dramaturgy | Bitter Gertrude

Jan 25 2021

Film, Theatre

Ten Ableist Tropes to Jettison in 2021

People with disabilities make up a significant percentage of the population– by some measures, a full quarter– and yet, despite aggressive, ongoing ableism, we are almost always left out of discussions of diversity and equity in theatre & film. We’re rarely hired and our stories are rarely told– when they are, they’re almost always told by abled people, for abled people, with abled people. Abled people are centered in nearly everything about us.

Throughout this post, I’ve included pictures and information about disabled actors, directors, writers, producers, & designers. Meet actor Melissa Salguero. Melissa is represented by Gail Williamson at KMR.

The centering of abled people routinely takes the form of ableist tropes that present the lives of disabled people through an ableist lens. In these tropes, the disabled body is used as a container for the emotions able-bodied people have about disability.

You’ll recognize all of the following ableist tropes; you’ve seen them all numerous times. I am hardly the first person to write about these, and this isn’t even the first time I’ve written about them. Yet somehow, no matter how often we write or speak about this, ableism never seems to be taken seriously, and our concerns are minimized, dismissed, ignored, or outright rejected. Disabled people need people who live in privileged bodies to do better.

Actor, storyteller, and performance artist Terri Lynne Hudson.

Ten Ableist Tropes to Jettison in 2021:

1. WE ARE NOT SYMBOLS. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen scripts with a disabled person who never appears on stage, only appearing in the play as a topic of conversation, a problem that must be solved by the able-bodied characters. I’ve seen scripts where a disabled person is on stage, but never given any lines or any meaningful action, often partially concealed– back to the audience, or partially behind a screen, for example. In each of these cases, the disabled person is a symbol of something affecting the able-bodied people. When a silent disabled character appears on stage yet is marginalized from the action, the disabled body is minimized, a prop rather than a human being. And those silent roles, removed from all meaningful action, are almost always played by able-bodied actors, which renders disabled people voiceless, powerless, and entirely invisible. The voiceless, powerless, disabled body is framed as a burden, an object of ridicule, an object of disgust, or an object of pity. An object, never a subject.

Our disabilities are not ABOUT YOU. We are not a “symbol of oppression,” a “symbol of willful ignorance,” “a symbol of the voiceless,” “a symbol of the futility of language,” “a symbol for our burdens,” or any of the other dozens of explanations I’ve been given when I point out that the disabled character is reduced to a prop.

Actor, singer, director, and producer Erin Cronican, Executive Artistic Director of The Seeing Place Theater.

2. DO NOT INFANTILIZE US. When you depict your able-bodied characters treating your disabled characters like children, you’re echoing generations of oppression and marginalization we have endured. And these issues are intersectional. When you infantilize a disabled character who is neither male nor white, that infantilization is intensified by the white infantilization of BIPOC and the male infantilization of women, as well as trans, enby, and genderqueer people.

Disabled adults are adults. Needing assistance does not make us children any more than an able-bodied person’s need for assistance makes them children. Everyone on the planet requires the assistance of another person each and every day. Unless you live as a hermit, grow your own food, generate your own electricity, make your own clothing from fabric you craft from raw materials; never use the internet, the postal service, retail stores, roads, healthcare, or sanitation services; never read books, listen to music, watch films, take classes, or have partnered sex, you are being assisted by others.

Adults with disabilities are adults. We have adult problems, concerns, joys, fears, relationships, hopes, ambitions, plans, and desires.

A tall, thin white man with a mustache and a beard; short, dark hair in a stylish cut, and dark eyes adjusts his tie as he smiles rakishly at the camera. He's pictured from the waist up, showing his stylish suit. — Actor Brian Seitel.

3. WE ARE NOT HERE FOR YOU TO SAVE. One of the most popular tropes is the “heroic” narrative in which an able-bodied person “saves” a disabled person by “curing” them, teaching them something (to walk again! to use spoken language!), or showing them life is worth living. The disabled person is deeply minimized, presented (again) as a problem for the able-bodied person to solve. The disabled character is often entirely reduced to “disabled and sad,”“disabled and angry,” or “disabled and bitter.” Disability is presented as a dragon for able-bodied people to slay while the disabled character sits by passively, and then showers the able-bodied character with gratitude when they are “cured.” The worst part of this trope is that it’s often presented as “the heroic doctor who stops at nothing to find the diagnosis, treatment, and/or cure” when in reality, medical professionals routinely disbelieve us, avoid us, refuse to give us needed tests and medications, misdiagnose us, or give up after their first guess proves incorrect. And this gets much, much worse if you’re also in any of the other groups that doctors treat with the utmost skepticism– if you are a woman, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, poor, or fat.

A woman with dark eyes and pale skin sits in her wheelchair. She has bleached blonde hair with dark roots cut in a short, 80s-inspired style. She wears a black top, a silver pendant, silver hoop earrings, and blue jeans. Her hands are in her lap and her body is turned away from the camera, but her head is turned to face us. and she has a slight smile that's a bit mischievous. — Actor, singer, dancer, director, and writer Megan Simcox.

4. WE ARE NOT HERE TO INSPIRE YOU. You may have already seen this one referred to as “inspiration porn.” We’re not here to inspire you; we’re just trying to live our lives. We have all the same problems you do, plus our sometimes stubborn & disobedient– and beautiful, and sexual, and joyful– bodies. One especially egregious version of this trope is the MANIC CRIPPLED DREAM GIRL. Her illness or disability is always invisible and she’s always played by a thin, conventionally beautiful, young able-bodied white woman. She teaches the able-bodied hero to love, or to find himself, or to “appreciate the beauty of life,” while she bravely “overcomes” her disability to graduate, or travel “one last time,” or enter the big ballroom dance competition or whatever. She then conveniently dies, but not before her Final Inspirational Words, which are, of course, all about HIM. She dies (prettily) and he lives on, eternally inspired. There are many other versions of this trope, such as:

“NO EXCUSES” (“a nearly worthless disabled person can do this amazing thing, so why can’t you, with all your majestic abledness?”)
“SUPERCRIP” (“it should be impossible for this disabled person to do this thing, but they are the literal best in the world”)
“THE ONLY REAL DISABILITY IS A BAD ATTITUDE” (“look how positive this weak and worthless disabled person is; suck up your problems, majestic abled”)
“HOW CUTE! THEY THINK THEY’RE PEOPLE” (“these poor, useless cripples get one shining moment to pretend to be human through the selfless, heroic work of able-bodied people who staged this event”).

A Black woman with short hair, a green headband, tortoise-shell-framed glasses, a black spaghetti-strap top, and pink lipstick smiles cutely, showing off her dimple. She's seated outdoors in a lovely park with green grass and trees. — Actress, writer, and poet Love Lace. Email ciarayvonnelovelace@gmail.com for booking inquiries.

There’s an easy way to depict disabled people doing cool– dare I say inspirational– stuff and avoid sliding into inspiration porn. Just write the disabled character exactly the same way you would write an abled character doing the same thing. Chirrut Imwe from Rogue One is a great example. What prevents him from falling into the “Supercrip” category is the fact that able-bodied characters throughout the series are similarly depicted using the force to achieve seemingly impossible things. Imwe is a valued member of a collective. He has a well-developed personality. His loving, longterm relationship with Baze Malbus is one of the most enjoyable relationships throughout the entire genre. Depict disabled people and our lives as varied and as full as anyone else’s and you won’t go wrong.

A tall, thin woman with pale skin and long, curly brown hair sits in her wheelchair. She wears a 1/2-sleeved black top with a plunging neckline, blue jeans, and a thick gold bangle. Her hands are crossed in her lap and her body is turned away from us, but her face is turned toward the camera. She's in a house with a hardwood floor and cream-colored walls. Her smile is wide, warm, and welcoming. — Actor, singer, and teaching artist Jenna Bainbridge. Jenna is represented by Gail Williamson at KMR.

