Tag Archives: women playwrights

Precious Little

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This very smart play presents a conundrum of ideas and feelings which, happily, it refuses to sort out in any complete or resolved way. Part of playwright Madeleine George’s point is to suggest that even when we think we’ve got it all figured out, life becomes more ambiguous and ambivalent for reasons far out of our control. The protagonist here is Brodie (Kelly McAndrew), a lesbian linguist. After many years working in obscure language communities out in the field, she’s achieved tenure at her university. The obvious next step for a woman of her generation and means is to have a baby. With characteristic deliberateness, she finds a suitable sperm donor and becomes pregnant.

One of the play’s many pleasures is that Brodie is an independent woman completely capable of being on her own, who’s decided to have a child because she wants to, not because she thinks she has to for her life to be meaningful or complete. The play opens with Brodie speaking with an obsequious, condescending young birth technology counselor (played by Theo Allyn, virtuosic in multiple roles), who tries to prepare her for the results of her upcoming amniocentesis.

Brodie is over 40, and knows that her age means that her pregnancy could go awry in myriad ways. But the jolt in her life’s narrative comes when the test does indeed show a potential abnormality, and Brodie responds with uncharacteristic uncertainty about which path to choose. Should she abort the baby or carry it to term, gambling on the possibility that her daughter (she knows its sex because the inept counselor accidentally slips and tells her) will be, as she imagines, “broken”?

George isn’t sanguine about a middle-age lesbian’s life choices. But at the same time, she suggests that for strong, sure women who’ve spent their lives making good decisions, it’s still possible to be surprised and unprepared when a curve ball comes flying at you. In fact, one of the play’s many ruminations centers on the unpredictability of our lives, regardless how intelligent, controlled, and well-meant our plans.

Brodie is a linguistic anthropologist, whose interest in language doesn’t necessarily guarantee that she’s an excellent communicator. For each of the play’s multiple characters, the ability to access language provides the key to a deeper level of feeling.

The play opens with a caged gorilla living with great equanimity behind her bars, speaking her inner thoughts in short, declarative sentences. Played with simple, suggestive physicality by Laurie Klatscher, the animal is fully present to her environment, noticing the angle and quantity of light has it floods her home and the smell of the air on her fur. The animal describes her own activities in the present tense, luxuriating in the pleasure of cataloguing her life as it happens.

A parade of visitors roam past what Brodie and her graduate student, Rhiannon (Allyn), call the animal’s “enclosure” instead of its “cage,” using politically correct language to mask the fact of the ape’s captivity, just as we all use euphemisms to soften the sting of difficult realities.

Allyn also plays a collection of people called “the zoo goers,” who stand outside the ape’s cage looking in, their words and responses blurring into one another much the way the animal might hear them. As George writes their stream-of-consciousness impressions, it’s evident that most people just want to consume their superficial experience of the animal, rather than really trying to connect with it meaningfully before they move on to the next exhibit. They barely notice her soulful presence before they’re begging to see the giraffes.

Dragged to the zoo against her will because Rhiannon, her young graduate student lover, wants to do something other than have furtive sex in her office, Brodie does in fact connect with the ape. Although the animal supposedly has 30 or so words at her disposal, their appeal to one another is mostly mute. Brodie understands something of the animal’s presentness, her ability to simply be in the moment in ways that Brodie’s life precludes.

The animal becomes a kind of ego ideal, as Brodie comes to realize that she, too, will have to be staunchly in her life instead of second-guessing whatever choice she makes.As Dorothy (Klatscher), an older, wiser counselor at the birth clinic suggests as Brody debates her baby’s fate, she’ll make a decision and then she’ll live in it, regardless of how her life changes.

One of Brodie’s research informants is Cleva (Klatscher, poignant in the third of her multiple roles), a woman who speaks the dying Slavic language Brodie studies. When Cleva emigrated to the States, she adopted English to separate herself from a politically violent past. As she works with Brodie, who gives her words to record in the university’s sound booth, Cleva reconnects to her history through her original tongue and seems to slip from the present, which irritates her emotionally parsimonious daughter no end.

For Cleva, language is a gift, even though it describes a traumatic past. For the ape, language allows her to describe and revel in her local environment, however compromised. Brodie’s challenge is to figure out how to use language to capture a future she can’t quite imagine. When, in the play’s final moment, the ape grips Brodie in a fervent embrace, Brodie’s great relief seems to be the solace she derives from simply being in that moment without the necessity that it be resolved or vocalized.

The play is beautifully directed by Tracy Brigden, who moves the three actors around a simple, evocative set through vignettes of Brodie’s emotional and philosophical quandary, accumulating anaffective nuance as the play goes forward. Each of the performers offer precise, carefully drawn portraits of the women whose lives intersect with Brodie’s. McAndrew presents a straightforward, likable Brodie, whose existential debate proceeds along a steady trajectory.

Precious Little isn’t interested in a voyeuristic study of the emotional angst of a difficult, life-altering decision, but instead, presents a character for whom deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy provides an opportunity for useful growth. To see a woman academic onstage who’s not punished for her intelligence by a fatal disease (see Wit and even the recent The How and the Why), and who isn’t belittled or presented as somehow castrating, makes Precious Little a notable contribution to dramatic literature in which female professors are more routinely made to suffer for their competencies.

It’s also refreshing to see a play in which a lesbian isn’t eager to form a conventional domestic couple. Brodie enjoys Rhiannon, but when the younger woman’s opinion about Brodie’s pregnancy sounds too glib and thoughtless, Brodie doesn’t hesitate to end the relationship.

At the same time, Rhiannon is clear about the pitfalls of sleeping with a professor, anticipating the day when Brodie will not so subtly pass her off to a colleague and withdraw her support. Separating the personal from the professional, George suggests, is impossible, since women who’ve achieved the success Brodie boasts often find their emotional support and sexual pleasure among those with whom they connect intellectually.

