Deb Randall has just published two books: a collection of monologues by women playwrights she has produced, Frozen Women, Flowing Thoughts, and a memoir, Venus. Venus Theatre has produced more than 70 plays by women since 2000, a phenomenal track record. She has produced  readings or full productions of a dozen of my plays, and her journey has been an inspiration to me.

CG: The issue of space is interesting to me. I feel it’s the tail that wags the dog. Reading your memoir, I was struck by your struggles and the adaptations you made in finding and creating venues in DC and then in Laurel (outside Baltimore.) Your thoughts on this… and the future of little theatres in light of the insane inflation of rental costs…? 

DR: Fortunately for me, the theatre space afforded me as a High School student was state of the art. I believe it was sponsored by DuPont. So, access to proscenium spaces when I was a teenager was constant even going into Community College. So much so, that I found it boring. It was when I decided to revive the experimental theatre program with my professor that my imagination took off in terms of alternate spaces to produce theatre. I found this style much more engaging. Since my time there in the 80’s, our whole culture has left the age of analog and moved entirely into the digital age. This only affirmed my distaste for the proscenium style of theatre. Why pretend actors are inside of a picture frame when you can go to the cinema and watch realistic stories with unending production value?

My advice is that your only limit is your imagination. I was once advised by a panel of female directors during a symposium at the “National Museum for Women In the Arts” that “Theatre is not made of bricks and mortar. Theatre is made of people.”
 
Theatre sits at the center of the humanities. As long as there is humanity there will be theatre. Maybe not in huge structures developers build to fill their wallets. I don’t think it works well there anyway. Might as well go to the mall and window shop. 
 
I think the rough state of our world is a result of bad theatre right now. Like most dictators ours are all failed artists. Bad actors (in every sense), terrible theatrons. Just look at [Steve] Bannon’s rap opera of Coriolanus. 
 
Powerful theatre is always a result of powerful connections. I have a feeling we’re making our way back to those connections now out of sheer necessity and I’m excited about that.

CG: I appreciated how your memoir blended what was happening in your personal life with what was happening in your professional life. I sometimes think that theatre self-selects those of us who are not finding a place for ourselves and our dreams in the so-called real world—either because of trauma and/or marginalized identity issues. In my experience, this was exhilarating and visionary, but at the same time, it made for a lot of “explosions in the laboratory.” Any thoughts on this?
 
DR: The thing about “explosions in the laboratory” is they feel absolutely devastating when they happen and yet, they are the most informative and impactive truth-telling events an artist can experience. When I think of the moments I really got something wrong, I remember how inept I felt. How it made me want to shrivel up and quit. Then came the next breath though. I knew in that next breath that somehow I was still standing.
 
Every crash is really an opportunity to grow.  I think the patriarchal way of thinking is linear. Beginning, middle, end. It’s dull. It’s not my experience. There’s no greater beginning than the last terrible ending.
 

CG: You produced several of your own shows… for me, most notably the play about the rape and murder of your best friend. How was it different, doing your own work?

DR: I’ve been writing monologues and poetry forever. Way before I was cast in anything. I still write a monologue a day in my studio. Staging my own work is something that began when I was a kid with carport shows for my Grandmother. In my immediate circle, I have people who really love my writing. I couldn’t find the characters I was looking for inside of the canon so one of my mentors used to say, “If it doesn’t exist, create it.” And that’s been a mantra for me.
 
Finding the female playwright, outside of myself, made me feel less alone. That’s the big grift isn’t it? “You’re all alone in this.”  The more I produced women the more I realized how much bullshit that was. Working with women in so many social movements taught me a lot. Heather Booth, one of the founders of the Jane Movement, said “it’s always the same”. She went on to explain that whenever women gathered, and they could be seated on the floor of her carpeted living room while she fed her son sitting in a high chair, it was always the same. Each woman would arrive thinking she was alone and isolated in her experience. And as soon as one woman began to talk the rest would join in and this solidarity would arise around the survivorship of women.
 
There have been many times I’ve circled back to doing my own work. I think it’s kind of like calibrating my compass to true north. As much as I love producing other work, it’s equally important that I stay in touch with my own voice. It’s also exciting to see the growth that comes from collaborating.

Tricia loved my solo shows. She sat in the front row. She brought people with her to the backs of bars where I performed. I distinctly remember her instructing them to “spread out!”.  I developed some of my work in her living space. My set was a barstool and a small ladder. She loved giving me feedback. She would tell me I had to cut a character and I would go and write more of that character to show her how it worked. It was a big part of our relationship.

So, when I developed that solo piece I was in dialogue with her in my own soul. I would rehearse myself for the walls in the space and remember each audience seat she’d occupied. The trauma of her rape and murder was so overwhelming I’m still recovering. But, for some reason, I could still hear her laughing, can still hear.  And, it became essential that I embrace that energy. I was playing for her laughter knowing I’d never hear it again. But, still needing to play for it. That’s the best way I can describe it. I miss her. I miss our relationship. It was unique in the way we laughed our asses off at the world. And, I’m still searching for that laughter, reaching through the veil for it.
 
Afterwards, people would just nod with their faces covered in tears. One thanked me for putting words to the unspeakable. Theatre is all about connection and she was our center and we were all shattered. So that piece was a way to collectively experience her again. It was important. It was life changing for me. I’m so glad I had the skill set to do it.

CG: Poet Adrienne Rich said, “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.” That resonated with my experience with my theatre company. It was, for me, the best of times and the worst of times. My theatre was riddled with issues of unaddressed trauma, mental illness, and addiction, as well as wildly unrealistic expectations of sisterhood. This is kind of like the earlier question about why certain people are drawn to work in theatre. Any comments?
 
DR: This is almost an insider conversation between you and me, I feel. We’ve talked about this privately so much.
 
One thing I learned in my PTSD recovery over the loss of Tricia was that I had to get mad. It’s a human emotion and suppressing it is harmful.  This terrified me because I’d been terrorized as a child by a rageful mother. So, for me, “getting mad” was the thing to avoid. Learning to get angry has been a challenge for me and I think it’s an overall issue for women. The societal expectations that we are to make everything better and also, accept blame for anything anyone else is not ready to face is so toxic.

Unaddressed trauma is a big deal. Having been out of our space for three years now, I’m able to begin to look back. I see that creating a safe space for women often meant putting myself in unsafe positions. And, that’s not good. I wouldn’t do it again.

We must be able to speak frankly to one another. And this hostage-taking situation of feeling like if you say the wrong word or think the wrong thought you might be responsible for someone's deep unhappiness, or worse their mortal demise is all too much. There’s no way to create in that environment. That’s a therapeutic environment, not an artistic one. Not to say that art cannot be therapeutic. But, to specifically point out that you need a clean channel to create. If you haven’t dealt with your issues by way of being aware you have them and cultivating a tool kit of responsibility to address them, you do not belong on anyone’s professional stage. The show needs to be about the play, not the trauma of the players. Once this is made clear and collective decision to move forward arises, it’s absolutely phenomenal.

CG: Best memory of a production?

DR:  Best? Hard to say. I think the night lightning struck and took out all of the power after our instrument check was profound for me. I was doing, “Living and Dying with Tricia McCauley” and we lost electricity just as the audience was arriving. Amy and I put our heads together. We’d produced for so long that there was no way we’d ever turn away one audience member. So, those who could not come back on a different night stayed. They mostly sat in the front row on the red couch. This was significant because it was a symbol of Tricia’s couch in her living room where she would sit and watch and give me feedback. And a mutual friend brought a painting he’d given her to give to me. That was over the couch. So, we told the audience to use their phones and we cued them into video and sound spots.  They lit me with their flashlights. I experienced that show in a completely different way. It was terrifying. It was really dark and I had to move where the audience guided me with their lights, and they were with me. I mean really WITH me.  I couldn’t leave the stage after curtain because I couldn’t see anything so for some reason I just sat down. And everyone was piled onto that red couch. We talked and talked for longer than the run of the show. There was something profound and deeply truthful about the experience. I felt held. I felt understood. I felt that we can always create no matter what.
 

CG: If you were to mentor a young producer today, what would be the thing or things you would most want her to know?
 
DR: I think my mentor is a collage of many people doing many powerful and unlikely things. That, sprinkled with people who simply bring light. I hold onto to those memories and experiences and let them shape me. And, I keep searching for the people moving forward.
 