5. OUR LIVES ARE NOT ABOUT DISABILITY. OUR PERSONALITIES ARE NOT “DISABILITY.” People with disabilities are wonderful people. We are also petty bitches, selfless heroes, cruel gossips, hardworking activists, ambitious entrepreneurs, excellent parents, terrible parents, and everything else. Becoming disabled didn’t change anything about me. I walk with a cane and have to manage chronic pain but I was the same irreverent, nerdy, overeducated discount Dorothy Parker both before and after I acquired this disability. If “disabled” is your character’s only description, you need to start over.

An olive-skinned young adult sits with their body facing away from the camera, but their head turned back toward us, their left hand behind their head. They have short, dark hair in an 80s-inspired style; deep, dark eyes, and full lips. They wear a hoodie with pastel multicolored stripes and a diamond earring. They're sitting indoors, in front of a small wooden table with a green, grassy plant in a white ceramic container. — Singer, director, actor, and writer Osiris. Email cuenosiris@gmail.com for booking inquiries.

6. OUR LIVES ARE WORTH LIVING. One of the ways in which able-bodied people comfort themselves in this pandemic is to tell each other, “Most of the people who die have pre-existing conditions.” This is equivalent to saying, “Your life is worth so little that your death is less serious than mine would be.” When a disabled character dies, other characters should not echo this kind of sentiment by saying things like, “At least he’s not suffering any more” unless he was in excruciating daily pain. Sure, there are ways in which disability can limit what we can do, but even if we can’t do a ten mile hike or see a painting, trust and believe our lives are as full of joy and pleasure as yours is. We have spouses and children; we make and consume art; we make and consume food. To quote your aunt’s kitchen wall, we “live, laugh, love” as much as anyone else.

A filmmaker is lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, on the ground near the wheels of a non-moving train. She holds her camera, but looks over the top. She has brown skin, black hair pulled back from her face, and an expression on her face of serious concentration. She wears a short-sleeved red top, blue jeans, and a, orange and white bangle. A black labrador sits on the ground with its body up against her, gazing off camera at the same thing the filmmaker is looking at. — Day Al-Mohamed is an author, filmmaker, and political analyst. She’s a founding member of FWD-Doc (Documentary Filmmakers with Disabilities) and the author of the novella *The Labyrinth’s Archivist*. I don’t know the dog’s name, but he is clearly a very good boy.

7. DISABILITY DOES NOT MAKE US DIVINE ORACLES. This trope is thousands of years old, and deeply enmeshed in western literature. Sophocles, Shakespeare, and everyone else who wrote prior to the 20th century get a free pass. Yeah, I’m not thrilled about “Now that he is blind, he can REALLY SEE” or “This nonverbal person can literally BLESS YOU,” but no one is seriously proposing that we set fire to classical literature. We’re only asking for an acknowledgment that these tropes dehumanize us and a pledge to do better now that you know. A blind human has no more (or less) psychic, prophetic, spiritual, or metaphysical talents than a sighted human. A nonverbal human is not an “angel.” People with disabilities are people, no more or less oracular than anyone else. Disabled people share this tired trope with BIPOC (the “Magical Negro,” the “Magical Native American,” the “Magical Asian”) and we’re all asking you to do better. How do you know if you’ve written a “Magical Cripple” as opposed to a cool character with special powers? Does the disabled character have any goal, purpose, objective, or concerns other than helping an able-bodied character? If not, it’s time for a rewrite.

A man sits in his wheelchair outside in front of a large tree. He has long, curly drak hair, olive skin, and a beard. His mustache has been waxed to curl up at the ends. He wears large, 70s-style sunglasses, a dark yellow suede coat with a fur-lined hood and fringe at the chest and waist, and blue jeans. He has one hand on the wheelchair armrest and one on his knee. He has tattoos on his chest and hand, and a serious expression on his face. — Writer, producer, and director Rio Finnegan. His film production company is White Whale Productions.

8. DISABILITY DOES NOT MAKE US VILLAINOUS. This trope is also thousands of years old, and based in two purely ableist bits of nonsense: “Disabled people are bitter and angry at the world, and their hate and jealousy lead them to commit unspeakable acts,” and “A deformed body reflects a deformed soul.” Again, no one is asking you to detonate every existing copy of Richard III. We’re asking you to acknowledge the issue and pledge to do better in your 21st century work as a writer. Allison Alexander has a great piece on this trope. Read it here.

A woman with light skin and light brown hair is pictured partially obscured by something out of focus. She sits with her head tilted to her right, propped up by her right hand, with her left hand curled at her chin. SHe wears a tan off-the-shoulder sweater and has a somber expression on her face, — Director Chloe Kennedy specializes in acting theory, improv techniques, and queer performance. Email chloenkennedy@icloud.com for booking inquiries.

9. DISABILITY DOES NOT MAKE US INNOCENT. One of the issues widely discussed in medical ableism is the fact that doctors often assume disabled people do not have sex. It can be a struggle to get STD testing, birth control, or useful, sex-positive information. This issue is exacerbated by the portrayal of people with disabilities as innocent, asexual beings. Let’s face it, even people who are genuinely asexual aren’t angelic innocents. No one is. This trope is also expressed as characters with cognitive disabilities who are “too innocent” to recognize abuse or crime, the “cute mute,” and characters with physical disabilities who are automatically assumed to be incapable of evildoing.

Natalie is a young white woman with a round face, large, deep green eyes with winged eyeliner, and full lips with red lipstick. Her hair is cut in a short, stylish fashion with a streak of magenta on the left side. She wears a short gold necklace with a gold bar at the center and a denim shirt wirth a plunging neckline. She looks out at the camera with a serious expression. — Playwright Natalie Ann Valentine.

10. WE ARE NOT FAKING OUR DISABILITIES. This trope does significant real-world harm. One of the most common problems people with disabilities face is being disbelieved. We’re considered unreliable narrators of our own lives by medical professionals, by our families, by coworkers, and even by random strangers. Nearly every disabled person– certainly every one I’ve ever met– has been accused of exaggerating or outright faking either their symptoms or their entire disability. Ambulatory wheelchair users and people with invisible disabilities are particularly favorite targets of ableist bullying. This trope causes immediate and immense real-world harm whether the character you’re writing is deliberately faking a disability or has a psychosomatic disability that magically resolves when they learn to accept that the Big Accident was Not Their Fault, or when they learn to love life again, or when they learn the true meaning of Arbor Day. (Bonus points for the able-bodied characters smugly smirking behind the Fake Disabled person’s back when he forgets to limp because they have successfully distracted him).

The only possible way around this is including at least one well-rounded, fully developed disabled character. You can argue all you like that people fake disabilities in “real life,” but “real life” also includes far more examples of actual disabled people, so without that counterbalance, your script is just ableist.

Griffyn is angled away from the camera, but looks back at us with an eyebrow slightly raised and a slight, mischievious smile. His dark hair is buzzed on the sides and longer on top. He has pale skin and wide, dark eyes. He wears a grey T-shirt with a red flannel checked shirt over it and sits in front of a bookshelf stuffed full of books. — Actor, writer, and consultant (specializing in mental health, gender positivity, and disability) Griffyn Gilligan. Contact his agent, Simon Pontin, at castings@thesoundcheckgroup.com.

Ableism is rampant in playwriting and screenwriting. It’s 2021, writers. It’s long past time to do better.

MORE DISABLED TALENT TO HIRE AND SUPPORT:

Michaela Goldhaber is a playwright, director, and dramaturg who heads the disabled women’s theatre group Wry Crips.

Writer Jack Martin runs the film review website Film Feeder.

Michelle E. Benda is a freelance lighting designer for theatre, dance, and opera. See her portfolio here.

