In the annals of theatre history, Green Grow the Lilacs by Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs is mostly known as the play upon which the blockbuster Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Is based.

That’s ironic, because the musical actually subverts the radical paradigm that Riggs has so beautifully crafted. Perhaps that kind of dramaturgical subversion is inevitable any time a Native writer’s work is adapted for mainstream commercial purposes. Also, the American musical is probably not the best vehicle for exploring the moral ambiguities and contradictions that are intrinsic to Riggs’ depiction of frontier life in what he specifically designates as “Indian Territory”—in other words, not the state of Oklahoma. Finally, Riggs is not only writing about colonization of Indian Territory, but also about colonization into heteropatriarchal values through a particular community ritual called "shivaree."  The musical completely subverts the nature of that ritual and its pivotal role in Green Grow the Lilacs.

But first, let's look at the appropriation of Indian Territory:

What exactly was Indian Territory in 1900, the year the play takes place?  It was, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica:  

"…originally ‘all of that part of the United States west of the Mississippi, and not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas.’ Never an organized territory, it was soon restricted to the present state of Oklahoma, excepting the panhandle and Greer county. The Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes were forcibly moved to this area between 1830 and 1843, and an act of June 30, 1834, set aside the land as Indian country (later known as Indian Territory)… In 1866 the western half of Indian Territory was ceded to the United States, which opened part of it to white settlers in 1889. This portion became the Territory of Oklahoma in 1890 and eventually encompassed all the lands ceded in 1866. The two territories were united and admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma in 1907."

Yes, Indian Territory is on the brink of statehood in 1900, when the play opens, but Riggs makes clear this is not something about which the prairie folks are enthusiastic. Here is Aunt Eller’s speech to her neighbors from the end of the play: “Why, the way you’re sidin’ with the federal marshall, you’d think us people out here lived in the United States! It’s jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin’ it! Jist dirty ole furriners, every last one of you!”

And her neighbors are quick to respond: “My pappy and mammy was both borned in Indian Territory! Why I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself.” “Me, too! And I c’n prove it!”

In most productions, the characters of the play are presumed to be settlers, but Riggs tells us in the dialogue that they are, in fact, “full of Indian blood” and proud of it.

So... on to the issue of the shivaree, a traditional frontier ritual involving males in the community kidnapping, harassing, and terrorizing  newlyweds on their wedding night.

The shivaree as depicted in Oklahoma! has become sanitized and civilized, so that it is little more than an extension of the wedding party… kind of like when the bridesmaids and groomsmen sneak off to tie old shoes onto the back of the newlyweds’ car. The musical has transferred the scene from the dead of night to broad daylight. Shivarees are traditionally done in the dark. In the musical, just after the ceremony,  the bride tosses her flowers over her shoulder, and then exits to change into her traveling clothes. The groom leaves to pack, and the men announce that they plan to have a shivaree. There is a vaudevillian interlude featuring a henpecked husband, and then the men return with pots and pans, making a racket. As the bride and groom exit for their travels, the men hoist the groom amiably on their shoulders… but whatever good-natured hazing they have planned is interrupted by the arrival of Judd Fry, the villain of the piece. Wielding a knife, Judd goes to attack the groom and a fight ensues that ends in Fry’s death. The shivaree has been reduced to a noisy, fraternal, daytime bon voyage party for the newlyweds.

Th shivaree in Riggs play is something completely different. It is a terrifying artifact of rape culture, and it serves to traumatize and permanently alter both protagonists in ways that are resonant with the appropriation of Indian Territory.  To understand its dramaturgical significance, it’s important to look at the origins of the custom:

“Charivari” dates all the way to medieval and early modern Europe, where it was a ritual used to punish members of a community who failed to conform to social norms, especially sexual norms. Targets of the charivari might include a widow who remarried, a wife who assaulted her husband, or a couple who failed to have children. In France, where the term originated, teenaged boys and unmarried men traditionally led the ritual, parading through the streets, shouting mocking insults, beating on pots and pans, and threatening violence. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, these males would also attack local brothels during Lent. If the victim paid his or her tormentors off with money or wine, the charivari might end without these threats being carried out.  

Apparently, until two hundred years ago, most Europeans thought the charivari was a legitimate and effective practice for curbing social deviance. It allowed for a public venting of outrage, with the opportunity for a “peaceful” resolution of a potentially explosive situation. In other words, it served as a kind of communal vent for blowing off steam… an exorcism of deviance. The victims were shamed, but then reintegrated into the community.

