A Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance

On and Beyond the Stage

Carol Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134844234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

This work is a unique collection of key articles on feminist theatre and performance form The Drama Review (TDR). Carol Martin juxtaposes theory and practice to provide an exceptionally comprehensive overview of the development of feminist theatre.
This outstanding collection includes key texts by theorists such as Elin Diamond, Peggy Phelan and Lynda Hart and interviews with practitioners including Anna Deveare Smith and Robbie McCauley. It also contains full performances texts by two of the most influential and controversial practiitioners of feminist theatre: Dress Suits to Hire by Holly Hughes and The Constant State of Desire by Karen Finley.
A Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance is an essential purchase for students of theatre studies, performance studies and women's theatre.

PART I: History

1: ART VERSUS BUSINESS: The Role of Women in American Theatre

Helen Krich Chinoy

In the decade or more since the women's movement began, a number of books on the female experience in literature, art and architecture, film and dance have been published, but no comparable attempts have been made to identify a women's tradition in the complex art of theatre. Some excellent volumes of plays by women and some about women, some interesting articles on individuals and on the new feminist theatres, a symposium or an interview here or there have appeared. With the exception of the reissue of Rosamund Gilder's classic, Enter the Actress, however, no overall study has tried to see how women have used and have been used in theatre.

Yet questions about women's participation in all aspects of theatre have become more insistent. As women with new self-awareness and enthusiasm try to use theatre to explore what it means to be a woman, they also look back in the hope of locating themselves in some female tradition that will help them understand their problems in the present as well as plan for the future. Despite the public life of theatre, we know very little about the role that women have played. It has not been easy to see a female network in the composite art of theatre or to find a sense of “we-consciousness,” as Simone de Beauvoir calls it, among actresses, playwrights, designers, directors, and producers.

As a starting-point, there is the striking evidence of women's continued and extensive participation in theatre. Acting, of course, has been the obvious career for women. If you were pretty but poor, or wellborn but hard-up, with no useful skills but your feminine attractions to offer, the stage was always a possible way to earn a living. In Aria Da Capo Edna St. Vincent Millay neatly satirizes the easy link of women and acting. When Columbine complains that she can't act, Pierrot answers: “Can't act? Can't act? La, listen to the woman!…You're blond, are you not?—you have no education, have you? Can't act! You underrate yourself, my dear!” In addition to their obvious but crucial function as actresses, women—often starting as actresses—have been involved in greater numbers and in a greater variety of jobs than are indicated in the theatre history books that usually mention only the big names who made it on Broadway.

Many of these unsung women were born into theatrical families where they learned to do all that was necessary. Some added management to acting on the death of their fathers or their husbands; others started their own theatres, often the first in an outlying area, out of the need to earn a living for themselves or their children or a desire to enrich the life of a community. There were those who were the power behind the scene, managing actress daughters or enriching, or almost ghostwriting, the plays of their husbands. Various strong, independent women served theatre on their own terms, whether that meant playing male roles to satisfy their own sense of power and authority or alternatively exploiting their female sexuality in defiance of the “flabby sanctimoniousness” of good women who, they chided, dwindled into “nonentities” on marriage.

Liberated by their work in the very public, often vulgar world of theatre, they wrote plays for themselves or for others to star in, courted commercial success or struggled for personal expression. They organized companies, trained young performers in their troupes and later in notable studios and schools. They experimented with chemical and physical laws to devise new scenic effects and directed the plays they wrote to ensure that they were staged properly. They have been casting and dramatic agents, producers, financiers, and lawyers for theatre. Especially since the turn of the 20th century, women have made their way into all the specialized positions in theatre, where they can be found if you have a mind to look for them and some sense of where they are most likely to be located.

For although many women have made their mark in theatre, it hasn't been easy for them to do so on Broadway or in the mainstream of theatre. In show business as in other businesses and professions, women have not easily or regularly come into positions of importance or power in the major institutions. They have been restricted by the blatant prejudice against letting women have any say where big money and decision making have been involved, as well as by their socialization into a passive but emotional self-image.

To the usual limits on female career aspirations—marriage, family, appropriate submissive behavior and acceptable feminine appearance—theatre has imposed further restrictions by being socially and morally suspect in puritanical, middle-class America. In a country where theatre was thought of as Satan's haunt and actresses often equated with harlots whose “lascivious smiles, wanton glances, and indelicate attitudes” threatened the ideal of “womanhood,” the women who worked in theatre had a difficult time. Defined in this way by society, they could exploit their erotic attractions before an often largely male audience and make a rather free and easy life for themselves outside the limits of good society. Or, anxious to get on, they could fit themselves to the stereotypes acceptable to the popular audience—the innocent ingenue, the noble wife, the fallen woman. From the beginning, however, some women challenged the debased image of theatre and of women in it. Attracted by the stage, they tried to reform it and to raise the moral and aesthetic level of the profession. Although they were sometimes snobbish, prudish, even priggish—reflecting what was thought appropriate when a “lady” turned to theatre—these women, through their efforts over the years and in response to changing values, eventually transformed their defensive attitudes into a dynamic idea of theatre in America.

