I met lesbian singer-songwriter Jamie Anderson around 1989. She was playing at a house concert in Southern Oregon. I am sure she thought I was a complete asshole.

The truth was I was scared to death. I had just come out, both as a lesbian and as an artist, and I was terrified.

In moving to Southern Oregon, I felt I was infiltrating the Big Girls’ Club of fiercely independent, wildly creative, and deeply political 1980's lesbians.  And here was Jamie, younger than myself by several years… and already "out" longer and traveling around the country alone, making money off her art. She was obviously one of the Big Girls, and I was completely intimidated.

Fast forward twenty-five years, and I am reading Jamie’s memoir Drive All Night. It is an astounding testament of passion: passion for lesbian culture and community, passion for music, and—let it be said—passion for driving, sometimes all night. 

And, of course, there are the vehicles. This woman has driven herself and her guitar 500,000 miles, mostly solo.  That’s a HALF A MILLION MILES! Yeah, literally, to the moon and back again. And she only went through four pickup trucks to do it. I think my favorite truck story was the one about how she was desperate enough to tape a crystal to the top of her air filter… with the point facing forward. Hate to think what might have happened had it been facing backwards.

And then there are the motels. Here’s a little jewel:

"At another hotel, I was sleeping soundly after a long day of driving when at midnight the people in the next room awakened me. A young kid was singing loudly out of tune as the adults laughed. I banged on the wall to no avail. When I got up at six a.m. the next morning, I phoned them. I’m not proud of my behavior, but it sure felt good to hear that groggy “Hello?” on the other end of the line. I should have sung for them. At least it would have been in tune."

So many stories… stalking the Shakers, auditioning for Canada’s Got Talent, singing to the stranded in airports, the square tires of Alaska, bras and bellydancing...

Jamie Anderson, you intimidated me twenty-five years ago, but now you positively scare the crap out of me. You are a complete badass. Oh, and a Big Lesbo.

Get this book. Read it. We are not worthy.

“What in the ever loving hell kept me from blowing my brains out?”

This was the question that Judith Witherow asked when she was reviewing the personal essays that make up her memoir Strong Enough to Bend. And her answer was "love." She understood that no one could love her partner Sue or her sons with the kind of passion she carries in her body. After reading her book, I would conclude that she also carries that unique passion to her readers. She wants us to heal with her. She wants us to understand. To that end, she shares stories of great suffering and great fortitude.

Witherow defines herself as a “poor, mixed-blood Native American Indian raised in the Northern Appalachians.” She is also a lesbian living with multiple sclerosis and lupus.  She is careful to forge the links between the oppressions in her life: The illnesses that come from drinking the polluted water that flowed downstream from mountains strip-mined for coal, her prospects in life  limited by an educational system that tracked poorer children into lower level classes in spite of their high grades.

Over and over, Witherow adjusts the lens of the reader to bring the reality of poverty into focus. Patiently, she explains why her beloved mother could never meet the middle-class criteria for a “mother of the year” award. She details the multiple jobs that she and her siblings worked from as early as she can remember, giving the lie to the belief that poor people are lazy.  The reality of our health care system is brought home in the terrible story of her sister’s death, being denied care in the hospitals that could have saved her life because she lacked insurance.

"The last night of my marriage still seems like some other woman lived through it. Him sitting on the bed slapping a buck knife against his leg. Me pinned down by the blankets and the fear in my gut. 'I don’t want to kill you but I have to.'”

Her story of escape to the arms of the woman who would become her life-partner is riveting. And in this second section of the book, about her lesbianism, Witherow’s earlier themes return like a leitmotif: how class differences must be negotiated with her partner, and how her Native American background interfaced with an emerging butch identity. 

"Bottom line, whatever is affecting you needs a label."

The third section of the book is about the author’s health… and again, she makes sure the reader understands the ways in which misogyny, racism, and poverty inform the narrative. There are misdiagnoses, medical malpractice, and the mysterious experimental treatments she underwent as a child… because they were free. Witherow, warrior woman, does her own research and her own networking about her illnesses. She notes, in an essay about a group therapy session, “The knowledge I crave can only come from the other ‘chosen ones.’”  And she also notes, “Whenever ‘it strikes women more often’ is heard, the battle for funding automatically begins.” This is a tough section to read, but as Witherow notes the real shame she feels is toward a country that spends more on war than on research for saving lives.

