I’m coming late to the controversy over the resoundingly white male-written and -directed season announced for the Guthrie next year, in part because I’m tired of hearing myself rehearse the same old indignities at these repetitive insults to women’s artistry and integrity.  Reading the many smart excoriations of Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling’s defensive protestations about why it’s okay to ignore gender and race in season selection, I’m simply reminded, yet again, of the supreme arrogance of white men like him (not all white men) who are accustomed to seeing and remaking the world in their own image.

I was deeply moved by Polly Carl’s essay, “A Boy in a Man’s Theatre,” on HowlRound (4/28/12), in which she eloquently admitted, “I am compelled to talk some truth about finding yourself ‘other’ in a white man’s world—about the importance of insisting on being seen.”  Describing her reaction to watching a rehearsal of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Carl realized that although the new musical isn’t her “exact” story, “it was my story.”  The power of recognition—of seeing a life that looks like yours on stage—was overwhelming for Carl.  And if I’ve done my math right, Carl is in her 40s.  She’s been feeling invisible for a long time.

I wish someone like Joe Dowling could imagine what it feels like to go to the theatre or the movies, or turn on the television, and never see yourself represented.  If you’re white and male, and especially if you’re straight, it must go without mention that something that at least looks like your life will be part and parcel of the story told of an evening.  I can’t imagine the privilege of just assuming that the world will look like you, and that if it doesn’t, it’s because affirmative action or some other “self-serving” quota system (as Dowling accused protests over the Guthrie season of being) has allowed the riff-raff of gender, race, ethnic, and sexual difference to sneak in.

Even the conservative Wall Street Journal published an article called “Lots of Guys, Too Few Dolls,” shortly after this year’s Tony Award nominations were announced, in which the reporter—Pia Catton (a woman)—noted that “one is reminded of a sad truth:  While Tony’s are equally bestowed on male and female stars of the stage, there’s a colossal gender gap in the honors given to the men and women who create the shows.”  Catton went on to report that the percentages of plays written and directed by women on Broadway has barely changed over the decades, quoting experts like Susan Jonas, who co-wrote the 2002 New York State Council on the Arts report on the status of women in theatre, and mentioning the recently established Lilly Awards (named after Lillian Hellman), which turn their backs on the Tonys’ snubs by giving their own honors to women working in theatre.

On a much brighter side of this ubiquitous story, this week I received by snail mail the new season announcement from Arena Stage, in D.C., and was reminded that the gender and racial diversity in play and director selection that Dowling considers impossible or beneath him (or both) happens as a matter of course at other U.S. theatres.  In a market bigger than Minneapolis, with subscribers equally as august and long-standing, Arena artistic director Molly Smith regularly programs seasons that include a majority of productions written or directed by women and people of color (and both).

For 2012-2013, Arena’s eight-play season includes three plays by women, two of which are by women of color:  Pullman Porter Blues, by Cheryl L. West, and The Mountaintop, by Katori Hall, as well as a revival of Metamorphoses, written and directed by Mary Zimmerman.  West’s play will be directed by Lisa Peterson, who, along with colleagues Zimmerman, Jackie Maxwell, Kyle Donnelly, and Smith herself, comprise a roster of five women directors out of the eight productions.  Of the remaining three shows directed by men, two are directed by African Americans (and Tazewell Thompson also wrote the play he’ll direct).  The one show written and directed by a white man is One Night with Janis Joplin, so its content counts as gender diversity, if part of the issue is whose stories are told and whose bodies are seen on stage.

Good for Molly Smith and her artistic staff and her board, who no doubt ratified her progressive vision.  Smith is directing My Fair Lady at Arena next season, the Lerner and Loewe musical she mounted last summer at the Shaw Festival in Canada.  That production was a terrific, high energy, multi-racial cast production that rivaled her 2010 reimagining of Oklahoma! in its rejuvenated vision of the classic American musical.  Smith takes the American canon—part of Arena’s mandate—and refashions it to speak across identity communities, instead of sequestering it in presumptively white enclaves and preserving it for white people.  That narrow vision—Dowling’s vision—doesn’t reflect or do justice to the complex race, gender, sexuality, ethnic, and class composition of contemporary America.  Dowling’s vision is former presidential candidate Bob Dole’s bridge to the past; Smith’s is a glorious, hopeful representation of a reimagined future.

