Below you will find a mess of ideas: mostly in the shape of feminist essays, meditations on my erotic stories, and cookie recipes. See L.J.’s Stories for a list of all the published stories, essays for my more scholarly writings on feminism, gay rights, etc., and Behind the Scenes for thoughts on what it’s like to be an erotic writer and the answer to the ever-present where did you get that idea?
How to Survive “It Follows”
Written to soothe Lisette Gallows, who is easily the worst person to take to a horror movie.
It’s common knowledge that the act of sexual intercourse attracts supernatural non-human aggressive persons (SNAPs). Being a sexually active young human-person sharing the same world with supernatural serial killers, werewolves, and other aggressive non-human persons, statistically means having a lower survival rate. Sex is so linked to death by SNAPs that some of us, eg. vampires, use sexual attractiveness as a means of luring more ill-informed prey. Indeed abstinence is an almost fool-proof way to avoid any supernatural encounter (provided you have aged out of that stage of early human development where your vulnerability makes you both cute and terrifying). But a different type of danger is exposed in the new documentary “It Follows.” Directed by David Robert Mitchell, “It Follows” explores what some less culturally sensitive human-people are calling “sexually transmitted monsters.”
As American human-persons, you may feel you have the right to engage in rampant sex with anyone at any time without risking death by dismemberment, blood loss, and/or non-consensual supernatural sex acts. We sometimes disagree. We understand that it can be frustrating when poor life-choices result in a supernatural non-human aggressive person slowly pursuing, and inevitably rape/murdering the human-person who made said poor life-choices. But always bear in mind, that the SNAP has feelings too and probably doesn’t like being referred to as a monster. In this spirit, we tracked down The Thing Which Follows as it trudged purposefully towards… some place in New Jersey, maybe Philly. We’re not sure who it’s after right now, some meat-sack. Point is, we wanted to show human-persons both the SNAP perspective and to give the same human-persons a rough guideline to weathering this particular threat. You know, so they’re still alive for the rest of us to eat later.
The Thing Which Follows, a well-known member inside the SNAP community, has always been somewhat shy and uncommunicative with its human prey. The Thing Which Follows shares the joy of the relentless pursuit with mindless-type zombies, but unlike the highly visible walking undead community, who enjoy hunting reasonably informed humans, The Thing Which Follows has generally kept a low profile. In the interest of human-person and non-human person relations, The Thing Which Follows agreed to be interviewed… well, not interviewed since it’s unknown whether it can actually speak. We sat down… we walked besides this interesting and integral member of the SNAP community and asked it… questions which it did not answer.
Listen, here’s what I know about surviving sexually transmitted monsters.
- Practice safe sex.
As discussed above, the most certain way to protect your fragile soul-shell is to never have sex. Like ever. The next best thing is to practice safe sex. And this is good advice to prevent attacks by all supernatural non-human aggressive persons. If you must have sex, always be in a safe indoor location. Avoid sex in cars, abandoned warehouse, parks and all other poorly-lit public places. If possible, be in a monogamous relationship before having sex, for at least three months. That should be plenty of time to detect unexplainable flights of terror, unusual paranoia, and possible death by blood-loss and rape before the so-called “curse” (we like to think of it as an invitation) can be unknowingly transferred to you. Also, it’s a good idea to talk openly with your potential partner about his/her/its previous experience with sexually transmitted SNAPs.
- Practice gay sex.
It has been theorized due to the entity’s heteronormative and highly conservative values, The Thing Which Follows will not transmit its “invitation” during same-sex encounters. This has not been confirmed by traditional scientific study or occult research, but there have been no known cases of gays, lesbians, or transgendered human-people contracting sexually transmitted SNAPs. This advice only works for The Thing Which Follows; be aware that practicing homosexual sex makes you a target for vampires and fairies.
Perhaps this advice has fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps it’s already too late and you, unfortunate meat-sack, have already contracted a sexually transmitted SNAP and are checking the internet for a solution during a brief period of rest before The Thing Which Follows catches up with you. Again. Maybe check behind you just in case.