As a mentor I would advise to stay true to your mission. Don’t confuse concessions with collaborations. I promise you there are other creatives out there who will lock into what you are seeing. There really can’t be enough women's theatre produced. I’d say lose all desperation and dive into that thing that tickles your soul and create it. Easier said than done, I know. But, it’s really a matter of discernment. Even if you are in an unpleasant set up you can learn from that and use it to shape what you are building as you move forward. The world needs diverse, unique, specific voices all rising up together. So, if one thing isn’t a match that’s okay. Let it go and move on to what pulls you and trust that impulse. “Impulse is golden”.

When the audience laughs at something on stage that is supposed to be serious, you really—as a playwright—have no choice but to roll with it or else revise the scene. You can rail all you want about their failure to embrace a lofty concept in the direction. You can accuse them of being shallow or juvenile. You can talk about the few bad apples. But long, long after all memory of the production has faded, the echo of that inappropriate laughter will continue to haunt and reverberate.

The first time I experienced this was at a community theatre production of the musical Camelot. Lancelot is a new arrival at King Arthur’s court, applying to become one of the knights of the celebrated Round Table. His reputation for purity and piety has preceded him. In a jousting tournament at the end of the first act, he defeats his three challengers, and accidentally kills the last one, Sir Lionel. In fact, if the chorus is to be believed, Lancelot has completely run him through with a spear.

 Distraught and humbled, he kneels in prayer over the body, taking the dead man’s hand in his. The crowd stands silent and motionless. It’s a long, long moment for musical theatre, and then Sir Lionel gasps and sits up… It's a miracle!  The entire court kneels in awe, and Queen Guinevere herself takes a knee, signalling her surrender to an adulterous love. It’s the high point of the act and a major turning point in the musical.

In the version I saw, the entire audience broke out in uproarious laughter when Sir Lionel sat up. They could not be brought round even by Guinevere. They laughed straight through the to end of the scene, ruining the act.

The second time was at a production of the opera Manon Lescaut. This is a story about a student who runs off with a young woman  who is on her way to join a convent. Eventually the young woman is deported along with a group of other young women who are mostly prostitutes. Her student lover manages to get hired as one of the crew and the two sail off to the New World where the young woman will die of dehydration wandering the deserts of Louisiana.

In this production, the music swells as the lovers are about to board the vessel that will carry them off to their doom.  Suddenly the sails unfurl, revealing a death ship constructed of skulls and bones. The ship was so over-the-top, the audience burst into laughter that was followed up by a chorus of booing... apparently signalling displeasure at  the effort to update a classic.

And the third time was just last night, when I streamed the National Theatre Live production of Anthony and Cleopatra, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okoneda.  In Act IV, Scene 14, Anthony is told (falsely, as it happens) that Cleopatra is dead. His response to the news is to command  his manservant to kill him, but instead, the loyal servant kills himself.  Anthony then takes his knife and attempts to stab himself.  It is a clumsy attempt, and we know this, because he immediately says:

“How, not dead?/ Not dead?”

[The live audience found this hilarious, as did I. It was like, “Oh, shit, I can't even do this right!”]
 
In the next scene, he is brought, dying, to Cleopatra. She is hiding out in some kind of monument which is going to requiring the hauling up of Anthony’s body.  And she says:
 
"But come, come, Antony.--
Help me, my women!—We must draw thee up.--
Assist, good friends."
 
At which point the good friends begin lifting him. And then Anthony says:

“O, quick, or I am gone.”

[At this point, you could feel what was coming.]

And then she says:

“Here’s sport indeed. How heavy weighs my lord!”
 
And audience breaks out laughing. And, in truth, the Queen of the Nile didst inflect too much. Now I’m sure Shakespeare intended to use the mechanics of the scene to inspire a disquisition on the ponderous nature of death, on the burden upon losing a great love, and on the crushing agony of defeat in warfare… But instead this Cleopatra appears to be working off the mirth of the audience, as she proceeds:

"Our strength is all gone into heaviness;
That makes the weight. Had I great Juno’s power,
The strong-winged Mercury should fetch thee up
And set thee by Jove’s side. Yet come a little.
Wishers were ever fools. O, come, come, come!"
 
All this played like the cast of Friends frantically attempting to navigate a large sofa up the hairpin turns of their apartment building’s staircase:  “Pivot! Pivot!”  If Shakespeare failed to see the comedic potential of his own staging, Sophie Okoneda certainly did not.

These are all fond memories for me. Is there any kernal of dramaturgical wisdom to be gleaned from these failures of gravitas?  “Shit happens,” maybe? Or perhaps, “Never take yourself too seriously.” More to the point, “The closer a scene approaches the zenith of angst and pathos, the more it teeters on the brink of absurdity.” An audience who is not engrossed by the action on the stage, becomes a passive aggressive entity—and rightfully so. 

If they can laugh at you, they will. You have been warned.

Originally published as "Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Gay Icon?" On the Issues, Winter, 1996, New York.

In a recent gay-and-lesbian theatre newsletter, there were two notices about Oscar Wilde.  One was recruiting petitioners for a campaign to obtain an official pardon for Wilde, and the other was recruiting support for an Oscar Wilde celebration.
 
I strongly object to Oscar Wilde's being marketed as some kind of figurehead for gay and lesbian theatre activists.  And I object to gay men's attempts to unilaterally define what is touted to the media as coalition culture.  And I object most strongly of all to what I call lesbian "theatre wives," who, for the questionable privilege of a male-funded theatre roof over their heads are willing to table women's issues in favor of those which speak to the interests of their theatre husbands.
 
Oscar Wilde is a case in point.  His "culture" - arrogantly classist, misogynist, pedophilic - shares nothing in common with lesbian-feminist values, and as lesbians we need to be knowledgeable about the facts before we join our gay brothers in celebrating as a martyr someone whom many of us would consider a criminal.

According to the record, Wilde was sent to jail because of his sexual exploitation of working-class and poverty-class child prostitutes.  It was they who presented the testimony against him, and it was their evidence that sent him to prison.
 
Furthermore, it was Wilde's homophobia that set the whole legal process in motion in the first place!  His lover's father "accused" Wilde of homosexual behavior, and Wilde, in a fit of pique and egged on by his narcissistic lover, sued the man for libel - in other words, for lying.  Hardly a stand for gay rights!
 
And here is Wilde retaining an attorney for his suit: 
 
Sir Edward Clarke advised him, "I can only accept this brief, Mr. Wilde, if you can assure me on your honour... that there is no and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you."  Wilde stood up and declared the charges "absolutely false and groundless."  It is important to remember that Wilde was prosecuting, and that Clarke, like most attorneys, was not interested in taking on an unwinnable case.   To his credit, Sir Edward continued to defend Wilde through his subsequent trials, even after he discovered how his client's deliberate duplicity had placed him on the losing side of a sordid and sensational case which became known as the "trial of the century."  The suit proved such a professional embarrassment to him, Clarke omitted any mention of it in his memoirs.
 
And what about his family?  Wilde was married with two children at the time that he instigated the frivolous libel suit.  It was an action taken without consulting his wife and without the funds to pay the legal fees.  Foolishly, Wilde trusted his lover to cover the costs.  After his incarceration, his creditors moved in, and his family's possessions - even the children's toys - were ruthlessly auctioned off.  His wife, compelled by the scandal to leave England, found that it was necessary to change her name and her sons' names even to obtain lodging in a foreign hotel. 

Although Constance Wilde was strongly advised to divorce her husband, he importuned her from prison, and she decided against taking such action.  In fact, she continued to demonstrate   extraordinary consideration towards the man who had shown so little for her and for their children, traveling in poor health from Switzerland to Reading Gaol in order to convey in person the news of Wilde's mother's death.  After his release from prison, Wilde proceeded to violate all of the agreements he had made with her to protect the family from any further notoriety.
 
As a footnote to the marriage, Wilde had not had sexual relations with Constance for several years.  The reason he had given was that his syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his student years and had believed to be cured, was, in fact, still virulent.  There is no evidence that Wilde ever shared this information with any of the boys with whom he had sexual relations.
 
Wilde was brought to bankruptcy while in prison when his lover's father brought suit to recover his damages from the ill-advised libel suit.  Not only did Lord Alfred, Wilde's lover, renege on his agreement to cover these costs, but as Wilde reminded him in his famous letter "de Profundis," this parsimony was all the more reprehensible, because Wilde had squandered many times that amount on Lord Alfred.