Strong Enough to Bend ends with feminism. Witherow makes connections between her past activism and the issues confronting women today. One of the most poignant essays tells of an Equal Rights Amendment protest that coincided with a march of Native American activists walking from California to Washington. The Native American activists began to chant “Bitches with Riches Getting More Rights for Whites,” and Witherow was called upon to mediate with “her people.”

There is so much between the covers of this book, and I understand it’s still only a tiny percentage of the intersecting oppressions and overlapping experiences in Witherow’s life. One of the many take-aways from this powerful memoir is a stanza from one of her poems titled “Losin’ Our Origin:”

"'If you would just think
more positively your
life would be better.
Smile more. Expect less.
Life is crap because
your outlook created it.'

Reservations rack and reel with this gem."

Bear with me... I'm going to take a few paragraphs to work up to my central theme...

As a marginalized writer of lesbian-feminist plays, I used to wonder what it would be like if one of my plays achieved first-class production (which is the industry lingo for “Broadway-level”).  My question was answered when a Brazilian film and television star ran across a collection of my plays in a bookstore near Union Square, read my play about Joan of Arc, and decided to produce and star in it. In Brazil, of course. First-class production!

A word about the play: It was a one-woman show dealing with Joan of Arc as a teenaged, lesbian, butch runaway who was returning from the grave with a searing radical feminist critique of her experiences and those responsible for them. She is returning with a mission to warn contemporary women that they are facing the same enemies and that they need to understand this and to fight.

In other words, an unlikely candidate for first-class production.

But, you know what? The show was the top-selling commercial production of the season in both São Paulo and Rio. And then it went on to tour all the other major cities in Brazil. It was a smash hit.

Is Brazil a nation of lesbian feminists? What could possibly explain this?

Well… For starts, this one-woman show featured four really beefy, macho men. They rode motorcycles onto the stage, making a lot of noise, but no “lines” per se. This enabled the producer to designate them “scenic elements,” not added characters… which would have been a violation of my contract.

These four Hell’s Angels would circle Joan, maul her, cradle her, drive her on the back of their motorcycles…  In other words, come constantly between her and the audience. And the butch thing was gone, completely. Joan wore enough eye makeup to put Theda Bara to shame, and she was dressed in tights.

And then there was the rape.

Joan was raped in her prison cell in a situation that was clearly engineered to make her prefer death to life. And it worked. She recanted her recantation and was burned at the stake.

Now, lots of playwrights have written about Joan.. Bernard Shaw, Jean Anouihl, Eva Le Gallienne... and they end at the stake. I didn’t want to do that. In my play she is returning from the dead. The stake is in the past. We are looking to the future. I wanted to respect and protect the survivors in my audience who did not need to have their trauma memories restimulated. I did not want to write a play where, once again, the boys win.

In the Brazilian production, there was no such sensitivity. The four “scenic elements” stripped down to full frontal nudity and performed the assault on the stage. They raped my character. They raped my play. The play I had crafted to empower and inspire survivors became one more traumatic encounter reinforcing the helplessness of women, always outnumbered by the machine of patriarchy.

And they screwed me financially. Of course. It took more than three years to recover my royalty, and the amount was not commensurate with the success of the work.

Why am I telling you this in an article about Saving Mr. Banks?

Because I am a lesbian writer whose beloved lesbian protagonist was hideously mangled by the machinery of patriarchal theatre, and I was angry about that. Really, really angry. Still am, because the pain of that experience never goes away. And I believe that PL Travers was a lesbian writer whose beloved lesbian protagonist was hideously mangled by the machinery of patriarchal Hollywood, and that she was angry about that. Really, really angry. And now the world is invited to come and mock this thoroughly unpleasant woman.

I come to celebrate her.

Was PL Travers a lesbian?  Duh.

Some insist that she was bisexual, but the evidence for that is very sketchy. Aggressively pursuing publication, Travers went to Dublin to meet the editor Æ (aka George Russell), who had sent her an encouraging letter about her poems. He was married and twice her age, with a penchant for encouraging young writers. Travers’ biographer characterizes their friendship as “filial, intellectual, and marked by romantic gestures.” In other words, he flirted. But more to the point, he insisted that she get together with Madge Burnand. She did indeed get together with Madge, moved in with her, wrote the first Mary Poppins book in a cottage with her, and continued to live with her for ten years in a relationship that her biographer characterizes as “intense.” Duh.