Sins Invalid is a “disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.” Sins Invalid is run by disabled artists of color.

Access Acting Academy is an actor training studio for blind, low vision, and visually impaired adults, teens, and kids. They offer classes in New York and worldwide via Zoom. Access is headed by actor, writer, director, and motivational speaker Marilee Talkington.

And of course, yours truly. I’m currently available for consulting, dramaturgy, workshops, and classes. You can also become a Bitter Gertrude patron on Patreon.

Tagged disability, dramaturgy, new plays, playwrights, screenwriting, social justice

Nov 26 2020

Bitter Dramaturgy, education, Theatre

Worldbuilding: Your Secret Weapon

Cartoon image of Melissa in a red-orange shirtwaist dress with orange details, including a pumpkin brooch. Melissa has short red hair with bangs and wears black-framed glasses. — Art by Asia Ellington! I only own this dress in my dreams.

I’m giving a workshop in worldbuilding for playwrights! Come play with me!

Worldbuilding isn’t something we talk about often in playwriting and screenwriting. It’s more common to writers of fictional prose, especially SF/F writers. Careful attention to worldbuilding, however, can level up your scripts significantly. Conversely, its lack can sink a piece, distancing or even confusing your audience.

When people give examples of excellent worldbuilding, they’re always rich, deeply crafted fantasy scapes like the Lord of the Rings films, NK Jemisin’s fiction, or Game of Thrones. When you ask people about worldbuilding in playwriting, people will offer high concept musicals like Wicked or Seussical. But all well-crafted plays have richly detailed worldbuilding.

At its heart, worldbuilding is about consistency and detail.

This Sunday at 4PM PST, I’ll be giving a Zoom workshop through PlayCafe on worldbuilding in playwriting. We’ll discuss the basics of intentional worldbuilding, troubleshooting common pitfalls, building inclusive worlds, and navigating authenticity. Reserve your tickets here! The workshop is free, with a suggested donation of $10-20 to support the great work PlayCafe does for local playwrights.

Tagged dramaturgy, new plays, playwrights, workshops

Sep 21 2017

Bitter Dramaturgy, Culture, Film

Stop Telling Me to Watch Stranger Things

This post is full of spoilers, so be forewarned.

I know I’m late to this party, but the ongoing cult status of the Netflix Original series Stranger Things (written and directed by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer) inspires men to tell me, a D&D playing, scifi loving nerd, that I would LOVE IT OMG WHY HAVEN’T YOU WATCHED IT all the time. So I did. I watched the whole thing. I wanted to love it. I hoped I would love it. That hope ran aground on Stranger Things‘ predictable sexism.

The male characters are lovingly crafted and fully detailed. The main hero is a paunchy small town cop whose life is a mess, and not a glamorous mess in the way this trope usually goes. He does save that particular day, but he’s morally suspect and almost certainly colluding with The Bad Guys in some way. His younger narrative counterpart, the teen hero, is an outcast with few social skills and a tendency to stalk pretty girls, yet is still framed as one of the most courageous people in the series. The meganerdy science teacher is one of the best-drawn characters in the whole thing, framed as bighearted, brilliant, and charmingly clueless. The three main boys are all D&D nerds. One of the actors, Gaten Matarazzo, has a disability, and his character, Dustin, of course has the same disability. This is a massive step forward in casting and something that should be openly lauded, as the disability isn’t presented as “inspirational” disability porn but as just one aspect of his character. The male characters are all interesting and specific.

Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin.

The women, however, are generic sexist tropes yet they are continually held up as “strong women,” even “trope-busters.”

The main female characters are the Distraught Mother (Joyce), the Pretty Young Girl (Nancy), the PYG’s Less Pretty Sidekick (Barb), and the Extraordinary Woman– in this case, an eleven-year-old girl with telekinetic powers, named, irritatingly, Eleven. Without describing anything else about them, and without having seen the series, you can predict how these characters are portrayed and what happens to all of them. The character that pushed me over the edge, however, was the Extraordinary Woman, a type I can no longer stomach.

Young Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven in Stranger Things. She did a fantastic job portraying this character, making her one of the most interesting characters in the series.

The Extraordinary Woman is a character type who breaks rules and has some kind of extraordinary qualities or extraordinary power. When an Extraordinary Woman is introduced, the Narrative Sexism Clock beings its countdown to her destruction. She is either subsumed within a more ordinary role (she loses her powers, forgetting everything; her narrative is detoured into a romance; she regrets having powers because all she ever wanted was a baby) or she is removed from the narrative entirely, dying or disappearing. Very often, she sacrifices her powers to marry an ordinary man, or she sacrifices her life so that the ordinary male character(s) can live.

I have watched and read precisely infinity narratives featuring the Extraordinary Woman. From Charlotte’s Web when I was 8 to Stranger Things a few months ago, I have been watching my culture tell me over and over that the best happy ending I can ever hope for is propping up a mediocre white man, and if I reach for extraordinary, I’ll be sacrificed. The most tedious response to this is “Eleven might still be alive.” It reminds me of a class I was in when Thelma and Louise first came out in 1991, wherein I made the very same critique I’m making here. A male classmate responded to me, “You don’t know what happened to them. The car could have gone up.”

Eleven, kidnapped as a baby and raised in a lab, is the subject of torturous experiments, and is relentlessly pursued by a shadowy government agency when she escapes, yet after her disappearance, no one in the town seems interested in her well-being or current whereabouts, despite the fact that she has living family.

Eleven sacrificed herself to save the boys whether the men who wrote her decide to bring her back to make more money killing her again or not. Everyone got a happy ending but Eleven. Even if she’s alive, where is she? How is she surviving? She’s a little girl with telekinetic powers, the use of which weaken her considerably (of course), not Bear Grylls. She’s treated like a stray dog. The cop leaves food for her out in the woods at the end as a narrative device to imply that she might yet be alive although we watched her sacrifice herself a few scenes earlier. If the cop thinks she might be alive out in the woods, why isn’t he launching an all-out search for her like they did for the lost little boy?

Eleven exists solely as a plot device. She is almost entirely mute (because of course she is). She has no needs or desires that anyone cares about. Her safety is ignored at all times. When she disappears in her final burst of power, the entire town shrugs its shoulders. Oh well! Is she dead? Is she in the Upside Down? Who knows! We’ll leave some frozen waffles in a box in the woods just in case. A little boy goes missing and the entire area goes on a massive search for him, but Eleven (and Barb, for that matter) are treated as if their disappearances are about as serious as losing an earring.

Barb is engagingly played by Shannon Purser, whose performance has inspired a cult following for a character that only appeared in a few scenes.

Every woman in Stranger Things conforms to a specific sexist trope. Barb is the less pretty friend, so she dies simply to raise the stakes, her death treated as otherwise unimportant. Even her supposed best friend, Nancy, rarely mentions her after a certain point. Nancy herself is a box standard Pretty Girl Gets Tough in Dire Circumstances, immediately recuperated into her relationship with the douchey popular boy at the end. I will hand it to the writers for not pairing her with the antisocial stalker boy, although she forgives him with a smile for taking stalkery pictures of her because the writers are men. But the douchey popular boy is no better. Did it ever occur to the writers that she would be better off without either of these jerks? That she might be remembering Barb in her final onscreen moments? Probably not, because without that recuperation back into a relationship with a man, reflecting the only happy ending possible for women written by mediocre men, Nancy veers dangerously close to an Extraordinary Woman. For Pretty Girl Gets Tough in Dire Circumstances, she can either be shunted back into a “normal” female role (mother, wife, girlfriend, daughter) or die for becoming too extraordinary.