But, back to the trial...  Needless to say, the man that Oscar Wilde was suing did everything he could to prove his innocence - as most people will do when they are being sued.  And so, not surprisingly, he produced as witnesses a number of the child prostitutes whose "services" had been procured by Wilde.
 
And at this point, a number of my gay brothers will insist that I make a distinction between "child prostitute" and "teenaged prostitute."  I confess that the distinction is lost on me, and I will leave it to those for whom qualifiers of age, class, geography, period in history, etc. provide a certain rationale, if not outright justification, for a practice which is apparently so intrinsic a part of gay male culture and so violently antithetical to lesbian-feminist values.
 
Some gay brothers will also jump to Wilde's defense, claiming that the boys were being paid by the defendant to testify, either that, or cooperating with the state in order to avoid prosecution.  That some of these boys had histories of blackmailing their "clients" has also been used to discredit their testimony.  Leaving for a moment the fact that Wilde admitted to friends on several subsequent occasions that the charges had been true, let us look at these objections.

Why shouldn't these boys protect their interests against a class of sexual predators who had chosen to victimize them specifically because of their disenfranchisement both as children and as members of a profoundly oppressed underclass?  Why should anyone be surprised that Wilde's affectionately engraved cigarette cases should find their way to the pawnshop?  If, as a function of his privilege, Wilde chose to romanticize his sexually exploitive transactions - such sentimentality was hardly a luxury his victims could afford.  When wealthy members of an elite class pay bargain prices for the sexual services of children, based on the poverty-class economy of these children, -can they be surprised if the more enterprising of these boys turn around and charge them premium prices for privacy based on their economy of privilege?
 
The relationship between the john and the prostituted boy  is not a mutual one.  It is the standard method of operation for colonialists, enslavers, and pimps, to brutalize the members of an underclass created by economic and sometimes social violence, and then to point to their brutalization as a rationale for the conditions to which they are subjected.  This circular and self-serving logic is in play when Wilde's defenders attempt to discredit his victims as "blackmailers and thieves." 
 
Wilde gave a speech during the trial, which is often cited as a testimonial to his gay pride.  In fact, he gave the speech as an attempt to prove that his relations with Lord Alfred were not gay, but rather a platonic bonding between an older man and a younger man.  The context in which he framed his famous "love that dares not speak its name" speech was profoundly homophobic.

During the trial, Wilde persisted in denying any participation in homosexual activity.  Repeatedly questioned about his frequenting of a notorious male brothel, where his "companions" were children who worked as valets, grooms, and coachmen, Wilde stated that he sought the boys out, because they were "bright and entertaining," insisting that he was oblivious to class differences: "I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied."  And again, "I recognize no social distinctions of any kind... "
 
This is difficult to believe when, on one occasion, Wilde picked up a boy who sold newspapers, and took him to a hotel in Brighton for a weekend.  In order to disguise the obvious nature of the relationship, Wilde bought the boy a suit of clothing with insignia that would associate him with a prestigious private boys' school.  In court, he insisted that the choice of the school's colors had been the boy's. 
 
In fact, Wilde was very class-conscious.  In "de Profundis," he told a very different story - and one in which class difference features prominently:

"People thought it was dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life... It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.  I used to feel as a snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and make it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air...  Their poison was part of their perfection." 
 
To what does "poison" refer if not their class antagonism towards Wilde and his kind?  And what a patriarchal reversal of the power relations!  It is remniscent of the rhetoric used against incest victims, characterizing them as promiscuous and vampiric.
 
One of the boys who testified had not been procured for Wilde.  He had been employed as an office boy at Wilde's publishing firm, and Wilde had cultivated the friendship by exploiting the boy's interest in his writing.  The boy testified that he had been ignorant of Wilde's intentions, that he was traumatized by the sexual contact, and that he was subsequently fired from his job for his association with Wilde.  His emotional confusion about his victimization by a "benign" perpetrator was used against him in court as proof that he was crazy.
 
After his conviction, and halfway through his two-year prison sentence, Wilde wrote the following words in a petition to the Home Secretary.  No doubt the homophobia is exacerbated by his desire to win a pardon, but Wilde's attempt to characterize his homosexuality as a disease or the result of bad company is cowardly to say the least:

"The Petitioner... was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position..., the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and drove him to his hideous ruin."
 
Hardly a gay rights manifesto. 
 
And after prison?  Wilde went to Paris, where he rendez-voused with Lord Alfred, who was being serviced sexually at the time by a fourteen-year-old boy who sold flowers on the street.  This boy claimed to be "keeping" a twelve-year-old at home, and Lord Alfred was attempting to gain sexual access to the boy.  Wilde himself, in the words of his lover, was "hand in glove with all the little boys on the Boulevard." 
 
I cannot imagine a lesbian couple deliberately choosing a vacation spot where economic violence and/or colonization has created an underclass of girls who are coerced into selling their bodies to wealthy women tourists.  I cannot imagine this loving lesbian couple buying these little girls and exploiting their poverty for the purposes of sexual self-gratification.  And I cannot imagine two lesbians experiencing this exploitation as a pleasurable and harmless recreational activity around which they could bond. 

And yet this is the kind of vacation activity in which such gay male luminaries as Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, and Oscar Wilde would habitually indulge.
 
Oscar Wilde was a pedophile, a woman-hater, a colonialist, a classist, a coward, and a colossal liar.  The record speaks for itself. I call upon my gay brothers to drop the euphemisms surrounding the culture of prostitution and child sexual abuse, and to come out of denial about the nature of the men who participate in that culture. 

[If you found this blog interesting, I have another about Wilde...  "Oscar Wilde:His Father's Son."]

                                                                           

I bought a cupboard in the winter of 2018, or maybe 2017. I was in love with a painter, but she was not in love with me. I may have been compensating. I bought it from a woman on the island who told me that her father, who came from Sweden, had painted it for his granddaughter. She was selling it for $200. I debated buying it, until my fear that someone else would buy it first grew greater than my fear of what it might say about my taste. I was, of course, thinking of the painter.
 
Juli was visiting me on my island, because I was launching a book of plays. She came up to hear the readings. After the event, she and her friend and the actors were sitting in the room with the cupboard. Juli was impressed by the hand-painted, blue hydrangea bouquets—all seven of them—four large ones on the two doors and three smaller ones on the three drawers. And the eight, hand-painted, miniature bouquets on the eight enamel knobs. And especially the seven painted, wooden cutouts that were mounted in the center of the bouquets on the doors and drawers… adding a third dimension and a third hydrangea.

It was difficult to ignore the cupboard, and for that reason, few people commented on it.  They were either above it or below it, but Juli was never above or below anything or anyone. She was beside. Always beside. Which is an impossibly generous position to take in life, but one that Juli maintained nonetheless. No doubt it took a toll.
 
She was impressed by the hydrangeas and said so. “Just wait,” I said as I crossed to the cupboard and flung open the doors. The interior was hand-painted green like the tender shoots of the crocus that have been subversively growing under a pile of dead leaves, and which, when first uncovered, appear with a waxy, death-like pallor, but in a day will turn resilient yellow-green to meet the April sun. The interior of the doors were painted with four large hydrangea bouquets. Juli was astonished. “That’s a commitment!” she exclaimed. And we all nodded. It was the perfect, the exact word, and only a woman who stands beside everything would have thought of it.

So Juli is gone now, and we miss her. For better or worse, all I can do with my life is continue to generate the plays that haunt my imagination—the "blue hydrangeas" of my attention. These cannot be emphasized enough, and so I paint them large and small, in threes and twos and more, in miniature, externally, internally, in multiple dimensions. Is it too much or not enough?
 
People will say that my plays are amateur, they are kitsch, they are rants, they are propaganda. They will say this for a long time. People will be above them or below them. And then they will start to examine them more closely, comparing them to each other. Obviously, they cannot all be the same. One can only paint a painting once.  Over and over, yes, but only one at a time. And they will stop being surprised and annoyed that the interior is painted as carefully as the exterior. And after the indifference, the dismissal, the indulgence, the curiosity, the secret admiration that sours like milk left out on the counter, and possibly the adulation—after all this, exhausted by their own opinions, they will arrive at what Juli saw in the first instance: There is a commitment that cannot be refuted. It is a thing sacred unto itself, and even the artist may not understand it.
 
