I’m a professor of literature married to a professor of theater.
For the past decade and a half, I’ve been going to plays, meeting good-looking and alarmingly loud actors, and generally observing from the outside a world full of bodies and lights and just-managed chaos.
It terrifies me.
Literature is calmer. In literature, if people are running around in a frenzy, it is only ever on the page, imagined and managed.
Yet, somehow, a few months ago I found myself on the brightly-lit stage of Crawfordsville’s community theater wearing an absurd number of feathers and being alarmingly loud. That experience challenged my assumptions about how to analyze texts, about community, and about the uses of benign chaos.
“The Women” is a social satire written by Clare Boothe Luce in 1937. As the title suggests, the cast is entirely female. Luce is clear about this. A note on the title page of the script reads: “In all performances of this play, no changes may be made to the gender of the characters.” Past directors have taken this warning to heart: in the 1939 film version, even the dogs and horses were female.
When Wabash Archivist Beth Swift (the play’s director) and Director of Public Affairs Jim Amidon ’87, (the play’s co-producer) invited me to audition for The Vanity’s production of “The Women,” I was greedy for it. As a Wabash professor, I spend most of my time around men. I appreciate the odd magic of same-sex communities. “The Women” was a way to have the best of both worlds: teach at a men’s college by day, act in women’s theater by night.
Meanwhile, my husband was beginning rehearsals for Wabash’s production of “The Tempest,” in which he played Prospero. I imagined that being in a play myself would help me understand his scholarship, his strange attraction to the late-night adrenaline of performance.
My character—named Crystal like me—is a home-wrecking gold digger with the brassy aggressiveness of a woman determined to better her position in life at any cost. People like that intimidate me in real life. Playing one on stage felt strange: everyone wants to assert her inner bitch, but being able to perform as one means letting go of habitual insecurities and self-consciousness. I was daunted by wearing a bustier and acting like a tramp in front of an audience that would include my colleagues. I was anxious about remembering my lines. I spent a lot of time at the first few rehearsals feeling unmoored.
I would like to say that I shed all my fear like an old cloak and emerged triumphant on stage. That didn’t happen. I was nervous every night, from the first to the last.
But something did happen. As rehearsals went on, I began to think less about my awkward self and more about the play. That happened for all of us. The center of gravity shifted from personal concerns to group interpretation. We became Luce scholars.
The cast came together over Luce’s words slowly and, at times, awkwardly, but we converged with passion and intelligence. We came together to figure out “The Women,” and to figure out women, too. As we learned our lines and got to know our characters, we were also sorting through decades of gender stereotyping, patriarchy, and feminism. We embodied drunken, heart-broken, needy, seedy, catty, furious women on stage, and then we sat backstage and talked about how social pressures and economic inequalities shaped women’s lives in the 1930s (and still do today). And we did all that while taking on and off fake eyelashes and passing around the curling iron.
A lot of people think that “The Women” is sexist tripe, and in a way, they’re right. It’s a play about a bunch of over-or-undersexed New York socialites being petty to one another and stealing each other’s husbands. It ends with the heroine’s recognition that her divorce was her fault because she ought not to have made a scene about her husband’s “natural” infidelities: “No, no pride; that’s a luxury a woman in love can’t afford,” she cries as she runs into the (offstage) arms of the man who deserted her for a slattern shop girl.
The characters in this play are cardboard stereotypes: the whore, the catty backstabber, the martyred wife—the very stereotypes many real women struggle against today. Why, then, was it so much fun to play them on stage? Why so fun to watch them? I have a degree in women’s studies. I teach Virginia Woolf and Judith Butler. I call myself a feminist. Was I willing to betray all that for the fun of tramping it up in too much makeup?
Well, we often talked backstage about the play’s politics. We traded insights and arguments that I couldn’t hope to do justice to here, but for me the upshot was that in performing over-the-top negative stereotypes of femininity, we were reveling in their absurdity (and, one hopes, showing them as such). We were doing farce.
We talked a lot backstage about the other things the play shows, too: that under a patriarchal society, women were (and sometimes still are) socially and economically dependent on men. This poisons their relationships with other women because they become competition instead of potential allies, just as it poisons their relationships with men because men become resources rather than people. Relationships are big business, corporate intrigue, rather than human bonds.
We talked most of all about class issues. Some women in the play were, as Beth Swift put it, merely “nouns.” These were the women who were labeled in the cast list as “nurse” or “maid” or “cook.” Women who had to work for a living were less than real people, the play implies. Money—not love or sex—is the real motivating factor for the play’s characters. There are no men in the play because, in Luce’s dark vision, the economic security men represented was more important than the men themselves.
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I’d put our backstage conversations up against any college seminar. There was an intelligence that emanated from our talks and our performances, an intelligence that was, like the play itself, bigger than any one of us. It didn’t matter that the cast included women from all walks of life: single women, married women, career women, academic women, daughters, mothers, and grandmothers. We were united in a mutual goal. We were helping one another think the play through.
Our ideas spilled out beyond the theater: for the first time in recent memory, Vanity actors held a panel discussion at Wabash for both the local and the College community. It was sponsored by the College’s Gender Issues Committee. It was contentious. Students wrote papers about the play. The play took on an intellectual life none of us could have foreseen.
Over the course of the production, I began to realize that theater is more than hammered-down hysteria. It isn’t just vanity. It’s a deeply generous act of literary criticism. In my real life, I write literary criticism and teach students how to do the same. We pull apart texts to demonstrate what it shows without meaning to. At times, it can feel like the literary equivalent of pointing out someone’s slip.
Literary criticism through acting is different because you embody the words and characters. You become them and let them speak through you until you have truly heard—absorbed and repeated—what it is they have to say. It is literary intelligence on the level of muscle memory.
As interesting as these discoveries are to me, what I will really remember in 20 years has nothing to do with literary theory.
During the confrontational last scene, most of the cast bustles on and off the stage. On closing night, we waited for our final turns on stage just behind the big red curtain that separated us from the audience. We were bathed in dark red light. We were stifling our laughter, or dancing a little to the music, or mouthing the lines along with the others. It was festive—we’d (almost) gotten through it one more time. It was such a vibrant feeling to be in the final throes of a tremendous group effort, enveloped by it and changed by it. And there was just this red velvet membrane separating us from our audience, from the real world, from the rest of our lives.
