Woman as image, man as bearer of the look...A History of Women in Theatre Part 3 of 3

At Odds:  Negotiating with the internalized oppressor:

Representing women on stage clearly creates a particular dilemma regarding exposure and identity, and not only because female performers have been objectified.  While our perceptions of male and female roles (figurative and literal) are ever metamorphosing, distant echoes of the 19th century underpin our framing of male and female behavior.  A recent study aired on PBS Radio, in which MBA students were given histories of entrepreneurs whose start-ups had failed, and asked to evaluate the entrepreneur's actions and choices. [1]  Each business history was printed twice, one copy citing a man as the entrepreneur and the other copy naming a woman.

The results found that women and men were evaluated differently for the same actions.  When it was believed that the entrepreneur was male, adjectives such as ‘persistent’, ‘focused’, ‘optimistic’ were used.  When it was believed that the entrepreneur was a woman, the entrepreneur was described as ‘aggressive’, ‘ruthless’, ‘unrealistic’. Protagonists 'drive' the plot in much the way entrepreneurs must 'drive' a business. 

The Sands study on gender bias in theatre found that female protagonists written by women were seen as unlikable by female artistic directors and agents.  In a dismissive attack on the Sands study, Thomas Garvey writes, "It's no secret, after all, that minority audiences unconsciously view characters as social emblems - and thus a negatively-drawn female character written by a woman could stir up greater feelings of unconscious betrayal in women than in men."[2]  While he misnames women as a minority and draws different conclusions than I do as to the significance of this, he touches on one of the reasons women may struggle to write and portray themselves. 

During the California workshops of Today I Live, Director Jessa Brie Moreno and I struggled with our judgment of the character Niaz.  Was she too strident in argument?   Was she unreasonable?  Why should she be reasonable? Was she unlikable?  Male or female, flawed characters are more interesting. We are all sometimes unlikeable, (why can’t we ‘cut Niaz a little slack’)?  Men have not been primarily valued in our society for their likeability, nor seen as strident when they are active.

Practice as Research: Obfuscation/Revelation

“[She, the writer] played the pivotal role…in the first production of the play; this enabled her to further explore issues of authorship and identity, through performance, and this…provides further evidence between her biography – her life and work – and her attitudes towards authorship and performance.”[3]

Playing the role of "Niaz" for the first time, I felt hugely exposed.  Herein is best exemplified the desire to reveal and to hide as it manifests specifically for women performers when they find themselves in the realm of ‘taboo’: revealing their desires or their rage.  Watching intimate scenes enacted by others in anything I’ve written always causes me to blush, burst into laughter, or make self-deprecating quips to the actors .  While most English playwrights I have met are quiet, thoughtful introverts, I appear to approach my role as playwright as another type of performance, a tendency of which I feel obscurely ashamed.  I believe that I should be more enigmatic, more dignified.  But isn’t this expectation in itself a little pretentious?

How much more intense is the internal conundrum when I play a role I’ve written.  Enacting my own scenes in front of others, I cannot say, “Darling, the playwright made me do it,” without underlining my own culpability.  Character feels like scant refuge, under these circumstances, for:  “ – the ‘character’ which ‘even though a version of the writer, is a created identity, a representative figure of the author’s idea of self’”.[4]

The "three in a bed" scene in TodayI Live is particularly problematic for the actor-writer:

  Niaz and Farhad (lately estranged) have been drinking.  They lie on the bed together, embracing. Unbeknownst to anyone, Michael (a man living in 1821 in the flat) is also in the bed.  Niaz kisses Michael, who is hidden in the bedclothes, thinking he is her husband Farhad.  She comes to sitting, continuing to kiss Michael who is now seen by the audience.  The audience reaction was enormous, a wave, a shout of laughter breaking over the stage.  I too laughed, partly because I wanted to join the audience in their enjoyment and partly perhaps because I was embarrassed that I had written something like this!  A highly inappropriate perspective to take while onstage; I am acting in front of an audience and my character isn't laughing.[5]

Why did I write this and why did I enact it?  And herein a female actor-writer’s dilemma suggests itself: the desire to be viewed as we are and in so doing reclaim an empowered sexuality, coupled with an urge to hide engendered by our perception that this is an act of indecent self-exposure.   Particularly problematic when haunted by the ghost of ‘the actress as whore.’  An actor wants to be seen and protected by the mask of character; a playwright wants to be heard, yet protected by invisibility, like the voice of Oz behind the curtain[6].  As the actor-writer playing Niaz, I had fewer 'obfuscations' at my disposal.

On a personal level, the actor Johnny Moreno (Farhad), is the director's husband, and we are all friends of long-standing.  Being directed by Jessa in a love scene with her husband was a bizarre experience.   Of the three of us, only Jessa appeared entirely relaxed and content.  I imagine that Johnny and I were ‘watching’ her watching us, the inner mantra of both possibly being:  “This is not me, this is the character, these are not us, these are our characters…” And yet, the use of the self is central to my acting practice.  I need to be present to my own momentary impulses.  Telling myself “I am not me” is to disengage, rather than be alive to impulse.

In this split experience, one is thus experiencing playing the role, while watching oneself through the eyes of the audience in ‘Lacanic’ mirror fashion.[7] Here is the “interplay of acting and staging within a dialogic text,” the text emerging from the inner dialogue of actor and writer within the artist.  [8]  This experience suggests that writing without staging may not work theatrically, although of course you need not be an actor to write a successful play.  Rather, playwrights must be conscious of staging as they write.  Thus seeing the action onstage from the point of view of audience while being onstage is undeniably useful to the writer.  By playing the role oneself, the writer becomes “acutely aware of both the audience” and “that the spectator is a force somehow allowing or driving the action, the unfolding of character, the revelation of meaning.”[9] Like the playwright-actor Susan Glaspell, after a day of rehearsing my play as an actor, I return home and cross things out; I make changes based on the actor’s experience of the role on stage.