Brigden and the actors capture this dynamic nicely. It’s clear that although she’s guarded about their relationship, Rhiannon has real affection for her professor, while Brodie is just a bit too distracted to really notice the young woman’s attentions. We’re not invited to witness the formation of a couple, but to observe how even the most intimate relationships develop through a series of hits and misses, through sentences that sometimes don’t really finish the thought they mean to convey. When Brodie breaks off their affair, she says vaguely that “this isn’t working out.” Rhiannon knowingly retorts that it’d be kinder, in the long run, for Brodie to say exactly what she means.

But in Precious Little, even the most precise language can’t quite convey anything with real certainty because in the end, life’s just not that simple. Living in it, with all its immutable contradictions and confusions, with magnanimity and generosity, might be the best we can do.

The Feminist Spectator

Precious Little, City Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA, April 3, 2011.

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Kin

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Bathsheba Doran’s lovely new play is a meditation on community and the unlikely ways in which it forms and dissolves across time. With a light touch and moving, smart insights, Doran paints a series of vignettes that illustrate how despite the fundamental ambivalence with which we make our collective way through our lives, our sometimes unlikely connections with one another can be real and sustaining.

Anna (Kristen Bush) glues together a disparate group of quirky characters. At the play’s opening, she’s a grad student in English at Columbia working on a thesis about punctuation in Keats. She sits silently, withstanding the harangue of Simon (Matthew Rauch), a male professor with whom she’s had what appears to have been a casual affair. He’s breaking it off with all the pompous ego-centricity of an over-educated, over-privileged, too-cool white man. (Doran did her MFA at Columbia, and observes the peculiarities of academic practices with droll humor throughout Kin.)

In Anna’s next scene, she moves from Simon to Helena (played by the galvanizing, terrific Laura Heisler), her oldest friend, a mostly out of work actor who’s devastated by the death of her dog, with whom she’s clearly had her longest, most important emotional relationship. The two women bury the poor animal together at night in the park, even though Helena knows that the city forbids such interments. The scene is both funny and poignant, and sets the dual tone on which Doran balancesKin’s emotional quotient throughout.

In a parallel universe that soon connects with Anna’s, Sean (Patch Darragh), an Ireland-born personal trainer, speaks by phone to his mother, Linda (played by the wonderful Suzanne Bertish), back home. He’s broken up with a girlfriend who turned out to be a drug addict, and Linda is house-bound, agoraphobic because she was raped many years ago by the murky figure she calls the “man in the mist,” who’s never been identified or prosecuted.

Matched up by an on-line service, Anna and Sean begin to date, and Doran intertwines their very different lives in surprising, never predictable ways. Each character is drawn with confident, clear, and compelling attributes but with little elaborate psychology. Doran provides some back-story—Anna’s mother died of cancer when she was a teenager; her father, Adam (Cotter Smith), is a military man with professional and personal secrets that keep him and his daughter estranged; neurotic Helena’s mother is a psychiatrist. But we learn these details by accretion rather than through exposition, because what motivates Doran’s characters isn’t as important as the choices they make in the play’s present.

All of the characters change across the arc of the play in ways that seem hopeful without being facile or trite, and although Anna is central to the group’s relationships, her trajectory is ultimately one among many. Sean thinks Helena is crazy, then begins to feel real affection for her; Anna finds her dead mother’s diary and realizes that her parents were never happy; Sean wonders if he loves Anna and remains emotionally preoccupied with Rachel (Molly Ward), his drug-addicted ex.

When he first finds out about his daughter’s relationship, Adam scoffs to Kay (Kit Flanagan), his secret lover, that Sean will never amount to anything. But he comes to respect Sean, to see his goodness, and to understand what the young man brings to his daughter. Anna never meets Kay, who sees Anna’s picture for the first time on the cover of her book, even though Kay has mothered Anna, unacknowledged and unknown, from a distance for most of Anna’s life.

Adam’s secret relationship with Kay stands in for the wealth of what we don’t know about one another. Relationships, Kin suggests, are risks we take based on the tiny bits of knowledge we’re able to gather, confronted with how finally unfathomable we are to one another, yet how inevitably tied. Our connections are tenuous and attenuated, but they persist.

Helena, to whom Doran assigns the funniest lines and the most outrageous traits, seems poised on the brink of disaster throughout the play. She cries frequently and easily, sometimes for cause, sometimes not, and her career as an actor is minor at best. She dreams of a ward of children who’ve tried to commit suicide, and sees herself among them. But instead of ending her life, Helena begins it again by moving to North Carolina, where a confrontation with another animal provides the epiphany she needs to reboot her emotions.

Doran and director Sam Gold provide a hysterical spin on The Winter’s Tale’s famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” in a scene that provokes not only laughter, but admiration for Doran’s ability to craft a scene with such delicious theatricality and such moving sensitivity.

No prefabricated, falsely cataclysmic pathways open for these characters. Instead, Doran observes them making ambivalent but sustaining and transforming choices that change them by accretion, over time. On a very simple set that uses moveable pieces to frame the action, the most salient décor is the clocks that actors place on the walls, not to tell the time, but to remind us that time is the element in which we act. Time passes, as it does in Kin, in ways that we’re surprised to mark, in ways that bring us closer together and draw us apart less by agency than by the simple accumulation of hours, days, and years.

As Kin progresses (in under two hours with no intermission), Anna gets her PhD, writes a book, and gets tenure, but none of these events are as determining as what she learns about herself in relationship to the others. That self-knowledge isn’t delivered in big scenes with long, self-explanatory monologues, but in the way Doran and Gold establish the simple on-going project of her life. The play’s events are crafted through the characters’ commitment to one another, despite the essential, hovering doubt that infuses their interactions, much like the mist that obscures Sean and Anna’s wedding on the cliffs in Ireland at the play’s end.

For example, schooled by more conventional realism, we expect that Linda will undergo some profound catharsis that will exorcise the trauma of her rape. She finally does move outside to sit on the stoop of her house with Anna, and in the end, walks to the very cliffs where the rape took place to attend her son’s wedding.

