I didn't write a Theater Pub column this Thursday, because of Thanksgiving. And also because the editor needed to run the VERY VERY SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT that after a hiatus of a year and a half, Theater Pub will return to presenting free live theater in San Francisco bars as of January 2015. (HUZZAH!)
Four weeks before that, I wrote a column that I didn't link to at the time, because I realized I was kind of phoning it in. ("Horror Vacui," from October 30. Read it if you want to read my thoughts on some memoirs I've read recently, or what I did the night the Giants won the World Series. Gosh, doesn't that feel like ages ago?)
But two Thursdays ago... ah, two Thursdays ago, I wrote what is now the most-read (and I believe most-commented) piece in the history of the Theater Pub blog. I took blogger George Heymont to task for failing to perceive the clearly feminist message of Megan Cohen's "Centaurs, or the Horse's Ass," which had greatly affected me when I saw the script in its Olympians Festival staged reading. Heymont responded in the comments section and the back-and-forth got pretty heated.
I attended all of the readings of the 2014 Olympians Festival and it seemed like one of the key themes this year was female anger. Maybe that's appropriate: Stuart Bousel likes to point out that the Greeks had a lot of female monsters, more than most other cultures. The entire final week of the festival was devoted to female monsters, and other plays re-imagined the centaurs, Geryon, and the Minotaur as female. The spontaneous applause that broke out after a feminist rant in Veronica Tjioe's Minotaur play was one of the most satisfying moments I've had in a theater in 2014.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Monday, November 24, 2014
Autumn is for Gothic Fiction: "The Woman in White"
I often try to read some classic Gothic or horror fiction during the autumn months -- it seems like the right time of year for it. This year, my decision to start reading The Woman in White in late September also had something to do with the fact that I'd just gotten dumped by a fellow who loves to read but hates nineteenth-century novels. (I'd always tell him that he didn't know what he was missing.) What better way to start the healing process than to read a book that my ex wouldn't like?
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Woman in White could easily have been a run-of-the-mill Gothic potboiler about a scheming baronet out to steal the fortune of an innocent young lady, but it rises above the mundane thanks to Wilkie Collins' gifts for atmosphere, humor, and characterization. As in Collins' The Moonstone, the story is related in a series of first-person narratives; some of the narrators are sympathetic and relatively "normal" (upstanding Walter Hartright, courageous Marian Halcombe), while others are wildly eccentric and unreliable (selfish hypochondriac Frederick Fairlie; jolly megalomaniac Count Fosco).
The notes to the Penguin Classics edition say that when the novel was published, several gentlemen wrote to Collins and asked if he'd based the character of Marian on a real-life woman, because they wanted to marry her -- which gives me a much better opinion of Victorian gentlemen than I had possessed hitherto. Marian is intelligent, passionate, brave and hard-working -- but she is ugly, and she constantly reproaches herself for being too headstrong. To learn that some Victorian readers preferred stubborn Marian to her conventionally sweet and docile half-sister Laura is very heartening. And perhaps it's what Collins wanted, too; after all, the novel suggests that Laura could have avoided many of her tribulations if only she'd stood up for herself.
Sir Percival Glyde, the fortune-hunting baronet who marries Laura, isn't much of a villain -- he comes across as a whiny brat. But his crony, Count Fosco, is a magnificent creation. Singing opera, eating bonbons, petting his white mice, and cooking up dastardly schemes the whole time, he's truly a villain you love to hate. Wisely, Collins has Fosco narrate one of the later sections of the novel, and makes his downfall (rather than Sir Percival's) the book's climax.
Collins wrote in his preface to The Woman in White that he thought a novel would succeed only if it presented interesting characters. This long, twisty, absorbing mystery story admirably bears out his theory.
Previous marissabidilla posts about reading Gothic fiction in the fall:
Vampire City by Paul Féval, October 2013
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, October 2010
The Woman in White by Wilkie CollinsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Woman in White could easily have been a run-of-the-mill Gothic potboiler about a scheming baronet out to steal the fortune of an innocent young lady, but it rises above the mundane thanks to Wilkie Collins' gifts for atmosphere, humor, and characterization. As in Collins' The Moonstone, the story is related in a series of first-person narratives; some of the narrators are sympathetic and relatively "normal" (upstanding Walter Hartright, courageous Marian Halcombe), while others are wildly eccentric and unreliable (selfish hypochondriac Frederick Fairlie; jolly megalomaniac Count Fosco).