Here’s the thing: It’s actually a rape culture ritual empowering young males to assert their primacy and dominance in the community, and especially with regards to widows who dare to remarry, women who most likely were just attempting to defend themselves in abusive marriages where their husbands had legal rights to rape and batter, married women attempting to salvage some degree of bodily autonomy and/or freedom from compulsory serial pregnancy by practicing birth control or abstinence, and women who were prostituted. The historical roots of the 19th century Midwest shivaree were not in a playful hazing of newlyweds, but in a sanctioned, violent policing by gangs of young men over women who, in their eyes,  were not sufficiently sexually subordinate.

Even when church and secular authorities attempted to outlaw charivari, local authorities were reluctant to prosecute these gangs of young men. Possibly, they feared reprisals against their persons or their properties, as coming between young men and what they perceive as their sexual prerogatives can be dangerous. Not surprisingly, when gang rape or other forms of violent assault occurred within the context of a charivari, the sentencing would be considerably lighter than under other circumstances.

But by the mid-1600’s, some victims began to push back, lodging formal complaints against the practice. Finally, by the 1700’s, the practice began to decline—first in the cities and eventually in rural areas.

In Green Grow the Lilacs, Riggs is writing about shivaree as practiced in 1900 in Indian Territory. It’s probable that he knew people who had experienced it. In fact, in 1900, Riggs would have been two years old, and his grandparents—if not his parents—may have been witnesses, victims, and/or participants to the kind of shivaree depicted in the play.

Unwelcome statehood looms over Indian Territory in Riggs’ play, as the final stage of a relentless and brutal colonization of the West. The shivaree looms over the protagonists of the play as a final and brutal stage of initiation into their expected gender roles in patriarchal rape culture.

Significantly, the shivaree scene opens at night. It opens as the newlyweds are attempting to sneak back into the farmhouse.  Expressing the hope that nobody knows they have gotten married, they are desperate to avoid a shivaree.  Laurey, the fearful bride, asks, “… if they ketch us, whut’ll happen? Will it be bad?” Her anxious groom responds, “You know about shivorees, honey. They get purdy rough.” He then assures her that they have outsmarted their would-be tormentors, but as they exit the stage, the gang of men enter in excited anticipation of capturing their prey. Their comments reflect their envy of Curly for having scored a bride who comes with “grazin and  timber and plowed land,” as well as physical appeal. Their prurient excitement mounts as they note a light coming on in the bedroom, the lace curtains blowing, and the shadows passing in front of the window. As the men attempt to scale the walls of the house with a ladder, a drunken farmer appears and salaciously shouts, “No time to wait now. Time to git goin’. See that there bride a-glimmerin’ there in her white! Waitin’ fer you. Been standin’ there with her hair down her back and her lips a-movin’. Git next to her, brother! Gonna be high ole times, gonna be Jesus into yer heart!”

The men drag the groom Curly from the house. He is angry and yelling at the men to leave his wife alone. They agree to stop manhandling her as they bring her in. Laurey enters, “pale and shaken” in a nightgown with her hair down.

The men have leaned a ladder up the side of a haystack and they force Laurey to mount it. Then they force Curly to climb up after her, amid lascivious catcalls. When both are at the top, they pull the ladder down. The men have urged the bride to “Make out it’s a bed, why don’t you!” They begin coaching the couple to kiss and for Curly to bite her shoulder and “eat her alive.” As the men’s “orgy of delight” (Riggs' description)  increases in its frenzy, one of the men calls out “Ain’t no right to be in no nightgown!” Another man taunts the bride, “How’s it feel to be married, Laurey, sugar, all safe and proper, to sich a fine purty man with curly hair and a dimple on his chin! Whee! Got you whur I want you—” The men begin to toss straw babies up to the top of the haystack, counting them out as they mock the couple.

Suddenly Curly cries out that the haystack is on fire. He begs for the ladder to be replaced, but the men ignore him as Jeeter (the Judd Fry character in Oklahoma!) enters with a torch. Curly jumps down and a fight ensues. Laurey climbs down from the haystack in time to witness the death agony of Jeeter.  The scene ends with Laurey in shock, repeating “He laid there in the stubble, so quiet, th’ his eyes open, and his eyeballs white and starin’! He laid there in the stubble—th’ his eyes open—!

The shivaree is not gratuitous violence.  It is the pivot of the play, in which Riggs has initially depicted the community as wholesome and even puritanical, counterposed against Jeeter’s solitary indulgence in pornography. But with the shivaree scene,  the black-and-white moral world of the play is turned inside out. Under cover of darkness, the upstanding citizens of the town transform themselves into rapists and terrorists. What is Riggs telling us here? And how does it fit with the context of an indigenous territory about to become annexed as a state?