But when Linda finally ends her self-imprisonment, Doran doesn’t herald the moment as a blaring triumph. The playwright presents it instead as an understated, simple movement forward. Linda’s liberation comes from the Xanax Anna supplies, and from the supportive arm Adam offers when it comes time to attend to the wedding ceremony. Doran suggests that great emotional revelations aren’t as important as the simple ways in which we help one another get through—with a pill or an arm that makes unexpected progress possible.

That the story culminates in a (heterosexual) marriage should make it seem conservative, but instead, the event seems less about the couple and more about the fragile but committed community that surrounds them. All the principals gather upstage, in a terrifically executed rainfall and cold mist that billows out into the first rows of the audience. As rain drenches the dearly beloved, Helena officiates, shouting against the weather that she’s not present in a religious capacity, but as a witness.

Linda stands beside Adam, revisiting for the first time the site of her own rape to observe her son’s marriage. Despite how momentous her presence is, Doran doesn’t focus the scene on Linda. But her attendance at the wedding underlines that change is fundamentally possible, that we can return to the scene of a crime and revise what that place means, that we can stand in it differently and reorient ourselves to our pasts and our futures.

Sean and Anna’s wedding isn’t inevitable in Kin. Both characters wonder if they should leave the relationship. Sean visits Rachel to see if the emotions he imagines still exist, and finds her already married, sober, and rather empty, unable to recall any of what must have been their old feeling.Anna confides in Helena that she feels alone even when she’s beside Sean, and thinks about leaving him.

Yet they do marry, not because they’re settling for less, but because Kin suggests that though doubt is a fundamental condition of our lives, it doesn’t prevent us from living. All the characters endure some sort of emotional damage that complicates their responses and relationships, but in Doran’s hands, their baggage isn’t predictive or fundamental, but only emotions that they carry along and move through, as time passes.

Kin is structured around two- or three-character exchanges until the very end, when the assembled community gathers for the wedding. The intimate style of those small scenes demonstrates Doran’s facility with language, her ear for how people talk to one another, garnished with a poet’s sense of how the content of what we say draws on a well of feeling that’s often expressed indirectly, metaphorically.

Gold directed Circle Mirror Transformation and Aliens, both written by Annie Baker, whose plays resemble Doran’s in their attention to tiny human interactions and the threads of relationships that make up lives and emotional communities. He directs Kin with a strong but simple visual style and deep emotional understanding. This is an actor’s play, which Gold and designers Paul Steinberg (set) and Jane Cox (lights) frame gracefully to highlight the characters’ connections.

Occasionally, when a scene ends, the actors who just performed remain on the set in a half-light to watch the next scene. Doran and Gold offer these moments of silent witnessing, of characters (or actors) just being there for one another, watching their lives unfold across time, perhaps to illustrate the wordless support we bring to our relationships just by staying connected.

Gold’s exquisite direction trusts the ensemble of talented actors to convey the script’s nuances. The set, which the actors move into its various configurations, shows us as if through a picture frame how we capture, if not memorialize, moments in our lives. The set’s predominating clocks seem to underline our passage onward and our sometimes perplexing faith that simply moving through time and space will lead us somewhere, however unexpected, however surprising.

Life, Kin tells us, is never perfect, but can be very good. After their wedding, Sean unexpectedly exclaims to Anna, “I hope we don’t die,” and she says, gently, “We won’t, not for a very long time.”The simple exchange crystalizes our continual surprise at the preciousness and fragility of our lives.The play ends on a note of hope, with a warm faith that by extending our kinship, we sustain ourselves.

The Feminist Spectator

Kin, by Bathsheba Doran, directed by Sam Gold, Playwrights Horizons, March 18, 2011.

Fen

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Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play, Fen, represents the British feminist playwright at her best, even though the play is rarely produced. In this revival at London’s Finborough Theatre, director Ria Parry (Iron Shoes Productions) and a top-notch cast offer a thrilling reminder of Churchill’s theatricality and her incisive Marxist/feminist analysis of the politics of gender, sexuality, and class.

Like many of Churchill’s earlier plays, Fen addresses the interactions among a community of people, rather than singling out one or two individuals for dramatic treatment. Here, Val, one of the women who work in the potato fields, stands out from the rest, but only as the catalyst for the story’s investigation of the social constraints dictated by the economics of labor. At the play’s beginning, Val decides to walk away from her job, to the surprise of her co-workers and their boss, a woman nominally more powerful than the field-hands, who stands on a low bridge above them, watching them work.

Played by Katharine Burford—the only cast member who doesn’t perform multiple roles—Val is a bit of a dreamer, convinced that her love for Frank (Alex Beckett) is more important than anything else in her life, including her job and her two young children. Val is the play’s most determined idealist; she establishes one pole of ambition against which the other women and Frank are measured. Val’s hopeful investment in the power of love doesn’t release her from her straitened circumstances. In fact, by the play’s end, her only way out of a deadening life is to beg Frank to kill her. Val’s trajectory represents Churchill’s bleak view of the options for those without economic agency.

In the small Finborough Theatre, which seats perhaps 50 spectators on two banks of facing risers across a small, narrow playing area, director Parry creates a rather environmental production. The two sides of the theatre are connected by a low bridge that spectators on the far side use to reach their seats, and that actors use to represent the play’s ever-changing locales.

The rectangular central playing area, which extends from one wall to the other, is covered in rich, dark dirt, which represents the fens, the potato fields where the community labors. Even when scenes move to various characters’ homes or other social settings, the dirt remains, a palpable reminder that these people are always mired in the manual labor that provides their only livelihood.

To establish the stultifying, physically challenging effort of potato farming, Churchill sets the first scene in the field, where the workers bend over metal buckets, pulling potatoes from the earth, wiping dirt off their skins, and dumping buckets of them into bins. The workers murmur among themselves while the forewoman watches from above, until Val, her face open and alive, declares that she’s leaving. None of the other workers know where Val intends to go, but they respond with a grim understanding that she’ll no doubt be back.

