Parody and Parity *

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ALISA SOLOMON Why have you turned to theater? What are you doing, exactly and why?

GERTRUDE STEIN We broadened the visual art focus to include performance art some years back, and then theater, and who knows where we’re going to go after this? We’re on a rampage.

CLAUDE CAHUN Film as well. And consumer culture in general.

STEIN We’ve always taken tangents. A whole year studying tokenism and another whole year studying homelessness, among women particularly, and women’s relationship to the Gulf War.

APHRA BEHN What we’ve been doing is just doing what we’ve always been doing: bringing light on the issue of the lack of parity for women.

CAHUN We did a survey of different theaters to find out how many were producing plays by women, how many were directing plays by women, and the conclusion was that women were not being represented. And so we made a sticker that said—

BEHN “In this theatre the taking of photographs, the use of recording devices, and the production of plays by women are strictly prohibited.”

CAHUN And we stuck these up in the toilets of, for instance, the Roundabout Theatre. Then we’d come back a week later and find they’d been torn down, but we’d stick them up again.

Which theaters did you look at and how did you choose them? Is this part of the study that the Women’s Project released in September, The Report on the Status of Women Directors and Playwrights in New York City Theater, by Celia Braxton and Susan Jonas?

BEHN We concentrated on the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area. We tried to look at big theaters, little theaters, but mainly theaters that were producing three, four, five plays a season.

CAHUN Like the Public and the Roundabout and Circle in the Square.

BEHN Also the Jean Cocteau Rep and Classic Stage Company Theaters that list their seasons.

Most of these are pretty conservative institutions.

STEIN But they claim not to be. New Group, for example, makes a big deal out of being progressive.

Then they do all those angry white boy plays.

BEHN We named them last year. After the stickers, we published the first Guerrilla Girls’ theater quiz, in the Tony issue of In Theater magazine. The first question was, What do these prominent theater companies have in common? And we listed a number of theaters, including the New Group, the Roundabout, Primary Stages, and Atlantic Theater. Our answer was: their 1997–98 season included no plays by women. This year the New Group has announced that they are producing a play by a woman. So we take credit for that. And we take credit for women winning Tony awards. That was another question on the quiz: How many women have won the Tony for directing?

CAHUN It was directly after that, after we put that ad in In Theater, that it happened. We definitely influenced the voting.

BEHN We concentrated on the theaters that produced no plays by women. But all the other theaters have one play by a woman, maybe, or a really good group would be two or three out of six or so. The Public has the best score this year.

If I were, say, Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, I’d say, “Look, I want to produce good plays. And if you send me good plays by women, fine. But why should it matter? Why is this a significant question? Why should the Manhattan Theater Club produce the same number of plays by women as by men? Why should art be held to a principle of parity?”

STEIN A study by the College Art Association showed how, in the art world, the number of women going to art school compared to the number of men, and then found that the number of folks who get promoted afterward is proportionately inverse. The reason we’re anonymous is to suggest that maybe we’re good, maybe we’re not so good, but that isn’t the issue we’re looking at. We’re looking at across-the-board sexism and insider trading practices and a lot of cronyish behavior that is no longer acceptable except in the cultural sector, where cronyism is considered to be aesthetic merit. And we maintain that it’s not aesthetic merit. It’s cronyism.

Things are done differently in the theater world. There’s certainly plenty of cronyism, and when the regional theaters all end up doing virtually the same season, it doesn’t happen through divine inspiration or spontaneous combustion. But a painter can paint. It’s true, her work might not be shown, it might not be bought. Still, the work is there, people find it eventually. Your book The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art is full of neglected artists who certainly shouldn’t have been neglected. But a playwright can’t make a play in her studio by herself. She needs a community of actors, an audience, for the play even to exist. Does that make the problem you’re looking at more entrenched, does it create more barriers? Or might it also create more opportunities because there are lots of off-off-Broadway places where you can do your stuff; you don’t have to get into MOMA for people to see your work? Leaving finances aside for a moment, there’s a kind of decentralization in theater . . .