In the subsequent scene, three days later, Curly is in jail awaiting a form of prairie justice that may or may not honor his plea of self-defense. Laurey, sleepless, has been hiding in her room since the shivaree. She emerges in the lamplight, “looking very pale and changed, years older, a woman now.” Her speech indicates that she is distracted and dissociated, dwelling on the events of the shivaree:

When her aunt attempts to comfort her, Laurey insists that she can never forget what she’s seen: “Over and over! The way the men done. The things they said. Oh—why’d it have to be that-away!”

Finally, Aunt Eller admits the futility of attempting to forget. This is the pivotal speech of the play: “They’s things you cain’t get rid of—lots of things. Not if you live to be a hundred. You got to learn. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other, and say ‘Well, all right, then!’ to both of ‘em.”

And with that, and a few more speeches about how hard a woman’s life is, Laurey  admits she’s been “sich a baby” and becomes, what the playwright intends us to understand as an adult woman.  Here is her transformative speech:

Riggs was a gay Cherokee playwright, born in Indian Territory in 1899. He was a disappointment to his father, a banker and a rancher. Photographs of Riggs show him to be a man of slight build, something of an “egghead” with his glasses and premature balding. What was his experience with the hypermasculinity and heteronormativity of the West? Did he experience hazing and bullying as a rite of passage? Did he learn to “stand it” in order to become an adult?  Is he telling us something about the survival of his people, as each new generation has had to face a heritage of ongoing violence, denigration, and theft?

The musical adaptation has appropriated Riggs’ deeply disturbing play in order to generate a post-war celebration of America, and especially of American expansionism.  (Hawaii and Alaska were still territories when the musical opened.)  Male violence, which Riggs characterizes as central to the enforcement of "family values," is relegated to the perverted outsider (Jeeter), who can be easily exorcized. In fact, Oklahoma! tells a colonizer's fanciful story--personal and politcal.

Green Grow the Lilacs is an Indian play, and its significance far outweighs its role as appropriated source material for Oklahoma!  The play stands on its own merits and occupies a critical place in Native American drama, documenting a pivotal time in history. Riggs' treatment of the shivaree as a paradigm for colonization/annexation is still ahead of its time. 

Allegra’s papers are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and this is her biography from their website:

“Born and raised in Brooklyn, Allegra studied theater at Bennington College and Hunter College, graduating from New York University in 1977 with a Bachelor's degree in dramatic literature, theater history and cinema. She worked as a construction electrician to support her writing and dancing, reviewed dance, theatre and film productions as a freelance cultural journalist, and produced lesbian and feminist-oriented radio programming for WBAI from 1975-1981.

Allegra was an early member of the Jemima Writers Collective, the first black lesbian writing group in New York City. The collective grew out of the Salsa Soul Sisters, the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States, and was founded to encourage black women writers to share their creative work with each other in a supportive environment. Fellow members of Jemima included Candace Boyce, Georgia Brooks, Linda Brown, Robin Christian, Yvonne Flowers (Maua), Chirlane McCray, Irare Sabasu, and Sapphire. Allegra later joined the Gap-Toothed Girlfriends Writers Workshop.

A prolific writer of poetry, short stories and biographical essays, Allegra has been published in over thirty lesbian and feminist anthologies and numerous black and lesbian journals and magazines. In 2001, she published her first book, Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers, a collection of twelve short stories and a novella about black lesbian dancers. In addition to her writing career, Allegra is an accomplished African folklore and jazz dancer.”

In this blog, I wanted to share excerpts from her short story “Dance of the Cranes.” This was originally published in the anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction. It’s also included in Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers. “Dance of the Cranes” is about a fourteen-year-old, black, lesbian butch who is struggling with issues of sexuality and gender, and also wrestling with the homophobia she is encountering in her community of dancers. In the story, this girl, Lenjen, finally sees someone who looks like her in her African dance class—an older butch dancer named Lamban, and the two are paired together by the instructor to perform the Dance of the Crane. As the pair demonstrate their dancing, the rest of the class bears witness and celebrates the tribal/familial bond of these two outsiders, and in doing that, Lenjen’s trauma and Lamban’s estrangement are healed.

This intersecting pain of butch-phobia and homophobia, coupled with racism, misogyny, and classism were familiar themes in Allegra’s life.

Writing in the late 1990’s when the Internet was still in its infancy, Allegra was ahead of her time in naming the specific intersecting oppressions that she faced as an emergent lesbian writer of color. Her exposés are exceptional in their candor about how these oppressions shaped her experience. In 1997, her essay, “Inconspicuous Assumptions,” was published in Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write About Class. In it, she ticks off these assumptions:

“Dance of the Crane” is set in a community of black women taking West African dance classes in New York. It opens with a teen-aged, gender-non-conforming, lesbian Lenjen accompanying her mother to a class.