Æ would also introduce Travers to the teachings of Gurdjieff, a charismatic and influential spiritual teacher. Travers’ involvement with the community of Gurdjieff’s followers in the 1930’s should be of special interest to lesbian scholars. In spite of Gurdjieff’s professed advocacy of rigid gender roles, he created a women-only group in the 1920’s known as “The Rope.” The members of this group were all strong, successful women—mostly lesbian—who did not subscribe to traditional gender roles. One of these women, Jessie Orage, became lovers with Travers. Orage had scandalized the Gurdjieff community a decade earlier by wearing men’s trousers and smoking cigarettes. She documents the affair with Travers in the pages of her diary.

So what about this Mary Poppins? Was she a lesbian? Well, I will argue—as did Travers—that heterosexual romance was not for her. Travers had first introduced the character in 1926, when she wrote a series of stories about children and their dreams. This collection became the basis for the first Mary Poppins book. On November 13, 1926, the Christchurch Sun published “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” a short story about Mary Poppins’ day off with her boyfriend Bert.

Eight years later, Travers published the first Mary Poppins book, and the most significant change between the 1926 version of the famous nanny and the 1934 one, had to do with Mary Poppins’ relationships with men. Bert is no longer a boyfriend, but a buddy… or, more accurately, a groupie. Mary Poppins has become what one writer calls “untouchable and distant,” but I would use the word “exalted.” She is morphing into archetypal forms. Æ suggested the goddess of destruction and empowerment, Kali—and Travers did not disagree. By 1934, the proper nanny of her earlier stories had begun to supercede the ineffectual mother Mrs. Banks. No one except Mr. Banks, according to Travers, could understand her.

I believe what we are dealing with here is a lesbian butch. A guardian/ warrior archetype who combines military discipline with a Gurdjieffian mysticism that enables her to ascend to the stars and commune with the animals. A lesbian butch who cannot identify with a haplessly subordinate mother-figure and who identifies more solidly with the bread-winning father who must brave the rigors of a collapsing financial world.

Disney, by the way, turned Mrs. Banks into a "Suffragette," because in his mind, this was synonymous with bad mothering. PL Travers, no doubt aware of the heavy lesbian butch presence among the ranks of women militating for equal rights, was baffled and unhappy with his choice. Truly, her flighty and uber-feminine Mrs. Banks would have been terrified by the Suffragists.

But back to Mary Poppins. I know this archetype. I have been working with lesbian archetypes in my writing for thirty years. I find them in the writings of other lesbians, in their biographies, in our spiritual traditions and rituals, and in the lives of the women I love. And they are completely invisible—censored—in mainstream culture. Where they do surface, they are wildly misinterpreted, ridiculed, or demonized. As is the character of PL Travers in Saving Mr. Banks. Which is more like "Saving Mr. Disney."

Disney comes off like “Father Knows Best” in the film, but, in fact, he was a heavy-handed union-buster who, according to documents that surfaced under the Freedom of Information Act, served from 1940 until his death in 1966 as a secret informer (read “spy”) for the FBI.

And he was a misogynist, a fact reflected in his hiring practices...  as well as his need to ridicule the movement for women's suffrage.The letter below spells out the Disney Studio's  policy:  "Women do not do any of the creative work..."

And then there was the animation. When Travers signed her agreement, she never dreamed that Disney would be sneaking animation into a film with live actors. Technically, it was not an animated film. He was sticking to the letter of the agreement, but not the spirit. The animated dance sequence took up a remarkable fifteen minutes of screen time. Was he just rubbing it in?

Not surprisingly Travers raised hell.

No, Disney did not invite her to the opening. This was a professional insult. Resourceful dyke that she was, she shamed another Disney executive into sending her an invitation. Yes, she wept at the premiere, but they were tears of frustration and disappointment. The animation! At the after-party she confronted Disney. According to Richard Sherman, who co-wrote the music, she declared in a loud voice, “Well. The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney looked at her coolly and replied, “Pamela, the ship has sailed.” (She had asked him to call her Mrs. Travers.)

Most of the world would now equate Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews’ characterization. Travers' radical revisioning of parenting outside the box of traditional gender roles had been domesticated. And even the Suffragists had been trashed. Mr. Banks was saved. Mrs. Banks was saved. Bert and Mary were saved. And the lesbians were safely back in the closet, banished to a shadow world apart from the nuclear family and disallowed contact with the children.

I feel for Travers. I feel for her pain in fighting so hard for the real Mary Poppins, but lacking a language and a literature of archetypes to which she could point and say, “No, this is not that! Here is the frame of reference!” But that literature was as censored as her identity. She insisted on being called Mrs. Travers, but there was no husband. There never had been. "Travers" was her father’s first name. How could “Mrs. Travers” possibly, in 1960,  advocate for all of the attributes, affinities, mythological referents that belong to our culture?

