Writing about Men, this strange love affair...

Put Your Characters Through Hell

I'm never short of ideas. But I am often sorely challenged to focus and whittle them down, working out what is most important in the story and what or whose story am I ultimately telling.  If I can't do this, the play doesn't work. 

A dear friend, playwright/director Stephen Beresford once pointed out that I empathised too much with my characters, that in fact I was loathe to hurt them.  He said to me:  "You must be like a Greek God!" and with relish:  "Put your characters through hell."   It's a thought that keeps me analyzing my motives as a write.  Am I treating these characters as friends?  Professional boundaries must be applied.  Who is to stage an intervention between myself and my characters...?

The Love of Other

Confession: I often become fascinated by my central male characters.  Excuse: the sole female in our house, I am surrounded by males...  And yet I am writing a woman's story .   Both men and women may write authentic male and female characters.  Yet gender is a strong factor in how we view the world, as is race, economic privilege etc.   For this reason it is crucial that both genders, and all races be adequately represented in theatre and film – until we are all so prolific that we begin to see the world through the lens of the other.  Unconsciously, our ideas about our society and the world are reinforced or changed through the art we view.  And yes, series appearing on HBO are mind-shaping art.  Even “The Kardashians”!

Although I often empathize with men, I can only empathize with them from the outside looking in.  I am energized and intellectually stimulated by apparent differences between the genders, analyzed in psycho-physical terms.  I think we are more similar than not, through the fact of our embodied humanity.  Much as across cultures, or the real/perceived boundaries of society and class and race etc. a great commonality exists.  This condition of humanity can unite us in shared understanding if we allow conditions to ripen...

The Archetype Within

A next evolution for the two genders in seeking equity and nourishment within a male/female partnership is to acknowledge and seek to understand some of these more typical differences, while still treating one's partner/children/friends /colleagues as distinct individuals. It is also my belief that we all carry archetypal male and female characteristics within ourselves.  Much of my work seems to be about this, an attempt to unite the male and female within.

It appears that my male characters are giving voice to an outgoing, active side of

myself, the more psychologically aware side - whereas my female

characters are harder for me to discover.  Mysterious and

introverted, they appear to hide from me as I write in much the way I hide from myself!

It’s suffocating in here! But ultimately in each new piece I am striving to bring out my ‘female’ voice more centrally.  My focus as I whittle down in a play spotlights the female character/s.

The Ruler is Watched

Women have watched men closely since time immemorial.  Reflecting on a time not so long ago in Europe (and still current in much of the world) in which the man has the final say and is center of the household, I can imagine the women in a household watching the male center like a hawk, attempting to guess his next move.   And what’s more I have seen this happen.  And done it myself…

I had the opportunity of staying for a prolonged visit with family members (in one of the top ten poorest nations in the world) who are in this situation today.  The culture is a classically macho one. The women in the family tend to hide their motivations and their activities in order to gain small freedoms. Their brothers and fathers are 'allowed' to interrogate and berate the women in a way that would be completely counter-cultural in reverse.  The women defend, in soft voices, but never attack.  They often lie to protect themselves.

Education is Crucial

As a voice teacher I was struck at how high the voices of the women are...without exception. They’ve learned to manipulate - a natural defense of the disempowered...  Their worlds are enclosed; the subject of their conversation: their neighbors and other family members.  In this culture too, there is a greater valuing of the woman as the center of the home, a deep loving of the mother, a greater embracing and caring of older people.  Family is truly valued.  

On the other hand, the women have had very little access to education and know nothing of the world outside.  Theirs is a seraglio of invisible yet tangible enclosures.  Education is a door to one’s own world, which furthermore can open endlessly onto other worlds.  The women in the family who have education are different, although they still have had to bow to their husbands.  Those women may stand out in the family and be discouraged by the other women from leaving the home to work.  If anyone does not feel concern about the attempt in some parts of the world to deny education to women, they need to make these connections.  The best way to maintain control over a person or a society is to deny them education.  Is this not the present racial inequity in our society today here and now?  Poverty is an oppression multiplying itself within the hearts of its victims.  Education is a way out.   And by education, I simply mean access to knowledge and the possibility of using that knowledge.