“Lenjen wanted her mother to understand how she drank from the current of energy that flowed from the dancing women, that they were the ones who enriched her blood. She wasn’t putting her passion on the floor for some mating game. But [her mother’s] mind was set, and Lenjen didn’t want to whine after her to explain.”

The girl has noticed an older woman at the dance classes, who has been away for a while but is just returning. She finds herself pulled toward this woman who “wore African pants and didn’t hold back from trying the men’s steps."

The older woman, Lamban, is an older version of Lenjen. I suspect that she represents the missing role model in Allegra’s own youth. In Lamban, we see the development of themes just emerging in the teenager and discover the secret behind her long absence from dance classes:

Female Anatomy Matters. And don’t let anyone tell you different.

From theories of women’s “wandering uteri” to the insistence that womanhood is a purely social construct, and  from the witchhunts to female genital mutilation, female anatomy has been under attack. This anatomy is necessary for reproduction… and patriarchy and capitalism both have special incentives for commodifying reproduction:  It produces the soldiers that either further dreams of empire or guard against it, and it produces a labor force—the larger, the cheaper.  And, of course, our bodies are commodified for the paid and unpaid rape experiences to which a huge percentage of men feel entitled.

In patriarchy, women’s bodies are an asset, a resource, the raw material out of which humans are made. We must be owned, controlled, and—above all—kept from our power. We must be raised to be dependent on males and male approval. We must learn to distrust and fear our mothers. We must be forced into competition with other women at the expense of forming powerful alliances. We must be kept ignorant about our bodies and denied access to resources that enable our control of our anatomy. We must embrace ideologies that dissociate us from our bodies and encourage us to live dissociated identities. We must use language that erases our agency and ownership and pride in our bodies. We must use a language of dissociation that will prevent our sense of an embodied self. We must not be allowed to name our oppression, and especially the modes of attack on our anatomy. We must embrace these misogynist ideologies and become the agents for policing and schooling each other.

How do men get away with this? Well, for starts, raw power. They very blatantly legislate control over our persons. Just in the last two centuries this meant we could not vote, serve on juries, own our own children, inherit, have professional careers, get formal education, get credit in our own names, own our own wages, terminate unwanted pregnancies. We could be legally raped in marriage, sexually harassed with impunity, and a husband could have his wife locked up indefinitely on the recommendation of a doctor, who didn’t even have to examine the woman personally. Raw power.

But they also do it with ideologies: The Biblical original sin of Eve, who dragged all men for eternity down into mortal sin, getting us all evicted from the Garden. Because of Eve, men have to work for a living and women have to suffer the torment of the damned in childbirth. What was her sin? Intellectual curiosity and insistence on her own agency. This stain on our lineage became the excuse for keeping us subordinated. Denying us personhood was ordained by “the Word.”  So were other forms of enslavement. Our Biblical scapegoating does not hold the same Western universality as it did a century ago, but today there is an ideology that insists that womanhood is nothing more than a social construct and that female anatomy can be acquired through surgery. This ideology imposes heavy sanctions against formation of female alliances around shared experiences and/or oppressions associated with our anatomy and its functions. Women are prohibited from speaking the truth of women’s anatomy, and any identification with that anatomy, which is to say, any sense of an embodied self, is dismissed as ignorance and bigotry on our part.

A third prong of this attempted totalitarian control over women’s anatomy is data bias. Men in the sciences operate under the assumption that “male=human.” The result of this is the skewing of data that erases half the human race. Women must move through a world that favors males. The book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez documents the high price women are forced to pay for this willful erasure of female anatomy

Let’s take a look:

SNOW REMOVAL. Yep. Snow removal. There is an order in which municipal snow removal occurs. The priority is usually the major arteries used by drivers who commute to work. These roads get plowed first, then the bus routes, then the pedestrian routes. But guess what? Women are more likely to take public transit or to walk. Part of this is our substantially lower income, but also because we are far more likely (25%)  to “trip chain,” that is to make a number of stops on our way to a destination: drop the kids at daycare, pick up the cleaning, pick up groceries, etc. And, of course, this difference is rooted in our anatomy. How? Well, 80% of women exercise our reproductive capacity, which results in almost two decades of primary caregiving as young adults, with attendant interruptions in career-building. We make about 20% less than men. And we constitute a sizable majority of the poor and working poor. Not surprisingly, women comprise 69% of the snow injuries from falling on uncleared streets and sidewalks. Is this just theory? No. In cities where bus routes and sidewalks are cleared first, women’s injuries go down. But… the funding priority still remains commuter roads, not public transit.