CAHUN There’s this idea that if you’ve been performing downtown for twenty years something’s wrong with you. How come you haven’t brought anything uptown? So your work is questioned. How do you progress? How do you go from downtown to uptown? Who has access to funding? If you look at who is represented in a history of American theater, you’ll see that women just aren’t there.

Doesn’t that depend on which part of American theater history? In the first half of this century, you see a lot more women than you see now.

CAHUN There was a lot more theater then too. But the playwright who had the run on Broadway . . .

BEHN Oh yeah? Who wrote Abie’s Irish Rose?

I don’t know!

BEHN It was a woman. I can’t think of her name off the top of my head. It was in the twenties, and it ran for five years. I just looked in a theater history book to see if that was included, and didn’t find it.

Many women were part of the Broadway scene in the first half of the century, and they’re no more forgotten than the men. Most of those plays are forgettable. But Lillian Hellman or Clare Boothe are remembered as well as, say, Elmer Rice. What do you think has changed? One would have thought that it would have been a lot harder then and that it would get better instead of worse. What has happened, just in terms of commercial Broadway theater?

CAHUN Certainly audiences have dropped off.

You said that there are fewer plays being done now. That’s for sure. Still, women were a much higher percentage.

BEHN I have no idea why. Maybe the economics of Broadway changed and the whole power structure with them. You didn’t spend the whole budget of a small country on one show in those days. Maybe money has made it scarier and mistier and more of an insider’s club.

STEIN The real estate concerns are so enormous now, you can’t be a start-up group.

CAHUN The feminist movement demanded that women be seen differently and perhaps some theaters have been scared off from representing women.

What do you mean, demanded that women be seen differently?

CAHUN The kinds of roles that women played on Broadway at the turn of the century—some of the parts that Lillian Gish played, for instance —are completely different from what feminists now demand.

Certainly in popular melodramas—which weren’t Broadway, exactly—they were damsels in distress. The original image, however, of a person being rescued from the railroad tracks just as the train was coming was a man being rescued by a young woman.

CAHUN In a movie?

No, a melodrama. Under the Gaslight, I think. But later, in Clare Boothe’s plays or Sophie Treadwell’s or Alice Childress’s, the female characters are not damsels in distress or mere functions for the plotting of men’s actions. More recent commercially produced plays by women, for example, ‘night, Mother, don’t present more feminist images of women’s roles than The Little Foxes.

STEIN Another piece of bread that’s thrown out is: look at all the women who are lighting designers and actors and assistant stage managers . . .

And literary managers, who supposedly choose the plays.

BEHN Still, 50 percent of the picture is missing from American theater.

What picture are we missing? I think we have to talk about questions of form. When the Manhattan Theatre Club does a play by a woman—which happens once in a blue moon—it’s the same kind of play they do when they do plays by men. If it’s Playwrights Horizons or Lincoln Center, maybe they do a Wendy Wasserstein play, not usually a feminist work. It’s a simplistic identity-politics position just to say, women’s plays should be produced simply because they’re by women. Sure, they should be: women have just as much right to have mediocre plays produced as men. But what’s the gesture here? Are we really talking about giving people a different picture, some different perspective, some woman’s view?

STEIN Of course the Girls are not of all one opinion about this. When the press asked how we felt about the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington, our basic feeling was, it’s fine. Any effort by any woman under any pretext is completely fine, and we’re not into making value judgments right now. We’re just interested in the statistical fact that women are consistently not represented in any form.

So if all the theaters in America that produce four plays a season did The Children’s Hour and The Heidi Chronicles as two of them, would you hang up your masks and go home?

CAHUN I think there are a lot more plays out there . . .

STEIN I would say yes. Everyone would be sick of The Heidi Chronicles after a year and they’d produce something else, wouldn’t you say?

BEHN Theoretically, yes. Audience demand is another whole issue. Spectators aren’t calling up theaters and saying, “I’m not going to buy a subscription because you don’t have any plays by women here.” That’s why we went into the bathrooms with the stickers.

