If the play’s the thing, what’s the play script good for? Aside from replenishing the arid reservoir of audition monologues and testifying to a play’s critical or box-office success, if we’re lucky, the printed text is as good as literature. It can be ruminated on like a volume of poetry. And when gathered and bound with others, it may also give us reason to reflect on the politics of the theatre itself. By their very existence, three anthologies of plays by women published this year do just that. But aside from a nod to sexual specificity, these volumes couldn’t be more different.
Perhaps women were wise to put so little stock in the sentiment that proclaimed last year the “Year of the Woman?’ It tends to be those who take such “honors” at face value who want to define “women’s perspectives” for the rest of us. One need only look at the Women’s Project, founded by Julia Miles in 1978, for a reminder of how rich and varied those perspectives can actually be. The company’s fifth anthology, Playwriting Women: 7 Plays from the Women’s Project, echoes the feminist aesthetic and consistent artistry of what was once a lone New York outpost.
As the book’s back cover notes, 15 years ago only “seven percent of all plays produced Off Broadway and regionally were written by women; six percent were directed by women.” A decade and a half later, the Women’s Project continues to be a major factor in changing those stats. Some of the best plays from the company’s more than 60 productions are collected here. The selections embrace a spectrum of women’s experiences and, to a certain extent, a variety of voices–from the rural struggles of Darrah Cloud’s O Pioneers!, to the claustrophobic nightmare of Pearl Cleage’s 1991 companion plays, Chain and Late Bus to Mecca. But topicality and urbane wit dominate, in plays like Kathleen Tolan’s Approximating Mother, Lavonne Mueller’s Violent Peace and Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky.
Despite the promise of its rah-rah foreword by Marsha Mason, a second anthology, the rather uneven Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1992, takes a safer, if less scenic, route through the theatrical wood, to arrive at the good old hearth. The unfortunate trap of “best of” collections is that the association often feels arbitrary, leaving one wishing for a unifying aesthetic other than the gender of the playwrights and the year of maiden productions. Among these formal comedies and darlings of the regional circuit are Cheryl West’s Jar the Floor, Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels and Paula Vogel’s award-winning The Baltimore Waltz. With the exception of Waltz and Sybille Pearson’s disturbing Unfinished Stories, much of this is light fare, with many warm moments but only a few surprises.
Women on the Verge: 7 Avant-Garde American Plays, on the other hand, is a rarity: a good read with actor-friendly monologue bites and a savvy outlook. Editor Rosette C. Lamont observes that in a country hopelessly hooked on realist drama, those presenting the most challenging work are women. “Why should it be so?” she asks. “Perhaps because female artists have nothing to lose.”
In her thorough introductory essay, Lamont strikes a balance between chagrin at the field, hope, womanist cheerleading and scholarly contextualization. The collection itself trumpets its diversity of voice, dramaturgy, social strata and culture, while also finding a unifying philosophy of risk-taking.
Occupational Hazard by Rosalyn Drexler, whose character of the Hunger Artist is a nod to Kafka, opens the anthology; Joan M. Schenkar’s ribald take on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood concludes it. Schenkar has said that The Universal Wolf is “about appetites,” an idea which can also be applied to those plays sandwiched in-between: Karen Malpede’s landscape of sexual desire, Us; Maria Irene Fornes’s sensuous quartet of playlets, What of the Night; Tina Howe’s Ionesco-inspired Birth and Afterbirth; Elizabeth Wong’s formally eloquent Letters to a Student Revolutionary; and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, a feat of the vernacular onstage that reveals new wonders when committed to the page. Appetites, yes. And language.
The poignant humor arising from a still-active battlefield–evident in all of these plays–is boldly pinpointed by Howe, who is quoted in the introduction: “Wait until we yoke our delicate touch and way with words to the darker impulses of theatre. All I can say is when that moment comes…LOOK OUT BELOW.”