In fact, when Val presents herself and her two young girls, suitcases in hand, to Frank, and begs him to go to London with them, he instead persuades her to stay. He doesn’t know what he’d do in London, and although she seems game for a romantic adventure, willing to move into an unknown world to free herself, Frank is differently stuck in the local and thwarts what turns out to be her last chance to escape.

He suggests they live together, which requires Val to leave her children with her ex-husband (who’s never seen) and her mother, Mavis (Rosie Thomson, who’s excellent in each of the four roles she cycles among). The girls are just old enough to resent Val’s absence; they punish her emotionally when she tries to visit them. Val’s choice to give up her children’s love to gain Frank’s demonstrates Churchill’s unsentimental view of motherhood, which is still refreshing, given other playwrights’ tendency to valorize women with children.

Family relationships in Fen never provide a haven for this community. The play tells parallel stories of a group of women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who work in the fields, and a group of young girls, perhaps eight, ten, and twelve, who are still growing up. One of the girls, Becky (Elicia Daly), has been left in the care of her cruel stepmother, Angela (Nicola Harrison). Angela taunts Becky with brutal antipathy and begins to beat and abuse her physically, finally putting out her cigarettes on Becky’s arms. Their relationship signals a kind of horizontal violence among people in such desperate straits.

In one of her few moments of contrition, Angela asks Becky how she can continue to love her, since Becky tolerates Angela’s abuse with a peculiar yet moving, quiet generosity. Angela explains that she hurts Becky so that she can reassure herself that she’s alive at all. Brutality becomes Angela’s only agency; without being cruel to Becky, and seeing the marks she leaves on her skin, Angela has no evidence that she exists.

Churchill interweaves public and private spheres in Fen, so that the women’s domestic worlds are always formed in relation to their field work. Across the set from the low bridge, a dirty, worn kitchen unit stands against the wall. An ancient sink, with cabinets above and below it, and an old ironing board nearby, frame the women’s domestic labor as clearly as the tin potato buckets on the fen ground their contributions to capitalism. These spheres aren’t separate, Churchill suggests, but thoroughly interpolate their subjects in both.

The play’s first monologue, for example, is delivered by a Japanese businessman (also played by Thomson), who describes the genealogy of ownership in which the land is entwined. This global investor, with a camera slung around his neck, can only see the fens through the dividends they accrue. The local landlord, Mr. Tewson (Beckett, playing both Frank and Frank’s boss), on the other hand, is caught in an economic bind, trying to make ends meet by negotiating a sale with a middle-person sent to buy out Mr. Tewson’s share.

In these scenes and the others in Fen, the cross-casting illustrates that none of these characters are villains and none heroes. In Frank’s first monologue, he practices a speech in which he intends to ask Mr. Tewson for a raise. When Beckett later plays Mr. Tewson, Churchill clarifies that the man Frank thinks has so much power actually has very little in the scheme of the corporate, global capitalism that’s squeezing him out. Churchill doesn’t lay individual blame, but constructs a social constellation in which each character is interdependent with the others, even if their access to power and wealth differently marks their experience.

Gender, too, is determining in Fen. In one of the production’s most effective scenes, the young girls make up a song and dance to a disco tune—the music of the 80s poignantly punctuates the production—that describes what they want to be when they grow up. They dance and laugh to their music, singing that they want to be nurses or hairdressers. But because these pre-teen girls are played by the same actors who perform the middle-aged women characters, it’s obvious that their fates are pre-determined. Like their mothers, aunts, or neighbors, they’ll work the fields, gathering potatoes and onions just like everyone else, and will never achieve their dreams of other, more glamorous-seeming occupations.

The dirt on which the whole story plays out is a constant reminder of the characters’ gritty lives.And because it pulls the production away from realism, the dirt, like the other singular, totemic objects brought out to help the story signify its themes, becomes itself a kind of currency. Most of the characters wear tall rubber boots necessary for mucking about in the often wet fields. Those boots remain constant, underneath other changes of clothing accessories that help the actors signal their various characters.

Every implement they use—a rake, dragged across the brown dirt; a dart board, at which the characters play in a rare moment of dingy leisure; a basket of laundry—has a place on stage, hanging from a hook or revealed inside a cupboard, waiting. The scene design evokes the furthest thing from plentitude; there’s no outside in which a wealth of other things might be gathered. Every object that exists is to hand; there’s no more. Everything on stage, then—whether prop or gesture, word or image—becomes a Brechtian gestus, emblematic of a set of social relations forcefully captured. Nothing is wasted. The acting and direction mirror the economy of means that the characters require to survive lives of blistering emotional and physical scarcity.

The six actors perform beautifully, capturing the feminist Brechtian acting style that Churchill’s plays demand to be effective. They don’t play the characters’ psychology, since Churchill doesn’t fill in individual backstories to excuse or even explain their behavior. But the actors make clear performance choices that center each character in the action of the scene, whether they’re gathering potatoes, making up dances, caring for a baby, or ironing a shirt. The actors flesh out the characters without writing them into a personal narrative. The story they collectively tell is an intensely shared, social story about people whose every move is dictated by economic necessity rather than personal desire, dreams, or choice.

And yet, Fen is wrenching because even in the midst of such lack, the characters do dream. Val isn’t the only woman with desires; they’re all simply at different stages of reconciling to the fact that they’ll never be fulfilled. After Val, finally hopeless, asks Frank to kill her and he complies, the play ends with Val’s mother, Mavis, left with the children. In earlier scenes, the girls have asked their grandmother to sing to them, as Val did, but Mavis can’t seem to produce a note. At the play’s end, we learn that Mavis can’t sing because she wanted nothing more than to be a singer. In Churchill’s final, ambivalent and ambiguous imagining, Mavis stands alone on the bridge, her face lit with hope, lip-syncing to a beautiful melody. She’s singing, but not really, moving her mouth, just as she moves her hands, in the service of someone else’s production.