So who will direct our attention to the things that matter, now? What can I do, Juli, but what I have always done? I will write another play, another hydrangea bouquet… except that now it’s a little easier and a little less lonely, because you have given me a word for it, and that word gives me strength. 

This article was originally published in 1997 as "Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father," On the Issues, NYC.

It was revised and published as "The Case for Marlowe as the Bard,” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Vol. 5, Number 4., Cambridge, MA.

Introduction:

Debate about the authorship of the Shakespeare canon has entered the era of post-modernism and electronic media with mock trials, interactive seminars, moot court hearings, caucusing at international conferences, websites, and PBS Frontline specials.   The questioning of the authorship, however, dates back to 1728 when the issue was first raised in print by one Captain Goulding in his "Essay Against Too Much Reading."  In the intervening centuries, many theories have been put forward, and the roster of potential candidates for authorship includes Sir Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, the 6th Earl of Derby, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, the Earl of Rutland, Sir Edward Dyer, Queen Elizabeth... and a "Learned Pig." 
 
The most recent controversy centers around Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whose name was first entered in the lists by British schoolmaster J. Thomas Looney in 1920, and whose claims have been most recently advanced by columnist Joseph Sobran in his book Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time (Free Press, 1997).    The "Oxfordians" build their case on the recent discovery of de Vere's Bible, with annotations that correspond to various passages from the plays, and on similarities between de Vere's experiences and plot lines from certain of the plays, most notably Hamlet.  As with every authorship theory, there exists a substantial body of scholarly refutations.
 
I am obviously not in sympathy with the cause of the Oxfordians, but, like many women authors before me --- including Muriel Spark, Clare Booth Luce, Helen Keller, and Daphne du Maurier --- I have come to question the traditional wisdom that attributes the canon to the actor-householder William Shakespeare.  In adding my voice to the debate, it is my hope that my disputants will heed the words of him whom we have come to praise, not to bury and "do as adversaries do in law/ Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends." 

It was not on the ramparts of Elsinore.  It was not in the Queen's bedroom.   It was upstairs in my studio loft, in front of my goddess altar.  That was where I encountered the ghost of Hamlet's father.  An awesome apparition, it bore no resemblance to the stern, military patriarch of the famous sixteenth-century tragedy.  No, the ghost of Hamlet's father, as he appeared this spring in my loft, was witty, articulate, and profane - but his message was the same as that of his dramatic predecessor: "Kill the King."  And to that end, I tell my story:
 
It begins with Aunt Mary, the family eccentric.  A large, athletic woman, Mary had joined the "hut boys" of the Appalachian Mountain Club in the 1920's to blaze trails and to stock cabins in the White Mountains.  A radical thinker, she had broken with her father's conservativism to take up the cause of Labor in the 1930's.  In 1964, at the age of fifty-five, she returned to Wellesley College to finish a degree program begun thirty years earlier.  After graduation, she had enrolled in a Master's program at Connecticut College, where she stubbornly devoted the next three years to writing a thesis that her advisors  warned they would never approve.   That was my Aunt Mary, quite contrary.

We all knew about Mary's thesis, of course.  It was like Cousin Bill's ships-in-a-bottle, or Aunt Laura's gardening, or my mother's  dachshunds.  To each her own.  I had a copy of Mary's paper.  We all did, because when Mary died, she had specified in her will that a collection of her writings, including the infamous thesis, be published and distributed to the members of the family.  I had placed my copy on the bookshelf as I would a cremation urn on a fireplace mantle - a memento of a loved one, but certainly not a thing of any practical use to the living.

And it was there the thesis sat, gathering dust for several years, until the evening my research on a nineteenth-century lesbian actor drove me in search of information about Shakespeare.  That's when I remembered the book.
 

Mary's thesis had been titled, "Reasonable Doubt and Shakespeare Authorship: An Appraisal of the Marlowe Theory."  That night, in my studio loft, I stayed up late and read it.  And it was on that same night that the ghost of Hamlet's father appeared to me.  The ghost was Christopher Marlowe.
 
Like the ghost in the play, Marlowe had returned in spirit to expose a crime that had been perpetrated against him.  He had come back to reveal how his kingdom - and such a kingdom! - had been usurped by one not worthy of the title.  The usurper, of course, was William Shakespeare.
 
William Shakespeare, that greatest of all dramatists in the English language, is the figure against which Western playwrights measure ourselves - and fall miserably short.  The facts of his life are the stuff of legends.  With no opportunity for education beyond the local grammar school, he had somehow achieved a university-level proficiency in Greek, Latin, and the classics.  Even in an era of public libraries, this would be an impressive feat, but for an author who had lived at a time when there weren't even any published dictionaries, it challenges credulity.  The texts for the classics were not in general circulation, and the books he would have to have read were cloistered in the private libraries of very rich men or chained to the desks at Cambridge and Oxford, where none but students and professors could access them.

And then there is the fact that Shakespeare's first play had sprung full-grown from his brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  There were no records of formative works, abortive efforts, juvenilia, embarrassingly bad plays, rejected drafts.   Just - boom - Henry VI, Part I,  a five-act drama in iambic pentameter, a work of genius.  And then thirty-six more plays written at an estimated clip of 1.38 per year over the next twenty-six years - sandwiched between spending time with his family (three children before he was twenty-one), managing a large and rambunctious theatre company, memorizing, rehearsing, and performing numerous roles, buying and renovating the largest house in Stratford, investing in real estate, engaging in several lawsuits, and commuting regularly from Stratford to London, a distance of ninety miles which required two days' travel each way.

With a track record like this, it is hardly necessary to add that, without ever attending a university or socializing at court or living on the streets, he had an intuitive understanding of the details, customs, and private scandals of all three worlds.  There is no record that William Shakespeare ever traveled outside of England, but more than half his plays are set in other countries, especially in Italy. 
 
Perhaps the most daunting aspect of the Shakespeare legend is his reputation for writing the plays "with scarce a blot," the manuscripts delivered to the printer apparently containing no editing, rewrites, or even minor corrections.  It would appear that William Shakespeare lived and breathed and had his being in perfect iambic pentameter.
 
So here had been my role model for playwriting - the solitary genius with the time and inclination to raise a family, the full-time writer with the initiative to run a busy theatre - William Shakespeare, the man who traveled by astral projection, who learned by osmosis, who existed simultaneously in parallel universes, and who channeled his plays through automatic handwriting.   

Virginia Woolf wrote of being hounded by the Victorian specter of an "angel in the house," an unwanted alter-ego who continually tried to censor her unladylike writing.  I, in my work as a feminist playwright, have also been plagued by a demon - this fiend of a bard from Avon.  Where Virginia Woolf chose to kill her tormentor, I have endeavored to compete with mine:  If Shakespeare had run his own theatre company, then so would I.  If Shakespeare had produced his own plays, then so would I.  If Shakespeare had performed in and toured with his own productions, then so would I.  If Shakespeare had been able to meet the demands of family life, then so would I.  And if Shakespeare could write one and a half plays a year while holding down a full-time job and commuting, could I, a writer of non-poetic drama, be expected to produce any less?

All of my efforts to emulate my role model only demonstrated how far short I fell of my ideal:  My domestic life was a disaster, the petty politicking within the theatre company drove me crazy, acting and directing and producing and touring and playwriting produced a disorder akin to multiple personality syndrome, and the pressure to write even two plays a year was overwhelming.  Finally, after years of this insanity, my body had enough sense to go on strike, and I collapsed. 

In addition to the daunting record of achievement, there was another angle to the long shadow cast by the Shakespeare legend.   As a very public lesbian-feminist playwright, I was forever in trouble: threats from the local homophobes, shunning by straight women and closet lesbians, eviction and boycott from gay men, slander from lesbians in coalition with all of the above, attacks from poverty-class lesbians for being middle-class, neglect from middle-class lesbians for espousing working-class causes, lawsuits with educational systems, trashings in the press, systematic exclusion from production and publication opportunities, and --- most painful of all --- sabotage from the members of my own theatre company.  Why couldn't I be more like the easy-going William Shakespeare, who was apparently respected by his peers, accepted as an equal by the members of his theatre company, loved by his family, generously supported by his audiences and patrons, and well thought of by his community?  He had even scored a coat-of-arms, the sixteenth-century symbol for "having arrived."                                                                              
 
The night Marlowe appeared to me in my loft, I discovered the secret identity of the author of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello.  The world's most famous playwright was not only rumored to have been a screaming queer, but had left England under threat of death for his heresies.  He had been arrested and incarcerated.  Even after the news of his death, his name continued to be vilified in the press and from the pulpit.  Kit Marlowe, mon frère.
 