Playwrights Horizons in New York also deserves a place of pride in this counter-pantheon of progressive American theatres.  For 2012-2013, long-time artistic director Tim Sanford (a white man) offers six productions, new plays all, of which four are written by women (one of whom is African American), and one is a musical adaptation of Far From Heaven (written by Richard Greenberg and directed by Michael Greif), Todd Hayne’s wrenching 2002 film about the wife of a closeted gay man navigating her nuclear family life in the 1950s.  White women direct three of the six productions:  Anne Kauffman directs Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit; Carolyn Cantor directs her frequent collaborator Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan; and Leigh Silverman directs Tanya Barfield’s The Call.  Sam Gold, who’s proven his sensitivity as a director of women’s work, directs Annie Baker’s The Flick.

Playwrights’ season teaser brochure also includes a clever “key” to the genres and themes introduced by its six plays.  The guide includes symbols that run alongside each play’s title, indicating whether it addresses “comic relief,” “gaiety” (of the LGBT variety), “parenthood,” “race relations,” “impossible love,” “job inequality,” “prophetic vision,” “skeletons in the closet,” “strange neighbors,” “suburban angst,” or “Mormonism.”  Just reading this key made me laugh; what a witty reminder that any production has something idiosyncratic for everyone and that “universality” never means just one thing.

Arena and Playwrights regularly stage plays written and directed by women and people of color, not to fill a token slot in each season, but because these productions showcase voices that have something to say across communities.  They make visible populations of citizens alongside all the Joe Dowlings who are too blind to see how these so-called minorities/future majorities are remaking our collective world.  Molly Smith’s Oklahoma! is the state we live in now, thank goodness.

Likewise, Emily Mann’s production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, now playing on Broadway with a cast of people of color, shows us something new about ourselves and the canon of American drama.  Mann knew Williams and discussed Streetcar with him.  She researched the French Quarter of the period and articles by theatre historians about other multiracial productions (especially Philip C. Kolin’s essay “Williams in Ebony:  Black and Multi-Racial Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire,” in African American Review, 25.1 [Spring 1991]: 147-181).  Mann found ample justification for casting the Dubois family and Stanley as black, conflicted by the same class differences that propel Williams’s drama when it’s cast with white actors.

But critics like Ben Brantley consider this “gimmick” casting, and scoff at Mann and the producers (who also mounted an African American production of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) for fooling around with the American canon in ways they, like Dowling, find self-serving.  These reviews sound reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim’s admonishment last summer that Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks had gone too far in their adaptation and revision of Porgy and Bess.

Underneath all these criticisms that purport to champion good American drama is a warning to women and people of color that they shouldn’t get too uppity, that they should steer clear of white men’s work and stay barefoot and happy—and invisible and silent—in the ghettos of their “special interest” theatres.

The same blatant discrimination was recently called out at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where of the 22 films nominated for the 2012 Palme D’Or prize, none were written or directed by women.  The oversight caused a similar online uproar as the Dowling debacle among the film (and larger) arts community, through which petitions circulated for signatures to protest this blatant exclusion.

Have we gone back to the future?  Is it the 1950s again?  In a political moment in which Republicans and Tea Party-ers threaten to reverse every achievement for women’s reproductive rights garnered since Roe v. Wade; when the same politicians inflame xenophobic anti-immigration sentiments about our southern borders (and when similar anti-immigrant racism roils political waters in Cannes’ France); and when LGBT activists have to celebrate when Obama announces that he’s “evolved” into thinking same-sex marriage is okay after all (gee, thanks, Barack), maybe it’s no surprise that the festival director at Cannes, and Brantley at the Times, and Dowling at the Guthrie think they can discriminate against women and people of color with impunity.

Let’s not let them get away with it.  Write to Molly Smith at Arena, and Tim Sanford at Playwrights and tell them how pleased you are with their 2012-2013 season announcements.  Write to Dowling at the Guthrie and tell him how disappointed you are that he’s such a Neanderthal.  Sign the petitions circulating protesting the exclusion of women from the prize at Cannes.  And write letters to the Times protesting that white men like Brantley and Charles Isherwood foster a discourse about the arts in which decisions like Dowling’s season are okay and productions like Mann’s Streetcar are dismissed.