STEIN The management isn’t going to change unless the public demands it.

That sounds logical. But in the regional theaters, something like 75 percent of the purchasers of tickets are women. (I don’t know if this is the actual number, but it’s a very high percentage.) They’re all trying to drag their husbands to the theater, and when they’re called by a marketing survey, they say, “Oh, I could never get my husband to come with me to that.” So the women, speaking about what they think the men wouldn’t come to see, end up conservative.

BEHN Who knows. Someone could see that sticker and say—

STEIN “Gee, I never thought about that.”

You said the stickers were getting torn down at the Roundabout. Do you have any sense of the response they’re generating? I haven’t seen any of these stickers, and I pee at every theater I go to.

STEIN They come down pretty fast.

BEHN We’ve been getting response through our e-mail. A lot of “Thank God you’re doing theater now. We love the fact that this is one of your focuses.”

CAHUN We’ve only just begun with theater. I think we should go back to your question about parity. How are choices made in theater? Obviously audience demand is one aspect, but the director is responsible to a board as well. We’re trying to enlighten directors about playwrights who are being overlooked.

There aren’t that many new plays that are done at these major regional institutions anyway, are there?

BEHN A lot of development is going on, conferences and play-reading groups. There are networking opportunities that I think women have been shut out of.

Plain old sexism would account for that to some degree. But what are the deeper reasons? If you look at a playwrights’ service organization like New Dramatists, you’ll see that around the same number of women as men are members. So what are the entrenched systems or reasons that keep interest from being sparked by their plays? When the Five Lesbian Brothers did The Secretaries they got rave reviews from everybody. It was great, it was wonderful. No commercial producers expressed interest in moving it. I think if they’d been men—and if it hadn’t been a feminist comedy—there would have been. OK. But what mechanisms need to be addressed? What really needs to change? What, specifically, are these playwrights running into?

STEIN The subject matter of the play itself. The Five Lesbian Brothers will say, “It’s because we’re lesbians that we’re not being produced.”

BEHN . . . a complex, complex issue. Our focus is just bringing to the public that it exists, and starting some dialogue.

What I find disheartening is that we’ve been talking about this for more than twenty-five years. The playwrights Maria Irene Fornes, Roslyn Drexler, Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens, and others established the New York Theater Strategy as early as 1968 to provide what Fornes called “a theater without compromise and sexism.” The Women’s Project started in the seventies. These numbers have been out there year after year after year. It’s great to put them in people’s faces, but I’m also so pessimistic.

STEIN The Girls are an absurdist group, you have to understand. We know we’re not going to change the world. We have to do something or we’ll go nuts. You go on. What can you do? You just go on.

CAHUN We also have a light touch, a certain cynicism, if you like. And the fact that we’re anonymous means we can focus on the issues and name names of the most egregious. It’s easy to point to a complainer and say, well obviously this person is mad because her work isn’t represented and somebody else’s is. We’re not being personally attacked, so we can have activism with fun and not get too downtrodden about it.

BEHN I think about the August Wilson-Robert Brustein debate last year at Town Hall. They should talk about this issue.

But why? It was horrible; they had nothing to say. It was men thumping their chests.

BEHN My point is, it was sold out. We’re trying to say that’s not the only issue in theater and let’s start talking about this. That was the hot ticket.

Well, it got hyped in a certain way—black nationalist and neocon duke it out. If TCG had wanted to sponsor a serious conversation about racial inequity in the American theater, those are not the speakers they would have invited. Wilson and Brustein started slinging mud at each other in a series of articles, it escalated, and people thought, we can sell this prizefight, and they did. It was really depressing.

BEHN We should get women to sling some mud, and have a big huge thing at Town Hall, and then switch the topic.

So who do you think you should get?

STEIN There was a pretty hot ticket some years ago when Robert Bly was talking at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. We should get somebody who can make the Girls really mad, and then get a whole lot of Girls to gang up on him.

Do you look at critics? Are reviewers part of your . . .

BEHN Oh, yeah.

