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 