Don’t just go to the theatre—respond to it, write about it, protest it, reimagine it.  It’s too important to keep allowing the barbarians to guard the gate.

The Feminist Spectator

Smash ended its first season this week, and has been renewed for a second, minus Theresa Rebeck, its creator and original show runner (and one of the only women playwrights to be produced on Broadway).  Too bad that Rebeck is losing such a high profile, visible perch from which to write for television, but maybe the small screen isn’t her milieu.  While her plays—see the recently closed Seminar for only one example—are filled with sharp dialogue, witty repartee, clever plotting, and acutely drawn characters, Smash has this season seemed a muddle of genres, styles, and concerns, none of which have gelled.

I’ve been watching avidly, but come away from most episodes disappointed as the show sinks more and more into a Glee-like thematic integration of songs into the plot, instead of the more theatrically-based use of musical numbers that promised from the outset to distinguish the series.  The Marilyn Monroe musical that the show’s characters have worked to develop all season–called Bombshell–actually seems quite good; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a real Broadway spin-off in the works.

The rehearsal numbers, which often morph into fantasy performance sequences, as the company prepares for its Boston tryout (something productions never do anymore, one way in which the show is full of anachronisms), are wonderfully choreographed (by Joshua Bergasse), and feature talented singers and dancers.  The two principals—Megan Hilty as Ivy and Katharine McPhee as Karen—have continued their uneasy alliance throughout the season, as they both keep their eye on the prize of Bombshell’s lead role.

In the season finale, that competition comes to a temporary conclusion, as (spoiler alert, just in case) the moody director Derek asks Karen to perform as Marilyn, rejecting Ivy by telling her she just doesn’t have that “certain something” that keeps Karen-as-Marilyn haunting his mind.  Despondent, Ivy is last seen spilling a bottle of prescription meds into her hand, staring into her dressing room mirror looking determined for all the wrong reasons.

The show’s ur-theme unspools how these talented young women have become cogs in the wheel of Broadway’s machinery, as the producer, Eileen—Angelica Huston, in a role that flatters her talents not at all—debates how to make the musical a necessary success.  In an earlier episode, after a backers’ showcase for which Ivy performs as Marilyn and to which would-be investors respond tepidly, Eileen decides that the show needs a star, and imports film actress Rebecca (Uma Thurman) to play the lead.

Thurman’s performance over her several-episode arc found the tone Smash needs to really work.  Thurman camped it up as the film star whose foray into live performance both terrified and thrilled her.  As the diva who requires lavish care and feeding, Thurman played the role with a kind of tossed off enthusiasm, not taking it all too seriously and as a result offering a playful, knowing performance.

The character’s predictable peccadilloes let Thurman highlight Rebecca’s narcissistic performance of herself.  In other words, Thurman parodied her character and herself, capturing the recognizable stereotype of a famous film actor doing a guest spot as a famous film actor swanning around a Broadway show.

Aside from Thurman’s episodes, the series hasn’t been able to find a consistent tone.  Smash is really a soap opera, a melodrama like Grey’s Anatomy and others of its ilk.  But the writers seem to want more than that.  They want to capture the backstage breeziness of the musical theatre gypsies who surround Karen and Ivy (and who are wonderful in the musical numbers), offering a theatrical glimpse into the cattiness and mutual supportiveness of those who are most often anonymous and invisible except as parts of the larger whole.

At the same time, Smash wants to play as serious dramatic realism, but the scenes the writers generate for the principal characters sound pretentious, contrived, and overly histrionic.  The contradiction makes for a kind of fascinating train wreck—how do you make a show about the process of creating a show dramatically interesting?

As Feminist Spectator 2 (Stacy Wolf) notes, it’s easy to think of numerous backstage musicals and films from the 20th century to the present, all of which demonstrate audiences’ fascination with how theatre works and how productions get put together.  The rehearsal scenes in Smash demonstrate something of that world, except that the characters are forced into the most old-fashioned, stereotypical versions of their parts.  Derek (Jack Davenport) is played as a temperamental artiste and womanizer who “gets” the performance he needs from his female leads by seducing them.  The stage manager is portrayed as harried, the chorus as catty, and the creators as conflicted (with themselves and one another).  This very conventional understanding of creativity—and gender—doesn’t do justice to the complexities of making something work for live theatre.

