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| Beth Dixon, Virginia Kull, and Amy Brenneman |
This has been a gender
filled week. First, Anne Marie Slaughter broke the internet with her polemic,
"Why Women Still Can't Have it All" in The Atlantic. I read the
article with as much interest and agreement as most of my friends, but felt that
something was lacking. Though I couldn't agree more with Slaughter's
assertion that some biological differences keep women from prioritizing their
careers, I disagreed with her premise. Why should any one--man or woman--who
wants to "have it all" be able to? Do we as a society really want to
treat people who choose to be parents equally as people who don't have such
familial obligations? Slaughter's article came off as a bit self-righteous and
scolding. Though it was necessary for her to present personal anecdotes that
illustrated her situation, these anecdotes ultimately felt incomplete. Could we
really trust someone who was giving prescriptive remedies to tell the whole
truth about her own problems, which she hopes to solve through these solutions?
At the same time, I still found her piece to be well-argued compared to many
other feminist bloggers/writers out there who seem to use their platforms to
merely whine about life.
Then I caught RaptureBlister Burn at Playwright's Horizons. Gina Gionfriddo's play is
a livelier and more thorough exploration of contemporary issues in feminism
than Anne Marie Slaughter's article. This work of fiction highlighted the
problems that feminist writers who draw from life have when writing magazine
articles. Amy Brenneman stars as Cathy, a fortysomething successful talking
head/feminist theorist, who takes a job at a "fourth tier" liberal
arts college in her hometown to look after her elderly mother.
Catherine reconnects with two friends from grad school, Don and Gwen, who are now married with two kids. Don now supports the family as a dean of the liberal arts school while Gwen stays home with the kids. This sets the stage for all three to brutally examine the choices they've made over the past two decades. Who is more fulfilled: the mother or the career woman? Throw in some grad seminar sessions between Cathy and a twenty-one year old female college student, and Gianfriddo manages to cover the whole spectrum of contemporary feminist issues while avoiding the traps of the magazine think piece format.
Catherine reconnects with two friends from grad school, Don and Gwen, who are now married with two kids. Don now supports the family as a dean of the liberal arts school while Gwen stays home with the kids. This sets the stage for all three to brutally examine the choices they've made over the past two decades. Who is more fulfilled: the mother or the career woman? Throw in some grad seminar sessions between Cathy and a twenty-one year old female college student, and Gianfriddo manages to cover the whole spectrum of contemporary feminist issues while avoiding the traps of the magazine think piece format.
Unlike a serious
think piece, Rapture Blister Burn can make fun of itself. As a
comedy, it doesn't take itself seriously. Along with that comes the freedom for
Gionfriddo to expose each character's flaws. A writer can't self-deprecate too
much without losing credibility. But in the play, Cathy jokes about her
sluttiness, her alcoholic tendencies, and her fears of dying alone. Avery
(Virginia Kull), the college student, delivers some of the bawdiest lines as
she exaggerates her ignorance of women's issues and her youth ("If Betty
Friedan said women should have choices, why can't they choose to suck cock on
screen?").
Multiple characters also
give the work multiple perspectives. A solo magazine article inevitably
reflects the writer's own demographic the best. In Rapture Cathy
espouses her view that all relationships must have a "leader and a
follower." Society imposes a double standard to condition men to lead and
women to follow. Men who sacrifice their careers to follow a woman are labeled
"users," while women who follow a man are "being
supportive." Avery objects to this classification by saying something I've
heard many of my twentysomething girlfriends say: "I think it's great that
guys want to make sacrifices; I'm just personally not attracted to those kinds
of guys." "Exactly," Cathy shoots back.
Gwen makes an offhanded observation at the beginning of the play: that as a fortysomething, she has reached the point of her life where she starts to question the life that could have been. By the end of the play, some women are in relationships while others are single. Gionfriddo doesn't say which position is better. It's this retreat from agenda pushing that makes Rapture Blister Burn more effective than any blog post on women's issues. It raises the issues in a compelling way, and leaves it to us to think about the answers.