Short answer: She couldn’t. But she did not pretend to be happy. She did not go gently into the heterotopia of Disneyland. She raised as much hell as she could, but she was outflanked, outmaneuvered, and outnumbered by the strike-breaking, Red-baiting, rabid McCarthy-ite spy who was dictating the so-called family values that would enshrine the patriarch and ensure the compliance of women.

Italian feminst Carla Lonzi has said, "Men use myth; women don’t have sufficient personal resources to create it. Women who have tried to do so by themselves have endured such stress that their lives have been shortened by it." But Travers beat the odds, living to be nearly a hundred. I submit that her fighting spirit, the very spirit so vilified in the movie, had a great deal to do with her longevity. Well-behaved women rarely make centenarians.

Saving Mr. Banks is a witch-burning. Make no mistake about that. Give me a film company and I will show you a film about a powerful, visionary, immanently reasonable lesbian fighting off an evil army of propagandists who are hell-bent on breaking the spirit of one of the greatest lesbian archetypes ever set on paper… a liberator of children, a goddess to the natural world, a harbinger of a new order in the wake of the collapse of capitalism. I invite you to imagine and inhabit that scenario, because, sisters, I promise you that it is the real story.


Like this blog? You'll probably enjoy my blog  "Stealing the Herd" and the Butch Visibility Project.

Thinking about my craft…

I just finished a wonderful book, The Lost Carving by David Esterly. The author is a woodcarver who specializes in ornamental fruits and flowers. He was commissioned to replace some remarkable work by eighteenth-century carver Grinling Gibbons that was destroyed in a fire at Hampton Court. The author takes us on a saunter into another era, without losing sight of the contemporary political skirmishes surrounding British heritage restoration work (being done by an American!)… along with meditations on the art of woodcarving, as well as bucolic commentary on the seasons in his rural workshop.

But the reason why I am writing about David Esterly’s book is that it set me to thinking about my own craft. The subtitle is “A Journey to the Heart of Making,” and I found myself applying many of his observations to my own work as a playwright.

“I’ve discovered the principle of dramatic tension that’s at the heart of the act of woodcarving.” He is talking about the way he holds the tools. The rear hand provides the propulsion, while the front hand resists the momentum. This results in precision and power.

In my playwriting, that propulsion is always the personal compulsion to tell a story that in some way answers a need of my own: the reclamation of the history of my lesbian foremothers that I so desperately need, the validation of other incest survivors who bear witness, the heroines who have dared to challenge the patriarchy. What is it that checks this evangelical or propagandistic momentum?  The rigid format required for telling a good story on the stage. The scenes that open and close the acts, the building of suspense and momentum, the deft handling of exposition (a major challenge with historical material), the subplots, the comic relief, and so on. And out of that tension, enhanced focus, economy of dialogue…  precision.

Esterly discovered something else. That there is third dynamic in play: The heel of the restraining hand must rest on a stable surface. Ah ha. The audience. The audience grounds the passion of the artist and the cleverness of the craftswoman. Always the audience. What do they see? How long can they sit? Can they tolerate a shock or will it alienate them? What are the limits of their “suspension of disbelief.”  In the words of Esterly, “It’s a beginner’s error that you can operate while floating above the world, in some ether of strength and desire and inspiration.” In fact, I may be mistaken about the audience being the grounding. Perhaps, for the playwright, the heel of our metaphorical hand rests, for better or worse, on box office revenue.

“These days I tell anyone who’ll listen that if you carve a leaf with holographic accuracy it looks like a wooden leaf. You need to introduce a series of selective exaggerations, which acknowledge the wood medium and render the leaf in that new language.”  Exactly. Yes, in real life, people do mumble, and they do stumble, and they certainly do not face in one direction for the whole of their time on earth. “Selective exaggerations.” Like projecting one’s voice to the back wall of a 500-seat house, even when whispering. Yes, this is a play. This is not real life. What is the point of a real whisper if the audience can’t hear it? “Selective exaggerations.” The high points. That was what Aristotle was after with his twenty-four-hour rule. Compression. Or as Samuel Goldwyn Mayer said, “Start with an earthquake and build from there.” Back to Esterly again: “Hyperbole in the service of naturalism.” His conclusion: Don’t copy nature; copy art. Indeed.