The mother, who insists her missing son is still alive, is called “crazy” and portrayed as unrelentingly hysterical. When she’s finally proven right, it’s glancingly acknowledged while she’s immediately pushed into the narrative background. She’s literally behind the man when they go into the Upside Down to save her son. We’re at one of the most important climaxes of the series– a moment that vindicates everything the mother has been saying– and she is almost entirely ignored as the scene focuses on the cop’s experience, the cop’s memories, the cop’s heroism. The mother is terrified and nearly panicking, barely holding it together, instead of marching in there, buoyed by her vindication and determined to get her child. Instead she cowers behind a man while we see his memories of characters we’ve never met. It’s weak writing, but it apparently never occurred to the male writers that the emotional center of the scene should be the woman.

Joyce, played by Winona Ryder, should have been the Big Damn Hero.

There wasn’t a single plot point I couldn’t see coming from a mile away. That’s not always a bad thing, but in this case, the series was structured as if every plot point was a huge SURPRISING REVEAL and spent far too much time building and building and building to a PLOT TWIST that was already obvious. I was dreading the death of Eleven from the moment she was introduced. I KNEW. How could I not? This is always what mediocre men imagine for extraordinary women.

I’m not mad that you like Stranger Things, even though we both know the women in the series deserve much better than the writers gave them. Many of you forgive Stranger Things its sexism and obviousness due to the nostalgia factor. And that’s truly fine. But I do not want to watch yet another show where women die to raise the stakes, where a box standard Pretty Girl Gets Tough is considered an achievement, where a woman who is right is called “crazy” and then when proven right, acknowledged with a few quick lines as she’s forced back in the narrative behind the man. I never want to watch another show where the extraordinary woman sacrifices herself at the end to save ordinary men. Never.

Tagged dramaturgy, feminism, film, narrative, screenwriting

Jul 13 2017

3 Comments

Theatre

The “Playwright’s Intent” and the Dangers of the “Purist”

It’s always exasperating to see people scolding directors for “desecrating” a canonical play or a canonical playwright’s “intent” because they cast actors of color, cast a disabled actor, or removed something racist (or sexist, antisemitic, ableist, etc) from the work. It’s exasperating because it’s the smallest and least artistically viable point of view to have about modern stagings of canonical work.*

Our “canon” has deliberately shut out women and people of color for a great many generations. Until fairly recently in western history, it was very difficult for women and people of color to become playwrights (lack of access to education being a significant bar), and for those who were playwrights, it was very difficult to get produced outside of certain theatres. Even if produced, the work of women and people of color was rarely considered “important” or “universal” enough to be included in the kinds of awards, articles, books, and university courses that created what we consider to be the “canon.” Plays that were considered “universal” reflected specifically white and male points of view; plays that differed from that were considered specific to a cultural subgroup rather than “universal” in the vast majority of cases. Even today, most works in a traditional survey course are written by white men while “Black theatre” is its own category, often represented by a single play. In my undergrad education, that play was the short piece “Dutchman” by Amiri Baraka– we didn’t even read a full-length play. “Asian Theatre,” “Chicano Theatre,” and “Feminist Theatre” are still often brief mentions as classes move directly to more important, “mainstream” writers such as Sam Shepard and David Mamet, with Caryl Churchill the lone female voice in an otherwise very male reading list.

Scholars and theatremakers have begun the process of interrogating the formation of the canon, as well as reframing the works we consider “canonical” within their specific sociohistorical context rather than continuing to pretend these works are “universal.” This is vital work.

You only get answers to the questions you ask. Scholars and theatremakers are asking new questions about “canonical” works and the formation of the “canon.”

When we stage canonical work, we have two choices. The first is what is mistakenly referred to as the “purist” approach. This approach holds that works should be preserved untouched, performed precisely as they were first performed. There’s some educational value in performing work in historically accurate ways– at least as far as we can reconstruct that level of accuracy. Those who advocate for this approach believe they are defending the “playwright’s intent,” which means they somehow believe that their interpretation of the “playwright’s intent” is the only accurate one. These people are, in my experience, overwhelmingly white and male, and, as such, have been taught from birth that their experience of the world is universal, and their interpretation of the world and its processes and symbols is “correct,” so it’s not entirely surprising that they believe they are the only ones who understand the “playwright’s intent” and can therefore separate what is a reasonable interpretation of a work from page to stage from what is a “desecration.”

There are many problems with the purist approach. First of all, no one knows the playwright’s intent if the playwright, as is the case with most canonical plays, is dead. Even if the playwright wrote a 47-paragraph screed entitled “Here Is My Intent: Waver Not Lest Ye Be Tormented By My Restless Spirit,” no one knows what the playwright’s intent would be if he had knowledge of the cultural changes that occurred after he died. The audience for whom he wrote the play– the culture that understood the references, the jokes, the unspoken inferences; the culture that understood the underlying messages and themes; the culture to whom the playwright wished to speak– is gone, and modern audiences will interpret the play according to their own cultural context. Slang terms change meaning in months; using a 400-year old punchline that uses a slang term 90% of the audience has never heard seems closer to vandalizing the playwright’s intent than preserving it. Would Tennessee Williams or William Shakespeare, masters of dialogue, insist that a line using a racial slur now considered horrific still works the way he intended? Still builds the character the way he intended? It seems dubious at best, yet this is the purist’s logic. The playwright’s intent on the day the play was written, the logic goes, could not ever possibly change.

It’s important to continue to study these works unchanged. We must not forget or attempt to rehabilitate our past. But to claim that lines written decades or even centuries in the past can still work the way the playwright originally intended is absurd.

We have begun to understand that the “canon” and its almost exclusively white male point of view is not “universal,” but is a depiction of the cultural dominance of a certain type of person and a certain way of thought. We have begun to re-evaluate those works and the “canon” as a whole as part of a larger historical narrative. This is why it is of great artistic interest to stage “canonical” work in conversation with the current cultural context.

When staging, for example, The Glass Menagerie in 2017, one must consider the current moment, the current audience. We can choose to present the work precisely as it was presented in 1944 as a way to experience a bygone era, or we can present the work in conversation with its canonical status, in conversation with our own time, in conversation with the distance between its era and our own, in conversation with the distance between the playwright’s intent and the impossibility of achieving that intent with a modern audience, simply due to the fact that too much time has passed for the original symbols, context, and themes to work the same way they once did.

What does The Glass Menagerie— or any canonical work– mean to an audience in 2017? What can it mean? What secrets can be unlocked in the work by allowing it to be interpreted and viewed from diverse perspectives? What can we learn about the work? About the canon? About the writer? About ourselves?

The meaning of any piece of art is not static. Whether the piece of art is a sculpture created in 423 BCE or a play written yesterday, the meaning of any piece of art is created in the mind of the person beholding it in the moment of beholding. The meaning of each piece changes with each viewing, just as the meaning of what we say is created in large part by the person to whom we’re saying it, which is why we can say “Meet me by the thing where we went that time” to your best friend but need to say “Meet me at the statue across from the red building on the 800 block of Dunstan” to an acquaintance. To insist that there is one “correct” meaning– always as determined by a white male– is to deny the entire purpose and function of art. You cannot create a “purist” interpretation without the play’s original audience in attendance. The closest you can come is a historical staging a modern audience views as if through a window, wondering how historical audiences might have reacted, or marveling at the words and situations historical audiences found shocking– or did not. How many audiences in 2017 understand Taming of the Shrew as a parodic response to the popularity of shrew-taming pieces? Shakespeare’s audience is gone and the cultural moment to which he was responding is gone, so the possibility of a “purist” staging is also gone.

This is 2017. Our audiences live in 2017. It’s insulting to them to present a play written generations in the past as if nothing about our culture has changed since then, as if a work of genius gave up every secret it had to give with the original staging, as if art has nothing whatsoever to do with the audience viewing it.

We know better. Art lives in our hearts and minds, whether those hearts and minds are white and male or not.

*Of course I am only referring to interpretations that have received permission from the writer or estate, or stagings of work in the public domain. This is not– at all– an argument in favor of running roughshod over someone else’s IP.

