One by one, they take the stage and talk about families, jobs, dating, marriage and kids-pedestrian topics of theater now and forever. They also talk about menstruation, birth control, mother-daughter complexes and the communal nightmares of dealing with men.
Quirky, jittery Jane Blass recalls when life first inspired her to adopt a self-imposed persona as a “Cool Girl.”
“I can trace it all back to my very first boyfriend, Woody Kennon, and that first kiss backstage during a performance of `The Sound of Music.’ My father, the local community theater leading man, was on stage singing (the lyric) `An ordinary couple. . . .’ Woody and I were backstage being one.”
Clare Nolan-Long begins with “I am a happily married mom of a small, smart, blond 3 1/2-year-old named Charlotte. I’m sort of part working mom and part stay-at-home mom, and mostly, I like that quite a bit. There are times, though, that my mixing of these two worlds has caused some . . . ah. . . mental delicacy.”
Or onetime Second City funnywoman Rose Abdoo, quoting feminist author Naomi Wolf: ” `Women are trained to see themselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women.’ Because that’s what they are-cheap imitations. TV and magazines are fake, man! We’re the real thing!”
As the title of their ongoing late-night Monday program at Cafe Voltaire suggests, the eight author-monologuists in “I’m Sweating Under My Breasts” are all women.
A woman-authored show is nothing new. “I’m Getting My Act Together,” “A . . . My Name Is Alice,” “The Secret Garden” and “The Heidi Chronicles” leap to mind for starters. What’s different is the current buzz in the air that such fare is finally becoming, if not exactly dominant, at least commonplace. Women are writing for the theater regularly now. There’s still a long way to go, but they have made great progress in gaining recognition.
Or have they? Theatre Magazine, the scholarly industry monthly published by the Theatre Communications Group, recently posed this provocative question on its cover: “Why don’t we see more plays by African-American women?”
Why indeed? Why, for that matter, don’t we see more plays by women, period?
The answer, in part, is organizational. Artistic directors remain mostly male in the Chicago area and elsewhere. Directors, more often than not, are male, too. That may or may not affect their play selection-they may not know for sure themselves. But the reality is that women are still struggling on just about every level of theater. There’s only one play by a woman on Broadway at the moment. Women are emerging here, more and more, although they often have to band together-like the company in “Sweating Under My Breasts”-and produce their own work to get an airing.
There’s also a widespread feeling on the part of women writers that their work will be labeled “women’s work” and that male work is more automatically assumed to have broader appeal. In terms of production, acclaim and commercial success, this sets up a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy-women are likely to get one token slot in a season, never a whole season in not-for-profit programming. For the most part, male artistic directors and producers assign work to male directors, all judged, primarily, by male critics. The cycle, though crippled by ongoing successes by women, isn’t yet broken.
“I’m glad to hear works by women are hitting fever pitch in Chicago,” says a skeptical Marsha Norman, one of only a handful of American women so far to cop the Pulitzer Prize for drama (for ” ‘night, Mother”). “It’s still very difficult to get work produced on Broadway or elsewhere in the country. Wendy (Wasserstein) and I have worked real hard to keep our names on Broadway, but if it’s not one of us, Broadway is still an iffy proposition.”
Indeed, ask anyone about women playwrights, and they’re likely to note how many more, like Norman, have been winning the Pulitzer Prizes in recent years. But their representation there remains quite paltry. While Norman, Wasserstein (“Heidi Chronicles”) and Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”) won in the ’80s, no women won in the ’60s or ’70s, and before that, only six women won over the course of four decades, including a collaborator (Frances Goodrich) of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Ketti Frings for adapting a novel by a man (“Look Homeward, Angel”).
So far, no woman has won in the ’90s, and not one black woman ever has won a Pulitzer for drama.
Women playwrights seem to be neither all-out outcasts nor comfy arrivistes-they’re somewhere in between. Works by women are getting attention, but not nearly in proportion to their numbers in the population (more than half) or in the theater audience (considerably more than half).
Times are a-changin’ ever so slowly. Commercial and resident theaters are giving women authors more attention than anytime so far in the 20th Century.