The series hasn’t yet found a way through its conundrums.  Talented performers like Debra Messing and Christian Borle, as Julia and Tom, the songwriting duo creating the Marilyn musical, are mostly wasted in roles that require them to plod through melodramatic plot lines about failing relationships that don’t showcase their real skill.  Both actors succeed in making more of their roles than the scripts deserve, but sometimes, their necessary labor shows.

Messing’s Julia is punished for her desire in a too predictable, too stereotypically gendered storyline.  Not for the first time, Julia sleeps with Bombshell’s leading man (Will Chase), jeopardizing her marriage to Frank, a perfectly nice if boring science teacher (played earnestly by Brian D’Arcy James).  Messing and Chase spark with attraction in their flirtation scenes.

By contrast, Julia’s domestic life with Frank and her imperious, impossible teenaged son are routine and dull.  Julia is supposed to be an accomplished Broadway lyricist/songwriter, yet she’s hobbled by a family whose demands on her emotional life threaten her ability to do her job.

Gay Tom, on the other hand, can at least follow his own desire.  He’s cycled through two different relationships this season, leaving a nice but ordinary lawyer with whom his mother, of all people, set him up, and ends the season having an affair with one of Bombshell’s chorus boys, a faith-full African American who wants to go slowly and build an emotional connection before consummating their relationship in a sexual one.  Although the couple is entirely unbelievable, Borle and his would-be boyfriend have nice chemistry (for a straight man, Borle does an excellent, convincing job playing gay).

Then there’s the Karen and Dev (Raza Jaffrey) subplot, in which Karen and her longtime boyfriend suffer complications from privileging her career as a performer over his as a politico/lawyer.  He’s been demoted in his mayor’s office job; his unhappiness leads him to flirt with a co-worker.  After he almost has sex with her, Dev runs to Boston to propose to Karen because he’s startled by his attraction to the other woman.

But handsome, soulful, mostly supportive Dev is rebuffed by Karen (who can’t contemplate a marriage proposal while she’s in tech, for heaven’s sake!).  And then, of all things, Dev parks at the Boston hotel bar to drown his sorrows, where he bumps into Ivy, propelling them into an inexplicable one-night stand.

These far-fetched stories would be fun if the show admitted to its own trashy campiness.  But Smash’s tone doesn’t signal anything but a weird earnestness about its unlikely narrative turns.  The musical numbers sometimes get the campiness right, though a Bollywood number, in which Karen performed in some sort of India royal court for Dev, with the two of them and the others decked out in Orientalist-wear, was completely gratuitous and patently racist.  But after these extra-textual insertions, the show returns to its soapy stories without the knowing self-reflexivity that would make them, well . . . fun, smart, and snappy.

Seeing two different Broadway theatre productions recently that featured two of Smash’s leading performers also helped me realize one of the show’s central problems.  Megan Hilty starred in last week’s City Center Encores! production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by the super-talented, super-funny John Rando (Urinetown).  The short-run production was a confection, a sweet, playful paean to a 1940s musical that uses musical idioms of the 20s (in which the story is set) and the 50s (to which it looks forward) to move its heroine, the iconic Lorelei, through a silly plot about finding a millionaire mate on a ship bound from New York for France.

Lorelei, of course, was originally played on Broadway by a young Carol Channing, and then on film by Marilyn Monroe.  That Hilty was cast as the Monroe character while she’s on television starring in a series about the making of a musical based on Monroe doesn’t seem a coincidence.  During the talk-back after last Saturday’s matinee performance (5/12/12), a vibrant and excited Hilty said that she and Rando talked about how she might make the role her own.

Hilty played the role as though she were born to it.  Her Lorelei, though, wasn’t the breathy bombshell who uses her sex appeal like a weapon, as Monroe would have her.  Hilty’s Lorelei was sweet and surprisingly smart.  Although she’s full of malapropisms and her take on politics and the real world is slightly askew, Lorelei becomes the voice of sanity in the play’s rather crazy world.