Uncomfortable in the commercial theatre or barred from full participation, important creative women have insisted that their theatre must be more than “amusement…prostituted to the purpose of vice,” to quote Mercy Otis Warren, our first woman dramatist, or “more than an amusement” to quote a Sunday New York Times headline about Zelda Fichandler's Arena Stage. In an earlier day women dramatists and actresses spoke of themselves as “reformers” who would grace the theatre with “their own pure and blameless lives” or with the “benign influence of a noble womanly spirit,” to quote Anna Cora Mowatt, the lady who wrote Fashion.

Olive Logan, actress, writer, and bluestocking, suggested that theatre could become “a worthy channel for gifted, intelligent, and virtuous young women to gain a livelihood through” if producers would only get rid of the “leg business” made popular in hits like Ada Isaacs Menken's “nude” Mazeppa or The Black Crook. In her fascinating series of essays, Apropos of Women and Theatre, written in 1869, Olive Logan argued that a career on the decent, serious stage was one of the few in which women cold earn equally with men and was therefore worthy of an aspiring, independent woman. Julia Marlowe, for example, was such a young woman who deliberately prepared herself by hard work and careful study of Shakespeare to be a “moral force” in acting his plays. She conceded that what impelled her as an actress was “the dramatic attraction of the woman who stays pure.” Her contemporary, Mary Shaw, equally idealistic, was impelled by the possibility of using the stage for a feminist vision. “Women exert a tremendous and virtually irresistible influence over the stage,” she insisted. “Aristocrat of the arts and child of religion,” she told the International Congress of Women in London in 1899, the drama “is a field for women.” With Jessie Bonstelle, actress and director-manager of important stock companies, Mary Shaw projected a Woman's National Theatre devoted to communicating “distinctive feminine feeling or opinions,” one of several such theatres planned in the early years of the 20th century.

By 1931, Eva Le Gallienne, actress-director of the Civic Repertory Theatre, could look back on this heritage of high-minded activism when analyzing “Women's Role in the Theatre” in the Alumnae Quarterly of Smith College, which had just given her an honorary degree. Her point of departure was an attack on women by Gordon Craig, who had written that “to achieve the reform of the theatre, to bring it into the condition necessary for it to become a fine art, women must have first left the boards.” Miss Le Gallienne's defense began in an apologetic familiar vein, noting the absence of women in ancient theatre and the use of only “lower types of women” in “orgies of licentiousness” during the “degenerate days of Rome and the Renaissance.” The modern movement in theatre, however, disavowing sexism and show business, was created by both men and women. Indeed, Le Gallienne suggested, at first somewhat hesitantly and then in stronger terms by the end of her comments, the modern theatre was in many ways the accomplishment of women. Looking at the achievements of, among others, Miss Horniman in Manchester, Lady Gregory in Ireland, Irene and Alice Lewisohn, Mary Shaw and Minnie Maddern Fiske in New York, she pointed out that, as she saw it, women were really the “doers” in the development of the modern art theatre.

Looking today for what seems especially to distinguish the contributions of notable women, for a female network or feminine consciousness in American theatre, we find ourselves reinforcing Miss Le Gallienne's suggestion that, counter to Craig's perverse admonition, serving the art of theatre has in many ways been the special function of women. The women who have made major contributions to American theatre have tended to identify themselves—whether they were actresses, playwrights, directors or producers—with an idea of theatre larger than that of Broadway. In the 1920s Edith Isaacs, editor of Theatre Arts Magazine, the journal of the art theatre movement, dubbed this alternative theatre “the tributary theatre.” In her important essay, she rejected commercial New York theatre as “not an artist's goal,” and urged Americans to go to “the four corners of the country and begin again, training playwrights to create in their own idiom, in their own theatres.” In declaring that theatre must have a “relation, human or esthetic, to the life of the people,” she sounded a call to which women have responded with unusual dedication.

The association of women with regional, institutional, little, art, and alternative theatres is striking. Think of Susan Glaspell, who became an innovative playwright after founding the Provincetown Players with her husband, George Cram Cook; of Theresa Helburn, executive director for many years of the famed Theatre Guild; of Edith Isaacs, for over 25 years reviewer, editor, and manager of Theatre Arts Magazine; of Rosamund Gilder, her disciple and associate, critic, historian, activist in the National Theatre Conference, ANTA, and voice of America through the International Theatre Institute; of Cheryl Crawford, co-founder with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg of the Group Theatre, and later collaborator with Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster in the American Repertory Theatre; of Hallie Flanagan Davis, creator of the Vassar Experimental Theatre and the Smith College Theatre Department and head of the great Federal Theatre Project; of Margo Jones, director-producer in Dallas, “high priestess” of the post-World War II regional theatre movement; of Nina Vance of the Houston Alley Theatre; of Zelda Fichandler of the Arena Stage; of Judith Malina, guru of the Living Theatre; of Ellen Stewart, “La Mama” of the whole off-off-Broadway theatre movement.