Ultimately, no escape is possible from lives that offer few options. One of the characters describes how people take out their rage on animals, which, sadly, calms them down—they have nothing else to do with their feelings. Val dies because she can’t see any way out of her predicament, but it’s more a function of the play’s sense of over-riding destiny than it is her own psychological dictates that determine her choice. Love isn’t escape; the best Frank’s love can do for Val is to direct the ax he finally uses to kill her.

Yet in such a bleak landscape, this production of Fen ends as oddly hopeful. The intimacy of the ensemble’s acting; the subtlety and sureness of the direction; the tactile, evocative set design; the haunting soundscape; all these choices create a theatrical experience that’s alienated in the positive, politically inflected, Brechtian sense of the word. They also paint a rich world with very specific brush strokes and a grounded, humane perspective on the wages of economic determinism in a social scheme where laborers toil hopelessly.

Fen deserves to be revived often, as it continues to resonate across the global social landscape.

The Feminist Spectator

Fen, Finborough Theatre, London, March 13, 2011.

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The Children’s Hour

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When I heard that Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss would star in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s classic realist play The Children’s Hour in London this spring, my first thought was, “Why now?” The play, written in 1934, remains one of Hellman’s most famous. Based on a true story about two headmistresses in Scotland in 1810, the play addresses the consequences of a lie spread by a difficult child at a school for girls run by long-time friends Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. The child, Mary Tilford, takes advantage of an incendiary accusation made by Martha’s dotty aunt, Lily Mortar, to spread a rumor that Karen and Martha are lovers. Although her story isn’t true, Mary’s powerful grandmother believes her and ruins the school she once helped champion.

Karen and Martha take Mrs. Tilford to court, but lose their slander case. Karen’s planned marriage to the loyal Dr. Joe Cardin is threatened. As the two women sit in their empty school, contemplating their now-ruined lives, Martha confesses that the lie was true, that she did indeed love Karen “the way they said.” Karen protests but Martha insists, and goes off to kill herself so that her friend will be free to continue her life.

Obviously, this isn’t a happy story for lesbians. It represents the time-honored tradition of realist plays in which lesbians have no choice but to kill themselves at the end (or die otherwise tragic deaths from inoperable cancer or other deadly means). When Hellman directed a Broadway revival in 1952, after her own black-listing by HUAC, she said that at that point in history, the play wasn’t “about” lesbians, but was rather about “a lie.” But The Children’s Hour has always been discussed as one of the first American plays with lesbian content.

The story is nothing but anachronistic, however, in an historical moment when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has finally been repealed in the U.S., and when President Obama has decided no longer to prosecute under the Defense of Marriage Act same-sex couples who want to marry. In the U.K., same-sex partners have long been allowed to marry, and they enjoy more legal rights than their counterparts in the States. So why, then, revive this play? Why now, in spring 2011, except as a vehicle for two women stars known primarily for their roles in film and television (Knightley most recently inNever Let Me Go and most famously in Atonement, and Moss for her performance as the stalwart, pre-feminist ad-woman Peggy Olsen on TV’s Mad Men)?

Director Ian Rickson answers that question in his London production by underlining the damage done in the play by those the program calls “the morally, or politically, or religiously self-righteous [who] stand in judgment and brook no doubt about the rightness of their world view.” I believe that Rickson has subtly altered the script, too, so that Karen appears unsurprised by Martha’s confession of her love, and so that Martha’s self-revulsion is down-played instead of highlighted as the rationale for her death.

Rickson’s deft direction moves the play along quickly and creates an appropriate hot-house atmosphere of sex and desire among the young girl students. Knightley’s and Moss’s performances bring a distinctly resistant strength to roles sometimes played as abject. As a result, The Children’s Hour winds up being a terrific, compelling, and even relevant production.

The wonderful setting—designed by Mark Thompson, with lighting by Neil Austin and sound by Paul Groothuis—signals that this revival sees the play as more than a domestic drama. The small stage of the West End’s Comedy Theatre is further narrowed with a high box set, painted in roughened gray wood that suggests the Dobie-Wright School for Girls’ farmhouse beginnings. A huge high door looms upstage, just right of center, through which all the significant entrances and exits occur, and at which Mary’s two young roommates are found listening during Martha’s fateful quarrel with her aunt.

To stage left of the door, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, filled with volumes in the first scene, empty in the last, takes the visual temperature of the play, as Karen and Martha’s lives change from busy, over-filled happiness to devastated emptiness. The scene shifts to Mrs. Tilford’s mansion maintain the large door, but fill the bookcase with the precious knick-knacks of those wealthy enough to afford useless pretty things. Columns descend from the flies to mark the stately remoteness of the home to which Mary so wants to return from school that she makes up her lie to keep herself free. The set’s overwhelming height and magnitude emblematizes the pressure of social strictures bearing down on both the school and on Mrs. Tilford’s home.

Rickson covers the several scene changes and the play’s opening with wordless moments of interaction among the characters that help pinpoint Hellman’s rich subtext. At the opening, Mary appears, alone on stage, reading from a book that’s clearly meant for adults. She finds a place to hide herself by the wood-burning stove, and proceeds to swoon from what she’s reading. When her classmates arrive, the book becomes a much-coveted source of attention. That the book is about sex is clear from how titillated the girls act, and their glee in reading its pages over one another’s shoulders.

Rickson directs the eleven-odd young women playing the girls to act like a pack of puppies. They crowd together on the set’s lone sofa, roll over one another to get closer to the book, fall onto the floor, and huddle together, always moving, bumping up against one another, getting in each other’s faces with laughter, and whispering scandalized secrets in one another’s ears. Their behavior establishes the play’s over-ripe atmosphere of teenaged sexuality and longing, and the fine line between pleasure and danger that makes the school a powder keg of emotion waiting to explode.