And via Hilty, Lorelei was all heart.  Hilty is a terrific, superbly charismatic stage performer.  “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” was a knockout number in Hilty’s hands.  She controlled every note, every step, and every beat of her delivery with a confidence, wit, and pleasure that made her galvanizing to watch.

The stage is Hilty’s milieu.  Her connection to her fellow performers and to the audience was palpable and thrilling throughout the Gentlemen performance.  She’s a graceful, generous performer; you can see and feel her buoying up the rest of the cast and offering herself with powerful aplomb to the audience, with the Lorelei role as the vehicle for her wonderful talent.

Watching Hilty perform live helped me realize what’s wrong with Smash.  Although it’s great fun to see so many Broadway actors on the small screen, television just can’t do justice to their talent.  As Ivy, Hilty’s charisma is compressed by a story that makes the character jealous and small, and by a format that shrinks her exuberance down to fit a much more constrained medium.

Although we get glimpses of Hilty’s magnetism in the few numbers Smash shares from Bombshell, they barely hint at the power of her live presence as a performer.  It’s in the exchange between cast-mates and audience that Hilty excels, putting over a number by how she orients her body and her sound to the house, by the outsized smile she wears, which shines on her heart, beating on her sleeve.

Television and a melodrama about leading women competing with one another over a role and over their men diminish Hilty’s innate strengths.  Smash forces you to look at this glorious performer as though through the wrong end of a telescope; she’s reduced, shrunk to fit a two-dimensional screen that can only flatten her.

The same is true of Christian Borle, who’s performing on Broadway in Peter and the Star-Catcher, a wonderfully invented play with music that began at New York Theatre Workshop last season.  The play (by Rick Elice) narrates the back-story of Peter Pan, featuring an ensemble of 10 men and one young woman (the very talented, delightful Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays “Molly,” a feisty girl who goes on to become Wendy’s mother).  The actors deliver the tale in a terrifically physical, energetic, transformational acting style.

Co-directed by Roger Rees (he of Nicholas Nickleby fame, to which Peter has been compared by some critics) and Alex Timber (who created a similarly active, imaginative mise-èn-scene for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), Peter uses the actors’ bodies and simple theatrical tricks to create the story of three boy orphans who are shipped against their will to an evil king.  En route, their lives are saved and transformed by Molly and her father, the custodians of magical “star stuff,” who are delivering their goods in another ship.  When two trunks get switched before these two ships sail, the crew and contents of both vessels become intertwined to spin out the story that leads to Peter Pan.

As Black Stache (short for “moustache”), the character who eventually becomes the vile Captain Hook, Christian Borle is, in a word, awesome.  Like Hilty, he’s a consummate live performer, whose work with the ensemble and his interactions with the audience are hilarious, smart, and entirely skillful.  He jumps, he leaps, he sweats, and he works on stage, all to make it look easy and so much fun.  (His extra-large theatrical persona was also evident in his turn as Prior in last year’s Signature Theatre revival of Angels in America.)

Sitting at a piano crooning tunes and rolling his eyes at his fellow characters’ machinations in Smash wastes Borle’s abilities.  But how could television incorporate the wonder of seeing him use the space of the stage to express his outsized talent?  TV compresses these wonderful stage actors into a story that reduces their characters and their own performing gifts.

Before it became routine and tiresome, Glee captured some of the campy style that Smash needs to make it, you should excuse me, sing.  The series needs less plodding scripting and more celebration of what it feels like to be able to sing with a voice like Megan Hilty’s, and more acknowledgement that performers with as much presence and charisma as Hilty and Borle are what makes Broadway continue to attract audiences, even while film spectacles beckon them away.

Hilty and Borle demonstrate that live popular performance like Broadway musicals and comedies rely on something very old fashioned indeed:  the magnetism of consummate performers who know how to hold the audience in the palm of their hand.  How pleasurable it is to be carried away on the high of an actor’s charisma.  And how sad not to be able to capture that on a television show about Broadway.

The Feminist Spectator

FYI, Split Britches will receive the Edwin Booth Award from the Theatre Program of the CUNY Graduate Center today. I’m sure it’ll be a wonderful conversation. See the link for details. The Feminist Spectator

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