So, what's the story?  The subject could fill a book, and, in fact, already has.  In brief, here's the synopsis:

 
Marlowe, born in 1564 (two months after the birth of the actor William Shakespeare), was the son of a cobbler.  He had been able to obtain scholarships first to a prep school and then to Cambridge, evidence that his intellectual gifts had been recognized at an early age.  During his years at Cambridge, Marlowe became involved in Her Majesty's secret service, and when the university attempted to withhold from him his Master's degree on the grounds of excessive absenteeism, the Queen herself intervened with a message from her Privy Council:  "... it was not her Majesty's pleasure that anyone employed as he [Marlowe] had been in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those ignorant in the affairs he went about."  Needless to say, Marlowe received his degree.
 
Instead of taking the religious orders which might have been expected under the terms of his scholarships, Marlowe had gone to London, where his first play Tamburlaine had been a brilliant success.  At this time, his patron was Thomas Walsingham.  Walsingham's cousin was Secretary of State, and both Thomas and his young protegee moved freely in court circles.  Marlowe joined a group of heretical intellectuals who centered around Sir Walter Raleigh, and he was hailed as the most gifted and original playwright of the age. 

And then, on May 12, 1593, fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd, was arrested.  When Kyd's room was searched, a pamphlet was discovered which argued against the divinity of Jesus.  Kyd, tortured on the rack, identified the author of the pamphlet as Christopher Marlowe. 

Heresy was a serious charge, and heretics were still being burned at the stake in England.  A week later, on May 20, Marlowe was arrested at Walsingham's estate, but his influential friends managed to arrange for his bail ---  on the condition that, until the date of the hearing, he report daily in person to the Privy Council.  This would effectively prevent Marlowe from leaving the country.
 
During this time a formal charge of heresy was entered against him by one Richard Baines, a government informer.  Baines claimed that "almost into every company he [Marlowe] cometh, he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins and utterly scorning both God and ministers."

The document includes a list of accusations, including the following statements attributed to Marlowe:

• "That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe."
  
• "That all Protestants are hypocritical asses."
• "That if he [Marlowe] were to write a new religion, he would undertake both a more excellent and admirable method, and that all the new testament is filthily written."
  
• "That all they that love not Tobacco and boys were fools."
  

Baines' report to the Privy Council was received on May 29, 1593.  The next day, Marlowe was "accidentally" killed.
 
Until the nineteenth century, Marlowe's death had only been an historical rumor with no details as to the date, place, or circumstance.  Then, in 1820, the burial record was found in Deptford.  It read, "1st June, 1593, Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis (sic) Frizer."

It was to be another hundred years before the coroner's report surfaced.  In 1925, Dr. Leslie Hotson discovered the original report of the Coroner's Inquest, along with another interesting document, and if these papers had only come to light just a few centuries earlier, it is unlikely that the legend of William Shakespeare would have ever taken root.
 
According to the official report, Christopher Marlowe had been socializing all day  in a rented room of a private residence (not a tavern!) with three of his secret service buddies, men who were also in the employ of Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's patron.  Allegedly, there had been an argument over the bill, Marlowe had attacked one of the men, Ingram Frizer, and the man had reacted in self-defense, fatally wounding Marlowe in the face with a dagger. 

The inquest itself was unusual, in that it had not been conducted by the local coroner, but by the Queen's Coroner who just happened to have been traveling in the neighborhood at the time of the murder.  Was this a second incidence of Her Majesty's intervention on behalf of the young hothead?   The second document discovered by Hotson was a personal pardon by the Queen for the man who had murdered Marlowe, a pardon issued in an unusually brief period of time.  Frizer, the pardoned murderer, was back in Walsingham's employ within weeks --- a seemingly odd indulgence on the part of Marlowe's dearest friend.

These are the facts of Marlowe's "murder," a murder which occurred within days of his hearing before the Privy Council on charges of such a serious nature that even his wealthy patron would not have been able to save him from torture --- and the possibility of his naming other "heretics" --- and execution.
 
If the murder had been staged (as the circumstances would suggest), with the substitution of a corpse with a mutilated face for the body of Marlowe, and if Marlowe had been allowed to escape from England to live in exile, this would certainly explain a number of things. 

It would explain why Shakespeare's first writings did not appear until the year of Marlowe's death.  It would explain why the early Shakespeare plays are so similar to the late Marlowe plays, why the Shakespeare plays deal with so many of the same themes, and why the Shakespeare plays borrow so many phrases, and even whole passages, from the Marlowe plays.
 
If Marlowe did escape, it would explain the familiarity with and interest in foreign settings for the plays.  It would also explain why the manuscripts received by the printers were letter perfect: A copyist would have been hired to transcribe all of them in order to prevent Marlowe's handwriting from being recognized.  It might also explain the unusual and generous bequest to a copyist made by Thomas Walsingham in his will.
 
If Marlowe had escaped, it would explain how the author of the plays knew so much first-hand about working-class life, about the inside of jails, about court intrigue and customs, about Cambridge, and about exile.  It would explain the author's extensive knowledge of the classics.  And if the author had been living in exile, away from his family and friends, away from the theatre, away from the country where his language was spoken, it would explain how he acquired the solitude, isolation, and leisure that every other creative author in the history of the world has required in order to turn out works of comparable genius.

Moreover, if Marlowe had escaped, it would explain the dramatist's obsession with themes of traumatic reversals of fortune, betrayal by trusted friends,  life in exile, and cases of mistaken identity.  It would explain the repeated plot device in which characters fake their own death in order to save themselves. (There are thirty-three characters in eighteen Shakespeare plays who are wrongly believed to be dead, and seven of those deaths are faked.)  Finally, it would explain the playful gender-bending which appears in so many of the plays, especially the comedies. 

It would explain the sonnets about separation and, if Marlowe was indeed gay, it would explain the sonnets about  gay love.  As a rule, the Shakespeare plays do not treat marriage kindly, and when there is a stable, loyal relationship, it is inevitably between members of the same sex, especially between two men.  (When camaraderie is depicted between a man and a woman, frequently the woman is passing as a male, or - as in Taming of the Shrew - both partners are actively engaged in mocking and subverting the heterosexual paradigm.)

And, finally, there are the portraits: The "Chandos portrait," the most famous of a number of portraits believed to depict William Shakespeare. It was painted between 1600 and 1610, and it may have been the basis for the engraved portrait used in the First Folio. It resides in London's Naitonal Portrait Gallery, which believes it to be a rendering of the playwright, who  would have been between 36 and 46.

Then there is the "Corpus Christi portrait," dated 1585, and discovered during renovations at Corpus Christi College of Cambridge in 1952 or 1953. One account says that it was discovered in the walls of the room above the one occupied by Marlowe 370 years earlier. Is it a painting of Marlowe?  It could be. Marlowe would have been a young man of twenty. Certainly, the subject is opulently dressed for a scholarship student, but there is evidence that in 1584 Marlowe began receiving "significant additional income from an unknown source" [Wikipedia].  In any event, since 1950's the painting has become firmly associated with Marlowe.

They appear to me to be portraits of the same man, twenty years apart. The configuration of the lips, the fly-away hair, the eyebrows, the thinning hair over the forehead that's already apparent in the younger portrait. One final word: The Corpus Christi painting carries the inscription: "Quod me nutrit me destruit," which translates to "That which nourishes me destroys me."

The thesis that Marlowe lived to continue his playwriting solves more problems than it raises, and one is left to marvel at the far-fetched and incredible hypotheses of those who would still argue in favor of William Shakespeare's authorship of the plays.  The only plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that these academics are - as Shakespeare was - middle-class, bourgeois, christian, heterosexual, politically conservative, status-seeking organization men who, in their zeal to have it all, have elevated the legend of William Shakespeare to a religious doctrine - one which holds for them a promise of salvation and redemption.  The legend of Shakespeare would prove that  any one of these men, at any moment, is capable of producing world-class literature, demonstrating not only an innate capacity for spontaneous, unrehearsed genius, but also depths of the spirit which have historically only been associated with those individuals who have undergone tremendous loss and suffering through an ordeal by which they have had to carve out an identity separate from and at odds with the norms of their society.
                                      ______________________________

In 1930, during the Depression, my Aunt Mary had won a scholarship to study sculpting at Yale.  She chose instead to go to New York, where she worked as a bookkeeper and as a secretary for twelve years - up until the time of her marriage. 
 
