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

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

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

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

Okay, I promised to keep this brief:

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

Moving on.

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

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

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

Brilliant.

But I promised to be brief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday I listened to an interview on NPR, celebrating the twentieth-year anniversary of the iconic film Thelma and Louise. Why was it iconic?  Because they killed a man. Yep. They killed a man… a rapist actually.  You know, an “enemy.” Oh, wait… am I allowed to say that? They rob a convenience store and blow up a truck, but it’s killing a man that really does it.

Anyway, Terry Gross was interviewing Callie Khouri, who had written the screenplay. And, of course, they were talking about the ending of the film. The killing of the man was iconic, but it was the ending that enabled the iconicity.  Rather than be arrested, the two women drive off the edge of the Grand Canyon together. Callie, in the NPR interview, gives her take on this ending: “They got away.” Perhaps, the more accurate  response is the statement she made when picking up her Oscar in 1992: “For everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma and Louise, for me this is it.” Yep. And there's a connection. If they hadn't driven off the Grand Canyon, Khouri would never had gotten the Oscar. In fact, the film would never have gotten made.

I have written about Thelma and Louise before. It’s in a paper titled “Ugly Ducklings:  How I Came To Write a Play Where the Lesbian Doesn't Kill Herself.”

"Consider the 1990 film Thelma and Louise.  They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws.  They have killed a would-be rapist.   They are on the run.  And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. [which is filmed so poorly this was the best screenshot I could get...] Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point… the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare:  They kiss, they look at each other, they yell “yee-haw”—and then they get down to the business of survival:  They ditch the car.  Duh.  They dye their hair.  Duh.  They go underground on any one of the dozens of women's lands all over the US.  They're in Arizona, right?  They could go to A***.  Or A***** J*****, which is an entire village of lesbians.  They get healthy.  They heal.  They make love. They change their diets.  They do yoga.  They dance under the full moon.  They build a hay bale house.  They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any.  They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute.  They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment.  They have a zillion delicious options.   But, in the movie, they go off a cliff.  In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss.  Lesbianism is the fate worse than death.  The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators.  The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kiss—coming after the decision to commit double suicide."

I would not have had such a strong objection to the ending, if it had been depicted with the same attention to detail as, say, the blowing up of the truck. You know… the car making impact, rolling and bouncing down the canyon, the screaming terror on the faces… and finally the still shot of the carnage. But that’s not in Callie’s screenplay. What happens? The screen goes blank.  You know… death, transcendence. That romantic high-school fantasy that promotes so much youth suicide.

No, show the reality, or don’t go there. How many girls and women have taken their lives because of the romance of the white screen, the belief that this would be their triumphant escape… or how, as Callie Khouri might put it, they could get away?

Okay, Thelma and Louise is nearly a quarter-century old. Did it spawn two generations of girl-buddy, road pictures where the women unapologetically kill their enemies and go on to live happy, predator-free lives the way male protagonists do? No, not really. There are women who kill a-plenty in films these days, but they don’t kiss each other. They dress for the male gaze. Their idea of liberation is seducing the men who can’t keep up with them.

Yesterday, Beyoncé “dropped” her newest video: “Girls Who Run the World.” Iconically speaking, she’s got some interesting visuals… an army of men coming after a renegade band of women in what appears to have been a global gender massacre. The men have the usual arsenal of firearms, but of course, the women have that secret weapon that brings them all to their knees... oh, wait, our knees... what?  Anyway, the women have that pornographic fantasy thing…  the clothing, the moves. Beyoncé’s response to armed aggression is to “drop it like it’s hot” and crawl across the floor twitching her pelvis. In a lyric that says it all, she whispers, “Hope you still like me…”

I know, I know. This is mainstream media. Why am I wasting my time even writing about it? Well… I will tell you. Because I just want to point out the hijacking, the disconnect. It’s one thing to present women as brainless fembots whose only ambition in life is to fulfill male fantasies. It’s another to begin with an acknowledgement that women are targets and prey and that we don’t like it, and then to attempt to glorify capitulation as empowering resistance. I’m talking about that damned white screen and the nincompoopery of crawling around on the floor.

