I'm going to keep this short. I don't want to bore myself.

I recently ordered a play. I rarely do that. But this was the first play written by a woman to be produced on the main stage at the Royal National Theatre. Furthermore, it was a play about women's history... the Suffrage Movement in England, to be exact. And... it dealt with a lesbian love story! It garnered four-star reviews in most of the London papers, and even managed three in The Times.

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

I've been writing plays about women's history featuring lesbian love stories for a quarter century. Not coincidentally, I have also been writing about the censorship of lesbian and feminist drama for that long.  Had there been some kind of cultural revolution in the West End that I had missed?  Or was there something about the play itself?  I had to find out.

Okay, I promised to keep this brief:

1) The title: Her Naked Skin. Whew... Thank the Goddess she had enough sense to give it a title that showed some skin!  And how clever of her! Like the woman who shows a little cleavage in the board room... All one has to do is think of the titles of Suffrage books to realize the strategic brilliance of  Ms. Lenkiewicz' title. Just imagine a West End play with a title like "Shoulder to Shoulder," or "Women Who Dare," or "The Fighting Days..." 

Moving on.

2) It opens with a woman's apparent suicide. Well, actually, that's controversial.   It's a rather celebrated death, actually. Emily Wilding Davison was a militant Suffragist. She had been a hunger striker in Holloway. She had planted a bomb in the Prime Minister's home. She had also taken extraordinary measures to follow a course of study at Oxford at a time when Oxford did not grant degrees to women. This, of course, allowed her to be a governess... which is something like a glorified nanny.

Davison's apparent suicide was occasioned by her running out onto the track with a Suffrage banner just as the King's horse was rounding the bend. She was trampled to death. Some think she intended to die. Personally, I think she planned to attach the banner to the ass of the King's horse and make him advertise her cause. She died with a return rail ticket and a ticket to a women's dance in her pocket. I think she was planning to celebrate. On the other hand, she had intentionally thrown herself thirty feet down an iron staircase in Holloway.

Her Naked Skin opens with Emily in front of a mirror. How reassuringly female! Because even Suffragists on their way to their death care about their looks! The gramophone gets stuck... Emily does not fix it immediately. A metaphor for the broken-record quality of women's demands for equality? The annoying redundancy of our political movements? And then the script calls for a projection of the authentic, grainy, nearly indecipherable, 1913 newsreel footage of her death. The playwright acknowledges in the stage directions the obscurity of the imagery, but notes that "the general impression of the film is that something has 'happened.'"

Brilliant.

But I promised to be brief.

3) There is a lesbian love story: An upper-class, married Suffragist meets and falls in love with a fellow Suffragist, a factory worker, in prison. There is a scene that calls for their semi-nudity in bed. I'm assuming the naked half would mean their  breasts exposed. This is always good for box office. I know because I am a producer sometimes. When word gets 'round that there are bare titties in a show, there is a certain demographic who would otherwise never set foot in a women's theatre. Again, a good move. And, of course, with a title like Her Naked Skin... well, what choice did she have?

4) There is an onstage assault of a woman. In fact, it would appear to be the obligatory scene... more so even than the sex. The infamous force-feeding of the hunger strikers in Holloway is heavily foreshadowed in scene after scene. When it finally arrives, it is all we can hope for: The victim is, of course, the working-class lesbian. She is man-handled, bound, her orifice is pried open, a phallic tube is inserted, with descriptions of how many inches of penetration. There are two--count 'em--two gags. The stage directions indicate that the actor should shake and choke.  A suggestive mix of raw egg and brandy is forced into her mouth. According to the stage directions, the actor must  regurgitate it over her own face. Imagine... a pornographic "money shot" on the main stage at the National Theatre!  As I say, brilliant.

5) The lesbians break up. The factory worker is jealous about the fact that her lover has had other affairs (with men) before meeting her. Doesn't make sense to me either, but then, the factory worker also keeps going on about wishing she could have been a virgin. The only thing I can guess is that virginity and monogamy, being obsessions for heterosexual men, were introduced to help them identify with the characters. The fact is this: Lesbian audiences are never going to fill the National. Straight men and their girlfriends and wives will. If the playwright plays her cards right.

6) There is an onstage suicide attempt... again, by the working-class lesbian. She slits her wrists into a basin. Blood is specified. And... wait for it... before she does it, she takes her clothes off! All the way... because the stage directions call for a sponge bath! Naked lesbian AND lesbian suicide, in the same scene!  I'm speechless.

7) The working-class lesbian marries unhappily. Her punishment for surviving the wrist-slitting.

8) The upper-class lesbian has an Ibsenian ending, walking out on her husband and her seven (7!) children. Oh... but she stops and checks herself in a mirror on the way out. Get it?  The way Emily did at the top of the show, on the way to her suicide/death? Women and mirrors... the bookends for the action. Revolution is what happens to us between primping.

And that, my friends, is how it's done. That is how to get your women's history/lesbian play into a first-class theatre with good reviews.