As a child, I remember discovering one of Mary's sculptures up in my grandmother's attic.  It was a stunning female nude, and I had asked my mother why her sister had never told me she was an artist.  My mother explained that with Mary's passion for great art, she had decided it was better to quit than to run the risk of turning out inferior work.
 
Aunt Mary had aborted her career without even giving herself the chance to develop. I can't help wondering how much the censorship of information about women artists and the inflated myths of male artists, like the legends surrounding the actor William Shakespeare, had contributed to her unrealistic expectations and subsequent demoralization.  And I also can't help wondering if her return so late in life to academia, with her hopeless quest for the acceptance of her heretical thesis, was not the final act of a tragic patriarchal drama in which her own monarchy had been usurped by a pretender. 
 
 

In 1988, I flew to Buffalo to attend the first conference of International Women Playwrights, the organization that would later morph into the International Center for Women Playwrights (ICWP.)  I was thirty-six years old and had just come out publicly as a lesbian and as a playwright in 1986. At that time, I had officially given myself the name “Carolyn Gage,” naming myself after Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose unwillingness to make compromises had resulted in her being written out of history. At this historic conference and so newly emerged from my chrysalis, I experienced one life-changing encounter after another with playwrights who seemed like goddesses to me.

This is a record of my impressions and my experiences of that conference, looking back from a distance of thirty-four years. I am autistic, the conference was overwhelming for me, and these memories are highly subjective. Whatever interpretations, inaccuracies, or projections this paper contains, they are my own.

At the first meeting of all the attendees, we were asked to stand up, one by one, and state our name and the location of our home. My heart pounding, I stood up and said, “Carolyn Gage, Lesbian Nation.” Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution was the title of a book written in 1973 by the radical-lesbian, feminist author and cultural critic Jill Johnston. Most Western lesbians in my age cohort would have been familiar with the phrase, if not the book. In announcing my sexual orientation as a homeland, I was not only making a statement about bonds of lesbianism transcending and transgressing boundaries of citizenship, but I was also putting out a challenge to the lesbians at the conference to identify ourselves so that we could find each other. If I am remembering rightly, there was some programming at the conference for lesbians, but it was not until the last day—which would be too late for us to socialize or organize. Other women began to claim lesbian status in their naming, but more to the point, when I sat down to eat lunch, my table began to fill up with the lesbians.

And what lesbians! Phyllis Jane Rose, Sandra Shotlander, and Eva Johnson were just a few who made a tremendous impression on me.
 

I remember a Russian woman who had a male interpreter, and what a stir that caused… a man sharing the podium and daring to translate the words of a woman! Separatism was in the air.  Eva Johnson, an out-and-proud, Aboriginal Australian playwright, performer, poet, theatre director and producer 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: She asked who better understood the mind of the white male colonizer than the Aboriginal woman. Within a year I had founded a lesbian theatre company named No To Men, where women would play all the male parts.

Eva changed my life in another way. She was a featured speaker, and I remember how, before she began her talk, she requested that all the men leave the auditorium. Many of the men at this historic women’s conference were from the press—international and national, and they could not believe that Eva was ordering them out! One of the men in the audience was the interpreter for the Russian playwright, and passionate pleas were made to allow him to stay. But Eva would not budge. I had never in my life seen a woman exercise so much authority. It took my breath away.

Eva 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, and would not be reunited with her mother for three decades. As I remember, her mother was in a nursing home, and she saw her daughter on television and recognized her. This was the story she was going to tell. (She wrote a poem about her mother. You can read it here.)

That day, standing on the stage in front of hundreds of playwrights, academics, and members of the press, she stared down the protesters, declaring simply “This is women’s business.” I have never forgotten that. I can still hear her voice in my head. It had never occurred to me that women had a right to our own spaces, or that we had “business” that entitled us to that space. I was electrified.
 
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. She lit up the conference with her joy and her exuberance, which were inextricably connected to her awareness of her history. She is a living embodiment of Alice Walker’s affirmation, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”

I remember eating breakfast with Nigerian playwright, Onuekwuke Nwazulu Sofola (aka Zulu Sofola), who was teaching for a year at the State University at Buffalo. She wanted to talk with me about lesbianism, and I remember that she asked an unusual question. At this point in my life, I was very focused on the ways in which lesbianism was, in the words of Jill Johnston, the “feminist solution” to patriarchy and its abuses. Onuekwuke’s work was deeply engaged with issues of women’s subordination and violence against women, and I remember thinking that her questions reflected her engagement with this issue of “feminist solutions.” She told me she had been thinking all night about what she had heard about lesbianism at the conference. Suddenly she leaned toward me and asked me, “But when the women break up, it must be terrible…?” I affirmed that it was, and in my (vastly limited) experience, this was because the potential for intimacy between women was so much greater than that between a man and a woman. I remember she nodded and sat back. Something had been resolved in her mind. I remember thinking “This woman must love women so much, that she would see this pain of separation as the central issue associated with lesbianism.” I felt profoundly chastened and also deeply moved, and I never forgot that exchange.  

And then there was Toni Cade Bambara. Wearing a bright red, leather kufi hat and African print pants, she burst into the room, swung up to the podium, and delivered a dramatic and refreshingly non-academic presentation. I remember she opened her talk with a vivid and affectionate tribute to the women who had been influential in her life, the “ladies in the black slips,” as she described them—the African American women in her family who would hold forth in the kitchen on Sunday mornings. At that time, I was not familiar with her work. I went home from the conference and read everything she had written that I could get my hands on. Twenty years before “diversity” and “inclusion” became buzzwords, she was writing “One’s got to see what the factory worker sees, what the prisoner sees, what the welfare children see, what the scholar sees, got to see what the ruling-class mythmakers see as well, in order to tell the truth and not get trapped.”

Toni had edited one of the first collections of essays, poetry, and short stories by African American women, The Black Woman: An Anthology.  It was a response to the male “experts,” both black and white, whose sweeping generalizations about Black women made no allowances for the voices of those women themselves. In her second anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks, Toni included selections written by freshman composition students along with works by Alice Walker and Langston Hughes. The point I want to make is that the opening of her talk was just a glimpse into her radical approach to art and to activism—an activism that perpetually widened the circle of community as she defined it.

On the second day of the conference, the lesbians had organized a gathering, and Toni showed up for it. One of the orders of business was to collect signatures for a conference resolution condemning Section 28, which was the legislative designation for a series of laws across Britain that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. It had been introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government and had gone into effect earlier in the year. The vague and hateful language of the bill translated to widespread censorship and paranoia across the UK, especially among educators. I remember that Toni took on a leadership role, educating us about the most effective way to go about achieving our goals, and she did this with mind-blowing humility and respect for egalitarian process, never once pulling rank, even though she was clearly the most experienced activist in the room, and possibly one of the most experienced in the world.

Toni left an indelible impression on me. She personified a level of authenticity and integrity that I had never experienced personally. She was present… I mean, 100% in mind, body, and spirit. She had a power that was palpable. When she stepped up to that podium, I felt as if the room had gone from grey to technicolor, that we had all been half-asleep and now were fully awake. In her essay “What It Is I Think I Am Doing,” she had written:
 
…when I look back on the body of book reviews I’ve produced in the past fifteen years, for all their socioideolitero brilliant somethingorother, the underlying standard always seemed to be—Does this author here genuinely love his/her community?
 
She walked her talk, and I feel very grateful to have had the opportunity to meet her and hear her in person. And I appreciate the opportunity to revisit my memories from this conference now as an old woman, and to be able to see so clearly how the influence from these remarkable women was taken up in my bones and how my desire to emulate them laid the foundation for my lifework.