TOILETS. Studies show that converting men’s and women’s bathrooms to “gender neutral,” with the men’s room retaining urinals, results in men using both bathrooms and women using only the former women’s room. Which means our lines will be even longer. The 50/50 law that mandates equal floor space for men’s and women’s facilities fails to take into account that women use cubicles exclusively, where men use urinals, greatly increasing the number of men who can use the facilities at the same time. And bathroom safety for women and children is a huge issue. WaterAid reports that women and girls around the world spend 97 billion hours a year seeking safe places to relieve themselves. Because of our anatomy and social sanctions, we cannot “go anywhere” when we need to urinate. And, of course, there is rape. Women often will avoid using public bathrooms after dark, for fear of being ambushed and assaulted. Public bathrooms around the world are notorious sites for harassment. To manage this, women often don’t drink enough water, risking dehydration and heat illness. Invisible Women has an entire chapter titled “Gender Neutral with Urinals.” It’s huge.

I really set out to summarize the book, but the examples run into the hundreds, and I am, honestly, overwhelmed. The data bias where the data is not disaggregated by sex is pervasive, and the consequences for women are disastrous. Take crash-test dummies. Yep, modeled on the average male body. But women have different muscle-mass distribution, lower bone density, differences in vertebrae spacing. And don’t even get me started on seat belts and pregnant women. We sway differently. And yes, Female Anatomy Matters. We are 17% more likely to die in car crashes.

Medicine… where to begin? That our heart attack symptoms are radically different from those of men, and for this reason thousands of women, not recognizing them in time to seek emergency services, are dead. Or the fact that colon cancer occurs higher up the colon in women, rendering the do-it-yourself, at-home screening kits less effective for women. Are we told this when considering alternatives to colonoscopies? No. Again, more female fatalities.

I actually did some crowdsourcing for examples of medical misogyny and the examples were too numerous to include. But drug testing has historically been conducted on males, resulting in the horrors of birth defects from thalidomide use by pregnant women. The horror here is that pregnant women were being specifically targeted, because thalidomide was a sedative promoted for use in third trimester sleep disorders. And ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome) is an autoimmune disorder that affects females more than males. Needless to say, it has been treated as psychosomatic: the “lazy/crazy disease.” Also Female Anatomy Matters with Lyme disease. Women tend to have more atypical rashes from the tick bites, resulting in missed or misdiagnoses. Commercial Lyme testing favors men over women, because men have more positive ELISA tests and more positive Western blots.

Mental health? Volumes have been written on this subject. Birth control and birthing practices? Ditto. Menopause and aging? Of course.  

I’m really not doing this subject justice. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, y’all. It just might save your life.

The point I want to make, as a lesbian and as a feminist, is this: Our LGBT community, in it’s admirable intention to make the world more tolerant, inclusive, and equal has overreached with ideologies that lend themselves to this “Invisible Women” oppression. In a rush to validate trans identities, we have become guilty of contributing to the disrespect toward and diminution of the significance of female anatomy. Disappearing the reality, the historical oppression, and the lived experience of female anatomy will not pave any kind of path forward toward acceptance and equality. Female Anatomy Matters is the way. This does not mean that trans identities and anatomies don’t matter. In fact, understanding why and how Female Anatomy Matters is a touchstone for liberation for all. 

 “The story of [American] women’s suffrage has been told in the same fashion for 100 years: it is familiar, repetitive, and overwhelmingly white."--from press release.

BUT... no more! There is a new history book that has just been published, and it is GLORIOUS! 

Seriously. This book is a terrific read, a complete page-turner. I could barely put it down. The only reason I would put it down was that it was 500 pages long, and, periodically, I actually had to eat and sleep. I was really sad to see it end, even if it did mean we finally got the vote.

So how did Sally Roesch Wagner turn the history of women’s suffrage into the best beach read of the summer?  I’ll let her answer:
 
“I was inspired by nearly 50 years of learning from my students. They taught me what stories they shared with their friends; what information impacted and empowered them; what made them angry; and, most importantly, what they had never been told.”
 
She gives the reader what she wants!  And she also does not give her what she doesn’t want:
 
“I also had to avoid the impulse to replace the ‘great-men-great-wars’ narrative with a ‘great-women' one—not a task for the faint-hearted or the perfectionist.”
 
Sally Roesch Wagner has widened the lens of Suffrage history and refocused the narrative to include the women of color whose presence has always informed the struggle. She does not minimize or excuse the racism of white women, and this is one of the reasons why the book is such a page-turner: The divisions, the issues, the strategies of appeasement vs. radical action are heart-poundingly relevant to the divisions, issues and strategies of today. The major players find their counterparts in today’s Black Lives Matter and across the spectrum of Congressional leadership. In the words of Susan B. Anthony: “Every generation of converts [to feminism] threshes over the same old straw.”