Excuse me. I think I'll go back to my failures...  Which you can check out  at www.carolyngage.com.

See also: "How I Came To Write A Play Where the Lesbian Doesn't Kill Herself."

It's too late for a women's party. That was the great dream of some of our Suffrage foremothers-- that after women got the vote we would organize ourselves into a separate political party that would seriously rearrange the business-as-usual agenda. Opponents of Suffrage, for all the rhetoric about "a woman's place" and protecting our pure minds from the dirty work of politics, were terrified that this would be the outcome. Frankly, I think it's sad that a women's party did not emerge. In the ninety-one years since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, there have been a few "gender gaps" in the poll numbers between the Democrats and the Republicans, but the Equal Rights Amendment never passed, we are still needing to fight for our reproductive rights,  the majority of folks living in poverty in the US are women and children, and violence against us continues to rise. Women adn children comprise 80% of the casualties in war these days...  up 400% since the days of Suffrage. Needless to say, we are wildly underrepresented in Congress.

And it's too late for that women's party now. The evil is too big, too pervasive.  What we need is something more radical. Something like a children's party.  Political, that is.

Children are the most globally disenfranchised, helpless, dependent, and historically victimized population on the planet. They are raped, beaten, trafficked, starved, forced into slave labor, held as captives, tortured, pimped out in marriages, and forced to give birth... with near impunity. Their abuse is legal in many situations. They are colonized by adults everywhere

Children, as an exploited and colonized population are in a unique situation. They have never had a voice politically, and they never will. Why? Because they don't earn wages and those who are fortunate enough to have money in their name will have no control over that money until they become adults. In other words, they lack leverage; they have no clout. Oh, and they're children. Their brains are still developing. They are naive about the world, they lack language skills. The conditions for their ongoing exploitation are near ideal: They are ubiquitous, financially dependent, easy to discredit because of their youth, without representation, unable to organize themselves, naive and gullible, physically diminutive and relatively frail, and treated as the property of adults.

Children can't even organize a protest. How could they be expected to organize a national political party? Well, they can't. But adults, acting as proxies, could.

And, of course, this immediately calls to mind the absolutely abysmal historical record of adults attempting to protect children via legislation and agencies. How would this be any different?

Because it would be visionary. It would not be about advocacy and lobbying of existing adultist institutions. It would be a political party that prioritized the needs of children, not as planks in a platform, but as the sole agenda.

And what are those needs?

• The right to their bodily integrity. (no corporal punishment, trafficking, prostitution, exploitation in pornography, rape, molestation)
• The right to their childhood. (no slave labor)
• The right to clean air and clean water.
• The right to education.
• The right to safe homes.
• The right to a radiation-free, pollution-free environment.
• The right to access nature.
• The right to health, dental, and optical care.
• The right to spiritual autonomy. (no indoctrination)
• The right to food that is pesticide-free and not genetically-modified.
• The right to a future.
  

I read this week that the Japanese government will be issuing radiation-monitoring badges to 34,000 children in northern Japan.  This is in lieu of evacuation and will take three radiation-accumulating months to accomplish.

This year, there have been a spate of lawsuits filed in several states and in federal court by an Oregon-based nonprofit called Our Children's Trust. The lawsuits, filed on behalf of children and young adults,  are based on "common law" theories about "public trusts." The goal is to have the atmosphere declared for the first time as a public trust, warranting government protection.  In the past, this "public trust" concept has been effectively used to clean up polluted rivers and coastlines. Applying it to global warming and climate change may be somewhat trickier. The organization uses the phrase "intergenerational justice."

And... child trafficking. This is one of the fastest growing crimes in the world. Trafficking is the world’s second largest criminal enterprise, after drugs. The global market of child trafficking at over $12 billion a year with over 1.2 million child victims. Baby-farming, pornography, child brides, child soldiers... 

A children's party. An act of penance on the part of all of us adults. A children's party NOW.

Today my world shifted a smidge on its axis. Today, I took in a painting. Really took it in. The painting is “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Stephanie Frostad, and the reason I took it in is that I watched a video where Ms. Frostad described her process in the creation of it. (The interview with Frostad begins 6:45 minutes into the video.)

The painting is named for the Biblical parable about the return of a son who has been away from home, wasting his family's money by living a life of irresponsible debauchery. Upon his penitent return, he is welcomed by his parents, who celebrate by slaughtering the “fatted calf.” The parable is filled with themes near and dear to Christian theologists: the redemption of the sinner, unconditional forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and so on.

Frostad has done something shocking. She has told the story—in painting—from the perspective of the calf, its mother, and the sober, responsible son who has stayed at his post, as a steward of the land and of the animals. The idyllic, pastoral relationship between the mother cow and her calf dominate the painting to such a degree that it appears at first glance to be a portrait of cows. The next most visible figure is what Frostad refers to as the “dutiful son.” In her video, there is a close-up of this figure. He stands aloof, watching the joyful reunion with a poker face. What is he feeling? Anger, ambivalence, resentment, skepticism, disgust?