Because women are, unfortunately, watching. And girls are watching, too. Teaching is going on. Callie Khouri is interpreting for us--at the Oscars, on NPR. “This is what escape looks like.” “This is what winning looks like.” But here’s the thing. You have to be alive to escape. Yeah. I know… radical.  And you have to defeat your opponent/enemy in order to win. Unclear about what that means? Try “beat, conquer, rout, trounce, crush, thrash, whip, wipe the floor with, make mincemeat of, clobber, slaughter, demolish.”

Callie made a film the same way Beyoncé made her video: hoping that the men who control the industry, and the women who are subject to them, will still like her. And they did and they do and I don’t. If you want to know what real resistance looks like, read my plays.

Lesbian cartoonist and brilliant graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel articulated what has come to be known  as the Bechdel Test. It's from her brilliant and long-running cartoon strip "Dykes to Watch Out For." Two lesbians are on their way to the movies, and one of them says, "I have this rule, see.... I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it... who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man."

There is actually a website, where folks can rate movies according to their ranking on the Bechdel Test.
 
Well, the recent release of a lesbian-themed Hollywood movie, The Kids Are All Right, has inspired me to propose a lesbian adjunct to the Bechdel Test. Let’s call it the Lesbian Litmus…

Okay, here goes... To pass the Lesbian Litmus, a film about lesbians must have:

1)  Butch parity.  For every lesbian femme character there is a lesbian butch. Not a transgender male. Not a butchy femme. A lesbian butch. This was an ongoing struggle for "The L-Word."

3)    No “all she needs is a good man.” (The Fox, The Kids Are All Right, The Children’s Hour, Chasing Amy, Kissing Jessica Stein) No “give me a baby” sex.  (French Twist)  And, help me if I’m forgetting any.

4)    No killing off of the lesbian to make it okay (Boys on the Side, The Fox, The Killing of Sister George, original ending of Maedchen in Uniform, Thelma and Louise... who can only justify their lesbian kiss with the fact they are going to be ruptured and shattered cadavers seconds after.) 

5) It shouldn't be necessary for the women to be drunk/high. The lesbianism shouldn't be accidental or dismissable because of having been drunk, but clearly chosen. (Claire of the Moon) (Thank you, Karen Escovitz!)

6) The lesbian sex scenes should not be outnumbered or outclassed by heterosex scenes (The Kids Are All Right)  (Thanks, again, Karen!)

7)    AND NO SEX SCENES WRITTEN OR DIRECTED BY SOME IDIOT WHO STILL CAN’T ACCEPT OR IMAGINE THAT WE DO JUST FINE WITHOUT A PENIS, WITHOUT MALE PORNOGRAPHY, WITHOUT WINDCHIMES, WITHOUT VAMPIRES, WITHOUT INEBRIATION, WITHOUT SUICIDE, AND ESPECIALLY WITHOUT PANDERING TO SOME INTERNALIZED MALE PORNOGRAPHIC GAZE. OKAY?

So that’s my proposed “Lesbian Litmus.”

The Bechdel Test seems to eliminate about half of the big studio films. The Lesbian Litmus looks to me like it will take out about half of the lesbian films. The more assertive lesbians and feminists become the more rarified the cinematic atmosphere… 

And now I am going to suggest The Gage Gauge:

The lesbians who are in a primary relationship express an understanding that their intimacy poses a tremendous threat to male dominant institutions, and they derive both pleasure and energy from this understanding and, because of this, seek out opportunities to maximize the radical potential of their lesbianism.

Now, surely, somewhere there must be a lesbian film that ranks on the Gage Gauge…?  If not, may I suggest any number of Gage plays for future filmmaking projects? www.carolyngage.com

 

I want to say something serious about Lindsay Lohan. 

She tried to be in a public lesbian relationship at the same time that Hollywood was claiming her as a heterosexual sex goddess. Nobody has ever done that before.  And she pulled off one of the most remarkable portrayals of an incest victim ever seen on screen.