Although this method satisfies the needs of the writer, it is problematic to performing the role, in a truly present and spontaneous fashion. As an actor I want to immerse myself in the part, remain in the moment with other actors – not transport myself out of body into a form of ‘tri-consciousness’.

[10]

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look

 ...The presence of woman is an indispensable element...in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation..."  As Budd Boeticher has put it:

            What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents.  She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does.  In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."[11]

I think that this passage illustrates why the character of Niaz has troubled me as a writer and taken me longer to develop into a successful protagonist.  I am unaccustomed to seeing female protagonists: towards creating one, few reference points exist.[12]  In my experience, women are highly active in aspects of their life, but frequently receptive in aspects of the male/female engagement.  Towards myself as writer, there is always the interrogation:  Is this right?  Is this how it is?  Is she active enough?  Is she too active?  What am I saying here - about women, about myself? 

The structure of Today I Live is unconventional, partly due to Niaz being an unconscious protagonist.   While she is determined to be the executor of her own artistic life, and struggles forward on her path as a visual artist, she is unconscious that her actions impact and even dictate the life of a man living within the flat in another time.  Michael is Niaz's 'invisible' model, and becomes her muse.  In her mind's eye she views him and paints him.  His visual presence freezes moments, and yet rather than working against the action, these moments create space for the audience to enter the world of the play.  All in all, this is not an exact role reversal, but a struggle for new ground.[13]

Only in playing Niaz myself, did I become aware of this ambivalence around ‘action’, which lay at the heart of my internal dialogue between the actor playing Niaz and the playwright (me and myself).[14]  The elliptical relationship between actor/writer thus serves to illuminate choices the writer initially made unconsciously.  A conscious writer can choose to use this information to become more ‘muscular’ and active in her writing.

---

[1] As heard on PBS station KQED, San Francisco, CA

[2] Thomas Garvey, Opening the Curtain on Emily Glassberg Sands, Part III, The Hub Review, August 20, 2009 (http://hubreview.blogspot.com/2009/07/opening-curtain-on-emily-glassberg_2920.html)

[3]Nicola Shaughnessy, The Disappearing Subject in Susan Glaspell’s Auto/biographial Theatre Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press 2004) p. 44

[4] Mary Jean Corbett cited by 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. 12

[5] See photos REFERENCE p.55-59

[6] L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York, NY: Harper Collins 2001)

[7] ‘The Mirror Stage” is the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in which an infant recognizes itself in a mirror, or the symbolic ‘mirror’ of a parent etc., which induces the infant to view self through the perspective of the mirror as an object.

[8] Nicola Shaughnessy, The Disappearing Subject in Susan Glaspell’s Auto/biographial Theatre Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press 2004) p. 42

[9] Ibid.

[10] Referring to dual-consciousness as interpreted by Stanislavsky: Sharon Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 2^nd Edition: An Acting Master for the 21^st Century (Abingdon, Oxon UK: Routledge, 2009)

[11] Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: (Screen 16/3, Autumn, 1975) pp.6-18

[12] Recently successful on British television: "Call the Midwife" and "The Hour" (among others) have strong female protagonists and are written by women; I am energized signs of a sea change in the right direction

[13] See photo REFERENCE p.59

[14] Which touches on just feedback received from male mentors desiring more high-powered ‘events’

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]

---

[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

---

[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

Receiving Feedback: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Part 1

BACKGROUND

“Do you not know that I am a woman?  When I think, I must speak.”
[1]

Performing Identities:

Theatre Director Michael Barakiva introduced us to concepts of Performing Identities, in our first ‘Core’ class at UC Davis.  Through showcasing his personal preoccupation with identity, he encouraged us to do the same.  I began to be aware of the myriad of roles I play, and furthermore, how specific roles (that of actor and playwright) are colored by gender.  I began to examine a challenge I’ve had in believing that my work as a playwright can be ‘understood’ by my male mentors (in the UK), in whom I have witnessed a desire to push my work into the linear/literal.  Their critiques seem to express a preference for hugely dramatic events (high action).  How to receive feedback from people viewing our work through the lens of their own bias? 

In sifting through their words for ‘truth kernels’, I discover that my beloved male mentors in the UK are right when they identify an issue, but frequently prescribe a remedy that doesn’t fit my aesthetic or intention.  While at UC Davis, I had access to a wide range of feedback for my work for the first time.  During the intensely two years of the MFA, I learned to use feedback more efficiently: I compile it and puzzle through it, excited when I realise how apparently different bits of feedback seem to point to the same issue.   I couldn’t proceed effectively in my work as an artist without mentors, audience and friends who are willing to act as ‘an outside eye’.  In this manner, all of my work feels collaborative.  I am interested that the women in my life who currently critique my work tend to do so by questioning, rather than critique, which I find extremely useful.  I attempt to emulate this myself by supporting fellow artists and friends with more questions and less opinions in general.  

Further on gender: inhabiting UC Davis alerted me to a particular discomfort I habitually experience in hierarchical environments.  Class reading material on gender, imbibed in this institution has further awakened my awareness.  I note that my discomfort with hierarchy appeared to be shared by the women in the group, who tended to seek lateral collaboration.  I began to reflect on my past life as a woman and a woman artist.  I became ignited by statistics: women are radically under-employed in theatre by a ratio of 2:1.  Thus emerged the desire to contextualize this shared experience in Possession, and to realize a potential as actor-writer to create work for myself. 

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.