Gender as a License to Abuse

While the men go out and take enormous license, particularly in terms of unrestrained sexual freedom the women must stay indoors more or less, traveling between the market and their home, or other family members homes, their whereabouts questioned on a daily basis.  Friendships with women outside of the family are regarded with suspicion.  'Who knows what those women might be plotting.'  Infidelity is not unheard of for women but it is the norm for the men in this culture.  Clarifying the heading of this paragraph, at it’s most extreme, this is a place where armed thugs wait outside of schools and steal young girls.  They do so without consequence.  Most of these children are never seen again.  The few who return may commit suicide. The violence endemic to this place has come about partly through prolonged civil war (an effect of endless colonization by a number of European/American entities both overt and covert), corrupt government, the West’s thirst for drugs.  An entire blog is required to give this discussion justice.

It is important to acknowledge that this type of violence is also alive in wealthier, colonizing cultures.   Public outcry, laws and law enforcement, a greater ability to protect our children and greater empowerment of women have forced it underground. 

Getting back to centuries of women watching men, it came to me that negative stereotypes about women being manipulative, conniving, deceptive and gossipy have come about entirely as a result of disempowerment.  Think about negative stereotypes of the poor and unprivileged today.  Where do disempowerment and stereotype convene?

Hit by Love the Drug

In our own culture, I think women often find that when first love hits, their lives are subsumed by the male object of this love (much as I am distracted by my male characters in the first flush of writing, for indeed writing a play is to me like being very much in love)!  I spoke to a married male friend about this, whose wife is a younger woman in her early twenties.  She followed his movements closely. Her world revolved around him.  It appeared that she herself resented this absorption in him and wanted to strike out and do some of the things that he was doing in his life.  Yet she continued to make him the center.   He had apparently encouraged her to broaden her own horizons.  I tried to explain that as a married woman in her mid-twenties she might even be biologically wired to focus on her husband, as everything in her being is preparing for creating a family whether she actually wants to have children or not.  Just a theory…which seemed appropriate to this particular couple.  No, actually I was at the time reading “The Female Brain” by Louann Brizendine, M.D. and was very intrigued by the power of biology as described by her in this book...

Reading this book, I recognized much of what Brizendine describes.  As women grow older, they put themselves at the center of the circle - having experienced the opposite posture from early (heterosexual) relationships (I shall have to ask a friend who is in a female partnership how she sees this playing out for herself). 

Women at this time of life engage in a self-focus akin to the younger male, focusing on their careers, caring less what people say about them, become more self-directed and confident.  Women's careers are sometimes forged later in life, particularly artistic work.  It is fortunate when this coincides with a male partner wanting to stay home more and focus in on family a bit more. Of course many young women are striking out as well.  But it still appears to be a choice for women between children and personal advancement/development one way or another during different stages in life.

Introduction: The Futility of Ignoring The Artist's Gender

To the Actor: “….After studying and rehearsing him for a length of time, you ought to know the movement of the author’s thoughts.  They must affect you.  You must learn to like them.  Their rhythm must infect yours.  Try to understand the author.  Your training and nature will take care of the rest…

The emotion of the character is the only sphere where the author should pay attention to the actor’s demands and adjust his writings to the actor’s interpretation.  Or, an actor is justified in adjusting the author’s writing to achieve best results for his emotional outline of the part.”

                                                                                               -Richard Boleslavsky

INTRODUCTION: The Actor/Writer:  Hiding in Plain Sight

Imagine that we embark on a social examination of actors and playwrights, agreeing to omit all mention of gender.  Imagine too that this discursive experiment takes place before an audience, in whose presence each artist’s career and personal particulars are examined at length.  Yet in this public weighing of artist’s lives no clue to gender may be revealed.  

Next, we attempt to build statistics on our pool of genderless artists.[1] Struggling to organize our data in a cohesive manner, we fall to arguing as to ‘which genius it was had this brilliant idea, to omit genus?’   Without the frame of gender, we find ourselves proverbially at sea in our efforts to draw significant results.  While similar in some respects, the lives of male and female artists differ significantly.  To ignore gender is to ignore our own sociology, of which the theatre is a part.  In ancient Greek, the word theatre can be found to mean “the seeing place”.   Theatre is the mirror of society.  The story of gender within the theatrical professions tells an anthropological tale. 