1) Pass it on.
2) Pursue a career in piloting and/or long distance trucking.
If for moral reason you cannot pass along the curse and you are content to live a sexless existence (how did you catch it in the first place?), consider lucrative career paths that will keep you from being in the same place for a long time.
3) Get good at calculating walking speeds, triangulation, etc.
It is possible with good math and discipline to triangulate you position so that The Thing Which Follows never has the chance to get close enough to you to feed. For example, if you drive two hours East to work and then drive one hours North-west to your recreational place, then drive one hour South-west to your sleeping place, The Thing Which Follows might not get close to you giving you eight hours of sleep, work, and play… oh humans still live in a 24 hour day? Fuck it, I’m bad at math and they’re just walking snack-packets as far as I’m concerned.
4) Pass it Along.
Seriously, keep it going. The Thing Which Follows is fairly reasonably as far as SNAPs go and won’t kill any of you, if you all just keep fucking. Did you ever stop and think that maybe we in the SNAP community needed a surefire way to keep you young people making new food? That’s The Thing Which Follows. We know, it’s not pleasant. We don’t like it either. It’s really awkward at parties.
5) Pass it along to a prostitute and/or sex addict.
Prostitutes and/or sex addict will certainly pass the invitation along to a client and/or prostitutes. This gives you crucial distance from The Thing Which Follows. Also, if the meat-sack the prostitute and/or sex addict passed the invitation along to dies, The Thing Which Follows will be transmitted back to the prostitute and/or sex addict and be transferred again, possibly without ever being noticed.
Pro tip: Use a high-end escort to stick it to “the man.”
6) Go to another country and pass it along to a prostitute.
Try Japan. We hear it’s lovely this time of year and The Thing Which Follows has never really gotten a chance to travel out of The States and its been stuck in Detroit for a while now. Let it explore new flavors… of culture.
If The Thing Which Follows does manage to feed on the high-end escort and/or sex addict you hired, it will have a long soggy walk back across the ocean to you. Maybe it will give up. I mean it’s physically impossible for it to give up, but maybe you’ll be tore to bits by a werewolf, bitten by a vampire, or devoured by a zombie before then. After all, you are a young, sexually active human person, something will eat you soon.
7) Give up.
Have you considered giving up? Maybe you’ll like being dead. I hear it’s peaceful.
Really, do you have anything to live for that’s better than… I don’t know, providing nourishment to your local chapter of supernatural non-human aggressive predators. Think of the lives you could save if you donated your blood to a vampire! Or distracted a werewolf on Bingo night at the senior center. You know, since you’re going to die anyway. When The Thing Which Follows catches up.
Behind the scene: Fair Deal
Getting things done is written on the back, seriously.
Idea
This one is kinda nifty actually.
I am an avid read of postsecret.com, which you can get to by clicking on that secret to the left. Or just typing in postsecret.com, unless you’re lazy. Or lack the ability to type.
Postsecret is a brilliant website where people from all over the world send this guy, Frank Warren, their secrets on postcards, some are sad, some are funny, some are a bit creepy. But all of them make you think about the billions of other humans on this planet.
I discovered postsecret when I was in college and every once in a while I would come across a secret that made me think, “whoa, that would be a phenomenal story.”
So I took a bunch of those secrets and turned them into stories.
Revision
This is the only one that is worthwhile. One of the secrets is in Gloria’s confession that when she drives under the overpass she thinks all she has to do is not turn with the road and she will find some peace. There are others hidden in their between this man and woman. I’ve lost and cut out quite a few over the years, but that’s the one that haunts me.
One of the reasons why the other stories didn’t make it was that these secrets are so personal. I don’t want to take advantages of someone else’s suffering and turn it into what to me is a fine art, but to them is just something filthy. Something worthy of a post secret.
Of the actual story:
“A Fair Deal” or as it was originally titled “The Whore of Tuckerton” was a sort of post secret to myself for a while.