The notes to the Penguin Classics edition say that when the novel was published, several gentlemen wrote to Collins and asked if he'd based the character of Marian on a real-life woman, because they wanted to marry her -- which gives me a much better opinion of Victorian gentlemen than I had possessed hitherto. Marian is intelligent, passionate, brave and hard-working -- but she is ugly, and she constantly reproaches herself for being too headstrong. To learn that some Victorian readers preferred stubborn Marian to her conventionally sweet and docile half-sister Laura is very heartening. And perhaps it's what Collins wanted, too; after all, the novel suggests that Laura could have avoided many of her tribulations if only she'd stood up for herself.
Sir Percival Glyde, the fortune-hunting baronet who marries Laura, isn't much of a villain -- he comes across as a whiny brat. But his crony, Count Fosco, is a magnificent creation. Singing opera, eating bonbons, petting his white mice, and cooking up dastardly schemes the whole time, he's truly a villain you love to hate. Wisely, Collins has Fosco narrate one of the later sections of the novel, and makes his downfall (rather than Sir Percival's) the book's climax.
Collins wrote in his preface to The Woman in White that he thought a novel would succeed only if it presented interesting characters. This long, twisty, absorbing mystery story admirably bears out his theory.
Previous marissabidilla posts about reading Gothic fiction in the fall:
Vampire City by Paul Féval, October 2013
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, October 2010
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Everything's Coming Up Rosie: Overthinking My Halloween Costume
- Ease of putting the costume together. The day before Halloween, I wasn't even sure that I would dress up -- and then I realized that I had all of the components of the "Rosie" costume already in my closet.
- Applicability to women of all ages, races, and sizes. Unlike many costumes, you don't have to have a certain body type or hair color to be recognizable as Rosie the Riveter -- all you need is the red bandana and blue work shirt.
- It's an explicitly feminist costume that enables you to demonstrate how you're not into the whole "Halloween as an excuse to wear lingerie in public" thing, but it still allows you to look attractive -- wear red lipstick, show off your muscle.
- Millennial-generation nostalgia for the "Greatest Generation" 1940s. Think about it: we fetishize handicrafts and the artisanal; we name our Etsy stores after our grandparents; we put up "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. I also saw a lot of A League of Their Own "Rockford Peaches" this Halloween -- a costume that occupies a comparable place in our cultural iconography to Rosie the Riveter.
- Amy Poehler's character on Parks and Recreation dressed up as Rosie the Riveter in 2012. I don't watch Parks and Rec, but you can't underestimate the influence of pop culture.
- Dressing up as Frida Kahlo does require you to possess certain physical characteristics: you've pretty much got to have long, dark hair. And, if you are brunette but not Hispanic, you may also worry that dressing up as this iconic Mexican artist constitutes cultural appropriation. At least when you live in a city that is so consumed with debates over gentrification.
- There was a big Frida Kahlo exhibit at SFMOMA in 2008, which might have contributed to all of the Fridas I saw that Halloween.
- Frida and Rosie are both feminist icons, but they represent two different kinds of feminism. Kahlo's art often depicts the female experience as one of pain and suffering. (My most-read post of all time is called "Must a Female Artist Suffer?", written in response to the 2008 Kahlo exhibition.) Rosie the Riveter is about rolling up your sleeves and getting shit done. Which seems in tune with the forcefulness that feminism has attained in the last half-decade.
- Six years ago, fashion was much more in tune with Frida's boho style than with Rosie's utilitarian workwear. But now, the tide has shifted. Clothes have gotten more minimalist, more tomboy. Call it a shift from Anthropologie to J. Crew. I didn't own a "Rosie the Riveter" blue button-down six years ago, but now it's one of my favorite shirts.
Photo of me as Rosie at my office Halloween party taken by my colleague, Abdul Bassa.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
"Les Belles-Soeurs" -- Fifteen Squabbling Quebecoises
After reading and enjoying Michel Tremblay's play Albertine, in Five Times, I decided I should read his most famous work for the stage, Les Belles-Soeurs.
Les Belles-Soeurs by Michel Tremblay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Michel Tremblay’s play Les Belles-Soeurs is raucous, energetic, and boisterous -- and, because women so rarely get to be boisterous onstage, it’s revolutionary. The play plunks you down in the kitchen of Germaine, a middle-aged housewife in 1960s Montreal. She’s just won a million department-store coupons in a contest, and she’s invited fourteen of her neighbors to help her paste the coupons into booklets. Gossip, squabbling, scandal, and even a brawl ensue.
