism, but about "the power of a lie." She was defending the right of women to be self-sufficient and to live without men, without being accused of lesbianism. This is a far from dated theme. Most current plays and films about single women go to extraordinary lengths to reassure audiences about not only the heterosexual orientation of the characters, but also their silliness and subordination in relation to men.

For Hellman to make her point, lesbianism must be represented as heinous. If she equivocates on this point at all, it is only in the final moments of the play, when one of the women realizes that her feelings may actually be lesbian. Within minutes of this confession, she kills herself--leaving it up to the audience to decide whether or not this is a tragedy or a necessary consequence.

The Children's Hour was less useful to me than Tea and Sympathy, because it did not work that well dramaturgically. It plays like a melodrama. But, again, it reflected mainstream attitudes toward lesbianism that are still rampant, and it provided a kind of foil for my own play.

The third play was the German classic Children in Uniform, adapted from the film Mädchen in Uniform adapted from a book by Christa Winsloe. This took place in a Prussian girls' boarding school, and actually depicted a butch student and her crush on the female teacher who showed her some tenderness in the otherwise harsh and regimented environment of the school. The film was released in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and critics are quick to point out that it represents an allegory about retaining humanity in a totalitarian environment. Interestingly, critics still fail to identify Winsloe=s intentional depiction of lesbianism as a locus of resistance.

This play was the closest to what I wanted to do in Ugly Ducklings, in that it was sympathetic to the lesbian characters. But the play is not without problems. Winsloe intends us to view the teacher as a martyr, but today's audiences find her relationship with the students inappropriate. Also, in the book Manuela kills herself at the end, leaping from the roof of the school. When the film was made, two alternate endings were shot--one where the suicide was completed and one where it was intercepted. By the time the play was written, box office had obviously weighed in in favor of the intercepted suicide, but it is an obviously pasted-on, fake happy ending. Dramaturgically, all the action is pointed to the necessity, even the inevitability, of Manuela's suicide.

And I want to take a minute with lesbian suicide, because it is such a central theme in my play and in our culture. Lesbian suicide is a nifty ending for lesbian plays, because it offers the audience an opportunity to feel they can empathize with the character's suffering without feeling that they are enabling an identity that troubles their notions about gender or morality. Most of us can afford to feel charitable toward the dead.
 
Consider the 1991 film Thelma and Louise. They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws. They have killed a would-be rapist. They are on the run. And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point, the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare: They kiss, they look at each other, they yell "yee-haw"--and then they get down to the business of survival. They ditch the car. They dye their hair. They go underground on any one of the dozens of women=s lands all over the U.S. They're in Arizona, right? They could go to Adobeland. Or Apache Junction, which is an entire village of lesbians. They get healthy. They heal. They make love. They change their diets. They do yoga. They dance under the full moon. They build a hay bale house. They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any. They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute. They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment. They have a zillion delicious options. But in the movie, they go off a cliff. In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss. Lesbianism is a fate worse than death. The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators. The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kissCcoming after the decision to commit double suicide. (Twenty years later, Million-Dollar Baby has not traveled far. The empowered woman with fighting skills must ultimately desire her own suicide.)

There are two plots in Ugly Ducklings. One is the coming-out story of a closeted, middle-class counselor who has fallen in love with an out, working-class counselor. The second plot concerns a deeply disturbed adolescent butch and a ten-year-old camper who has a crush on her. The adolescent lesbian acts out intense, internalized homophobia to deflect attention from herself, and the target she chooses is the ten-year-old. The ten-year-old, terrified by the scapegoating, attempts to hang herself on the stage. This attempt is intercepted by the two counselors, and in the course of the intervention, the closeted counselor outs herself. The child is saved, the lesbian lovers, on their way out of patriarchy, are reconciled.

I submitted this play to a well-known, mainstream theater in D.C. several years ago. They considered producing it. The script was circulated among the staff. They had a meeting about it. In the end, they rejected it on the grounds that it was too pedagogical. I was puzzled by this. Pedagogical... meaning preachy? I went back through the script. There's only one preaching or teaching speech in the entire play, and that's the speech at the end of the play delivered to the child with a rope around her neck. It is definitely pedagogical, because the child has internalized some very bad pedagogy that's going to kill her. In the speech, the counselor explains how being lesbian is something like being born left-handed. Absolutely pedagogical, no question about it, and also dramaturgically justified. In fact, there was nothing else I could have put in that spot--unless, of course, I wanted the child to die. What this theatre was telling me was that the difference between art and propaganda was the death of the child. Kill her, it's art, and they'll produce it. Let her live, it's propaganda, and no production.
 