And along similar lines:  “If the viewer is truly deceived, then the effect of the art object is no different from that of the actual object.” He was talking about painting wood carvings to simulate the real thing. And then he goes on to describe something called the “valley effect.” A Japanese scientist found that the closer he designed robots to resemble humans, the more repellent people found them. (The “valley” is the dip in acceptance levels.) Esterly notes, “Simulacra are disturbing. We want to know where we stand with a thing. We want the terms to be clear.”

I  have always felt that it is important to visibly pull one’s punches in staged violence. I want the audience to stay in the world of the play. If the violence appears too real, they come out of the play to wonder if the actor is hurt or, if not, then they want to know why not. Worse, some audience members are triggered into a post-traumatic stress response. At that point, they aren’t even in the theatre in real time and space, much less the world of the play!

And I feel the same way about sex in the theatre. If the actors are going at it, the audience becomes curious about how they deal with it every night. If the actress is taking all her clothing off, the audience again leaves the world of the play to speculate about the performer and her boundaries. Is she dissociating? Has the production resulted in her being stalked? Is she cold? Simulacra are disturbing. And, as Esterly notes, “We want reassuring differences.” In film, these are not necessary, because we are looking at dots on a screen, projections of a thing that happened often a long time ago and in another location. Not so for live theatre. We need those reassuring differences.

“Structural weakness thereby produces formal opulence.” Esterly is talking about the stems of flowers… too delicate in woodcarving to support the head of a flower. The solution? Doubling or tripling the stems, or else anchoring the flower to half-hidden leaves or flowers below them. In the work of Grinling Gibbons, this translates to an abundance of cascading flowers, fruit, braids and sheaves.

The structural weakness of theatre as a medium? The platform, the one-hundred-and-twenty minutes. The need for a break after sixty minutes. These are the fragile stems upon which the playwright hopes to hang her weighty themes and life-changing drama. And she does it by exquisite compression, in both time and space. She has a captive audience, as opposed to a novelist or even, these days, a viewer of film, who can rent the DVD at home. Those audiences can set the book down or hit pause if they need a bathroom break. The playwright has to respect the captive nature of her audience. She has to work to hold interest and be responsive to the needs. The break must either be comic relief, or an intermission. The structural weakness of theatre produces the formal opulence of compelling dramatic content and masterful storytelling.

“Somewhere I read of a study that identified not optimism or happiness or serenity or  sociability as the psychological trait most predictive of longevity, but a more homespun one: conscientiousness.”  Esterly is talking about the zealotry of Gibbons in carving out forms where they would never been seen. He referenced pious cathedral sculptors who would finish the backs of their statues, because God can see everything.

Esterly made the discovery that fifty percent of the effort will achieve ninety percent of the effect. I immediately thought of all the amateur actors I had known who would learn their lines a few days before the performance, of the tech weeks where the sets, costumes, and lights come together for the first time on opening night. But Esterly goes on to observe, “If you allow yourself to stop at that ninety percent, then the carving can never succeed, never really succeed.” And there it is. Why I love Chekhov. Why I always choose Chekhov when coaching an audition piece. Chekhovian dialogue is always the tip of the iceberg, and if the actor has not studied the nonverbal submerged aspects of the character, the words are unactable. In other words, there is no ninety percent with Chekhov. The silences, the shadows, the thoughts—self-censored by the character—should scream across the footlights.

But here’s the rub: It takes another fifty percent to achieve that final ten percent. It may not be missed by the masses. Certainly, not by folks who are paying for your time. I have worked with many an actor who balked at doubling their effort for such a diminished return, failing to recognize that, in the words of Esterly, that last ten percent is “everything.”

“What makes handwork inimitable is what will allow it to survive.” Esterly is talking about the invention of computed numerical controlled (CNC) machine tools that can be controlled by computer-aided design or computer-aided manufacture (CAD or CAM) programs. Obviously, these programs are far cheaper and more efficient than hiring a woodcarver, and Esterly advises against competing with them. But there are things they cannot do: “Carving’s redoubt is the mountain fastness where it thrives best, the overhanging peaks, sharp arêtes, and shaded hollows that defy the geometrics of machine tools.” He quotes Herodotus, “Better to live in a rugged land and rule, than to farm a soft plain and be slaves.”