John Van Burek and Bill Glassco have translated Tremblay’s working-class Quebecois French into working-class North American English. Generally, it’s effective, but sometimes it makes the characters sound like refugees from a 1930s B-movie: “Sure, he promised me the moon. We were gonna be happy. He was raking it in, I thought everything was roses.”
There aren’t a lot of admirable characters in Les Belles-Soeurs. At times, Tremblay seems to mock these women and encourage the audience to feel superior to them. Yet the play ultimately blames the women’s faults -- their small-mindedness, their hypocrisy, their catty jealousy -- on the society they live in. Poverty, Catholicism, provincialism and patriarchy have conspired to make these women what they are. The high point of the play is the monologue where Rose, a self-described “class clown,” drops her façade and reveals her underlying rage and despair: “Goddamn sex! It’s never that way in the movies, is it? Oh no, in the movies it’s always fun! Besides, who cares about a woman who’s gotta spend her life with a pig ‘cause she said yes to him once? Well, I’m telling you, no fucking movie was ever this sad. Because movies don’t last a lifetime!”
I don’t think I’d like to spend a lifetime with Germaine and her friends, either, but I didn’t mind spending two hours with them.
View all my reviews
Les Belles-Soeurs by Michel Tremblay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Michel Tremblay’s play Les Belles-Soeurs is raucous, energetic, and boisterous -- and, because women so rarely get to be boisterous onstage, it’s revolutionary. The play plunks you down in the kitchen of Germaine, a middle-aged housewife in 1960s Montreal. She’s just won a million department-store coupons in a contest, and she’s invited fourteen of her neighbors to help her paste the coupons into booklets. Gossip, squabbling, scandal, and even a brawl ensue.
John Van Burek and Bill Glassco have translated Tremblay’s working-class Quebecois French into working-class North American English. Generally, it’s effective, but sometimes it makes the characters sound like refugees from a 1930s B-movie: “Sure, he promised me the moon. We were gonna be happy. He was raking it in, I thought everything was roses.”
There aren’t a lot of admirable characters in Les Belles-Soeurs. At times, Tremblay seems to mock these women and encourage the audience to feel superior to them. Yet the play ultimately blames the women’s faults -- their small-mindedness, their hypocrisy, their catty jealousy -- on the society they live in. Poverty, Catholicism, provincialism and patriarchy have conspired to make these women what they are. The high point of the play is the monologue where Rose, a self-described “class clown,” drops her façade and reveals her underlying rage and despair: “Goddamn sex! It’s never that way in the movies, is it? Oh no, in the movies it’s always fun! Besides, who cares about a woman who’s gotta spend her life with a pig ‘cause she said yes to him once? Well, I’m telling you, no fucking movie was ever this sad. Because movies don’t last a lifetime!”
I don’t think I’d like to spend a lifetime with Germaine and her friends, either, but I didn’t mind spending two hours with them.
View all my reviews
Sunday, October 19, 2014
"The Dryad of Suburbia" - staged reading Nov. 5
(At least two people have already inquired whether there will be nudity on this evening. Highly unlikely, as it's a staged reading. But I'm pleased that the evening's title has done its job and grabbed people's attention.)
You can find out more about The Dryad of Suburbia on the festival's website. Yes, that page has changed since the last time I linked to it, back in January. Back then, I thought I was going to write a play about a Dryad encountering a Druid. I clung to that idea for months without writing a word -- because I was unable to hear my characters' voices. At the eleventh hour, I scrapped that idea and banged out The Dryad of Suburbia in a mad rush. I wrote about this experience in more detail for my Theater Pub column this week.
My new play is about a contemporary, suburban couple whose young daughter has become convinced that she is a "tree spirit." When I was writing it, I had no idea that Cody Rishell, the poster artist for Nymph Night, was designing a suite of posters that show little girls playing with their nymph friends! It's like we were tuned into the same wavelength. The Dryads poster (above) is astoundingly perfect -- I am a very happy playwright! You can check out all of the Nymph posters on Cody's website.
The reading of The Dryad of Suburbia will be directed by Valerie Fachman and feature actors Colleen Egan and Nick Trengove. The other "Nymphs!" playwrights are Sam Bertken, Leah Halper, Sam Hurwitt, Carol Lashof, Bridgette Dutta Portman, Jennifer Lynne Roberts, and Siyu Song.