The book is packed with fascinating, complicated, passionate, flawed women practicing radical and visionary politics—and also engaging in abysmal, good-old-white-boy deals-with-the-devil. Roesch shows us the backroom trades, the rhetoric, the scandals, the pernicious impact of mixing religion with politics, and the cautionary divisions that historians have attempted to hide.
 
And the men! Many women have been caught off-guard by the recent tsunami of misogyny that appears to have arisen from nowhere.  Well, it wasn’t “from nowhere” at all! The Women’s Suffrage Movement plunges us deep below the surface of this present wave to experience the historical, bottomless ocean of men’s hatred of women and compulsion to dominate every single aspect of our lives. There are no Sith or Terran Empires, no Necrons, Tyranids, Weeping Angels or other sci-fi villains who can compare with the fiendish forces of white men arrayed against women, and especially against women of color, in the struggle for women’s liberation.
 
So how does this book work?

It works because it is so user-friendly. Wagner pulls us in with her first two “I-did-not-see-that-coming” chapters: “Women Voted Before the United States Was Formed” and “Women Organized Before Seneca Falls.”
 
Just one example. There was an informal meeting of five women on Sunday, July 9, 1848 in Waterloo, New York. History books might tells us that this was where the idea for the first women’s rights convention was birthed. *yawn*
 
Wagner puts us in the room with the women. Four of them had just come from a Quaker meeting. Possibly they decided to meet in the home of the woman with the two-week-old baby, because she was still nursing. A newcomer to the meeting was a mother of five children who lived at the end of a dead-end road, two miles from her nearest neighbor, with an often-absent husband. The four Quaker women all lived in homes that were on the Underground Railroad. Even as they sat there sipping, they were breaking the law. One of these abolitionist activists had traveled all the way to London to attend an abolitionist convention, only to discover they would not seat her because she was female. WOMEN WITH ISSUES.
 
And… one of the women had just gotten home from a month-long visit with the Seneca Nation near the Pennsylvania border, as these indigenous people debated whether or not to abandon their traditional clan-based government and replace it with with a US election system. It was not lost on her that the indigenous women had more voice, dignity, and respect under their own form of government. As they sit in the room with the new-born and her mother, they most likely discussed how the Haudenosaunee people had a visionary provision that all treaties had to be approved by three fourths of all the mothers in the nation.  This provision appears to me to be an acknowledgement of the unique and very physical connection and investment that mothers have with their offspring, connection and investment that incentivizes them to priorize long-term consequences with regards to dispensation of land. And here we are today where female biology is not just considered irrelevant, but taboo to reference!  I often have wished that our government had a Cabinet position, “Secretary of Long-Term Consequences” from the Department of the Future. The Haudenosaunee were on it a thousand years ago.

ANYWAY… The old history books would simply reel off the five names. Wagner puts us in the room with all of those multicultural, multi-generational, trans-European, multi-issue cross-currents swirling around our heads. THAT’s how it’s done, women. Personal frustrations, political indignities, humble acknowledgement that indigenous people have more evolved systems of government, and white women putting their freedom on the line for the liberation of people of color. Given a context like that, almost anything could be the flashpoint for revolution.
 
So then, after these eye-opening chapters, Wagner devotes each chapter to a decade, from the 1850’s up to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally passed. Bonus: At the end of each chapter, Wagner includes riveting, primary-source samples of speeches, reports, editorials and other documents from that decade. Why? As Wagner says, “Primary sources take us onto the field where we watch the action, listen to the players, and figure out for ourselves what is going on.”
 
One of my favorite examples of the value of primary resources are the editorials debating dress reform. There is an obnoxious editorial by a master mansplainer, informing Suffrage women that they are forfeiting their right to all respect and credibility in his eyes (oh, no!), because they have abandoned wearing the Bloomer costume. He, of course, never wore anything in his life that would cause threatening mobs of people to follow him down the street, to throw horse manure all over him, and to subject him to endless catcalls and threats of rape everywhere he went. Elizabeth Cady Stanton cleans his clock quite handily and I savored every word she wrote.

Well… I don’t want to give too many spoilers… but in terms of relevance, there is domestic worker Hester Vaughan who either miscarried or aborted a child borne of rape, and who was given the death penalty. What saved her?  Women who organized.
 
There is a 19th century #MeToo moment when Victoria Woodhull, slut-shamed as a "Free Love" advocate, calls out the womanizing preacher Henry Ward Beecher on his adulterous relations with a married parishioner.
 