"For a woman artist is after all a woman - that is her "problem" - and if she denies her own gender she inevitably confronts an identity crisis..." [2] 

Theatre artists themselves generally fall into two camps:  male and female, within which race, culture and sexual orientation play significant roles.  I cannot escape my own worldview for it is the lens through which I peer outward.  Therefore, it bears stating that these articles are framed by my female gender, and my experience of working in British and American Theatre as a bi-national, heterosexually identified Caucasian actor.   Theatrical traditions are diverse, and vary throughout the world.  Unless specified, it is to be assumed that I am referring to English speaking theatre and culture.

While I have always understood that gender played a factor in my experience of being a playwright and actor, it is not something I’ve discussed much with others.    Often after a performance, and within the confines of a pub, actors engage in discussions about acting processes and what it ‘means’ to ‘be’ an actor.  Viewed anthropologically, such discursive habits allow for a ritual ‘unwinding’ after theatrical events.  Expressions of dissatisfaction regarding ‘the industry’ at large and in particular may be aired at length during such sessions.  For the most part, I haven’t enjoyed the anatomizing aspect of these rituals:  Dissection has never seemed as appealing as doing.  Until now! 

My artistic life has been rejuvenated by my experience of higher education.  As a mature student I was exposed to artistic processes via the analytical, awakening in me a new desire to debate matters from a wider perspective than likely to be encountered in the post-show ritual.  One actor’s theatrical anecdote may be entertaining, yet actors’ experiences have greater relevance and purpose when placed within social and historical contexts.  

Jacky Bratton on gender and biography finds that “theatre people” of both genders write about their lives not to assert their own “particular importance in the world, so much as to construct a group identity in which their individual identity is seated”.   Furthermore, female autobiography in general seeks to define self-identity in relation to significant others:  “interdependence and community is key in the development of woman’s identity”.[3]  I am a woman who takes to the stage and writes for the stage.  By identifying myself within a community of women actor-playwrights, I opened a door to a personal and collective historical past.

The percentage of female playwrights produced lags well behind their male counterparts as do the percentage of women acting on stage and screen.[4]  Women artists are hiding in plain sight through lack of access.[5]   We fight for stage space, yet when granted access we choose to possess this space indirectly through the curious obfuscation of actor and playwright.  Working in a public forum, all actors reveal aspects of the self while donning borrowed masks.  Metamorphosed personal truths are revealed in stories told by playwrights.  Historically, artistic women have felt a particular need to protect their identity even while they long to be seen, a subject to be further explored in these articles.

The innately hierarchical relationship of actor and writer creates a challenge to the artistic process.    Within a complex social arena, what dynamics of revelation and control does the female actor-playwright enact, towards the shared goal of character manifestation?  Through the creation of the practical aspect of my MFA thesis, of which this article formed a part, I investigated the dynamic and elliptical relationship of female actor/writer, from dis/ease to productive collaboration.

---

[1] Julie Jordan, Julie Jordan’s Speech, Town Hall Meeting NYC (New York, NY: Town Hall Meeting, New Dramatists, 27^th October, 2008) www.womenplaywrights.org

[2] Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic:  The Woman Writer and the 19th Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979) pp. 65-66

[3] Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004) p.4

[4] Patricia Cohen, Rethinking Gender Bias in Theatre (New York, NY: The New York Times: June 24^th 2009)

[5] Statistics generally agree that while 40% of playwrights submitting their work in the UK and the US are female, about 17% of new plays produced are by women.  If you add previously produced plays to the number of women being produced, the number goes up to 19%.

Acknowledgement is the First Step

It appears that there is a strong belief among many in the theatre community that theatre is largely exempt from the prejudices (racial and gender inequity) that plague the rest of the world.  Having engaged in and read several discussions online that touched on this subject, I have been dismayed by the wall of resistance erected against acknowledging what statistics and reputable studies make clear.  This defensive wall is invariably erected along racial and gender lines.  

When I talk about inequity, I am not blaming the random/curious/dedicated male reader.  At any time in a discussion, a listener has a choice to identify himself/herself as a supportive ally.  I appreciate supportive allies.  It's hard for any movement to succeed without them.  When I make a post on facebook about female playwrights receiving the highest awards for writing this year, and male friends in theatre "like" the post, I feel particular appreciation to those members.  It has a healing effect.  Those men appear to be applauding women and rooting for them to succeed (so it appears to me).  They become allies, and part of a developing solution.