Some women on the West Coast some years ago used to give out an award for the most sexist review of the year. I think they called it the Dicky Award. Is work by women described and discussed differently?

STEIN I don’t know if we care about that, yet. We’re down to basics.

So let’s talk about your own work. Aphra, which of your plays would you like to see produced in the coming season?

BEHN Emperor of the Moon.

Where? Who’s your dream director? What would it look like?

BEHN At the Minskoff Theater, Tina Landau directing.

STEIN I’m already being produced at the Performing Garage: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, which the Wooster Group is doing.

CAHUN Would you like to see something produced uptown?

STEIN No. I think it belongs where it is.

Let’s go back to that question of uptown. Certainly every artist should have money and health insurance, should be able to make a living. But why should everyone aspire to being produced uptown? Why is that the only measure of success?

CAHUN I don’t think it’s the only measure of success. It has to do with cachet and reputation, and whether you’re taken seriously or not. If you’re always downtown, it’s OK in terms of personal growth, personal development, but to be taken seriously . . .

People don’t say that about Richard Foreman. Or about Liz LeCompte.

STEIN It didn’t hurt Liz LeCompte to have Willem Defoe end up in the movies.

CAHUN It didn’t hurt Richard Foreman to be independently wealthy, which puts you in a different place from the majority of people struggling to get their work out. Being uptown means you have gotten enough people interested in you that they’ll invest money and present you because they believe your work is sellable to a broader audience.

Then if you’re, say, Julie Taymor, you’re earning tons of money but you’re making The Lion King instead of the wonderful things you used to make. Right? A big trade-off.

STEIN Yeah. The Robert Wilsonization of the work—turns into product over process.

More the Disneyfication. Robert Wilsonization would be an improvement.

CAHUN Perhaps she plans on going back to doing what she did before. There is that option, once you’re in a certain place.

STEIN I haven’t seen The Lion King. Did you think it was awful?

It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s visually thrilling. And the story is totally retrograde. There’s an enormous clash of approach and values, a great work of the imagination—Taymor’s—up against everything that’s completely corporate- and computer-generated. A misogynist and homophobic story, canned music, but breathtakingly beautiful visually. So I don’t know exactly how to answer whether it’s awful. I’d say she’s doing amazing work in the service of something awful. I don’t mean to suggest that she doesn’t deserve to make money or to have a wide audience, or that people should starve for their work forever—or at all. I just wonder if we can envision other solutions for how artists like, say, Carmelita Tropicana can have health insurance, other than by having to have a Broadway hit.

CAHUN That’s success in our world.

How do the Guerrilla Girls function? How do you reproduce yourselves, recruit, and develop your projects?

STEIN We don’t reveal how many Girls are in the group, which formed in 1985 as a reaction to the choices made in the Museum of Modern Art’s Greatest Hits of the Twentieth Century, with its seventeen women and three hundred men, or some god-awful number like that, and zero artists of color. The Girls started to meet to think about ways not to burn our bras, but to do something else appropriate.

BEHN Since then, we’ve been meeting every twenty-eight days.

How can somebody join the Guerrilla Girls?

CAHUN You’d have to know a Guerrilla Girl.

So it’s cronyism. [General laughter.]

BEHN We get requests by e-mail from women who want to join. We tell them to consider the conditions in their own communities and whether they can’t form their own cell and be useful there rather than, say, coming in from Long Island to work with us.

STEIN We say there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that you can’t just join, but the good news is that you don’t need us. You can do these stickers and get together.

BEHN The Guerrilla Girls don’t care if you want to buy a mask and go out and do things on your own.

Have people done that?

STEIN A group on the West Coast called themselves Guerrilla Girls, but they didn’t have a sense of humor and we didn’t like that. Another group in Texas called themselves the Guerrilla Gals and they had these trench coats and they’d expose themselves. They had exactly the spirit. But we haven’t been in touch with them, don’t have their address.

CAHUN When we do gigs at a college or get invited to do something in a museum or gallery in different parts of the U.S., during the Q and A there are always people who want to join. We just encourage them to get on the case locally themselves.

