Comic Textures and Female Communities 1937 and 1977: Clare Boothe and Wendy Wasserstein

Comic Textures and Female Communities 1937 and 1977: Clare Boothe and Wendy Wasserstein SUSAN L. CARLSON Although comedy's Lysistratas and Rosalinds have prompted general critical agreement that comedy promotes sexual equality, the women in two twentieth- . century comedies by women suggest how easily such conclusions may be called into question. As they create all-female comic worlds, both Clare Boothe in The Women and Wendy Wasserstein in Uncommon Women and Others magnify some of the special dissonances which accompany the appearance of any woman in comedy. Neither Boothe's nor Wasserstein's is a major achievement, but as solid, successful plays, both tell us a great deal about the conventions and assumptions we depend on and respond to in all comedies. Specifically, the two plays disclose the kinds of female characters and communities comedy encourages or discourages. I While Boothe's I937 comedy The Women is a play full of women, it is not a woman's play. As a comedy it is troubled and troubling. Like a comedy, it is propelled by the humorous unmasking ofhuman frailties and double standards. Like a comedy, it is neatly knotted at the end by marriage and an attitude of compromise that bravely point both characters and audience toward the future. Like many comedies, it is also laced with satire and irony that transmit double messages: its scintillating wit is both freedom and escape, its stage full of women at once a potential women's community and a backhanded endorsement of a male world. But the results of the satire and irony in Boothe's comedy are unusually disruptive.2 While many have held. Boothe accountable for the disconcerting effect of her female enclave, comedy itself is the cause of the disturbance in her play. Displayed in a succession of exclusively female domains - a powder room, an exercise salon, a beauty shop, a kitchen, and others - the five central women in Boothe's play victimize themselves and one another in winner-take-all games of marriage, adultery, and divorce. Boothe maintains that she wrote the play to satirize only a "small group ofladies native to the Park Avenues of America,"3 Clare Boothe and Wendy Wasserstein but nevertheless she fills her world with characters and encounters which make this playa much broader study ofwomen's roles. The cast list alone underlines her concentration on women in roles and as roles. While Boothe's main characters have names (although even they dwindle into the roles "single" or "married" when Nancy is subtitled "Miss Blake," Sylvia "Mrs. Howard Fowler," etc.), a majority ofthe forty-four cast members are listed only as types or roles. There are hairdressers, pedicurists, salesgirls, models, a nurse, a cook, an instructress, a cutie, a society woman, a dowager, a debutante, and a girl in distress. These social, professional, and personal roles supply a busy backdrop for the playwright's central study of the roles most vital for her women: roles as wives, mothers, daughters, and friends. Comedy has always been fertile ground for the study of social roles, masks, and the often indistinguishable line between the two. Boothe adopts this comic concern with a vengeance. First and foremost "the women" are wives. But as wives, the central character Mary and her four closest friends Sylvia, Nancy, Edith, and Peggy do not enact for us their halfof a simple battle between the sexes. That basic comic battle has been superseded by a vicious battle within one sex over the other. Dubbed "odious harpies," "werewolves," "sluts," "barbaric savages," and "brazen hussies" by 1937 reviewers,4 Boothe's women engage themselves in an endless and incestuous series of bruising encounters: for example, Mary loses Stephen to Crystal, who deserts him for Buck, who abandons the Countess, who has been married four previous times. Every time a community of women forms, it is splintered by the women's battles over their men, their battles to be wives. The bold but unbecoming behavior of"the women" as wives works as flashy camouflage to cover the much more destructive self-hatred which grows out of the women's roles as mothers, daughters, and friends. The play's harsh attitude toward mothering is defined most specifically...