Women Playwrights and Their Stony Road...

BUFFALO, N.Y. —  A bright orange tablecloth spread on a large assembly floor. Multicolored candles. A Madonna-like figure of a native American Indian goddess. Two bouquets of flowers, a ripe eggplant and a basket of ballpark peanuts to be handed to each of the participants as a symbol of welcome.

It was the second morning of the first International Women’s Playwrights Conference, at the Buffalo-Amherst campus of the State University of New York. The tablecloth, candles, etc., served as props for a discussion of “Myth, Legend and Ritual in Plays by Women.”

The 250 playwrights, directors, producers and academicians from 34 nations turned the conference into a forum where politics and women’s issues were at least as important as their art. Although there were a dozen plays or play excerpts performed on the campus or in downtown Buffalo theaters, along with a score of staged readings, the playwriting art and the woman’s aesthestic turned out to be the conference subtext.

Whether or not there is a difference in plays written by women, a conference run by women playwrights proved to be a distinctively unpinstriped occasion, with one panel discussion flowing into the next regardless of the announced topic (or participants), as if a conversation had been interrupted and was now ready to begin again.

“It has never been easy for women to make their way as playwrights,” conference director Anna Kay France, associate professor of English and theater at Buffalo, said at the outset. “Many from the past have been lost in obscurity and anonymity--treated with neglect, even contempt. . . .”

To hear the women playwrights, discrimination is a given. They did not need playwright Kathleen Betsko to tell them that just 7% of plays produced in this country are written by women, and those that are produced generally cluster on the bottom rungs of the theater ladder, on the “Off-Off Broadways,” in the United States and many countries abroad.

Ironically, two of this country’s better known playwrights--Emily Mann (“Execution of Justice”) and Wendy Wasserstein (“Isn’t It Romantic?”) did not attend because they were working on plays currently in production.

Betsko (“Johnny Bull”), who grew up in England, asserts that a generalized character written by a male playwright is deemed by male critics to be an “archetype” while the same character written by a woman is dismissed as “stereotype.” She noted that when playwright John Osborne, one of the esteemed “angry young men” of the postwar period in Great Britan, wrote “Look Back in Anger,” his kitchen sink was considered a “metaphor for the declining British Empire,” but when a woman writes about a kitchen sink it’s “just a domestic drama.”

Betsko also criticized producer Joe Papp for saying he no longer wants “domestic” or “kitchen-sink” dramas. With “fragmented lives,” because many women playwrights are often also wives and mothers, that’s what many women know and write about, she said.

But Alice Childress, 68 (“Wedding Band, “The African Garden,” “Mojo”), sees this as an advantage. As one of a trio of keynoters she urged women to take heart from the many things they do know and to tell their stories, just as she, the great-granddaughter of slaves, tells hers.

“We know things other people do not know,” Childress said. “How we overcome! How we find time between our fragmented lives, and fragmented life isn’t all tragedy. We know a lot more about many little things than men do because we have had to cook and wash and bury the dead, and take care of the births. Today! People called to ask me to do something, and I said I’m afraid I can’t (because of the conference) but I’ll ask my husband, Nathan, (composer) Nathan Woodard. She said, ‘Oh don’t bother him. ‘ “

“They must constantly be reminded, our women writers, that the greatest writers in the world, whoever they may be, had to write the first word, the first line,” Childress said. “You will create new forms, not to be stylish, but you will create them because they come out of you, and you have to find a way to express yourself without permission. And we have to be taught how not to put down ourselves. . . .”

Is there a woman’s aesthetic, or is true art genderless? Are women writers creating their own art forms?

“Art is art no matter who writes it, man or woman,” says Soviet writer Valerya Vrublevskaya, a playwright from Kiev, “near Chernobyl.” “Tolstoy--no one understood a woman better than he did with ‘Anna Karenina.’ ”

In her plays, Vrublevskaya writes about women--”strong Ukranian women.” Currently she is writing about writer Olga Koblianskaya, who died in 1942. Her recent plays have dealt with the problems of Soviet women.

Vrublevskaya wrote “Proof of Paternity,” about a 40-year-old unmarried woman who did not have a child “and started wanting one. Her idea is that it’s not absolutely essential to have a family, because if you have a child and a husband, you’ve really got two children. But when she has a child, the feminine psychology changes. After the fact she wants the man to acknowledge his paternity.”

Finnish playwright Inkeri Kilipinen wrote “Verily, verily” in which she reversed traditional sexual roles. “I built up a fantasy world where women had all the power, all the education, and the men had to stay at home and educate and take care of the children. To make this fantasy even sharper, I made the men wear a black chador (shawl).

“Also, the woman had the right to marry four husbands,” Kilipinen continued, “and the story started when this rich village merchant woman married as her fourth husband the most handsome young boy of the village who was 17. . . .”

“Especially male critics became furious,” Kilipinen added. “I read headlines in the newspapers indicating Kilipinen had gone mad, and ‘what is all this rubbish?’ During one performance, one man leaned forward at intermission and said, ‘I am not going to watch any more of this kind of insult.’ So a woman close to him said, ‘Are you so weak you can’t even take 2 1/2 hours fantasy performance of these things with which the woman has had to stay for thousands and thousands of years?’ He stayed,” Kilipinen said, and later became a friend.