Tagged casting, civil rights, directing, disability, diversity, dramaturgy, feminism, playwrights, producing, racism

Mar 01 2017

6 Comments

Film, Uncategorized

The Bechdel Test and White Feminism

I keep running across white women saying things like, “I’m never seeing any film or play that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test ever again!”

This statement epitomizes the problem with white feminism.

First, a quick definition of the Bechdel test, invented by amazing writer and comic artist Alison Bechdel, known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and her memoir Fun Home, which she turned into a Tony Award-winning musical. Just in case you weren’t already convinced she’s a genius (and I have been since the old DTWOF days), she was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant.

Alison Bechdel. Source: Out Magazine.

The “Bechdel test” is a metric she created in 1985 in a DTWOF strip to evaluate female representation in films. In order to pass the Bechdel test, a film must have two female characters who have at least one conversation that is not about men. It sounds surprisingly basic, yet the vast preponderance of films cannot pass the Bechdel test.

The Bechdel test becomes tricky when applied to theatre. For example, it immediately eliminates all solo performance and all male/male and male/female two-handers, regardless of content.

And this is exactly my issue with the Bechdel test being used as a basic metric of acceptability in theatre– it ignores both content and context. It ignores intersectionality.

Let’s take two examples. The first play, written by a middle-aged white man, is about four wealthy white women discussing their problems and lives while at various brunches in upscale New York eateries. The main topics of conversation are their wealth and whether the sacrifices they made to obtain that wealth were worth it. The central narrative is one character revealing she has lost most of her money and must now live outside Manhattan. This play neatly passes the Bechdel test.

The second play, written and performed by four young Black men, is about their experiences growing up in Oakland. The main topics of conversation are police violence and racism. The central narrative is the loss of their friend, murdered by police while unarmed, driving home from work at a local elementary school, the same school where all five friends met. This play does not pass the Bechdel test.

If the goal of metrics like the Bechdel test are to hold artists accountable for the work we create, insisting on work that resists cultural marginalization and works for inclusion, the Bechdel test is not enough. It is not enough to fight for the inclusion of women and ONLY the inclusion of women. Insisting that a play about privileged white women is so deeply, intrinsically superior to a play about Black men that we can issue a test to “prove” it is counterproductive to every diversity goal we have. We’re issuing a test that by design marginalizes men of color.

We need work that passes the Bechdel test, and we need it badly. But we cannot use that test as a metric for the acceptability of all work.

Kamal Angelo Bolden as Chad Deity in The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity in the Victory Gardens/Teatro Vista co-pro in Chicago, 2009. Photo: Chicago Theater Beat

We live in an intersectional world, and issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion must be addressed intersectionally. Yes,we must fight for the inclusion of women in our narratives, but we must also fight for the inclusion of other marginalized groups. When we refuse to do so– when we announce that all plays must pass the Bechdel test in order to be acceptable, as I have seen so many white women do– we fail. We become “white feminists,” content with centering ourselves while ignoring other marginalized groups.

To state that you will never see a play that does not pass the Bechdel test is to state that Crimes of the Heart, In the Boom Boom Room, and Five Women Wearing the Same Dress are intrinsically important and worthwhile, while Topdog/Underdog, The Mountaintop, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, The Year Zero, Mambo Mouth, and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 are not worth seeing.

Mason Lee in the Off Broadway production of The Year Zero, 2010. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The Bechdel test even fails at what it was purportedly designed to do. Many films steeped in misogyny pass. “Lesbian” pornography made for male consumption passes. Most Disney princess films pass. The Bechdel test, I have to believe, was never meant to be an iron-clad metric.

I don’t know Alison Bechdel, but I consider the Bechdel test excellent social commentary, not a call to action. It’s meant as criticism, to make a point about how few films have female characters with objectives of their own. It’s meant to point out how few films present women as human beings rather than as events in the lives of men.

We cannot use the Bechdel test as the sole metric for acceptability. The examination of our work and its resistance to, and participation in, systems of oppression is a complex process, not a three-point test.

Even issuing a test is a classic white gatekeeping maneuver. White liberals are always looking for clear-cut guidelines to make us instantly “not racist” or “not sexist,” and we excel at creating oversimplified litmus tests that prove we are the Most Woke and everyone else is Doing It Wrong.

not how it works

You can’t fill out a form with your credentials (“voted for Obama,” “watched Jessica Jones,” “smiled hard at Black guy on the street”), mail it in with a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Women’s Studies department at Howard and then just wait for your NOT RACIST OR SEXIST certificate to roll in. There’s no “Woke White Person” checklist.

There’s no test.

Fighting for diversity and equity in theatre is a complex, multifaceted process that involves the stories we tell and how we tell them, including who tells those stories and who’s in our audiences, who are the decision-makers and gatekeepers, where the funding comes from, and so much more. As tempting as it is to get a definitive ruling on what is “resistance theatre” and what is “collaboration theatre,” that fact remains that each piece of theatre we make will have facets of resistance and facets of collaboration, and all we can do is commit to the process of examining our decisions in both the work we make and the work we consume as thoroughly and realistically as possible. It’s never going to be as simple as only going to shows with The Gold Star of Bechdel next to their titles. Fighting systems of oppression requires more of us, much more.

Commit to the process. Continue to love the Bechdel test for what it is– an eye-opening way to examine narrative that sometimes works and sometimes does not, but can be an effective tool when used correctly. It was one moment of genius in a long career of genius moments for Alison Bechdel, but cannot be– and was never meant to be– the sole, definitive arbiter of acceptable work.

Tagged activism, diversity, dramaturgy, feminism, narrative, playwrights, racism, screenwriting

Nov 05 2016

4 Comments

Culture

Sex, Lies, and Hillary Clinton

In the mid-60s, Jan Kott wrote a truly horrible book called Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, in which he analyzes Shakespeare’s plays according to his specific point of view as a white European male who hasn’t quite grasped the humanity of the women and people of color around him, although, at the time, we just called that “Shakespeare criticism.”

When discussing the character Desdemona, a character whose complete faithfulness to her husband is the primary narrative linchpin of the play, Kott says, “Desdemona is faithful, but must have something of a slut in her.” He says that she must be a slut “in potentia” if not “in actua” because so many men desire her– because she inspired erotic imaginings in the men around her. SO SHE IS THE SLUT.

And while this kind of “my white male imagination tells me so” Shakespeare “analysis” we’re used to getting from the likes of mid-century scholars like Kott (and Harold Bloom, and so many others whose “analysis” of Shakespeare’s female characters is 100% flights of fancy) it stood out to me, even as a teenager when I first encountered this nonsensical “analysis.” It stood out to me that THIS IS AN ADMIRED BOOK OF SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM. This was the first moment I realized that the world of academia was going to be an uphill battle for me as a woman.

This moment– seeing a respected book of lit crit describe male desire for a woman who never sought nor wished for that desire as HER OWN FAULT for somehow being a “slut” “in potentia”– has come to mind again and again this election cycle.

Millions of our tax dollars have been poured out in a desperate attempt to pin something, ANYTHING, on Hillary Clinton. Nothing illegal has ever been found. Every investigation has exonerated her, and the Clinton Foundation is one of the highest-rated on every nonpartisan site that monitors charities. Obviously false scandals have been created by alt-right (and regular right) propagandists, and they’re shared around the internet as if they make sense. Scandal after scandal have been manufactured and debunked. Hillary haters are the hydra of American politics– chop off one false scandal and two grow back. There’s a never-ending supply of false scandals, and the factual evidence debunking them is dismissed as “irrelevant” or “bought and paid for.” As if the Clintons have an unlimited supply of money– oh, wait, according to the Hillary haters, THEY DO, thanks to Jewish bankers and the Evil Jewish Scrotillionaire Necromancer Lich Demon George Soros.

