Actress/Actor, Past and Present... A History of Women in Theatre Part 2 of 3

Actress/Actor, Past & Present:

 "At particular historical moments, the body of the actress (assumed to be an object onto which male desires were projected) and the body of the prostitute (assumed to be an object onto which male desires were enacted) slipped discursively into one: whore/actress."[1]

In Possession, the Actor stands in a queue for a cattle call audition for Les Miserables:

ACTOR: An assistant to the assistant director got me a ‘special’ audition.  Special as in stand in a queue round the corner…. I met him at the Ivy.  Pretending to be up and coming.  Me.  Maybe him as well... They never do something for nothing.

In performing the role of Actor in Possession, there were times when I felt that a one-night stand had occurred (in her fictional life), on the night alluded to in the text, when character when actor and assistant director met at The Ivy.  At other times, the character of Actor realized in the moment of telling, that she had now compromised herself by accepting the audition.  It is interesting that sexual activities are often said to be: ‘performed.’  They are also considered ‘acts’.

Nobody/Somebody:

One of the most interesting aspects of my research, were found in the accounts of three 'ordinary' actresses ('nobodies') from the 19th century, all of whom obscured their identities under pseudonyms. [2]  There is a persistent irony in the desire of actors who disguise themselves as others, longing to be seen for who they truly are. "[I am] content if what I wrote....may help to remove an unjust prejudice from the minds of those who think only of an actress as an...irresponsible being, without conscience, principle or self-respect, and incapable of understanding the serious duties and responsibilities of life." [3]

These three 'nobodies' recount the difficulties faced by women desirous of working with certain London theatres and touring companies, who were not 'kept' by a rich man, nor willing to exchange sexual favors for work.

I recognise in my younger self a definite naïveté regarding the business of theatre at large. My survival as an actor appeared to depend on choosing to ignore the way I was treated by many male directors.  How would I work if I allowed my discomfort to intrude?   My desire to act was great. 

Using my own experiences as a template, a female actor beginning her career in the late 20th century might experience the following:

• The director sends away the stage manager and the leading male actor so that he may enact the scene with you himself and physically assault you.

• On hearing that you used to ride horses, your director waxes lyrical about your muscled thighs pressing against said equine beasts.

• You are pursued by male audience members outside of the theatre, who appear to confuse you with the character you are playing; it becomes frightening.

• Yourself and other women in a production are expected to wear revealing clothing/expose your breasts although it is thought by all members of the cast that this is an extremely odd design/character choice.

• Your fellow actor believes that he can only 'connect' with his leading ladies if he sleeps with them; You use emotional reserve as a way to keep him at a distance.  Discussing the production years later with the director of the production, you find that he the director holds you responsible for the resulting lack of emotional grasp, voicing that you should have 'humored' the other actor, at least emotionally...

The accounts of 19th century female actors whose autobiography is “threaded through with stories of sexual exploitation of women in theatre”, affirm the universality of this experience.  By “recognizing the centrality of sisterhood to personal achievement,” I become the witness of myself through them; empowerment through contextualization.  Possession is a concrete manifestation of a newfound desire to contextualize myself as female actor-writer.[1]

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[1] Viv Garder, The Three Nobodies: Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press 2004) p.27

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[1] Kristen Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, February 2005) p. 2

[2] Viv Garder, The Three Nobodies: Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press 2004)

[3] Ascribed to Alma Ellerslie, Ibid., p.13

Developing my Own Voice: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Part 2

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman:

My training at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art[2] had a profound impact on my attitudes to work and learning.   Promoting a process-oriented approach to a wide variety of actor’s tools, the training was rigorous and diverse.[3]  We were admonished not to ‘end-gain’, but rather to lean into each moment of an exercise without worrying about getting it right.  An excellent methodology and easier said than done.  Such attitudes to work and learning I imperfectly strive to maintain.  

One of my most life changing classes at RADA proved to be Contemporary Text taught by Lloyd Trott. [4] Lloyd assigned us plays, requiring that we write a monologue for a character within the play. Appropriating the style of the writer became a ticket to each writer's unique world. I was required to observe, intuit, react and expand on the playwright's emergent themes. Lloyd’s arranged marriage between actor-writer had potency: a solid practice which released our ability as actors to deeply engage in performance of these texts, resulting in some of our best work.

Developing my own voice was not something I thought about in conscious terms.   Looking backwards I can see that this has been central to my work since the beginning.  I can best understand the themes I am writing about by looking sideways at them after the fact.  During the initial brainstorming for Possession[5], the character of a shadowy woman emerged, a mistress of William Shakespeare, she told her stories to him in bed.  Appropriating her tales, Shakespeare put them in his plays.  Possession chose to manifest in a radically different way, and the idea was shelved.  But the idea of a woman who gives her words away, unable to speak them in the public arena as herself, reveals my preoccupation with ‘voice’ with all it’s layers of meaning. The need to be heard was held close to the surface.

"Welcome to a parallel universe…":[6]

 Having completed RADA, and out of acting work, I began writing my first play Alaska.   By happy coincidence, I ran into my former instructor Lloyd Trott at the party of our mutual friend, Cambridge Jones.  Lloyd encouraged me to write Alaska for radio and enter it in BBC Radio 4’s First Bite, Young Writer’s Contest, deadline imminent.  I submitted the play with no expectations.  I couldn’t have been more surprised to win, resulting in a substantial writer’s fee and production of the play on BBC Radio 4 with then rising actor Michael Sheen in the lead role.