Kilipinen has focused on “lonely mother roles”--or what would characterized here as the empty-nest syndrome. In “White Roses on the Table” she tells of a 39-year-old woman whose mother didn’t love her, whose husband who didn’t either, whose lover betrayed her and whose son became independent of her. “She found that the best person to rely on was herself.”

When Zulu Sofola of Nigeria, a country where polygamy still exists, last year wrote “Memories in the Moonlight,” which also involved a sexual role reversal, the critics, not surprisingly, blasted her. (In her play, an unhappily married woman goes back to her father’s house, has lovers and children, then returns home with her offspring.) Sofola, a college professor, has five children in a monogamous marriage, “but you have to be prepared for everything,” she said.

China’s Bai Fengxi, who started writing a dozen years ago in the post-Maoist period after several decades as an actress, specializes in plays about women and rather controversial ones in terms of family issues. In her third play, “And a Bright Moon Begins to Shine,” Bai deals with three generations of upper-middle-class women and their conflicting attitudes about love and marriage. There is not a single male character, except by reference.

In “The Return of an Old Friend on a Stormy Night,” one of her characters says, “Woman is not the moon. She doesn’t need to reflect herself in the light of others.” And that, Bai noted, prompted a male critic to ask: “Do you want to be the sun ?”

“Controversy arises only when your work really touches people,” she said. “It’s just like a little stone which stirs up ripples and even waves. . . . Why should I write a play if I expect nobody to oppose it?”

Whatever women write about, their other lives intrude. The day before Bai left for the conference, she had to complete a newspaper article. “But my grandson was interfering all the time. The only thing I could do was ask the nanny to take him out. It’s very cold in autumn in Peking. It didn’t seem right to do this, but I had to.

“The next day, my daughter saw me to the airport and told me my grandson coughed the whole night. I was very upset. My daughter tried to comfort me; she said his coughing had nothing to do with playing outdoors. But I still felt guilty because I blame myself,” Bai said. “We women always kind of torture ourselves. We have this sense of guilt all the time.”

Gretchen Cryer (“The Last Sweet Days of Isaac,” “I’m Getting My Act Together”) said that there is a definitive women’s perspective “and it comes from having been outside the dominant culture for 2,000 years, outside the seats of power. We are in a way court jesters.”

For some playwrights, the female aesthetic is more precise. They talk of “linear” writing (male) as opposed to “circular” writing (female), which often carries a sexual connotation.

“We tend to write in a circular fashion,” said Betsko, who said her opinion is based on talking to 30 women playwrights and reading hundreds of plays by women for the book “Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights,” which she co-authored with Rachel Koenig.

Betsko believes that because a woman’s life is so fragmented--”10 minutes making the beds, 10 minutes dropping off the kids, picking up the old man, throwing the macaroni and cheese on the table”--women playwrights instinctively write shorter scenes. They also tend to “share the text more generously among all the characters on stage” so that there might be several leading main characters rather than the male form of protagonist and antagonist.

“We have a lot of problems structurally because we are trying to force our perceptions and our vision into predominantly male forms,” Betsko continued. “The underlying foundation is Aristotle, who requires that a play be made with rising conflict until it reaches the climax, and then tapers off. Whereas in women’s work you’ve got . . . a lot of small climaxes. Women tend to want to return to where they began at the beginning of the play.”

“We don’t see endings so easily because we really haven’t found out the beginnings,” said Margaret Hollingsworth of Canada. “This word conflict. Plays have to have conflict. I hate that word! It’s a male model of how to write a play, and it’s been very damaging to our work. What a play needs is push and pull, it needs energy and tension, something that drives it forward, but that is not necessarily conflict.”

“I am in search of structures closer to the feminine,” says Sabina Berman of Mexico, “that is circular dramatic structures.”

“I started writing because I was tired of being Gaugin’s whore.”

So Berman, like a significant number of those who attended the conference, said that at some point being an actress, playing roles that usually men had written, was not enough. They wanted to hear, if not say, their own words.

“I wanted to work with people, not just sitting writing a novel at a table,” said Dacia Maraini, who started an underground theater-- literally in a cellar--in a poor section of Rome. A play about abortion in the early ‘70s prompted seven bishops to speak out against it.

“I thought as a teen-ager that if I didn’t create my own world of theater, I would go crazy,” said writer, director, actress Koharu Kisaragi of Tokyo.

One of her plays, “Doll,” about five teen-age girls who make a suicide pact, received critical acclaim. “That issue struck me close because I also wanted to commit suicide a lot of times.” Kisaragi indicated that only the prospect of theater, of her work, saved her.

Still a significant number of playwrights here, usually from the Third World or developing countries, said personal issues had to give way to the larger issues of political oppression.

“I have seen horror, I have seen filth, things you wouldn’t believe, things that are the end product of apartheid. . . ,” said Fatima Dike, a black South African. “I am a woman fighting for the freedom of my people.”