I think of film. On location. Jump cuts, narration, voice-over, multiple camera angles, the opportunity to edit, close-ups, green screens, computer-generated imagery (CGI). Live theatre cannot hope to compete with the special effects or the realism of film… or the control over final product that an editor wields. Why does theatre spend so much money on a lighting system that can accommodate thousands of light cues, or sets that are sumptuously fanciful or meticulously realistic? These were trends that reached their apotheosis at the turn of the century, just before film began to poach our audiences. As film advances, why didn’t theatre head for our “redoubt of mountain fastness”… the thing that film can never replicate. The immediacy, the contemporaneity of real flesh-and-blood enactment before one’s very eyes. The stage performer’s skillset should be very different from that of a film actor. The stage performer must establish a rapport with an audience, a real relationship in real time and space.

Theatrical speeches, those verbal arias building in argument and intensity, used to carry audiences into such raptures they would halt the play for multiple rounds of ovations. Today, producers consider this kind of writing an embarrassment, a mark of amateurism. The playscript is expected to ape the screenplay, with dialogue consisting of one or two lines. This is like hiring a woodcarver to imitate work done by CAD/CAM. I have never understood why, except that film costs more and usually makes more money than live theatre, and on this basis alone, the presumption is made that it should be the touchstone for all the performing arts. Film is a visual medium, where stage is aural. Film is cool; live theatre smokin’ hot. If theatre is becoming obsolete in the age of electronic media, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

“A carver begins as a god and ends as a slave.” Or, as Esterly explicates, the balance of power progressively shifts from the maker to the made. “You start as a godlike creator, imposing ideas on a passive medium, and you end up grounded in the life of this world, taking instructions from the thing in front of you.”

A good play is about something, and a great play is about something significant… and the great playwrights choose to write about significant issues that are on their own edge. In other words, the higher the stakes for the playwright, the more she is incentivized to go for that extra ten percent. Starting out with a lofty thesis, the playwright is quickly brought down to earth by the constraints of the physical stage and performing within a two-hour span. As the play develops, the characters themselves begin to dictate their own dialogue. Then there is the need for scene sequences that will allow audiences the time to assimilate the emotions from the previous scene. The further along into the process, the fewer the options. Eventually, for me, the process of invention has turned into one of discovery… petition even. Will this work? Will the characters accept this? Can an audience go along with that? Can this be staged… and within a budget?

Esterly, who expected that his replication work would be haunted by the ghost of Grinling Gibbon, found that he was merely a fellow traveler: “The objects were telling me what they’d told him. They were defining the possibilities of their modeling.”  Esterly began to question who was in charge, and his answer emerged as he worked: “an embryonic carving intent on being born.” In other words, what he was making had begun to participate in its making.

This is as apt a description of playwriting as I have ever read. A play may appear to be the brainchild of the writer that is then painstakingly brought to life through the collaborative effort of dozens of artists. But my experience is more aligned with that of the sculptor Rodin who said, “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” There is an idea… story, or theme, or character—or a combination of the three. I begin to chip away the obviously extraneous elements, and as I do this the work begins to define possibilities for me. The godlike imposing of my vision on the medium begins to morph slowly into a listening-and-response. There is an embryonic drama intent on being born.

“There’s no waiting, then, for the muse to descend.” The creativity is not something separate from the making. Esterly quotes the aphorism, “Inspiration is for amateurs.” Of all the times when I approach drafts and edits, I would say only one or two of those approaches were motivated by a burning desire to create or express. Either habit or discipline account for the majority. And behind that habit and that discipline lies a sense of devotion to the craft: servitude.

Because Esterly was attempting to recreate the work of another sculptor, he felt a kinship with the carvers in Gibbons’ workshop. Were they fabricators for a conceptualist? Looking at the finished work, he concluded, “They seem to have carved as if it were their own composition. Sincerity shines out from the work, sincerity that seems inseparable from skill.” Sincerity inseparable from skill. In this commodified world, who would make that connection? “The daunting technical demands of the work appear only to have deepened their engagement. Its difficulty was their honor.”

Working for three decades as a lesbian playwright in a culture where lesbians neither own theatres nor have a historical affinity for them, I recognize the truth of Esterly’s insight into the craftspeople who worked for Gibbons. The demands of telling a lesbian and feminist story in such a labor-intensive and transitory medium, which has historically been profoundly hostile to women of non-traditional appearance and resistance to female gender roles, have been daunting. And those daunting demands did deepen my engagement. The difficulty drove me to write a book on how to produce and direct lesbian theatre, as well as publish a collection of scenes and monologues with lesbian content. And then there are the sixty-five plays in seven collections... all self-published. The difficulty of the work is my challenge, and when I take it up, it does become my honor.