Alaska is relevant to these articles thematically, the genre reminiscent of 1950’s science fiction.  In an icy world peopled entirely by men, two young men genetically engineer a woman, feeding her cultural information gleaned from women’s magazines.  The experiment is initially successful and Frank (Michael Sheen) falls in love with his creation, Winona (Nancy Crane).  When Winona, (biologically unstable from the accelerated growth process of her gestation) returns his love, the contradictory information she has assimilated (via the likes of Cosmopolitan Magazine), leads to her death.[7]

What struck me forcibly in my first experience in the role of playwright, was the respect I was accorded by everyone in the production process.  To an actor or director, bent on trying to crack open a play, the playwright is the mysterious keeper of secrets, arguably one of the main reasons for everyone else’s presence in the room. All actors on the other hand, have experienced feeling like a rich man’s fading mistress:  easily replaced. My status as a writer is enviable when contrasted to the way I have sometimes been made to feel as an actor. 

Turning playwright was like going over to the other side in an unacknowledged theatrical class divide.   Tentatively on the path of playwriting, I ricocheted schizophrenically between these two roles, returning to the US as an actor in the role of Kyra in David Hare’s Skylight at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.   I was never quite ready to say, “I am no longer and actor.”  In the UK, I had felt pressure to choose.  I found in California an environment in which duality thrives and is sometimes encouraged.  Once I had children, playwriting became the easier choice.  However:  "We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that."[8] 

Beginning the MFA at UC Davis opened a door to revisit and improve my acting craft as a student for the first time in years.  I am humbled to admit that I had no idea how much I still had to learn.[9]  I was on the artistic fence, skirt hiked up over a small divide, and soon to redefine myself through hyphenation.

Hide and Seek: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Part 3

Becoming the Actor-Writer

In 2010 and 2011, I visited London to workshop a stage play I’d been writing, Today I Live, in collaboration with my mentor Lloyd Trott.   I was hot on the heels of this fruitful writing process when I was accepted to UC Davis, and though excited about the course, I was loath to put work on the play aside and turn my hand entirely to acting and teaching.  But the illusion that we must choose is often as false as the illusion that we must do it all:  During my second year at UC Davis, I received a Margrit Mondavi Fellowship for further development of Today I Live and contrary to my previous expectation, had the opportunity for further work on the play, within the University environment.

Hide & Seek:

“The notion of ‘presence and absence’ is a recurring trope among all ‘performed autobiographies’…”[10] 

Hanna Berrigan, director of the London workshops, was curious to know why I myself didn’t play the central role in my play, commenting that I reminded her of the actress whom I have spoken to about playing the role of Niaz in a potential London production.   I responded that although I was drawn to the idea of playing Niaz in theory, not only am I from a different ethnic background than Niaz, but I have been largely concerned with seeing the character and the play from the outside. ‘Seeing’ Niaz has been a recurrent theme in this creative process. 

In much the way that it is difficult to see oneself, close loved ones or family members with any sense of impartiality it has been hard for me to write this character.  Whether I play her or not, Niaz is my voice hidden within the text.  I as the writer ‘appear’ to be absent from my play: a story that does not ‘appear’ to be autobiographic, bearing scant resemblance to the facts of my own life.  This exemplifies the typical artist’s game of hide and seek.  Obscuring myself under a metaphorical layering of the vastly different cultures and circumstances of my characters in Today I Live, I felt free to explore my own preoccupations, with which the play is bursting.   The Mondavi Fellowship gave me an opportunity to ‘try out’ Niaz as an actor on ‘the inside’, reporting back to the external writer, like a journalist on field assignment.   I was unsatisfied with how I had previously written the character and jumped at the chance to view her through a different lens.

I didn’t quite know what I was getting into.  My internal experience of double exposure in playing a role I have written, triggered a desire to hide all the time.   I struggled to free myself within the role, under the gaze of the observing and editing writer.  Failing to put the writer entirely aside during this process affected my playing of the role.  Constantly preoccupied with what the writing was doing or needed to be doing, kept me at a slight remove.  As this was the first time I’d ever played a character I have written, I wasn’t familiar with the pit falls I faced or how to avoid them.  Yet the process proved successful for ‘the writer’, who benefitted from the actor’s ‘live feed’, about what wasn’t working in the role of Niaz.

The experience was energizing, and yet I felt that my workshop performance was flawed.  This provoked in me a desire to develop the process of actor/writer collaboration.  What circumstances are most conducive to letting go of the critical eye?  Can I successfully act in something I have written? Some of the answers are found in the nuts and bolts of artistic process.  But to understand the conflicted relations of female writer to actor to self, I would like to paint the backdrop of our scene: the wider social and historical context from which the two emerge.

(Continued here:  "Disguise Thou Art a Wickedness")

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[1]  Rosalind, As You Like It by William Shakespeare

[2] Hereafter referred to as RADA

[3] Process-oriented approaches to learning place as much value on the experience of doing exercises rather than the outcome or endpoint of a given task, in the belief that the deepest learning occurs through moment to moment ‘experiencing’ of the exercise itself

[4] Current Head of Dramaturgy at RADA

[5] The title of the solo exploration, which forms the practical aspect of this thesis: susanjaneharrison.com/possession.html

[6] Excerpt from the BBC tagline to Alaska which aired on BBC R4: September 21^st, 1995

[7] susanjaneharrison.com/alaska.html

[8] Toni Morrison as cited in Newsweek Magazine, March 30^th, 1981

[9] I continue to take classes in aspects of craft I wish to improve and intend to do so for the rest of my life

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