I don’t like writing from a woman’s point of view. I’m not sure why. I feel uncomfortable and I don’t think I do it well, though no one has ever complained.
So for years I worked on this story, amused by it, saddened by it. I think it’s one of my best, but I was afraid to show it to any of my workshop groups. The only reason I eventually did was because one of my friends caught me doodling a picture of a woman on a tractor and I couldn’t explain her away. That doodle is the cover by the way.
Read it here.
Behind the Scenes: Evasive Love Part 2
Evasive Love is my first erotic sci-fi novel to be published. It will be released on Oct. 2nd by Ellora’s Cave, (with the help of a fantastic editor named Brianna St. James).
In 2004, I got my first professional job as a writing tutor for the college I was attending. Since then (to this day I am a freelance editor, ghost writer, and tutor), I’ve made money with words. I never dreamed how difficult it would be to edit a novel.
First Draft Hunted
I always meant to return to American Dreams and make Elliot into a serious character, a real criminal. I thought it would be fun to explore the moral dilemmas of falling in love with someone you are sending to prison.
Apparently, so did the people at Ellora’s Cave. One day back in 2012, I’m thinking sometime in October, I was scanning contests and content calls when I saw Ellora’s Cave asking for a story of any heat level, any pairing, about bounty hunters. I was intrigued because I remembered the campy old thing I had written in high school. With no serious thoughts of being published, I started to write it.
With in two weeks I had a first draft. I edited, pared down, read and reread until the deadline for submissions came. I spent the week before the submission deadline, checking and double-checking the guidelines, my query letter, my blurb. I submitted it and moved on. I’ve been submitting and moving on for a while now. I wasn’t expecting much.
Then in January, I found out I wasn’t rejected.
Revision
Once I got over the dancing and shouting at Skype (my partner was across the ocean when I received the joyful news), I puzzled over the draft I had sent. The one complaint I was given was that the language and sex scenes were too mild.
I was floored by this. I’ve been publishing pornography since I was in college and I always thought the difference between a romance novel and pornography was the language. I had no trouble fixing that; now it’s got reviews about how hot it is.
For the next eight months, my editor and I struggled through the monster that became Evasive Love. I was stunned by the sheer amount of errors that I hadn’t caught, little things I never thought about, and how incredibly inflexible the human body actually is during sex (oh yeah I guess that does kinda sound like he’s wrapping his spine around Kavan… hum, better fix that).
I can tell you I’m so sick of reading that novel I might never look at it again. But you should. It’s excellent. Bree told me so.
Coming Out as Gay Erotica Writer
By far the hardest thing that came out of this novel (besides your dicks, you sick freaks why are you reading this smut?) is explaining to my friends and family what all my work has been for. The inevitable question that comes after the statement, ‘I have a book coming out’ is ‘congratulations. What’s it about?”
I don’t think any other writer faces the potential embarrassment and judgment from that answer. Every writer faces criticism whether constructive of not, but few of us are actually risking revulsion with the answer. More than once I’ve muttered, “It’s a romantic sci-fi about a bounty hunter who falls in love with his mark” and quickly changed the subject to the writing process or anything else. I’ve never been so closeted. Yet, I can’t stand having something I’ve worked so hard for met with a sneer and a “Why would you want to write that?”
I have a lot more to write on the topic of shame and sex in America, the inequality given to romance and speculative fiction, and closets in general, but for now I’ll leave off with a very enthusiastic:
It’s a very explicit erotic science fiction romance about a bounty hunter who falls in love with the male criminal he’s after! Look it! Look it! Two dudes on the cover! And I didn’t make this cover!
Someone else made this cover, bitches!
Behind the Scenes: Evasive Love Part 1
Evasive Love is my first erotic sci-fi novel to be published. It will be released on Oct. 2nd by Ellora’s Cave, (which is a pretty big deal for me; they are a premiere publisher of erotic fiction and I’ve been submitting for years).