Hillary haters are forced, in the face of all the evidence exonerating her, to claim that the lack of evidence is the evidence. What is she hiding? It must be something! LOOK AT ALL THESE SCANDALS. Anyone who points to the facts is “bought and paid for” with all Clinton’s Jewish banker money, something I’ve been accused of myself multiple times. (I only wish someone was paying me to blog.)

And so we come back to Desdemona. SHE MUST BE SOME KIND OF SLUT. LOOK AT ALL THESE MEN LUSTING AFTER HER, reasons Jan Kott. EVEN IF SHE’S FAITHFUL TO HER HUSBAND, he continues, SHE’S STILL A SLUT, OTHERWISE WHY WOULD OTHELLO BELIEVE IAGO? Why indeed.

Kott blames Desdemona for the scandalous thoughts men have about her, and we blame Clinton for the scandalous thoughts we have about her.

“She’s too heaped in scandal,” “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” “There must be SOMETHING there,” “She’s clearly corrupt,” “One of the most corrupt politicians ever.” We dressed her in this outfit against her will, then condemned her for it.

Kott goes on:

Othello does not have to kill Desdemona. The play would be more cruel, if, in that final and decisive moment, he just left her. . . . Othello kills Desdemona in order to save the moral order, to restore love and faith. He kills Desdemona to be able to forgive her; so that the accounts be settled and the world returned to its equilibrium. Othello does not mumble any more. He desperately wants to save the meaning of life, of his life, perhaps even the meaning of the world. (123)

Kott– a respected Shakespearean critic– writes that killing a woman falsely heaped with scandal is the only way to “restore love and faith” and “the meaning of the world.” That men must use women as scapegoats for their own dark desires and imaginings and then kill them to restore order. Only dead can women be forgiven for “making” men have dark desires. This, again and again, returns to my mind as I see so many respected people– elected officials– calling for the murder of this woman who has borne the brunt of their imagined scandals, the congealed crust of hate and fear of powerful, independent, outspoken women.

And now I type the requisite sentences, the ones demanded of everyone who writes about Hillary Clinton and no other politician, ever: Do I agree with her every decision? No.

But we cannot productively discuss what kind of president she will be (and she will be president) in reality while we continue to make her the scapegoated center of 1000 false scandals. We cannot have productive discussions about foreign policy or ed policy– two areas we really need to be discussing right now– while the country is embroiled in a non-scandal about emails, or an alt-right created one about sex (take your pick).

Jan Kott is still taught. And respected newspapers are still running stories about Hillary’s emails, and the entire GOP is participating in a false story about voter fraud and a “rigged” election. The question is: Are we going to continue the Kott-like misogynistic scapegoating of this woman, or are we going to get to work on the actual issues?

Tagged 2016 election, dramaturgy, feminism, politics, Shakespeare

Aug 24 2016

4 Comments

Personal Nonsense, Theatre

My Book Is Out!

This image is shamelessly heisted from the TCG website. Link below.

And by “my book is out,” I mean Caridad Svich‘s book is out. The ever-brilliant (srsly) Svich has released a collection of essays for TCG entitled Audience (R)Evolution: Dispatches from the Field. In addition to one by yours truly called “The Lies We Tell About Audience Engagement,” it contains essays by Larissa Fasthorse, Richard Montoya, Itamar Moses, Jules Odendahl-James, Sylvan Oswald, Bill Rauch, Lisa D’Amour, Roberto G. Varea, Callie Kimball, Carlton Turner, and Svich herself, among many others.

Order your copy here!

Tagged a life in the theatre, actors, audience development, audience engagement, casting, directing, diversity, dramaturgs, dramaturgy, feminism, funding, new plays, playwrights, producing, racism

Feb 08 2016

126 Comments

Culture, Film

White People: Shut Up About Beyoncé

After the release of her game-changing, brilliant video, Formation, and the stir her Superbowl halftime show caused with dancers dressed like Black Panthers, Beyoncé is blowing up everyone’s feeds everywhere. And one thing I am shocked/notshocked to see is white outrage about both.

Let me begin by saying that I’m not a Beyoncé fan. I’m not a fan of any of the pop divas. I don’t have anything against them; it’s just not music that interests me. So Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Madonna, Mariah, Adele, I apologize, but I’m sure you and your massive success could not possibly care less that I would rather be listening to punk or classical. The only reason I’m pointing this out is to make sure you know I’m not a Beyoncé fan. This is not about defending a beloved star.

Let me tell you what it IS about.

The vast majority of Black people in the US are descended from people who were dragged here against their will and forced to live in a culture that shut them out completely from mainstream artistic production for 400 years. For 400 years, Black people were living in a culture where their pain, their culture, and their art were appropriated and sanitized for white consumption, or, more often, shut out of the narrative entirely, replaced by racist caricatures or rendered invisible. For 400 years, the stories of Black people on this continent were untold, belittled, or made the tools of white narrative and white profit.

Now we’re in a cultural moment where there are powerful, mainstream Black artists telling Black stories that may or may not include white people, may tell uncomfortable truths about white people in Black lives, or may use white people as metaphors. For 400 years Black people were used as metaphors in white art, so my sympathy for “not all white people” and “that’s not fair” is somewhere at the bottom of a pile of Magical Negroes, Gone with the Wind, and token Black friends.

In this cultural moment where powerful, mainstream Black artists like Beyoncé are telling their stories on their own terms, the white people who controlled the narrative– including how and when Black stories have been told– for the past 400 years need to sit back, shut up, and listen, listen, listen. You don’t like how white people are being portrayed? Spend some time thinking about why Black artists are portraying white people that way instead of demanding they adjust their stories to conform to your self-image as “the good guy.” We are not the heroes in these stories. We are not the intended audience. We are irrelevant, and there’s nothing people in power hate more than to be made irrelevant, but the fact remains that these are Black stories, by, for, and about Black people. You don’t like it? Don’t watch. But I recommend that you do, and give it some real thought. This is their truth. You do not get to dictate how Black artists see or portray their own lives.

And if the image of the tiny child dancing in front of a line of police officers, who then surrender to him, does not move you after little Tamir Rice (and so many others), you have no soul.

Formation-surrender

The line of riot police surrendering to the power of a beautiful dancing child is not “anti-white” or “anti-police.” It is pro-hope, pro-life, pro-art, and pro-Black. If you don’t like the metaphor of the line of white police officers here, I suggest you spend some time thinking about why Beyoncé chose it.

The Formation video and the Superbowl show are examples of a powerful Black woman at the top of her game brilliantly telling Black stories for Black people, brilliantly seizing the narrative and asserting the beauty, power, and truth of a people who have been stringently and deliberately silenced for centuries in this country.

The call for Black women to get in formation, get information, and celebrate their power gave me chills. You hear a lot about “Black excellence,” and Formation is a potent reminder that Black excellence isn’t something created by white people congratulating themselves for bending down to hand out opportunities. Too many of us define “white ally” as “someone who is desperately needed by Black people to help them, and therefore deserves all the cookies.” Black excellence is already there, has always been there. It doesn’t need white validation, and the lack of fucks Beyoncé has for white validation from the center of her Black power is giving some white people fits.

beyonce-formation-video-696x385

Beyoncé, I hope you’re bathing in a marble tub full of white tears this morning.

My fellow white people: Listen. Listen. Listen. This is a Black moment, rarer than rare in this culture. If you don’t like the way Black artists portray white people, work on changing the impact of white people in Black lives, not on telling Black people they’re wrong about their own lives.

SIGNAL BOOST: “We Slay, Part I” by New South Negress is an excellent analysis of Formation.