I kept my thoughts to myself for several years, but when the show was mounted last spring by Venus Productions, also in D.C., I had reason to reconsider my silence. The reviews were strong. We had an endorsement from the NPR affiliate station. The show was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for best new play of the year. And yet there were reviewers who took issue with the end of the play. Metro Weekly complained that the ending was "too neat, never takes advantage of ... lucrative opportunities to wrap up her dawdling script."
"Lucrative?" Interesting choice of words. "Dawdling?" The child with the noose around her neck ... as in "let's get on with it?" Potomac Stages praised my restraint (whatever what that means), at least until "the final scene when it turns preachy and, as a result, becomes artificial and off-putting." Why is letting the lesbian live perceived as "artificial?"  I have no comment whatsoever as to the application of the word "off-putting" to the rescue a child from hanging.

At risk of sounding like a touchy artiste, I submit that the intensity of the criticisms that have been so single-mindedly focused on pressuring me to change the ending of this play are in direct proportion to the success of that scene. If you are doing radical feminist work, and you are doing it well, and particularly if you are doing lesbian-feminist work, you will know the power of your work in exact proportion to the resistance you encounter. Never mistake it for a sign you are on the wrong path. We all must wrench, and wrench again, and keep wrenching as long as we are in the toxic, misogynist current of a male dominant culture. Do not ever apologize for that. And don't even think about changing your ending!


[The following was first delivered as a paper for the New England Women's Studies Conference in March, 2005. Originally published as "In Search of a Lesbian Stage Tradition," in The International Gay and Lesbian Review, Issue 14.2, March/April, 2007, Cambridge.]

 The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we attempt to use public facilities. What is the "politically correct" attitude toward gender presentation when the ability to identify a stranger's biological sex in an isolated environment can be a question of life or death? What happens when queer theory butts up against the intensely polarized reality of male violence against women?

These were the questions on my mind when I wrote The Ladies' Room, a six-minute play about a bathroom confrontation. The play opens in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. A woman has just gone to report to the security guard that there is a man in the bathroom. The "man" is actually Rae, a teenage, lesbian butch. Angry and humiliated in front of her partner, Rae is hurling taunts and insults directed toward the woman complainant. Her teen girlfriend, Nicole, is uncomfortable about the dynamic, and the two begin to argue.

When Nicole expresses concern that public bathrooms are the third most common public site for sexual assault, Rae ridicules her for buying into an urban myth. As Nicole defends herself, it becomes apparent that she has been a victim of a stranger rape in a public space. Rae is emotionally overwhelmed by this information. At this point, her accuser is seen returning with the security guard, and Rae has to make a decision about how to respond.

Responses to the play have been strong and personal, especially by women who experience frequent challenges about their sexual identity. In my play, Rae chooses not to run away at the end, but to go out to meet the security guard and voluntarily offer her gender credentials in the form of her driver's license. Several women took exception to that ending, feeling that Rae was enabling of her own oppression in making that gesture. One of my critics, who has experienced humiliating official pat-downs in airport bathrooms, expressed the belief that the women who challenge her appearance are not concerned about rape, but are just trying to impose their class-based sense of a "gender dress code."

Another masculine woman, who actually lived a passing life as a man for several years, took a different approach. She was a victim of a gang rape, and she told me that when she is confronted in bathrooms, she draws attention to the fact that she has breasts and is a woman, and then she thanks her accuser for her vigilance. This woman identifies as a radical feminist, and, for her, it is a priority not to shame her confronters or in any way, punish them, or make them uncomfortable for their vigilance about the possibility of a man being in a woman's space.

The two actors who performed the play this summer at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shared their own recent experience with unisex bathrooms. They had attended a large conference for queer-identified youth, and one of the first things the attendees did was to convert all of the bathrooms on their hotel floor to "gender-free." The actors commented that women using these bathrooms were constantly exposed to the sight of men's genitals, as the men were using the urinals and also leaving the doors open to the stalls when they used them. The women reported their feelings of shock and discomfort, noting that it would not have been safe for them to express these responses in the context of the conference, which was focused on the safety of trans youth.

The controversial ending of The Ladies' Room was not intended to represent a solution. In the play, the character makes the gesture as an attempt to remedy her perceived insensitivity to her partner's rape history. The play is designed to initiate dialogue between feminists and genderqueer allies.

[Originally published in On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine, August 18, 2009.]

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.