She was trashed and ridiculed for the lesbian relationship. Her girlfriend was given insulting nicknames by gossip columnists.  Her father expressed his homophobia openly to the press. And while she was going through all this, she was struggling very publicly with drug and alcohol addiction. The gossip-mongers reveled in every careless crotch shot, every drunken stumble. She was called “Lindsanity” and “Fire Crotch” and “LOLhan.” Her girlfriend’s admirable loyalty to her, even after the breakup, through DUI's, rehab, and up to the current jail sentence has been treated as a joke.

The film about incest was trashed by the critics and buried as quickly as it opened. The press was far more interested in Lohan’s unpredictable behavior on the set, which very closely mirrored Marilyn Monroe’s behaviors on the set of her last picture, The Misfits… and probably for the same reason: Both actresses were playing very close to home, bringing a  dangerous level of integrity to their roles as violated women fighting for their lives in real-life environments that offered inadequate support.

Georgia Rule was the film, and it featured Jane Fonda as the grandmother, Felicity Huffman as the mother, and Lohan as the teenaged daughter. In the film, Lohan’s unruly, sexually promiscuous character has been sent to live with her grandmother, a woman with old-fashioned values and methods of discipline. Turns out the girl is a handful because her stepfather has been raping her, and her mother does not believe her. As many child victims do, the daughter has recanted her accusations, because her mother’s denial of the abuse is more painful than her rejection of her daughter for lying … and, of course, after retraction, the acting out began. The victimized daughter tells the story, as so many of us have done, in ways that make up in drama for what they lack in directness.

Broadway and Off-Broadway... the touchstone for "arriving" in the world of theatre in the US... the El Dorado, the Brigadoon, the Camelot...  So why aren't there more women playwrights who make it? 

Here's how it works...  Remember the old playground game called Red Rover? Two lines of kids facing each other, and one team calls out, "Red Rover, Red Rover, send so-and-so right over!" and then the kid whose name was called starts running toward that line, while the kids all link arms and try to keep her from breaking through.

Now... here's the part that's pertinent: If the kid breaks through, she gets to take one of the two people who let her break through back to her home team. But, if she cannot break through, she must join the enemy team. To put it in corporate terms, the loser must assimilate.

In the world of top-tier commercial theatre, they don't exactly call us over by name. These days they do make a pretty big show about "Where are the women?" So we come a-running, manuscripts under our arms. If we can't break through, we are supposed to line up with their values, even against our own interests. Yes, and some of us do. 

These women who have gone over to the big-boy team may seem like good strategic points to try to break through. But, they are not. They understand that, if they are the reason another woman breaks through, they will have to leave the big-boy team and return with the winner back to the women's team. And we all know the women's team does not own any commercial theatres. They are far more motivated to keep us out than their brothers on the line.

Well... Red Rover is an analogy for a dynamic that has frustrated women playwrights for centuries. What is really at stake, of course, is power. And having a voice is having power. And women's voices, when we really tell the truth about our lives, cannot be assimilated with the voices of those who are benefiting from the systems that oppress and exploit us. That's what this is all about, really. It's not about men who don't like women, although that's part of it, of course. It's not about women not being good enough. It's about whose story is going to be heard.

So, okay, whose stories are heard? Let's look at four examples that are on issues that are central in the lives of women and critical in defining our experience and shaping our personalities: rape, sexual harassment, assault, systemic child sexual abuse, and its subset, incest.

When these stories get told in the commercial theatres, and they do occasionally get told... who does the telling? Whose point of view, whose issues are represented?

Let's take a look: 

One of the first plays that was focused on rape was Extremities, and it actually opened with an onstage, attempted, violent rape. The choreography was usually out-of-hand. Audience members would catch blobs of flying oatmeal, and, as Wikipedia notes, "it  wasn't uncommon to see the lead actress with bandaged and splinted fingers during the run of the play." Real bandages and real splints, people. Actor, not character, assaulted. Susan Sarandon left the cast, if memory serves me, on the advice of her therapist. Farrah Fawcett had an actual stalker disrupt one of her performances to ask if she had been receiving his letters and photos. So this, one of the very first plays focused on rape victims, opens with a scene that is guaranteed to traumatize the audience, if not physically and emotionally brutalize the leading lady.