IN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTIONS:

No, the title is not meant literally.
No, I am not an angry Black lady, but thank you for the compliment.
No, capitalizing “Black” does not reveal a secret plot for racial superiority. Capitalizing the word “Black” in reference to people is a linguistic thing. “White people” has a squidgy definition and refers to a hodgepodge of people from varied ethnic groups, all of which are capitalized, such as “Celtic people” or “Swedish people.” “Black” as shorthand for “The people of the African Diaspora living in the United States” is rightly capitalized as “Black people” in the same way we say “French people.” “African American” is linguistically and historically troubled because “Africa” is a continent with thousands of disparate cultures, and the people we label as such were forcibly separated from most aspects of their cultures of origin when they got to the US, creating an entirely new, coherent culture best described as “Black.” Of course, the word as an ethnic descriptor has other applications (“Black people in Germany,” for example), but this is the one I’m using in the article. Not all linguists agree, but that’s my position.

Tagged diversity, dramaturgy, narrative

Oct 13 2015

5 Comments

Theatre

The Problem with the Shakespeare “Translation” Controversy

There has been some fiery controversy around Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s announcement that they’re commissioning “translations” of all 39 Shakespeare plays into “modern English.” It was the rollout that launched a thousand screams of condemnation.

People were either condemning the idea that Shakespeare needed “translating” at all, or condemning the people who were protesting the “translations.” It was either “This is the death of art” or “People against this need to stop being so damn precious,” as if there was no room for mixed feelings or thoughtful discussion. I was a little disappointed in the terms of the discussion being set up as a battleground. I was asked to comment no less than ten times before I had even read the PR myself.

At first, I will admit, I was shocked that OSF would sponsor something that seemed so obviously horrible. Then I read OSF’s PR and realized what the problem was. In the PR, OSF referred to the project as modern language “translations,” and then went on to describe a project that couldn’t be further from that. The PR quotes OSF director of literary development and dramaturgy Lue Morgan Douthit as stating that the texts won’t be line-for-line “translations,” but much more subtle. Douthit is quoted as saying that she used the word because she likes “the rigor that ‘translate’ implies.” I have some skepticism about that quote. Considering that the most famous “Shakespeare translation” is the appallingly bad “No Fear Shakespeare,” the word “translation” in this context implies exactly zero rigor. It was a deeply unfortunate choice.

OSF has instructed its list of playwrights and dramaturgs– all of whom are leading national voices– to first, “do no harm.” Lines that are already clear are to be left intact. But what, exactly, does “clear” mean?

Let’s start with the bad news.

The pilot for this was Kenneth Cavander’s Timon of Athens. In it, Cavander sets the clarity bar incredibly low, and the resulting updates are problematic.

Original:

TIMON: What, are my doors opposed against my passage?
Have I been ever free, and must my house
Be my retentive enemy, my jail?
The place where I have feasted, does it now,
Like all mankind, show me an iron heart? [Arden 3.4.77]

Cavander:

TIMON: What’s this? My doors locked—to shut me in!?
Haven’t I been always open with my friends,
And now my own house turns against me,
Becomes my jail? Does my home, where I have feasted,
Show me, like the rest of mankind, an iron-heart?

Original:

CUPID: Hail to thee, worthy Timon, and to all that of his bounties taste! The five best senses acknowledge thee their patron and come freely to gratulate thy plenteous bosom. There taste, touch, all, pleased from thy table rise, They only now come but to feast thine eyes. [Arden 1.2.121]

Cavander:

CUPID: Hail to you, worthy Timon, and to all who savor the feast he provides…The Five Senses salute their patron, and gratefully honor your unstinting hospitality. I will now present…Taste…Touch…and the rest of them. Please rise, everyone…You have been well fed, so now—a second feast…For your eyes only!

(Source)

While some of the “translated” lines above are stilted and clunky, I’m most concerned with accuracy and clarity. Cavander’s “Does my home, where I have feasted, show me, like the rest of mankind, an iron-heart?” is actually LESS clear than the original. Moving “show me” in the sentence order makes “like the rest of mankind” modify “me.” Now the house is showing an iron heart to Timon and all mankind, rather than the house joining mankind in showing Timon an iron heart. It’s not the only inaccuracy just in these two samples. “Have I been ever free” is rendered as “Haven’t I always been open with my friends,” which is a huge change to the meaning of the line. At the end of the second quote, “They only come now but to feast thine eyes” becomes the inaccurate (and trite) “so now– a second feast. For your eyes only!”

While I’ve only seen a handful of samples, in every one, Cavander’s “translation” is much deeper than it needs to be, discarding words and phrases that are clear on their own, and inserting stilted or inaccurate substitutions. So I respect the alarm some had when they discovered that OSF was commissioning like “translations” of the rest of the works.

Those who had no experience of the Cavander were alarmed by the word “translation” because, up to this point, it primarily meant uniformly awful modern updates like No Fear Shakespeare. No Fear is not only badly written, its “translations” provide a superficial understanding of the lines, and sometimes even inaccurate ones. A few examples: “sighing like furnace” becomes “huffing and puffing like a furnace”; “Bless you, fair shrew” becomes “Hello to you, my little wench”; “Two may keep counsel, putting one away” becomes “Two can conspire to put one away.”

There are excellent reasons to have legitimate concerns about a “translation” project. It’s not about being “precious”; it’s about the deep problems evident in previous “translations.”

But let’s look at the good news.

The Cavander “translation” is troubling, yes, but for the rest of the series (apart from The Tempest, which Cavander is also writing) OSF has commissioned a phenomenal group of writers: Christopher Chen, Sean San Jose, Octavio Solis, Luis Alfaro, Lloyd Suh, Migdalia Cruz, Aditi Kapil, Marcus Gardley, Naomi Iizuka, and Taylor Mac, just to name a few, supported by dramaturgs like Joy Meads, Nakissa Etemad, Julie Felise Dubiner, and Desdemona Chiang. These people are some of the cream of the crop of modern American theatremaking.

Most importantly, they’ve been instructed to leave language that’s clear intact, and I trust them to make good choices about what “clear” means. None of these writers could ever be accused of imagining audiences can’t understand difficult language. I also trust them to know the difference between “poetic” and “stilted,” and I trust those dramaturgs to prevent misreadings of lines that would wind up “translated” incorrectly.

Given the “do no harm” instructive and the focus on clarity, what’s surely happening here is not much different than what we all already do for production. The meanings of some of the words in Shakespeare’s texts have changed so completely in the past 400 years that performing them as is becomes, essentially, vandalism of the author’s intent. If you’re producing As You Like It, you can’t perform a phrase like “the humorous duke” and expect a 2015 American audience to understand that it means “unpredictably moody” and not “funny.” There are literally hundreds of words and phrases whose meanings have changed, and there are even more that are just no longer in use. Some are clear from context, particularly when seen acted on stage (prithee, anon, varlet, belike, wherefore), others, not so much (sack, doubt, shrift, horns, jointure, French slop). There are some words whose definitions are hotly debated (pugging, wappened). When we produce Shakespeare, we all make decisions about which words we leave intact, believing the audience will get the gist in context, and which need to be changed to preserve the meaning of the line. It’s rare to see Shakespeare completely untouched because it’s a foolish way to perform it.

And don’t forget that there’s no one definitive Shakespeare text. Every published edition, and many performance texts, are the result of a series of decisions made by an editor with every past edition, folio, and quarto open on their desks. With no definitive text, absolute purism is indeed just preciousness.

But the problem wasn’t precious purism. The problem with Shakespeare “translation” is not in what these playwrights will actually do– they haven’t even done it yet– but in the word “translation” itself. It’s one hell of a trigger. If OSF had used a less unfortunate, more accurate word, there wouldn’t have been a controversy.

We’ve covered the good and the bad– now it’s time for the ugly.

What if the doomsayers are right, and every one of these plays is as bad as the worst No Fear?

Well, so what?