Mary (Bryony Hannah) serves as the instigator, the alpha girl around whom the others circle, trying to accrue some of her power and access. Mary’s manipulations range from subtle to overtly cruel, as she cajoles or bends the other girls to her will. In the written play, Mary’s evil appears crafty and nuanced; through Hellman’s command of the realist form’s subtext, the audience gradually comes to see how Mary constructs her story to free herself and sully her teacher’s names, all because they don’t condone her bad behavior and won’t believe her lies, treating her exactly as they do the other girls, despite her wealthy grandmother’s influence.

In Hannah’s performance, however, Mary is a whirling dervish of malevolence whose machinations are obvious from the start. Hannah plays the girl with broadly physical mannerisms, almost like a cartoon figure of a whiny, pouting, willful young thing determined to get her way. She stamps the ground, flings out her arms, screws up her face, and throws herself across furniture in dramatic displays of Mary’s displeasure, raising her voice more often to shout her demands than to issue quiet, needling imperatives.

Critics apparently split over Hannah’s performance. Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, called it one of the worst examples of over-acting he’s ever seen on stage. But several London critics believe that Hannah stole the show from her more famous acting partners. I found her performance distracting. Although her strong bearing and gestures gave her an interesting, boyish appeal, her general gestalt put her in a different universe than the other actors, and struck tonally false notes in an otherwise coherent and cohesive production.

Where the other actors seemed to be genuinely listening and reacting to one another, Hannah seemed to be playing Charades, signaling to her stage partners in the broadest possible terms what she meant them to guess about her intentions. The one-note performance became exhausting to watch; Hannah started so high, she had nowhere to take the character as the play progressed. Since Mary’s important subtext was broadcast in Hannah’s overt telegraphing of her intentions, the production lost some of its enigmatic quality.

But Mary’s hateful leadership also created contemporary resonances, since she’s a prototypical bully who tells lies to absolve herself of her own responsibility. The pack mentality of a school for girls is palpable in Rickson’s production. Rosalee, the one student who knows Mary is lying about seeing Karen and Martha kissing and is willing to say so, is brought into line when Mary threatens to reveal that Rosalee stole a bracelet from another girl. Mary’s awful power over the others is physical, emotional, and psychological, and Rosalee, especially, drowns in its wake along with Karen and Martha.

In a deft choice, Rickson stages Karen and Martha’s relationship to mirror those of their young charges. At their first entrance, Karen (Knightley) and Martha (Moss) are physically intimate, sharing their morning coffee and cigarette by passing the cup and the smoke back and forth between them as they prepare for their day. Their establishing business makes them in fact seem like a couple, with all the comfort and familiarity of a long friendship.

Throughout the play, Knightley and Moss show their solidarity by touching one another casually, in passing. Those gestures of support and warmth work to make Martha seem more secure in herself, marking her friendship with Karen as less “sick” than simply long-standing and comfortable. These are women who know one another well, who’ve worked together closely for eight years after graduating from college to build their now-successful school. Their physical casualness might mark them as women of 2011 more than 1934, when the play is set, but it makes good sense, given their history.

Carol Kane, as Lily Mortar, Martha’s querulous aunt, presents a dashing figure as the faded stage actor who tutors the students in elocution, even as she instills in her girls foolish notions of heterosexual romance by having them read Antony and Cleopatraaloud to one another. When her niece insists it’s time for Mrs. Mortar to leave their house and employ, Kane conveys the insulted Mortar’s narcissistic excess and her destructive prattling about Martha’s “unnatural” feelings for Karen.

Mortar’s insinuations, overheard by Mary’s roommates, seed the lie that Mary waters to fruition. Mortar’s unwillingness to return from her stage tour to tell the truth at their trial seals Martha and Karen’s fate. When the two women confront her toward the play’s end, Mortar insists she had a “moral obligation” to the theatre, and would never have considered returning to address what she calls the “unpleasant notoriety” of Martha and Karen’s hearing. Kane’s performance is so theatrical, you actually can believe that she’d put her paltry and ridiculous touring job ahead of her niece’s well-being. Mrs. Mortar’s self-concern underlines that those who refuse to stand against falsehoods are as responsible for their corruption as those who perpetrate them.

Likewise, Ellen Burstyn’s performance as the righteous Mrs. Tilford demonstrates both the hubris of those who think they know what’s right and true and the devastating downfall of those who can’t buy their way back into blamelessness. When Karen and Martha rush to Mrs. Tilford’s home to challenge her in person, the elderly woman relies on a textbook homophobic response, despite her earlier support for the Dobie-Wright School. Burstyn is perfect in this scene, brushing aside their remonstrations with “I don’t want to hear about it” and “What you do is your business, but when children are involved . . .,” mouthing to the letter the narrow-minded moralism of those of who think their own values rightfully prevail.

Burstyn also lets spectators see how Mary works on Mrs. Tilford, finally exhausting her into believing her story. When her Mary’s lie is finally exposed, the contrite Mrs. Tilford comes back to the school to try to buy Karen’s forgiveness, but Karen scoffs at her offer of help. Burstyn plays the woman’s regret and shame as a physical symptom, bending forward over a chair in the now dilapidated school’s sitting room, as though she’s made ill by the consequences of what she’s done.

In The Children’s Hour’s second act, in particular, some of the dialogue sounded different than the play I remember, making me wonder if the production team had rewritten parts of the text. In Karen’s final scene with her fiancé, Joe, for example, she intimates that she knew Martha loved her, even perhaps suggesting that she loved her “that way,” too, and admitting that within every lie there’s always a shadow of truth. She forces Joe to ask the question that hangs between them, after he slips and insists that it doesn’t matter “what you’ve done.”

In their rearranged lives, Karen notes bitterly that every word has a new meaning; she’s an English teacher who’s been forced to realize how easily language can betray. Tobias Menzies, as Joe, plays the moment sad and ashamed, but he does indeed ask Karen if the accusation is true. She realizes that the poison of not finally knowing for sure that he believes her will always haunt their relationship and insists that he leave.