And how do you keep afloat?

STEIN We’re funded by selling posters and gigs we do that pay for the posters. And we get donations from people. We just sent out a begging letter.

CAHUN People come and go, and some come back again. Recently we had a big recruitment drive and got a whole bunch of younger artists, many of them artists of color.

STEIN Our purposes are reanimated in light of younger women’s concerns. Feminism itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, and the twenty-somethings keep us conscious of what’s important to them.

CAHUN There was a question about gender—why we only have women, when feminist men could be Guerrilla Girls too. We’re going to debate when we go on a retreat soon.

STEIN There was a show at the New Museum called Urban Encounters and the Girls were part of it, and it indicated that younger artists are not forming new groups, they’re animating the old ones. I asked one of the twenty-somethings why, and she said: you have less and less energy to spread around. You have to make money. Maybe you have a couple of art careers—she has two—but you want to remain active. So rather than start from scratch, you infiltrate. You come into a situation and slowly bend it to your purposes. It’s sort of a nineties approach.

Do their purposes seem different from yours?

STEIN They do—not all, but some take for granted things that were won by women twenty years their senior, who fought the fights that made it possible for them to be going to graduate school and not to be questioned when they come up with their M.F.A. thesis ideas. On the other hand, they’re aware that these fights were won before.

CAHUN I was at a Q and A for Annie Sprinkle’s show. A lot of the women in the audience were offended by its pornographic aspect. They didn’t realize that we haven’t had a feminist interpretation of pornography for long. The Barnard conference in 1983 was the first real analysis. If you were born in the seventies and came of age in the late eighties, you might think, why do we have to look at this, why is she behaving like this? Because you don’t have a sense of the passage of time. Annie brought to everyone’s attention that female orgasm just wasn’t included in pornography, which was all about male satisfaction.

STEIN It was so brave and honest of her to show us what she did as a young porn star, with nothing going on above her shoulders, and then transform herself slowly into a feminist practitioner.

Not something likely to be presented by the Manhattan Theater Club. Maybe we’re back at that form question. The institutions you’re targeting are mostly doing plays that are conventional in attitude and form, but your examples of what you admire and would like to see more of are not in that realm.

CAHUN I don’t like to think we can’t force a change in what’s seen in those conventional theaters. I know Annie Sprinkle produced herself, which was brave, incredible for an artist with no money and no backing. But why should that be the only way that that happens? We have to force a dialogue to happen, a place for this work to be discussed and visible.

You have to force a dialogue between whom?

CAHUN Putting the stickers up is a beginning and getting the audience to be aware that women are being underrepresented.

STEIN Embarrassment is a great tool that the Girls have used to our advantage for years and years. Maybe one of the management women will go to the bathroom too, will have to scrape off a sticker, and will bring it to the attention of the people upstairs.

What is the role of educational institutions in all this?

STEIN The whole art system rests on the structure of the art school and the outmoded, irrelevant, sexist, limiting training of artists and how that plays out for the remainder of their careers. I don’t really know how theater professionals are trained, but I’d bet you the training system supports the sexism that’s entrenched in the industry.

Most of the students now studying to be literary managers and dramaturgs who are in a position to pick plays—though they hardly have absolute power—are women. When I studied in that field more than fifteen years ago, I was one of very few women. Now dramaturgy has been established as a service occupation, low-paid and not so important, and for all those traditional reasons women come to dominate. I’d be curious to know how many people in those positions in theaters already are women and what plays they’re proposing.

BEHN I wonder how much power the literary managers actually have. Are artistic directors and producers of theaters calling up friends all day and finding out who’s hot, and saying to the literary manager, “These suggestions are very nice, but I have my whole slate here”? Because it’s very similar in Hollywood, with film. The D-girls—the development girls—read all the scripts and write all the reports, but it’s the grunt work. They write those nice rejection letters and don’t offend anybody, but how much power do they have?

STEIN Maybe we have to wait for some guys to die, or something.