The story in it’s simplest form is about a bounty hunter who falls in love with his mark and that has been the plot line for over ten years. That’s really the only thing that hasn’t changed since 2003.
Idea
When I was in high school, I was a campy fool. The biggest proof of this is a novel I wrote called “American Dreams.” This was maybe my third or fourth novel and since I was under 18 and writing about sex it was complete shit. Some bits were salvageable (there’s a particularly nice scene in a basement/volex engine room which made it into Evasive), but some were laughable.
For example, Elliot, the criminal, was actually innocent in the original. He was an English teacher who had fled Victorian England and it’s anti-gay laws to live in pre-colonial America ( the education system isn’t that bad, I’ll explain in a moment). Before he managed to flee, he married a lesbian who left him in America to adventure. She missed him before long, though, and hired a bounty hunter to get him. The hunter thought Elliot was a con artist and Elliot had no idea what was going on; he was just a horny kid. I mean, I was- I mean… He was conflicted! Yeah. That was my plot.
As it turned out, that story was incredibly important to my career as a writer. The fledgling world Elliot and Alik (the original bounty hunter) inhabited had debuted in a different mess of a novel, but their literal journey that these two took as they walked and fucked all the way up the east coast got me planing and thinking. This story was my first trek into world building and one of the things I hear most often praised in my workshops is my ability to build a world.
The World of the Sectors
For example, I “discovered” Alik was not Alex because the midwife was illiterate. Elliot sees a broken and decayed statue of liberty (I know it’s a cliche, but I couldn’t resist in the new novel, either). There’s even a museum in homage to the fall of America. It was not a mistake that had someone running away from the Victorian ages and into a land inhabited by Native Americans and 1930’s gangsters.
In the ten years after this first adventure in camp, I would build and mold the world of the sectors into the complex future society that you’ll find in Evasive Love and in the other stories that inhabit that same world. Some of my favorite sectors include, Albion, which is a society that combines American materialize and media obsession with Steampunk/Victorian sensibilities, Cirque, which is an anarchy of castes and clowns, and Dockside, which is a mobile fishing community with an accent that is a mix of Louisiana’s Cajun and Northeastern Maine.
The world in Evasive Love took ten years to build and I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Click here for blubs and to purchase!
Evasive Love is available to download from Ellora’s Cave as of Oct. 2nd.
Behind the Scenes: Thug’s Night Off
Idea
My partner and I spend far too much time improvising various theater scenes, characters, and plays. One of our least effective, but very funny skits was a clown routine involving a gay yoga instructor, Tristan, and a mob capo, named Joe Gianni. It’s a very silly skit. For example, Joe doesn’t understand why vegans exist in this world (or how to pronounce the word), Tristan using the power of retail diagrams turns their Family into the most powerful in the city, and the don has dementia and thinks Tristan is his dead wife.
Here’s a sample of the dialogue: (it works best if you imagine Robert Deniro and Sassy Gay Friend).
Tristan: I’m performing an inventory to reduce Shrinkage.
Joe: Shrinkage? What the hell is that?
Tristan: Oh… it’s a retail word. It’s basically theft.
Joe: Theft?
Tristan: Basically
Joe: Basically theft?
Tristan: Yeah.
Joe: So why didn’t you just fuckin’ say theft?
Tristan: Because it’s…
Joe: Like if someone goes up to one of my drug dealers and shots him and steals all his product. I’m not gonna call that something different. It’s fucking theft.
Tristan: Fine an inventory reduces fucking theft.
Joe: Are you mocking me?
Tristan: *afraid* No. I was being sardonic.
Joe: Sardonic? Sar-fucking-donic? Do you know what I do to sar-fucking-donic hipsters, like you? I bend them into my favorite yoga position, which is horseshoe, then I kick them across the street so that they swing around that streetlamp with my shoe dangling from their hippy ass.
Tristan: That was oddly specific.
Joe: This inventory thing is a waste of my time.
Tristan: No it’s not. Shrink also accounts for free give-aways and employee discounts-
Joe: Free give-aways? I sell fucking drugs! What are you saying? My boys are smoking the coffee?
