I have a little button inside my brain that when it gets pushed a bright neon sign flashes behind my eyes that says, "You are not a good enough feminist." Two recent encounters pushed that button. Seeing the Ladies Ring Shout and reading this article. This is not to say either were meant to make me crumble beneath the weight of radical neurosis, but because they are saying things I admire and agree with but might not necessarily practice myself, I got to thinking. Or really asking myself that same question I seemingly cannot answer. Is my theatre feminist theatre?
Okay, this I know. I do feminism as a practice in my work, for sure. This has borne itself out in the arrangement we have constructed within H&NAS. We work together, collaboratively, undermining both the cult of individuality and the culture of competition that is often bred into young women. We write our own scripts, design our own costumes, book our own shows, buy our own stuff, modify things, paint our own faces, DIY ourselves to death essentially. Our characters are not women written by men (if they are women at all) and they are always three dimensional. We have learned to say no to what hurts. We check-in at each rehearsal so we can acknowledge and use the feelings we bring with us, instead of shoving them aside for "the work." "The work" does not trump our well-being. We seem to have the trappings of a scrappy lil'punk lady band. But, but, but.
But the issue that Bree McKennan and The Ladies Ring Shout bring up for me is not about process but product. When we obfuscate, when we relocate to the obscure, to the less confrontational, what do we get? Do we get a feminist product?
John McGrath, in one of his essay-lectures from A Good Night Out, talks about employing directness in creating working-class theatre. Such audiences want theatre-makers to say what they mean, to baldly admit their position. Bourgeois audiences love vagary, atmosphere, intrigue because it allows them to "solve" the play, to do a critical reading of it, as they were taught in whatever fancy school they attended. They see the simple act of talking to an audience as an attempt to tell them what to think. McGrath posits that working class folk appreciate hearing a perspective and then forming their own opinion on it. Now to me, this is what the Ladies Ring Shout do. It's kind of lovely to be asked, who is hurting feminism for women of color? Or, who are you to even answer that question? That feels, though the ladies are performing and I supposed to watch and shut up, like a conversation. I appreciate the shit out of that shit. I like that brand of confrontation and openness.
We do not ask questions and I would not say the the tone of H&NAS performances are conversational. Maybe the evidence pool is too small, but I would say, in general, we do not outright state our opinions on inequality (a lot of this possibly having to do with the fact that we probably disagree on those issues). We have a grand absurdist and surrealist streak. We would dry hump narrative if it were a person. And these are things I love about us. Because I do deeply love Ionesco and Beckett and Monty Python and Lorca and Eno and all that other stuff. I had nerdiness bred into me and there is no escaping it. Sure we are weird as all get and that's a something. We scare people. And we are capable of creating both compelling discomfort and comfort. But we are not so straightforward as other artists. There is unpacking that goes on in seeing one of our performances and the same is true of things that I have directed or written on my own. Feminism comes up in the content of the theatre I make, but it is often hidden.
It is quite possible that this is the result of being told that girls don't speak up or at least have take super roundabout routes to get what they want (i.e. behind every great man there is a woman or whatever). I went to a school for young ladies after all. But what I really think is the John McGrath has got me pinned.
Do I suffer a bourgeois problem? And is that bad? You see, I have no qualms about describing myself as bourgeois. Side note fun times: I would really like to do away with the more recent semantic development that is the word "privilege." It's a word that softens the blow of oppression by contributing to disappearance of the word bourgeois. Everybody has a little bit of privilege in some capacity and so we all think of ourselves on a great ladder of having and are pitted against one another in individual identity groups. We have stopped dividing the world into bourgeois and not bourgeois. We have defanged the devil, which is what I was raised as and what other people continue to be. That's some old school social shit right there.
And you know, my self mythology that I have wildly constructed is pretty compelling, making it hard to do away with that identity. I have assigned myself a handful of magic and it is for sure book magic. I have always considered myself a bit of a trickster and a seducer (a necromancer if you will!). Identifying most clearly with spies and diplomats and shape-shifters over kings and war heroes. I dreamed of being Loki and Matahari as a kid. And of course, my one great familial inheritance is assimilation. I come from a family of hiders-in-plain-sight. Now despite my lack of connection to Judaism or Jewish culture, this little idea holds firm in my psyche. I think probably somebody somewhere probably compared Jews to sand or insects or something. We slip in at the cracks and chew at the crown molding. But it takes a long time for folks to notice the damage we've done. I am convinced that people suspect, but cannot see the dark, dangerous thing that lurks behind my wardrobe of dresses and my long hair. And I do take great pleasure in undermining the expectations my visual presentation instills in people. I pride myself on being silver-tongued and charming, in order to ensnare. That is my origin myth. The ur-me slunk out of a crack in the cold Russian mountains, chowed down on an unsuspecting village, wiped her bloody mouth, and sat down in a classroom full of other girls to learn speak proper so that people would ignore the dried blood under her fingernails. Books, my path to power.
But also, what does one do once one has admitted to being bourgeois? What do I do with that? Seriously, now what? Because Suzan-Lori Parks (my fucking hero) says, "The last thing American theatre needs is another lame play." And she accuses her fellows of trying way too hard to SAY SOMETHING, to MAKE STATEMENTS. Suzan-Lori, you're confusing me. I love you and I love John McGrath and I don't know who to believe. Like literally stylistically, I do not know what I want. I spent months agonizing over this while writing my thesis - mostly concerning myself with trying to come up with a solid feminist theatrical identity. But I kept running into the problematic fact of my existence as a Millenial (I HATE THIS TERM, BUT THERE AREN'T ANY BETTER ONES). In my mind, my generation is one of pastiche and multiple identities. Most of us at heart are pluralists. I tried to make a list of things I am okay with people calling me. It's long. And I cannot cross any of them off. So how can I and do I even need to shuck off the bougee-ass-bullshit part of me?
Of course, We could end this all with an oft-quoted Aileen saying. "Everybody has a gender. All plays are about gender. So whatever."
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