Take Chicago. Regina Taylor’s “The Ties That Bind” opens Monday at the Goodman Theatre Studio; Sharon Evans’ “Freud, Dora and the Wolfman,” an extravagant, complex musical with puppets, set both in history and in the subconscious, is now at Pegasus Players; Donna Blue Lachman’s “Frida: The Last Portrait,” a one-woman show celebrating the painter Frida Kahlo, opens Thursday at Court Theatre.
Claudia Allen, long a playwright-in-residence at Victory Gardens Theater, manages one new play there every year or so. In New York right now, Anna Deveare Smith’s one-woman “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” is a sensation, while another black woman, Suzan Lori-Parks, won acclaim earlier this year for “The America Play.”
But there are still plenty of works that, without the authors’ own enterprise and sacrifice, wouldn’t see the light of day. Part of the impetus for “I’m Sweating Under My Breasts,” devised, written and launched last November, comes from the need to self-produce in order to get heard at all.
“Ten years ago, Chicago theaters didn’t seem interested in our work at all,” says Evans. “That’s why a lot of these women began as monologuists and in the performance-art arena.”
Then again, they’re individuals creating art, not engaging in politics. Lachman launched “Frida” at her own Blue Rider Theatre in Pilsen and toured it across the country, including an appearance at the Ross Perot Theatre in Texarkana, Texas, where she was picketed for distributing cookies shaped like male and female genitals. She says she started her own theater for the sake of total artistic independence, not because she felt an outsider as a woman.
“Sometimes I think more doors are open because I’m a woman,” she says. “I studied in Poland, and when I returned, no theater in America was doing what I wanted to do.”
Evans also notes that her “Freud” is not nearly as rigid or doctrinaire as current feminist attacks on the founder of psychoanalysis. “The more you learn, the less black and white you are-that’s what art is all about. But it’s no accident both Donna and I started our own theaters (in Evans’ case Live Bait, a co-producer of “Freud” at Pegasus). We didn’t have role models 10 years ago. Now, young women are looking to me, which is a little terrifying.”
Some other Chicago artists have more direct political missions. Footsteps Theatre, in Rogers Park, was founded in 1987 mainly to cater to a lesbian audience. Jean Adamac and Dale Heinen took over in 1992 and have steered the company more to what they call “genderless theater,” mainly through all-female mountings of Shakespeare.
Their audience is more mixed, now, though they want to win some of the lesbian audience back. Lesbian theater, by the way, also proved a mainstay this year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, an arena somewhat aggressive in its friendliness to women authors over the years. Henley and Norman found early showcases there.
But there’s a big difference between not-for-profit regional theater and the Great White Way. Heidi Landesman, the savvy producer and set designer (“Big River,” “The Secret Garden”), says the commercial theater, unlike the not-for-profit arena, is still closed to women.
“Some of it is due to misconception by producers,” she says. “Shows perceived as `women’s shows’ aren’t expected to do as well as more broadly based ones. For a broad-based show, the thinking goes, you want a male directing and designing team.
“In fact, so-called `women’s movies’ in the ’30 and ’40s were enormously successful, just as the musical `Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ which doesn’t target women and children, struggles at the box office,” Landesman adds. ” `Secret Garden,’ which appealed to women and children, demonstrated that the people buying the tickets are women.”
“I look at the success of `The Sisters Rosensweig,’ and I think, `Here’s a play about three women, but more than women are attending,’ ” says its author, Wendy Wasserstein, the most successful Broadway woman playwright of our time. (“Rosensweig” will play the Shubert Theatre here on tour sometime next season.) “It’s hard to be a playwright, period. But we do have access to stories that haven’t been told yet.”
“Lately,” agrees Chicago’s Evans, “I feel being a woman is an advantage. There are a lot of things I can write about that haven’t been written about.”
“I know statistically that there are more men’s roles,” says Dorothy Milne, who directed “Breasts” at Voltaire. “But we didn’t launch this project out of frustration. We launched it because we were friends, because we wanted to do something together.”
The group, called Pretzelrod Theatre, has extended through the spring and will launch a new set of monologues in June. They’re also thinking about a one-woman show for Abdoo, the riotous star of “Breasts,” if this democratic show has one.
Says Milne, “It’s true, once we wrote the show and got it up, we looked at each other and said, `Hey, this is the best stuff I’ve said on stage.’ “
Or, as Abdoo puts it: “TV and magazines are fake, man. We’re the real thing!”