Tristan: No, but some of my girls drink the coffee. Or put out too much milk and it goes bad, or drop a cookie. So not theft, but a disappearance of product without it being paid for.
Joe: If any of my product disappeared without it being paid form there would be hell to pay.
Tristan: Oh yeah? How do you know?
Joe: What?
Tristan: If you don’t keep inventory how do you know how much of your product has been sold and how much has disappeared?
Joe: *takes a breath to answer then can’t…* I… I just do.
Tristan: You should keep inventory. You’d be amazed at your shrink. Business 101.
Joe: I don’t have any shrink.
Tristan: Johnny is standing on the corner selling his weed. A pretty girl comes up and wants to buy. Does he give her more because she’s pretty? Does he bring a little to his friends so they can get high? Does he short change that asshole he doesn’t like?
Joe: Vinny, who’s this Johnny fucker stealing my drugs?
You get the idea. Joe’s bodyguard is this.
Revision
For whatever reason, lack of coherent plot, insulting stereotypes, wandering attention spans, this play will not be written of preformed any time soon. One of the things that most tickled my funny bone, was Tristan’s burgeoning relationship with Vinny, the big dumb soldier, who has a dream of becoming a masseuse and is very gentle with cavity searches.
One evening, the tickle found it’s logical way out of my system and I wrote down this story. I had written it about 15,000 words longer and included an actual first date, the sex in the backroom that leads to the first date, the continuation of the story from this point, etc. But the tone was all over the place. Sometimes, Tristan was in legitimate danger of being killed (by Vinny at Joe’s request) and other times there were ridiculous conversations like the one above. In the end, I put the rest of that material in the proverbial snack drawer with the hopes that one day my flash and camp will mature into something usable.
It worked with Evasive Love.
Read “Thug’s Night Off” here.
Behind the Scene: Alien Abduction
This is my backdrop right now. I’m so proud of this picture.
Idea
I’ll be honest, this is a silly, silly story which I took far too seriously. I was playing Sims 3 one night (I’m an obsessive Simmer) and one of my little doll men was abducted. He just happened to be gay (does that surprise you?) and came back alien pregnant, which has nothing to do with his gayness really, but I like to link unrelated ideas together sometimes and abuse punctuation; it’s my prerogative as a writer and someone who knows a bit about grammar to create unnaturally long sentences that don’t necessarily makes sense and certainly should have ended long before that semicolon.
Anyways.
I over think my thinks. While I was playing the game, raising the alien baby, I couldn’t help but wonder if Gary (that was the sim’s name) enjoyed his close encounter. Was the baby a true parasite, attached to Gary’s belly, bursting forth ala John Hurt? Or was this an illegitimate love child? Was the other Dad ever going to make himself?
Well, my car ended up flooding. Gary and Gary II were destroyed in a watery grave, but it got me thinking about alien abductions and anal probing. Like I said, I over think.
This story is the result.
Revision
I make no promises, but I’ve been working on a full novelized version of this story where the alien does come back for him. Him will probably get a name and will not be alien pregnant. I reserved the prettier cover in case I ever feel like expanding the story.
Read “Alien Abduction” here.
New Stories!
I meant to publish these short stories weeks ago, but I’ve been occupied by life, by partner, by job, and my Smashwords has suffered. Just so, here are some new stories:
Price: Free
A fun and erotic short about the truth behind UFOs, the mysteries of anal probing, and the hidden reasons behind alien abduction.
Price: $1.52
Vinny Marlo likes being muscle. He works for the most powerful men in his city, is respected by the family, and doesn’t usually mind the hours. His macho life quickly complicates when he meets Tristan Kessler, a free-spirited, peace-loving yoga instructor. Tristan is the first guy Vinny’s ever maybe, possibly sort of loved, and Vinny’s hot-headed boss isn’t making their first date any easier.