There are already eleventy splatillion “translations,” adaptations, deconstructions, and the like of these plays. If Macbeth can survive Throne of Blood and Scotland PA, if Romeo and Juliet can survive West Side Story and Romeo Must Die, and if Hamlet can survive Strange Brew and The Lion King, then I think the plays will survive some of the best playwrights and dramaturgs in the country having a whack at deciding what to do about “horns” and “Barbary cock-pigeon.”

And I get that it’s upsetting to a lot of people that OSF, one of the stewards of Shakespeare’s work in the US, seems to be endorsing something you’re imagining as a combination of No Fear and Forbidden Planet, but if someone handed you a gigantic check, told you that it was only for this project, but that you could hire any playwrights and dramaturgs you liked, you would JUMP at the chance. This is EXACTLY what we want one of our flagship American theatres doing– paying artists to art. This is something to be celebrated. If you don’t like the results, well, don’t stage them or go see them. OSF has no plans to stage them either, apart from the developmental readings. Just be glad that these enormously deserving artists landed this fantastic gig.

Personally, I’d be FAR more excited by full adaptations from these writers, engaging with the texts rather than “translating” them, but I wasn’t the one writing the check and telling OSF what to do with it. That honor belongs to Dave Hitz from the Hitz Foundation. Honestly, it’s wonderful that they’re supporting the work of all these artists. I think that should be the main focus here. People you admire– some of them your friends– are getting paid to do what they love. That’s a great thing, whether you love the resulting texts or not. Either way, Shakespeare will be fine.

Tagged directing, dramaturgs, dramaturgy, new plays, producing, Shakespeare

Oct 07 2015

2 Comments

Film, Theatre

Writers: Retire These Clichés (Version: LADYPARTS)

I know, I know: I write about overused tropes often. (Who said irony is dead?) Maybe one day I’ll compile them all into a self-published e-screed entitled “Melissa Reads Too Many Plays,” but for now, the blog will have to do.

Sometimes a cliché works. You’re engaging with the trope in an interesting way, or you’re commenting on the trope’s ubiquitousness. But most of the time, it’s just lazy writing. You plonk a clichéd trope into the scene because you haven’t given the moment much thought, and a well-worn piece of cultural narrative fits neatly into the scene with little effort. Sometimes the clichéd trope is a cultural narrative about race, gender, or religion that you take as given without examining your unconscious biases. Sometimes you’re more focused on other aspects of the scene. Sometimes you’re just . . . lazy. AS ARE WE ALL.

Feel the wrath of Ytar!

I don’t mean you don’t care about your work. I just mean, sometimes we take the easiest way out because the issue doesn’t interest us as much as other things at that moment. Sometimes we don’t even realize that’s what we’re doing.

Today’s edition of “Melissa Reads Too Many Plays” is centered around LADYPARTS. There are approximately eleventy gynillion inaccurate, irritating tropes about women and our MYSTERIOUS LADYBITS. Here are a few of the most preposterous.

Artist’s rendition of a description provided by a male playwright

Nausea and/or vomiting as the first sign a character is pregnant. I AM CALLING A MORATORIUM ON THIS. This trope is so bad it drags down the quality of the rest of the work. First of all, it’s inaccurate. While 75% of pregnant women experience nausea, only 50% will have to endure vomiting. Most importantly, it’s nowhere near the first sign of pregnancy. (For most of us, that honor belongs to sore boobs.) Vomiting is, however, the first outward sign of pregnancy that men have historically noticed because it’s the first outward sign of pregnancy that women cannot hide. In the 20th century, when this trope was popularized in TV and film written almost exclusively by men, few women paraded around the office telling male coworkers about their sore boobs. However, no one can avoid noticing the stenographer rushing out of a meeting to vomit in the trashcan in the hall. Presumably some of those male writers were fathers who knew better (depending on the level of disclosure they were willing to tolerate from their wives about their ladybusiness), but they were never going to get “Ow, my boobs” past the network censors. I’m not saying we should replace the nausea trope with a sore boob trope. I’m saying: Think about the ways you’re hinting at pregnancy. The second a female character of child-bearing age discusses nausea, your entire audience knows she’s pregnant. Is that how you wanted your reveal to go? Every other hint and lead-in after that is a boring time-waster. Your reveal happened the moment she threw up.

Pregnant woman laughing alone with salad. It's like someone left a box of inane tropes in the car and they all melted together.

Pregnant woman laughing alone with salad. It’s like someone left a box of tropes in the car and they all melted together.

Random Unexpected Pregnancy. Why is your character pregnant? Is it because you have a specific reason for her to carry a child? Or is it because you’re out of ideas and you need to create some conflict for the male lead? Are you already calculating how to make this pregnancy magically disappear as soon as the male lead resolves the conflict? If you’re not writing about pregnancy– if the pregnant woman is just an event in your male lead’s life– think about what you’re trying to accomplish with this unexpected pregnancy, and see if you can accomplish it in a more interesting way. Also, once this trope gets started, it often opens up a can of worms of sexist (and boring) tropes– Women can’t tell what’s important and what isn’t (important = male lead’s central narrative, most of which he hides from her; unimportant = helping her install the carseat, a prenatal appointment); women are killjoys (pregnant girlfriend = the death of fun); women are dreamcrushers (pregnant girlfriend demands he stop being an artist and get a job even though he’s on the verge of a breakthrough because women just don’t understand).

Childbirth Starts with Water Breaking and Ends Within Five Minutes. Honestly, just have her give birth off stage. When your water breaks, it generally trickles out, and it NEVER STOPS. Your body keeps replenishing it. Trust the woman who sat on a towel for hours. Only 10% of women start labor with their water breaking, and for those who do, it can be as much as 24-48 hours before labor begins in earnest. If your character’s water breaks, and all hell breaks loose because THE BABY IS COMING!!11!, you’re manufacturing conflict. Average length of labor for a first-rime mother is 6 – 18 hours, not one scene. Why do you want to show the actual childbirth? What narrative motion are you hoping to achieve? Is there a way to accomplish that without using an unrealistic, clichéd trope?

(source: wrathofzombie.wordpress.com)

Menstruation Turns Women Into Insane Blood Monsters. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” Just . . . no. Extreme mood swings occur in 3-8% of menstruating women. Chocolate cravings are not universal. I’m just going to set your play aside if your male lead comes home with chocolate for his bleeding wife who then screams at him for no discernible reason other than that you wanted to motivate his affair later in the play. This trope is both boring and misogynistic.

Don’t look at me; I just got here

Fish Jokes. This is exactly the way to get me to delete your play, take a shower, and try to pretend it never happened. I’m honestly astonished that men are still making these jokes in 2015, but evidently, they are. If you’re seeking a way to make a male character seem like an obnoxious idiot trying to hide the fact that he’s a virgin, I can see using this trope, but I still hate it, and I am not alone. Begone, trope.

Women’s Sexuality is Mysterious and Confusing. WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?!? I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out: ASK HER. When a male character is flopping around haphazardly trying to please a woman who has almost no lines but who, presumably, just sits there with a vaguely disapproving look on her face, most of the people in your audience are going to get very frustrated very fast. She can communicate, can’t she? Using her as a prop to establish your male character’s adorable awkwardness, sincere cluelessness, or comic lack of skillz is a trope I never want to see again. Women’s sexuality is not a puzzle for men to solve. Women’s sexuality is not a comment on male sexuality. Women are, believe it or not, people.

If the playwright would give me some lines, I could tell Roger there’s no need to go to all that . . . oh, no, not the full body latex. JUST ONE LINE, I BEG YOU (source: times.co.uk)

The advice is the same for all of these: Think about what, specifically, you’re trying to achieve with these tropes and then work to achieve them in a more interesting way.

Tagged dramaturgy, new plays, playwrights, screenwriting, women are people

Bitter Gertrude

Blogging about Culture, Equity, and the Arts since 2013

Tag Archives: dramaturgy