Joe says he doesn’t want to, but in a subtle bit of smart blocking, Menzies moves toward the door as he speaks, letting his body betray the loyalty he’s trying to perform. He agrees to Karen’s insistence on a trial separation, but she knows (and we know) that he won’t be back. In fact, one of the lines cut from this production is Mrs. Tilford’s hope, expressed very close to the play’s end in the original, that Karen will reconcile with Joe, to which she answers woefully, “Perhaps.” In Rickson’s production, the heterosexual contract is permanently sundered.

Martha’s destiny, sadly, can’t be changed. But in Moss’s performance, the way she arrives at her suicide gets a very different, much more powerful interpretation. As Karen and Martha sit together in their destroyed school, a week or two after the trial at which they lost their case against Mrs. Tilford, Moss plays Martha’s outlook with an ironic humor that makes her seem a tough survivor. She and Karen decide they should go for a walk, and that those who would look at them disapprovingly be damned. But Karen can’t leave the house. Martha is willing to face the world but Karen can’t find the strength.

When Martha opens the imposing school door to urge her friend to go out with her, their matching camel-colored coats hang side by side on hooks in the hall. The image is as redolent of their mutual affection and interconnectedness as the two male lovers’ shirts hung on the same hanger in one of the final images of Brokeback Mountain.

When Mrs. Mortar comes sidling back into their lives after her theatre tour, obviously broke and looking for shelter, Moss plays Martha’s rage with wonderful verve. Martha knows that her aunt set their destruction in motion with her insinuating suggestions. In response to the foolish woman’s sniveling demand that Martha care for her, Moss throws Mortar’s things out the large door, shouting, “I’ve always hated you.” The moment shows Martha capable of commanding huge emotions and remaining strong and intact.

But once Joe leaves, Martha can’t bear the responsibility for Karen’s unhappiness. She crosses to her friend to take her hand, and kneels in front of her to confess, “I’ve loved you the way they said.” When Karen moves away from her, Martha rises, and in her final speech, Hellman’s language (adapted or not) rings with contemporary resonance. Martha admits that she couldn’t call her feelings by a name, that it wasn’t until a stupid girl spread a silly rumor that she was able to finally see what she didn’t realize was in her all along.

But even though she says she feels “sick and dirty,” Moss won’t let Martha sink into abjection. She performs the woman’s anger, which becomes a kind of cri de coeuragainst a world that refuses to make a place for her love. She plays not Martha’s shame, but her fury at how she’s been forced to know herself, which dooms her to understand her desire and end her life at the very same time.

Martha moves to embrace Karen, but her friend shies away; you can see Moss realize that she’s lost her forever, and that without Karen, Martha’s life has no point. Moss’s face clears with resolve; she smiles; she straightens her back; and she exits, saying, “Good night, darling,” to Karen as she goes. A moment later, a gunshot echoes and we hear Martha’s body fall.

In the last scene of the play, Mrs. Mortar rushes in to see her niece’s dead body, declaring suicide a sin and continuing to moralize against her even in death. Mrs. Tilford forces her way into the house to tell Karen that she knows Mary’s story was a lie, too late to save Martha or the school. Karen responds with anger, refusing the money Mrs. Tilford offers to make things right, determined not to allow the older woman to ever be able to sleep with a clear conscience ever again.

Karen throws both women out of her home, pulls the sheet from the room’s window, and throws open the sash, breathing deeply of something that feels like freedom. The lights brighten on the image before they fade, and Knightley stands nearly defiant, cracking open the box of social moralism in which Karen has been confined for too long. This final moment provides an affecting image. Like so many others in Rickson’s production, it gives the old play new resonance and meaning, working against its more conservative ideological bent.

I’m still surprised by how moving I found the production. By empowering Martha at the end, and letting Moss play against the character’s shame, Rickson and his actors suggest that there really wasn’t any shame in Martha’s love for Karen. In her last speech, expressing her feelings seems like a gift for Martha; she directs her anger and judgment not at herself, but at a world that has no frame of reference for her love.

Of course, the play works against a happy ending, and it’s a stretch to find something progressive about it. But in addition to the new spin it puts on the play’s take on sexuality, the production also resonated as an argument against a poisonous atmosphere of general moralizing. Rickson and his cast clearly and powerfully indict the very circumstances the play narrates: The corruption of the elite, who create their own systems of meaning to damn and demean, at their whim, those with less access to power, who deserve so much more.

The Feminist Spectator

The Children’s Hour, Comedy Theatre, London, March 12, 2011.

Link to original post on Blogspot. 

The Heidi Chronicles at Princeton

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Wendy Wasserstein’s 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning play has become a history piece, representing her view of the progress of American feminism from its beginnings in the late 60s to its solidification and—by her lights—waning in the mid- to late-1980s. Seeing the play through a 2010 vantage point makes me feel more generous toward Wasserstein than I did when I saw the 1989 Broadway production, which enraged me with what I considered its dismissal not only of feminist accomplishments but of any kind of vital feminist future.

The Princeton Summer Theater production of The Heidi Chronicles, directed by R.N. Sandberg and ably performed by a company of mostly graduated Princeton seniors, does an excellent job of tracking the play’s contemporary relevance. The set’s stenciled outlines of dates and places keeps the spectator abreast of the passing of time and social mores, from the 1962 high school dance at which Heidi meets Peter, who eventually becomes her best (gay) male friend, to the 1989 New York loft where Heidi ends her journey with her adopted Panamanian baby. In this production, smart acting and complex characterizations keep Heidi’s choices relevant, perhaps especially for young women embarking on their own journeys, replete with complications similar to those Wasserstein’s heroine faces.

Rebecca Foresman plays Heidi Holland as first and foremost a smart, even opinionated woman, who clearly thinks about each choice she makes throughout the play. More often, Heidi is played as a cipher, a woman buffeted by history instead of choosing her way through it. Director Sandberg and Foresman instead put Heidi in the center of the play’s action. For instance, in the first act’s Ann Arbor consciousness-raising scene, in which Heidi is typically placed—awkward, uncomfortable, and wary—outside the earnest circle of women, this production puts Heidi among the others, watching with insight and intelligence. When she finally resolves to share her own experience, Foresman makes that choice with force and conviction, presenting Heidi as a clear and willing participant in shaping feminist understandings of women’s lives.