And the subject matter? The would-be victim manages to overpower the rapist and tie him up. Her housemates come home and the subject becomes, "Whatever will we do with him?" Because, of course, we all know rapists rarely are convicted, and even if they are, they may or may not be sentenced to prison. Should the women kill him?

In other words, the focus is on the rapist. The question of the play is, "What would women do to rapists if they were ever in a position to exact revenge?" Now, I know hundreds of survivors of rape. So does everyone, because it's one-in-three women. And I have sat in on thousands of conversations on the subject, and never, ever ONCE has it been, "Gosh, what will I do if I ever catch one?" It's simply not our issue. 
 
The conversations go like this:  "How can I leave the house?" or  "How can I support myself while I'm trying to work through the PTSD?" or "How can I keep from losing my partner when I have so many traumatic associations with intimacy?" or "How can we make sure this never happens again?" or "How can I help my daughter/lover/sister/neighbor/roommate... myself?"  These are the issues for women.

The rape play that went to Broadway was voyeuristic for perps and restimulating for trauma survivors, and obsessed with a question that only a rapist would find compelling.

Well...okay... but how about sexual harassment? And, yes, it's a real problem. These stats are from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

• 31% of the female workers claimed to have been harassed at work
• 62% of targets took no action
• 100% of women claimed the harasser was a man

Aside from the physical and emotional toll, many women have to change jobs, often more than once, and this has very real career and wage consequences. And, for women in the military, the stats tell us that 95% experience harassment. And, of course, in the military they can't can't change jobs or quit. Yes, it's a problem.

So, the sexual harassment play to go to Broadway? Oleanna. It's about sexual harassment on college campuses.

Okay... but I'm talking about the mainstream Broadway treatment of an issue that is huge for women. In the play, it turns out that the professor is a well-intentioned victim of a confused female student who has been manipulated by those evil, man-hating, paranoid bitches (read "dykes") over in Women's Studies.

Wow. And whose story is that?

Okay... next example. Let's take something that is irrefutable, documented, topical, and epidemic... the priest abuse cases. Of which there are tens of thousands globally. 

The play that went to Broadway was Doubt. Yep, you heard that right. Doubt. And, again, there is an evil, man-hating, spinsterish woman-- this time a nun.  And of course, the priest is progressive and much-loved. Yeah, so  you know who you're supposed to be rooting for. He ends up, in spite of a history of "doubtful interactions with children," with a promotion, and she ends up... doubting. Now, some have said that the play plants seeds of doubt, but I doubt that. Read the reviews. It frames a global horror as a situation fraught with gendered ambiguity. Not.

And how about incest? Well, there was How I Learned to Drive, which went to Off-Broadway. This play is by a woman, and represents a very accurate depiction of sexual abuse by a skillfully seductive, adult family member, who preys on the insecurities of his victim. The playwright depicts, with accuracy, the confusion of a teen victim who is unclear about her role in the perpetration. Her protecting of the memory (play is told in flashback), her occasional role as the aggressor, her sentimentalizing of her relationship to her uncle/perpetrator... these are all very real dynamics that can be present for the victim of incest. AND this confusion, this sentimentalizing, this ambivalence is actually part of the post-rape syndrome. The play does not frame it that way. Audiences and reviewers go away with comments like, "Incest is a complicated issue; there's no black-and-white" and "it's a two-way street." If you don't believe me, read them online.

And who benefits from that?

This is what is at stake in the Red Rover game for women trying to break into commercial theatre. Whose voice will be heard? 

And you know what? The most important, the most dangerous, the most competitive, and the most successful strategy we can engage is to arrange our lives and our careers so that, first and foremost, we can hear ourselves.