There is Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, rising to the podium and throwing out the most radical challenge of her career: making the same demands of religion that the movement has made of the State. She is an utter badass and her speech is a complete barn burner. And I am sure that half the women who had baked the cake and put up the party decorations where offended as hell. Because that's how it's done when you are eighty.
 
There is Alice Paul, radicalized by the militant Suffragettes in England, who wants to have a ton of parades and protests. The by-then conservative movement says, “Fine, sweetie. Just raise your own money, because we won’t give you any.” She does, and she hosts rallies and protests that are wildly, insanely successful in terms of attendance and PR… so they kick her out of the organization. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I am thinking of you so hard.
 
There is the “you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up” melodrama of the Tennessee vote to ratify the 19th amendment. It’s the final state vote that will make it law, and it comes right down to the wire, with a senator racing the clock to cast the vote and still make it home to attend the dying of his child. He’s escorted there by the women, who then have to race back to get him. He jumps from a moving train… Dirty tricks, last minute reversals, women staying one step ahead of their enemies. Really, someone needs to make a film.

One of the strongest through-lines of the book is white women’s betrayal of women of color in the movement. The pivotal moment happened in a midnight session of a national conference. It happened with a non-representational body of that organization. It was a dirty trick. But the groundwork for the division had been laid by complex grids of historical, social, and political matrices. 
 
There had been the “divide and conquer” tactics of the 14th amendment. Ostensibly granting citizenship to former slaves, the amendment introduces the word “male” into the Constitution... as a qualifier for voting rights. Should the Suffrage Movement oppose this amendment, so critical to spelling out citizens' rights to African Americans, if it was going to come at the expense of women's suffrage rights... including women of color?  Not surprisingly, women of color in the movement had a very different perspective from many of the white women. 

And then there was the temperance movement. Their organization had twice the membership of all the suffrage parties combined. Why? As Lucy Stone put it, “It’s so much easier to to see a drunkard than it is to see a principle.” The temperance movement has been framed today as a movement made up of Miss Grundy-type Puritanical school marms. In fact, in an era when women had almost no rights, it was a movement to stem domestic violence and especially rape. It was a movement filled with battered women and victims of sexual abuse, including incest. And it was a deeply religious movement, where women were reaching for a higher power than their human lords and masters, to legitimize their claims.

Susan B. Anthony wanted their numbers, and she was willing to do whatever was necessary to join forces with the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The price was an unholy alliance with organized, conservative, deeply racist religion.

And, finally, there was an appalling level of pandering to the racism of the Southern states. Women's suffrage was sold to them as a way to counter the rising political voice of African American men in the South.
 
In a conversation with Sally Roesch Wagner, she is asked, “What do you think are the most important takeaways from the women’s suffrage movement for social justice movements of today?”
 
Here is her answer:
 
“Eschew expediency. I’d like to see that on a big poster on every activist’s wall, and especially on the wall of organizations. When you abandon principle in order to win, like the later suffragists did, you may indeed win the battle, but you lose the war for justice. You create a legacy of division that continues for centuries.”
 
This is the best reason of all the many reasons to buy and read and treasure this delightful, intrepid, RELEVANT, page-turning, truth-telling book. It offers clarity and vision for our future. Eschew expediency right now and go out and get it.

I’m just going to put this right out there:  I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.
 
I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.
 
So why did I feel so differently about the musical?  To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.
 
Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood.  And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.
 
Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.
 
Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.
 
So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical,  in a nutshell:  The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.
 
In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of  creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.
 
In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is,  “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.
 
I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.
 
Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him?  Would that have changed your experience of the play?
 
I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.
 
When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to  revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.
 
Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario:  At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.
 
She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”
 
And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.
 
And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.”  They sing about the  time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions. 
 
The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!”  This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes.  Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.
 
Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.
 
Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not.  For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world.  The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.
 
In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?
 
We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.
 
Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prize-winning classic, is headed to Broadway… or, at least, it was headed for Broadway.
 
The author’s estate has just filed a lawsuit against the producer, Scott Rudin. At issue is his adaptation for stage. The estate attorney claims that it deviates too much from the novel and that this is a violation of their contract, which specifies that they shall not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel nor alter its characters.”
 
As a playwright, I find this case fascinating. As a lesbian, I think that both sides are overlooking the obvious.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, was considered radical in its day. The protagonist, Atticus Finch, is a white attorney who stands up to the prejudice in his small Alabama town, defending an African American man who has been falsely accused of rape by a white woman.

Today, however, the book is seen—rightfully—as exemplifying the racist trope of the Great White Savior.  In a silent tribute to their white champion, they rise spontaneously as Atticus leaves the courtroom. His head bowed in defeat, he neither sees nor acknowledges them.
 