Price: $1.52
In high school, Jason promised Gloria that she would be his first lover and Jason always keeps his promise. Now years later, when Gloria visits Jason needing his help with a somewhat gruesome request, she finds out he has kept this promise. Now in order to gain his help, she has to convince him its a fair deal.
Click on the titles or here to go to my Smashwords page.
“Evasive Love” comes out on Oct. 2nd, 2013
I’ve had a really difficult time writing about this very simple, very life-changing fact. This Wednesday, on October 2nd, my first erotic, science fiction novel is published.
The company is Ellora’s Cave. You can find the story here: Evasive Love.
The link above will give you a blurb about the story, some reviews, and let you read the novel yourself, which I think is probably the best thing I can do for this story now.
I got a book published and some one else made the cover, bitches!
Dublin Dykes: Why Doesn’t the Devil Steal Lady-souls?
The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in escaping the old ones. – John Maynard Keynes
My partner and I had a strange fight the other night centering on the play The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson. It’s a modern play, set in modern Dublin, and it’s a great story. The work requires five men, and is about four men having a boy’s night in when the devil joins them to win one of their souls in a game of poker. Sweetness has a problem with proposing to direct the play, because it requires five men and zero women. Women dominate his program, like most theater programs, and he feels it is unfair to put on a play that more than half the population can’t audition for. My answer was to “gender swap”, that is change the pronouns and have one of the characters be a woman, or “cross-gender cast” or to have women play men. Sweetness had a hard time articulating why he didn’t want to do either of these things, why he would rather put on a different play than allow woman to cross the gender line in The Seafarer. He said that play is about male power disputes, ex-girlfriends, brothers, etc. I argued with him because to me the idea of a bunch of Dublin women gathering around to talk about their ex-girlfriends, drinking problems, and the murder they committed years ago was thrilling. But Sweetness insisted it would be a different play.
Forgetting the illegality of gender swapping a play not out of copy-right, I was left feeling confused and uncomfortable with the conversation. Sweetness isn’t sexist, but his arguments about why a male-centric play like The Seafarer had to remain played by men and about men made too much sense to me. Does that mean we should never perform “The Seafarer”? I hope not, because it’s a great play. But this conversation got me thinking about other plays that are only played by men because they are about “male themes.” It occurred to me that the modern feminists’ battle for women’s equality is not only a battle with current media, but also with the great works of the past.
With a few outstanding exceptions, the great literary works of the past are about men. Most likely, this is because it was writers writing about themselves and most writers in the past have been male. While I think that a feminist should be more tolerant of sexism in the classics than in modern plays or films, I wonder if this isn’t creating a kind of anti-woman feedback. These male-centered older works are more studied than modern pieces, more available to perform, and as a result are very formative not only to audiences but to writers in the audience.
For example, take Shakespeare. I can list off some awesome Shakespeare heroines, Beatrice, Portia, Katherine (if you argue that “Taming of the Shrew” is about her self-growth and I would), etc. But even if you make the case that these women are the central characters (I would suggest that in most cases they are not) most of these plays are comedies and therefore not considered Shakespeare’s greatest works. The works I studied in high school were the tragedies Lear, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet and the history play Julius Cesar. As I was typing that I couldn’t help but notice there’s only one female name and Romeo and Juliet, when rightly preformed is the tragedy of the family not to mention poor Julie’s got to share her credit. Most of the Shakespeare I see preformed is those tragedies with the inclusion of Othello, Macbeth, and a few extra histories, Richard the Third, Henry the Fifth. I can’t think of the last time I say Taming of the Shrew advertized, let alone The Merchant of Venice or Measure for Measure, two “problem” plays that have very active female characters.
Now, there’s no way to time travel and bitch-slap the bard for being sexist. Writers of the past were as much responsible to their times as we are (and in general Willy was fairly progressive what with the sympathetic treatment of Jews and Blacks and general cross-dressing and bewailing woman’s plights). Many amateur companies perform classics because they are out of copy-right and cheaper to perform, so we’re more likely to see male-centered plays than the more modern pro-female plays.