Most of these women turned their backs on making it on Broadway. They rejected what sociologists consider the male preoccupation with power and climbing the ladder in the “cash nexus world.” Their concerns have tended to be with the values of what has been called the “status world” in which love, duty, tenderness, individuality, and expressiveness are central. Their activities belong to the tradition of female rites in which, as Linda Jenkins has pointed out, performance events are used primarily for family and social bonding rather than largely for entertainment and profit. Eva Le Gallienne, to stick with her instructive experience, turned against what she felt was the “stultifying effect of a successful engagement” as a leading lady to try her hand at special matinees of “better” plays. Her determination to stage Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Chekhov led to the founding of the Civic Repertory Theatre where the satisfactions of ensemble playing, repertory scheduling, low prices, and free training for performers replaced the triumphs she could have easily had as a star. Other leading actresses also freed themselves from being “commodities” in the hands of producers to head their own companies or join institutional theatres or even just tour an individual production that would allow them to perform personally and culturally meaningful plays. Think of the great Minnie Maddern Fiske, who was called the “most civilizing force” of the stage of her day, of Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, Helen Hayes, Julie Harris, and Irene Worth, among others.

Many of these women tend to look on their companies as family units within a larger community group, sharing, supporting, learning, and teaching. They reject the “atmosphere of hysteria, crisis, fragmentation, one-shotness, and mammon-mindedness” of the Broadway system as inappropriate for the “collective and cumulative” art of theatre, to quote Zelda Fichandler. They tend to turn away from the “nameless faces and the anonymity” of New York, as Nina Vance confessed she did when she opened her Alley Theatre in Houston, where she had a “feeling of roots.” They tend to work for a theatre “which is part of everybody's life… where there is a theatre in every town providing entertainment and enlightenment for the audience and a decent livelihood along with high artistic goals for the theatre work,” as Margo Jones put it in her book, Theatre-in-the-Round. This sampling of quotations, it should be noted, antedates the new feminist theatres where these nurturant, supportive, cooperative, community values have become the basis for a new kind of theatre that can even call itself, as one feminist troupe does, “It's All Right To Be a Woman.”

Much of what women did was dedicated to realizing a dream of a different kind of theatre. Perhaps this concluding sketch of the career of one woman will capture the essence of the special spirit that seems to have animated many of the women in American theatre.

During the “full, lean years” of the Depression, a tiny woman in a fedora hat cast a huge shadow that covered the whole land with the vision of a different kind of theatre. Hallie Flanagan Davis during the few short years of the Federal Theatre Project made the tributary the mainstream. The educational, regional, experimental, art theatre became our national people's theatre.

When Hallie Flanagan Davis was appointed National Director of the Federal Theatre Project in August, 1935, the New York Times wrote that “the boys—the local gentry for whom the theatre does not exist outside Manhattan—did not quite know what to make of that.” To them the appointment “represented ‘art’…. There was headshaking. What this project needed, they said, was an old-line Broadway manager who knew the commercial theatre's devious ways.”

There were many reasons why Harry L.Hopkins with President Roosevelt—and, we might add, Mrs. Roosevelt—supporting him wanted someone outside the commercial theatre, but here we only want to ask what were some of the qualities that Hallie Flanagan Davis brought to the job.

Born in South Dakota and brought up in Grinnell, Iowa, she belonged to the vast reaches of America that Broadway thought of as a “dumping ground” for some of its products. Although she eventually became part of the eastern scene, she always recalled, in often lyrical prose, the great quiet prairies and the “long summer days and long winter evenings” of a “serene childhood” and youth spent in the spacious west.

At Grinnell College she, like the rest of her group, was “imbued with the Grinnell conception of public service,” and she developed a strong sense of the importance of being “part of an institution.” She wrote of herself that “I can't imagine just being a floating rib someplace.” She could not imagine theatre apart from the life of a group.

She started her first work experience like a latter-day Nora, trying to earn money in secret for her ailing young husband by giving drama lessons, one of the few skills this young wife had. When her husband died, she thrust herself into teaching to earn money for herself and her two children. Her first notice came as a playwright when she won a prize offered by the Des Moines Little Theatre Society in a regional contest open only to Iowans. This success plus her effective productions at Grinnell College led her to Professor George Pierce Baker's Workshop 47 at Harvard, where she earned a Master's degree. With her small son Frederick, Davis went east t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance
• Worlds of Performance
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Editor's Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introductory Essay: Fathom Languages: Feminist Performance Theory, Pedagogy, and Practice
• Part I: History
• Part II: Theory
• Part III: Interviews
• Part IV: Texts