International Women Playwrights: Voices of Identity and Transformation- Proceedings of The First International Women Playwrights Conference, October 18-23, 1988
by Anna Kay France (Editor), P.J. Corso (Editor)

Records held by former University Professor at Buffalo, Anna Kay France, as related to her involvement in the 1st International Women Playwrights Conference(IWPC) held at the University at Buffalo, October 14-23, 1988. Includes correspondence with national and international playwrights, session transcripts, and papers from the International Center for Women Playwrights.
https://findingaids.lib.buffalo.edu/repositories/2/resources/737
https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/handle/2328/7978

“Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles - either online on social media, in the real world, or both.” –Wikipedia
 
Cancel culture is nothing new. In the 1950’s, it was called blacklisting, or Communist witchhunting. It was a political tool for consolidating support and silencing dissent, and it was especially effective in stifling writers… at least until it got to Broadway. And what happened when "cancel culture" attempted to invade Broadway is an example today for a world that is rapidly becoming more and more polarized and censorious.

It was June 22, 1950.  The names of prominent Broadway playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman had just been published in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The brainchild of three FBI agents, this official blacklist named 130 organizations and 151 individuals—actors, musicians, writers, and broadcast journalists, and it was intended to flush out subversives in the media and, in contemporary parlance, to “no-platform” them. The question on everyone’s minds, “Would Miller and Hellman now face the same fate as the ‘Hollywood Ten?’ Would their careers be destroyed? Would they also go to prison?”

Broadway was another story.  Stage actors formed families, rehearsing with each other for weeks and then facing their audiences together night after night, and maybe even for years if the show was a hit. Holding hands at the final curtain, the actors shared an awareness of the work as a whole and an appreciation for everyone’s part in it. Sometimes these shows would be sent out on tour, but for the most part, after a show closed, the Broadway family would scatter and then regroup at the next round of auditions for plays.  There was a centuries-old history and a tradition among Broadway actors that simply did not and could not exist in Hollywood.

The prison-bound Hollywood Ten all saw their careers terminated for a decade, but the Broadway artists had an entirely different experience.  The production of Death of a Salesman continued its Broadway run into the fall of 1950, five months after the publication of Red Channels. That same year producers Kermit Bloomgarten and Walter Fried sent the play out on national tour. In spite of the fact that one of the authors of Red Channels attempted to organize local boycotts of the play at every stop, the tour was a success. One month after Salesman closed on Broadway, Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People opened. And in 1953, one of the most enduring artifacts of the McCarthy era premiered at the Martin Beck Theatre. The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials, is often interpreted as a commentary on the McCarthy witchhunts. Called to testify before HUAC in 1956, Miller was asked about this, and his response was sardonic: “The comparison is inevitable, sir.” In 1955, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays both opened on Broadway.

And what about Hellman? In 1951, her play The Autumn Garden opened at the Coronet Theatre, and in 1956, the musical Candide, featuring Hellman’s libretto, won a Tony Award for Best Musical.

In other words, Broadway continued to support Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman. Let's look at how and why this happened:

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) would take a similar  position to SAG. Even as they fought on progressive fronts to become the first industry union to win employer-funded health and retirement plans, AFTRA voted to suspend any member who failed to cooperate with HUAC. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing the screenwriters, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) also supported HUAC and turned against their blacklisted members.

Workers in the film and television industries were frightened into silence, or worse, frightened into naming names in order to protect themselves. But three thousand miles away, on another coast and in an alternative universe, Actors Equity Association, the actors' union,  took a very different course of action. They rejected the blacklist and supported their members who had been named.

To understand their decision, it’s important to look at how Actors Equity worked. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, it was a union centered in New York, but with branches in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco… but—and this is important—regional decisions had to approved by the New York council. In other words, Broadway actors ran the show.  Actors Equity already had taken a progressive stand against segregation of audiences in 1947, effectively causing the closure of the National Theatre in Washington.

In September 1951, at a quarterly meeting of Equity in New York, the members passed a strongly worded resolution against the practice of blacklisting. Because it was passed by members, it had to go before the Equity Council, where it was hotly debated for two weeks before being rejected. A committee was formed to redraft the resolution. This time, the resolution passed, but with more diplomatic wording and unfortunately omitting a clause that drew attention the fact that Black actors faced a kind of double jeopardy “as they have always been discriminated against in terms of employment.”

 The final resolution was, however, unequivocal in its repudiation of the Communist witch hunts:  

“Whereas the aforementioned practice of “blacklisting” is by its very nature, based on secrecy and prejudiced judgement and results in conviction by accusation without an opportunity given to the accused person to be heard and to defend himself… now therefore be it resolved: That this Association again condemns the practice of “blacklisting” in all its forms, and that this Association will act to aid its members in their rights to obtain a fair and impartial hearing of any charges that may be brought against them.”

The union stood by the blacklisted actors and offered them support, and they were the first and the only performing arts organization to do so.  Following their lead, the Broadway producers joined with Equity in their condemnation of the practice. A paragraph regarding blacklisting became standard in Equity’s basic agreement:

“The Manager and Actor admit notice of the anti-blacklisting provision contained in the basic agreement between Equity and the League of New York Theatres…”

In the annals of theatre history, Green Grow the Lilacs by Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs is mostly known as the play upon which the blockbuster Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Is based.

That’s ironic, because the musical actually subverts the radical paradigm that Riggs has so beautifully crafted. Perhaps that kind of dramaturgical subversion is inevitable any time a Native writer’s work is adapted for mainstream commercial purposes. Also, the American musical is probably not the best vehicle for exploring the moral ambiguities and contradictions that are intrinsic to Riggs’ depiction of frontier life in what he specifically designates as “Indian Territory”—in other words, not the state of Oklahoma. Finally, Riggs is not only writing about colonization of Indian Territory, but also about colonization into heteropatriarchal values through a particular community ritual called "shivaree."  The musical completely subverts the nature of that ritual and its pivotal role in Green Grow the Lilacs.

But first, let's look at the appropriation of Indian Territory:

What exactly was Indian Territory in 1900, the year the play takes place?  It was, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica:  

"…originally ‘all of that part of the United States west of the Mississippi, and not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas.’ Never an organized territory, it was soon restricted to the present state of Oklahoma, excepting the panhandle and Greer county. The Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes were forcibly moved to this area between 1830 and 1843, and an act of June 30, 1834, set aside the land as Indian country (later known as Indian Territory)… In 1866 the western half of Indian Territory was ceded to the United States, which opened part of it to white settlers in 1889. This portion became the Territory of Oklahoma in 1890 and eventually encompassed all the lands ceded in 1866. The two territories were united and admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma in 1907."

Yes, Indian Territory is on the brink of statehood in 1900, when the play opens, but Riggs makes clear this is not something about which the prairie folks are enthusiastic. Here is Aunt Eller’s speech to her neighbors from the end of the play: “Why, the way you’re sidin’ with the federal marshall, you’d think us people out here lived in the United States! It’s jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin’ it! Jist dirty ole furriners, every last one of you!”

And her neighbors are quick to respond: “My pappy and mammy was both borned in Indian Territory! Why I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself.” “Me, too! And I c’n prove it!”

In most productions, the characters of the play are presumed to be settlers, but Riggs tells us in the dialogue that they are, in fact, “full of Indian blood” and proud of it.

So... on to the issue of the shivaree, a traditional frontier ritual involving males in the community kidnapping, harassing, and terrorizing  newlyweds on their wedding night.

The shivaree as depicted in Oklahoma! has become sanitized and civilized, so that it is little more than an extension of the wedding party… kind of like when the bridesmaids and groomsmen sneak off to tie old shoes onto the back of the newlyweds’ car. The musical has transferred the scene from the dead of night to broad daylight. Shivarees are traditionally done in the dark. In the musical, just after the ceremony,  the bride tosses her flowers over her shoulder, and then exits to change into her traveling clothes. The groom leaves to pack, and the men announce that they plan to have a shivaree. There is a vaudevillian interlude featuring a henpecked husband, and then the men return with pots and pans, making a racket. As the bride and groom exit for their travels, the men hoist the groom amiably on their shoulders… but whatever good-natured hazing they have planned is interrupted by the arrival of Judd Fry, the villain of the piece. Wielding a knife, Judd goes to attack the groom and a fight ensues that ends in Fry’s death. The shivaree has been reduced to a noisy, fraternal, daytime bon voyage party for the newlyweds.