It seems to me that the role of the modern feminist in art is not only to create new work, but also find a way to combat the accidental sexism of older pieces. One easy solution to this is to creatively gender swap the great authors who were writing before the advance of feminism. There many instances, particularly with the classics where gender swapping works beautifully. I recently saw a Tybalt who was a female. The inclusion of a violent active woman in Romeo and Juliet highlights Romeo’s weakness, the families’ hatred, and Juliet’s obedience. Gender swapping is a nice way to handle the plethora of women auditioning for a show and the pittance of men, and it instantly creates a character with interesting layers.
In addition, since mostly theater-going audiences know these classics, gender swapping puts things in a fresh perspective. If Faust is a female, for example, she is not only struggling to gain more knowledge, but also combating the sexism of the day and her sexual desires for other women. Personally, I’d like to see a female Iago.
Some artists, like Samuel Becket, insist against gender swapping. This is a problem particularly with modern playwrights (since I’m pretty sure Sweetness is right and it’s illegal). There is a class of playwrights and directors who hold to the Becket-ian belief that there is only one way to do the play, the right way, the way the author wrote it. This means that Martin Macdonough’s The Pillowman will never be about a woman who writes violent children’s stories that her retarded sister reenacts, and The Seafarer will never be about four Dublin dykes, both of which would be wildly entertaining for me. And writers have the legal right to expect that. Gender swapping can change the character and the play in significant ways. But when it doesn’t, for example with an absurd-ist plays like Waiting for Godot, this is remarkably frustrating to women who will never get to perform the choicest parts of great works.
Though, as it turns out four women have waited for Godot, they just had to do it as men without the pronoun change. That was the conclusion Sweetness and I came too; if he did propose The Seafarer he could cast women who could play the roles as men. Cross-gender casting is not illegal and I’ve seen it used to great effect. A recently saw a version of Ajax, which emphasized Ajax’s physical power, by casting the role of his opposite warrior, Odysseus, as a very slight woman. Most of the other soldiers cast were also women of short stature playing men.
But should we expect actresses to be content getting powerful roles, roles where they get to talk about God and death and glory, only when they are playing men? My next frustration in theater comes from the plays that are written with woman as main characters. There’s not a lot of classics that even fit into category. Oscar Wilde’s plays generally feature female protagonists and so do a great many ancient Greek plays. By and large, though plays about women seem to be about the relationships of the family. Independence, The Mai, A Doll’s House, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and The Vagina Monologues all have very strong female characters that would be exciting to play and watch. But all these plays are about… “female” issues. Women’s relationship to men, to their parents, to their bodies or their children. Even in the ancient Greeks plays about women doing amazing things Medea, Lysistrada, and Antigone, these heroines are doing what they do for men, husbands or brothers and they are doing it through children, sex, and household duty.
Now, I love these plays. These are also great plays and should be performed more. All plays should be performed more. But I’ve been in play/screen writing workshops with women who only write male protagonists, because they think people are only interested in reading about men and boys. Stories about men and boys are not about ‘women’s issues’.
I guess what I’m missing is the voice of a powerful female character not speaking about her rights or her relationship to her family. I want a female monologue about the nature of power, or God, not just about rape and childbirth. Where are the plays about the devil stealing a woman’s soul? Or women searching for their place in an absurd universe? Who is writing the tragedy of Eleanor of Aquitaine or Katherine the Great?
In the world of theater and the arts, it is the duty of feminist playwrights to create new plays that feature women, not only in their homes and gardens, but tackling the same problems that the great male characters of old did. Themes of power and greed, the search of honor and justice, the search for God or happiness. Modern audiences want to see these tales from a female point of view. In addition, it is the role of feminist directors to find a way to balance out the male-dominated theater by including these plays and gender swapping the classics, not just because not enough men auditioned, but because yes a woman can play Tybalt or Iago. Hell, really shock the audience: make Romeo a chick. You’d barely have to change the dialogue.
Jumping Whatsits in the Empress's Bed 