That the scene still caricatures 1970s CR groups indicates the tight construction of Wasserstein’s text. But the Princeton actors—including Veronica Siverd as a much warmer and fuzzier lesbian physicist Fran, Olivia Stoker as a very thoughtful and less bubble-headed Becky, Heather Mays as the ever-embracing hopeful housewife Jill, and Dominique Salerno as the mercurial, shape-shifting Susan—push against its stereotypes to make the scene a moving statement of feminist solidarity, something still rarely seen on American stages.

In fact, feminist energy, warmth, and companionship thread through this production, and take the sting out of Heidi’s Miss Crane’s school speech in the second act, which seems to blame other women for leaving her feeling stranded. Even in the baby shower scene, in which all the women but Heidi and Susan seem on their way to pregnancies, the women end their moment together on the downstage apron in a way that mirrors the solidarity of the 1970s CR meeting.

I was struck, in this production, that the play can offer these affirming representations of women supporting one another through history. Watching Siverd, Mays, and Stoker play multiple women characters underlined that history might change around them, and their stories might change along with the choices they make, but the women’s very presence and connection to one another stays constant and somehow true. Their multiple-casting (and Daniel Rattner’s nice turn as various subsidiary men) grounds Heidi’s picaresque tale.

Salerno’s portrayal of Susan makes the solidarity coloring each of the play’s vignettes especially poignant. Susan is Heidi’s foil, the modern feminist who changes with the times, adopting each passing trend with verve and energy but never with continuing commitment. Susan transforms herself from an eager and aggressive heterosexual, rolling up her skirt at the school dance to seduce the guy who can twist and smoke at the same time, to the feminist shepherdess on an all-women’s dude ranch in Montana, to an MBA-bearing Hollywood television producer who creates a show about three women in a loft in Houston that becomes wildly popular.

That Susan finally declares she’s “not political anymore,” and that she doesn’t care how many people she’s been still makes me wince. But despite Susan’s opportunistic embrace of the zeitgeist, Salerno plays her as genuinely warm and always, in her way, supportive of her BFF Heidi. Salerno as Susan puts her arms around Heidi’s shoulders, touching her and other characters with honest physical warmth that takes the sting out of what Wasserstein writes as Susan’s ambitious excess. This is the first production I’ve seen in which Susan is likeable, and in which her choices make real sense.

Susan is the play’s alpha female. Stoker plays the younger Denise with casual bite; her tossed off “I did women’s studies at Brown” comment in the baby shower scene indicates the entrenchment and de-fanging of feminism in the academy and introduces the social presumptions of third wave feminism. In this production, Heidi is the one who “keeps the faith” (the slogan proudly announced up-center, in the middle of the set, throughout the production). Heidi’s feminist humanism grounds her and her choices; as played by Foresman, she actually seems like a smart, thoughtful woman with staunch beliefs.

Foresman gives her an innate and persistent intelligence that renders her a worthy guide through her own life’s story. For example, I’ve never seen a production of the Chronicles in which Heidi is convincing as an art historian. Here, the feminist art history lectures that begin each act are actually interesting and informative in Foresman’s authoritative delivery, and establish Heidi as a professor and scholar with something to say about art, rather than a woman who apologizes for and undercuts her own intellect. Of course, that very intelligence makes her bitter Miss Crane’s school speech a bit unbelievable; how could a woman as smart and accomplished as Heidi truly measure herself as “worthless” against women in the locker room at her gym who she describes as striving and frankly silly?

Still, Foreman’s layered and nuanced portrayal made me want to continue following Heidi’s journey, and made the second act’s scenes more complicated and compelling. Heidi’s anger at how Peter (Tyler Weaks) and the redoubtable Scoop (Shawn Fennell) talk over her in the “Hello, New York” television segment is palpable. Her position between the two men is sharply drawn in this production. Fennell plays Scoop as wily but charismatic, a man who recognizes Heidi’s potential and knows he can’t live with a woman as competent as himself. Weaks plays Peter as less campy and sarcastic than actors sometimes portray him, giving him a soft, sweet aspect that complements well with Foresman’s sharp, professional focus.

In one of the play’s most objectionable scenes, Heidi visits Peter’s pediatric unit at the hospital to donate a box of books and albums and to tell him she’s leaving New York to teach in Minnesota. Typically, Peter’s fury at her departure trumps Heidi’s choice to pursue her career. In this production, I was still irritated that Wasserstein ennobles gay men’s struggle with HIV/AIDS over women’s fight for equality—why should they be rendered competing activist movements? But in Foresman’s portrayal, Heidi doesn’t apologize for her choices, even though she decides to stay. The scene paints Peter and Heidi as one another’s relations, underlining that it’s possible to create kinship systems outside of the nuclear family, heterosexual norm.

Heidi’s final encounter with Scoop—the voluble Jewish magazine editor she loves with deep ambivalence and finally, a healthy, wry distance—isn’t wistful in this production. Foresman and Sandberg clarify that Heidi likes the choice she’s made to favor her work; her adopted baby textures, rather than centers, her life. The production’s final image shows Heidi sitting in a rocking chair, literally balancing her baby and her book manuscript in her lap, holding her pen in her mouth as she rocks the child and reads her galleys. This picture of a feminist life as a happy balancing act tempers what too often becomes a romantic concluding image of a woman finally fulfilled by adopting a child.

Watching this production of The Heidi Chronicles, I was reminded how few popular mainstream plays exist about feminism. Even so, I wondered, as I watched, whether Heidi is a play about feminism, a feminist play, or a play that tells the story of a generation through one woman’s experience. Regardless, I’m delighted that the Princeton Summer Theater gives us the opportunity to think along with this smart, fun production, even as we enjoy Wasserstein’s sharply funny portrait of the woman she creates as our beguiling guide through our recent, collective past.

The Feminist Spectator