It is always a shock to me in discussions on inequity how readily some human beings will deny the experience of others.  Whether a discussion on race or gender, one sees this happen all the time.  There is a huge resistance to believing that our own group may be in some way responsible for oppressing another group, for these revelations invariably lead to questioning one's own behavior, and how our behavior, perhaps inadvertent (learned or habitual, unconsciously entitled, even simply self-absorbed) plays into the issue at hand.  These feelings are a call to become part of the solution.  I believe that if we push aside the inner voice with a defensive posture, we make the wrong choice.  Our resistant attitude appears to hide the whisper:  "It's never happened to me, so how do I know it really happens?"  Well, that's the point, isn't it?

Theatre is a slippery beast in many ways.  It wears the mask of permissive liberality, can give true voice to change, while in practice limiting and constraining the majority of it's artists.  It's a VERY small pie.  

There are number of reputable studies on the challenges which clearly face women playwrights in getting produced. There is debate about exactly what the causes may be. Emily Glassberg-Sands conducted a key study regarding this the findings of which contributed to sparking this important debate.  

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/theater/24play.html?_r=0 

The fact the women artistic directors' choices appeared to be most prejudicial against female writing is painful but important. Two reasons for this have been suggested as women being harder on women when it comes to female characters and how we are portrayed. And a certain sensitivity (or internalized sexism) these women may feel from their own position.

It has been suggested that perhaps women's work isn't good enough and doesn't stand up to men's and this is why it isn't being produced in equal measure.  That women just need to write better plays! It's hard to know how to respond to such an assumption.  Stella Duffy who writes for The Guardian points to remedies for our issue of under-production. 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/women-theatre-stand-up-inequality

The disparity between the success of female novelists and female playwrights would suggest that there are some key aspects that make theater different from book writing.  Historically, female actors and playwrights have had a very hard time. My study suggests that the body of the woman or even man on the stage (speaking with the voice of the female playwright) is particularly 'problematic' for society.   A novelists words enter and stimulate the private imagination of the reader, whereas a playwright's text emerges from the body of the player.  Words are given physical voice and presence.  The watching audience is implicated in this act:  the watcher being watched.

One way to trace this is to go back to Charles II's removal of the ban of women on stage, and why there had been a ban for so long.  Knowing what a sensualist Charles was may frame this choice in our minds.   Women of the stage were immediately viewed in the light of prostitutes.  The word actress and the word prostitute were at least euphemistically synonymous for most of our history.  

When women entered the stage, they took the jobs of male actors who had trained since boyhood to portray women.  In a reversal, these male actors were now banned from playing women.  The film Stage Beauty eloquently expresses the plight of one such male actor...  I think there is an indelible connection between the history of women actors and women playwrights and their issues 

(more on this history and it's connection to today to be shared in later posts)

Getting back to now, studies on both sides of the Atlantic show that 40% of playwrights are women and approximately 17%-19% of plays produced of both living and dead playwrights in Britain and America are by women. This is what needs redress. Furthermore, in blind submissions about 40% of plays chosen will be by women - so it's not a matter of talent or quality. Most establishments don't do blind submissions.   (I have entered two recently that were. Perhaps this is changing.  If so it's an exciting shift).  

Socially, women still do most of the raising of children. We still need "a room of our own" to write. Men have more support in the family to do their work while women are split many ways and often therefore come into their own later in life. I think there need to be more contests geared at older playwrights for this reason. Particularly if the contest is geared to women - having it be women under 30 doesn't make much sense in our population as we need the leg up later in life.

I think women have been shocked by these studies. I would ask that any male playwrights who may have a tendency to take a defensive posture on this put it aside and find out what women in theatre experience...read studies and listen before dismissing this out of hand.  I am interested to find male actors more supportive with regard to these issues.  They have seen what goes on from the shop floor and experienced their own very particular brand of powerlessness, perhaps...?

We all have a preconceived notion at some point that theater is a more equal setting. After a fairly long career my experience has shown me that it is in fact a bastion of inequality... 

(though a wonderful dramatic and hilarious place to share deep human connection all at the same time...)

And so ends my introduction to a blog that is dedicated to delving deeper into the historical causes of these issues, sideways into our current social climate, and narrowly, into my practical personal experience in theatre, the poignant side by side with the humorous.  More to come!  

What has been your most surprising or shocking discovery about the theatre to date?  From  your own experience or that of others?