This was the book that Harper Lee wrote. It is an artifact of its time. Although African American authors were writing and publishing, the white-dominated mainstream market was not ready to identify with their perspectives. Lee’s book was an immediate bestseller. It’s my opinion that the popular embrace of the book is contingent on the fact that Atticus loses his case and that the defendant is killed in attempting to escape. Like the trope of the dead lesbian, this reification of the status quo invites self-satisfied expressions of compassion from mainstream readers who are spared the more difficult work of embracing an ending that signals social change.
 
Today the Great White Savior narrative is widely acknowledged as offensive, and one not likely to repay the investment that goes into mounting a Broadway production. This is why, in this dramatic adaptation by Aaron Sorkin, Atticus is portrayed at the outset as a man in denial about the racism of his town—an apologist for prejudice, unwilling to believe that an innocent man can be found guilty.  The role of Calpurnia, the African American woman who cooks for the Finch family, has been rewritten as the agent for Atticus’ awakening. Through a series of confrontations with her employer, she manages to win over the white attorney, mentoring him into the reality of Southern rural racism in 1936. By the end of the play, he has become the Atticus with whom we are familiar, the righteous hero standing against the masses for social justice… but he owes it all to a woman of color.

Actor/musician Evadne Bryan-Perkins notes that this rewrite swaps one racist trope for another--that of the "Magical Negro." This trope relies on a supporting stock character coming to the aid of the white protagonists, helping them discern the error of their ways. (This term was popularized by African American film director Spike Lee in 2001, during his lecture tour of universities, where he was criticizing the unrealistic and stereotyped depictions of African American men in Hollywood cinema.)

But Rudin, the producer, is not just responding to the datedness of the Great White Savior narrative. He also knows his dramaturgy. In theatre, the main character needs to have what is called a “narrative arc.” The protagonist must go on a journey of transformation, starting out at Point A and, two hours later, ending up—ideally—at Point Z. (A dramatic trajectory from Point A to Point B is not likely to carry a play with the gravitas of To Kill a Mockingbird.) The Atticus of the book, tried as he is by circumstances, nevertheless begins with sterling character and social conscience and ends in the same state of  grace. He goes from Point A to Point A.
 
As a playwright, I sympathize with the producer.  He wants a play that is going to work. However, as a playwright who is zealous about her own copyright protections, I have to side with the Harper Lee estate: It is clear that, in giving Atticus a narrative arc, the producer has deviated substantially from the character in the book. In rewriting the role of Calpurnia to be a major voice in the play, the producer has essentially created a new character.

Scout has a huge dramatic arc. In fact, Scout’s coming-to-consciousness about the socials evils of the adult world is the point of the book. She goes from being a naive child who has absorbed the prejudices of her peers, to someone who can break away, incorporating perspectives of the under-represented and standing with the outsiders of the world. Scout watches the trial, literally, from the colored section of the segregated courtroom. At the end of the book, she has traveled from fear of a developmentally disabled neighbor, to recognizing him as an ally and friend.
 
Why not make Scout the central figure in the Broadway show?  In the book, she is six, but she was older in the film. If the play is refracted through the adoring eyes of a child, wouldn't that explain her idealized experience of her father? In the book, Scout accompanies Calpurnia to a Black church, where she has a massive awakening as she sees Calpurnia's transformation of status among members of her own community. No need to violate the contract. Just allow the woman the full and radical context of that scene.

Can a Broadway audience identify with a gender-non-conforming little girl. Why not?  It wouldn’t be the first time. Member of the Wedding, another best-seller by a Southern lesbian author, was adapted for Broadway. It opened in 1950 and ran for more than five hundred performances. A historic production, the cast included Ethel Waters and a young Julie Harris. What is significant here is that the author adapted the book herself, and the character of the tomboy, Frankie, remains as central and unaltered on the stage as she was in the book. 
 
Yes, there will be a problem if Aaron Sorkin stays on to attempt a Scout-centric adaptation. Sorkin’s writing credits include the television series The West Wing, and a roster of tough-talking, political films including A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. He has already been questioned about his ability to write dialogue for Harper Lee’s juvenile characters. Asked if they will be expected to “speak Sorkin,” he responded, "Well, they're gonna have to, because I didn't write their language like they were children."
 
As a solution to this author-producer deadlock, I would like to put my name forward as an alternative writer. My credentials include thirty years of creating and performing lesbian roles for the stage, including more than a dozen gender-non-conforming roles for little girls. I invite Mr. Rudin to the webpage for my Butch Visibility Project. I really believe this might work.