Th shivaree in Riggs play is something completely different. It is a terrifying artifact of rape culture, and it serves to traumatize and permanently alter both protagonists in ways that are resonant with the appropriation of Indian Territory.  To understand its dramaturgical significance, it’s important to look at the origins of the custom:

“Charivari” dates all the way to medieval and early modern Europe, where it was a ritual used to punish members of a community who failed to conform to social norms, especially sexual norms. Targets of the charivari might include a widow who remarried, a wife who assaulted her husband, or a couple who failed to have children. In France, where the term originated, teenaged boys and unmarried men traditionally led the ritual, parading through the streets, shouting mocking insults, beating on pots and pans, and threatening violence. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, these males would also attack local brothels during Lent. If the victim paid his or her tormentors off with money or wine, the charivari might end without these threats being carried out.  

Apparently, until two hundred years ago, most Europeans thought the charivari was a legitimate and effective practice for curbing social deviance. It allowed for a public venting of outrage, with the opportunity for a “peaceful” resolution of a potentially explosive situation. In other words, it served as a kind of communal vent for blowing off steam… an exorcism of deviance. The victims were shamed, but then reintegrated into the community.

Here’s the thing: It’s actually a rape culture ritual empowering young males to assert their primacy and dominance in the community, and especially with regards to widows who dare to remarry, women who most likely were just attempting to defend themselves in abusive marriages where their husbands had legal rights to rape and batter, married women attempting to salvage some degree of bodily autonomy and/or freedom from compulsory serial pregnancy by practicing birth control or abstinence, and women who were prostituted. The historical roots of the 19th century Midwest shivaree were not in a playful hazing of newlyweds, but in a sanctioned, violent policing by gangs of young men over women who, in their eyes,  were not sufficiently sexually subordinate.

Even when church and secular authorities attempted to outlaw charivari, local authorities were reluctant to prosecute these gangs of young men. Possibly, they feared reprisals against their persons or their properties, as coming between young men and what they perceive as their sexual prerogatives can be dangerous. Not surprisingly, when gang rape or other forms of violent assault occurred within the context of a charivari, the sentencing would be considerably lighter than under other circumstances.

But by the mid-1600’s, some victims began to push back, lodging formal complaints against the practice. Finally, by the 1700’s, the practice began to decline—first in the cities and eventually in rural areas.

In Green Grow the Lilacs, Riggs is writing about shivaree as practiced in 1900 in Indian Territory. It’s probable that he knew people who had experienced it. In fact, in 1900, Riggs would have been two years old, and his grandparents—if not his parents—may have been witnesses, victims, and/or participants to the kind of shivaree depicted in the play.

Unwelcome statehood looms over Indian Territory in Riggs’ play, as the final stage of a relentless and brutal colonization of the West. The shivaree looms over the protagonists of the play as a final and brutal stage of initiation into their expected gender roles in patriarchal rape culture.

Significantly, the shivaree scene opens at night. It opens as the newlyweds are attempting to sneak back into the farmhouse.  Expressing the hope that nobody knows they have gotten married, they are desperate to avoid a shivaree.  Laurey, the fearful bride, asks, “… if they ketch us, whut’ll happen? Will it be bad?” Her anxious groom responds, “You know about shivorees, honey. They get purdy rough.” He then assures her that they have outsmarted their would-be tormentors, but as they exit the stage, the gang of men enter in excited anticipation of capturing their prey. Their comments reflect their envy of Curly for having scored a bride who comes with “grazin and  timber and plowed land,” as well as physical appeal. Their prurient excitement mounts as they note a light coming on in the bedroom, the lace curtains blowing, and the shadows passing in front of the window. As the men attempt to scale the walls of the house with a ladder, a drunken farmer appears and salaciously shouts, “No time to wait now. Time to git goin’. See that there bride a-glimmerin’ there in her white! Waitin’ fer you. Been standin’ there with her hair down her back and her lips a-movin’. Git next to her, brother! Gonna be high ole times, gonna be Jesus into yer heart!”

The men drag the groom Curly from the house. He is angry and yelling at the men to leave his wife alone. They agree to stop manhandling her as they bring her in. Laurey enters, “pale and shaken” in a nightgown with her hair down.

The men have leaned a ladder up the side of a haystack and they force Laurey to mount it. Then they force Curly to climb up after her, amid lascivious catcalls. When both are at the top, they pull the ladder down. The men have urged the bride to “Make out it’s a bed, why don’t you!” They begin coaching the couple to kiss and for Curly to bite her shoulder and “eat her alive.” As the men’s “orgy of delight” (Riggs' description)  increases in its frenzy, one of the men calls out “Ain’t no right to be in no nightgown!” Another man taunts the bride, “How’s it feel to be married, Laurey, sugar, all safe and proper, to sich a fine purty man with curly hair and a dimple on his chin! Whee! Got you whur I want you—” The men begin to toss straw babies up to the top of the haystack, counting them out as they mock the couple.

Suddenly Curly cries out that the haystack is on fire. He begs for the ladder to be replaced, but the men ignore him as Jeeter (the Judd Fry character in Oklahoma!) enters with a torch. Curly jumps down and a fight ensues. Laurey climbs down from the haystack in time to witness the death agony of Jeeter.  The scene ends with Laurey in shock, repeating “He laid there in the stubble, so quiet, th’ his eyes open, and his eyeballs white and starin’! He laid there in the stubble—th’ his eyes open—!

The shivaree is not gratuitous violence.  It is the pivot of the play, in which Riggs has initially depicted the community as wholesome and even puritanical, counterposed against Jeeter’s solitary indulgence in pornography. But with the shivaree scene,  the black-and-white moral world of the play is turned inside out. Under cover of darkness, the upstanding citizens of the town transform themselves into rapists and terrorists. What is Riggs telling us here? And how does it fit with the context of an indigenous territory about to become annexed as a state?

In the subsequent scene, three days later, Curly is in jail awaiting a form of prairie justice that may or may not honor his plea of self-defense. Laurey, sleepless, has been hiding in her room since the shivaree. She emerges in the lamplight, “looking very pale and changed, years older, a woman now.” Her speech indicates that she is distracted and dissociated, dwelling on the events of the shivaree:

When her aunt attempts to comfort her, Laurey insists that she can never forget what she’s seen: “Over and over! The way the men done. The things they said. Oh—why’d it have to be that-away!”

Finally, Aunt Eller admits the futility of attempting to forget. This is the pivotal speech of the play: “They’s things you cain’t get rid of—lots of things. Not if you live to be a hundred. You got to learn. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other, and say ‘Well, all right, then!’ to both of ‘em.”

And with that, and a few more speeches about how hard a woman’s life is, Laurey  admits she’s been “sich a baby” and becomes, what the playwright intends us to understand as an adult woman.  Here is her transformative speech:

“I’ve thought about that awful night, too, until I thought I’d go crazy… Looked at it time and again, heared it—ringin’ in my ears! Cried about it, cried about everything! A plumb baby! And I’ve tried to figure out how it would be if sump’n did happen to you. Didn’t know how I could stand it. That was the worst! And nen, I tried to figger out how I could go on. Oh, I’ve went th’ough it all...from the start. Now I feel shore of sump’n, anyway—I’ll be growed up—like everybody else. I’ll put up with everything now. You don’t need to worry about me no more.”

Laurey has accepted her annexation into the role of wife and mother. She will forget what she has experienced at the hands of the town’s citizens. She will put up with everything now.

Riggs was a gay Cherokee playwright, born in Indian Territory in 1899. He was a disappointment to his father, a banker and a rancher. Photographs of Riggs show him to be a man of slight build, something of an “egghead” with his glasses and premature balding. What was his experience with the hypermasculinity and heteronormativity of the West? Did he experience hazing and bullying as a rite of passage? Did he learn to “stand it” in order to become an adult?  Is he telling us something about the survival of his people, as each new generation has had to face a heritage of ongoing violence, denigration, and theft?

The musical adaptation has appropriated Riggs’ deeply disturbing play in order to generate a post-war celebration of America, and especially of American expansionism.  (Hawaii and Alaska were still territories when the musical opened.)  Male violence, which Riggs characterizes as central to the enforcement of "family values," is relegated to the perverted outsider (Jeeter), who can be easily exorcized. In fact, Oklahoma! tells a colonizer's fanciful story--personal and politcal.

Green Grow the Lilacs is an Indian play, and its significance far outweighs its role as appropriated source material for Oklahoma!  The play stands on its own merits and occupies a critical place in Native American drama, documenting a pivotal time in history. Riggs' treatment of the shivaree as a paradigm for colonization/annexation is still ahead of its time. 

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.]