Finally, way in the background, is the scene that takes center stage in the Bible—the reunion of the wastrel son and his grieving parents. The figures are so tiny, they almost appear to be stick figures, their personalities reduced to gesture.

On the three-month anniversary of the most dangerous nuclear accident on the planet, with radiation continuing to spew into ocean and air, I experienced a paradigm shift as I viewed Frostad’s work and as I listened to her words. The story—the real story, the important story—is the cow and her calf, the sanctity of the innocent. The drama of the disconnected, dissociated son returning home, because he has finally run through his resources and is out of options, seems suddenly small, insignificant, obscene, out-of-focus. Who cares about him? And why should any more of the planet's precious resources be wasted on him? Frostad has finally put the story of the prodigal son in its true, planetary perspective... and along with it, the toxic theology and pedagogy that spawned it. No small thing.

I am a playwright, and this drama of the bad-boy acting out  occupies an inordinate amount of the canon of Western drama. It is perpetually compelling. There was an entire school of  "angry young man" plays. And the ongoing parade of "mommy-shocking" films. There is the angst of the dying salesman, the corporate criminal, the hubris-ridden king, the corrupt politician. Whatever will become of them? Will they be saved in time by the love of a good woman(or man... but mostly woman)? Will they die unrepentant? Will the long-suffering partner be amply rewarded by a show of gratitude? And then the homecoming... the tearful reunion, the joyous return to the marital bed, the father-son reconciliation, the sentimental return to the mother's embrace...

Let's face it: The addict takes focus. Why wouldn't he or she? The addict's actions are dramatically erratic and potentially disastrous, the monstrous selfishness is compelling to watch, the mounting debt and burden of guilt carry their own momentum. It's a plot that fairly writes itself. The storyline of the victims is nowhere near as fun. And the sober citizen? Well....zzzzzzz.

At least this is how  we have been conditioned. This is The Story. This how women learn about relationships with men, how children learn about relationships to parents, how minority cultures learn about relationships with the dominant culture, how underdeveloped countries learn about relationships to developed ones, how workers learn about relationships to bosses, how underclasses learn about relationships to the privileged classes, and so on.

We watch with anguish as these favored "prodigal sons" of patriarchal culture repeatedly betray our loyalty, as they take our resources and squander them on their selfish pleasure. We wring our hands, wondering when they will realize how much they owe us, when they will come back and make amends. And if they do return (invariably for more access to our resources), we are just desperate or self-deceived enough to receive them back with open arms, eager to spare them any humiliation... and pressing upon them more of our already-plundered resources.

The parable of the prodigal son plays out in our unending hopes that the men who run the governments and the corporations will gain a smidgeon of self-awareness, some glimmer of compassion for the lives that are so affected by their greed-driven, war-mongering policies. The drama of the return of the prodigal plays out in our living rooms with the focus on the addict or the alcoholic—with whole families held hostage to whims of this most banal of diseases. What is so fascinating about the self-absorption of the dissociated individual, or government, or corporation?  It must be our investment. The investment of a parent in the child they have raised. The investment of the lover in her partner. The investment of the electorate who has campaigned for a candidate. The investment of the stockholders in a corporation. And the investment of the just plain desperate, whose already hellish lives can actually be made worse.

But this drama, as Frostad makes so clear has nothing in common with the natural world, its seasons and its cycles. Our investments have been misplaced and we must collectively cut our losses. It is time for the “dutiful son”-- those on the planet who are attempting to live moderate, sustainable, environmentally conscientious lives--to turn away from this tedious drama of redemption, to reject the pseudo romance of reconciliation, to refuse to kill any more fatted calves for this obscene celebration of non-accountability. And it is time for the “dutiful son” to examine destructive loyalties to a family that is so absorbed in that drama that it cannot focus its priorities.

Looking at Frostad’s painting, I am aware that the peaceful relationship of cow and calf is about to be shattered, that the animals are oblivious to the distant drama that can seal their fate. But the figures do not come off as vulnerable or as victims. Frostad has painted them as integral to nature. It is as if she wants the viewer to understand that this essential rightness of relation in the natural world will endure, and that it is the unstable and disconnected humans who will be displaced.

What this painting has done for me is to push me to examine all the ways in which I have internalized the drama of the return of the prodigal as a meaningful narrative. What are the ways I am complicit with it? Am I still susceptible to the romance of redemption, to the paradigm of the mother, eternally delighted to reward the males who show any signs of coming home, thrilled at any return, however meager, of my investment? Am I the father, flush with the power of "forgiveness," sponsoring the prodigal back into the family? Am I the prodigal herself, expecting the world to be waiting for me with open arms when I realize the extent of my profligacy, arrogance, participation in a culture of  greed and exploitation?

The parable of the prodigal son is a tale of enabling, and it has always been a luxury. Now, as it has become a planetary imperative for all us to be learn what it means to become "right-sized," we need to flip the parable, as Frostad has done, privileging the narratives of the innocent and of the accountable. We need to shrink the romance of the reformed sinner to a distant memory from a dying planet.