It's all happening at 8 PM on November 5 at EXIT Theatre in San Francisco's scenic Tenderloin. RSVP to the Facebook event here. Tickets $10 at the door.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Playwrights and their Gallbladders
The lack of posts here on marissabidilla in 2014 doesn't mean that my life has suddenly become boring. Rather, it means that life has been pretty overwhelming this year, events and feelings all happening too fast for me to blog about them. E.g.: I self-produced a play, and then four days after it closed, I was in the hospital getting my gallbladder removed.
Despite all the things that life is throwing at me, I've continued to write for the San Francisco Theater Pub blog every two weeks. I'll try to be better about linking to my pieces as they come out, but in the meantime, here are links to three of my columns that center around my recent health crisis.
I wrote "Through the Fog, Step by Step," in late August, two days after getting diagnosed with gallstones. At the time, I didn't feel ready to discuss my condition publicly, so I wrote in more abstract terms about the feeling of wanting the summer to be over, and the need to take things one day at a time. (My editor noted that I wrote this piece on "four hours of sleep." Yeah, because my gallstone pain had kept me up half the night.)
The day after my surgery, I begged off of writing a column and asked my editor to post a short video clip from Scrubs that seemed relevant. (It was ostensibly Comedy Month on the blog. Not that I had a lot to laugh about.)
In "Things of Darkness and of Light," from two weeks ago, I wrote more directly about the experience of getting diagnosed with gallstones, and how I made peace with it.
Oddly enough, British playwright Mark Ravenhill also wrote an essay this month about getting his gallbladder removed. His experience of gallstones resonates with me so much: the terrible pain that comes as soon as you lie down, the way you attribute it to "indigestion" at first, the way you avoid food in the hopes that the pain will go away. Plus, just like Ravenhill, having gallstones caused me to muse on medieval medicine's "four humours," in which the black bile of the gallbladder was thought to make people melancholy (melan means "black" and chole means "bile" in Greek). His piece is also good on the science-y stuff (he and I both know more than we ever wanted to know about what the gallbladder does and why it's not essential), then takes a philosophical turn.
I also appreciated the gallbladder comics on The Awkward Yeti, forwarded to me by a sympathetic friend a couple of days before my surgery. Poor little gallbladder!
Despite all the things that life is throwing at me, I've continued to write for the San Francisco Theater Pub blog every two weeks. I'll try to be better about linking to my pieces as they come out, but in the meantime, here are links to three of my columns that center around my recent health crisis.
I wrote "Through the Fog, Step by Step," in late August, two days after getting diagnosed with gallstones. At the time, I didn't feel ready to discuss my condition publicly, so I wrote in more abstract terms about the feeling of wanting the summer to be over, and the need to take things one day at a time. (My editor noted that I wrote this piece on "four hours of sleep." Yeah, because my gallstone pain had kept me up half the night.)
The day after my surgery, I begged off of writing a column and asked my editor to post a short video clip from Scrubs that seemed relevant. (It was ostensibly Comedy Month on the blog. Not that I had a lot to laugh about.)
In "Things of Darkness and of Light," from two weeks ago, I wrote more directly about the experience of getting diagnosed with gallstones, and how I made peace with it.
Oddly enough, British playwright Mark Ravenhill also wrote an essay this month about getting his gallbladder removed. His experience of gallstones resonates with me so much: the terrible pain that comes as soon as you lie down, the way you attribute it to "indigestion" at first, the way you avoid food in the hopes that the pain will go away. Plus, just like Ravenhill, having gallstones caused me to muse on medieval medicine's "four humours," in which the black bile of the gallbladder was thought to make people melancholy (melan means "black" and chole means "bile" in Greek). His piece is also good on the science-y stuff (he and I both know more than we ever wanted to know about what the gallbladder does and why it's not essential), then takes a philosophical turn.
I also appreciated the gallbladder comics on The Awkward Yeti, forwarded to me by a sympathetic friend a couple of days before my surgery. Poor little gallbladder!
Monday, October 13, 2014
"Albertine, in Five Times" -- A French-Canadian "Three Tall Women"
Edward Albee's Three Tall Women has been on my mind this past week. Marian Seldes, who starred in its original production, passed away; and my friend and collaborator Katja Rivera will be directing the show next month at the Custom Made Theatre. Browsing the Plays section of a local used bookstore on Friday night, I came across a play I'd never heard of whose premise sounded strikingly similar to that of the Albee play. Of course, I bought and read it... and I'm very glad to have discovered it!
Albertine in Five Times by Michel Tremblay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The easiest way to describe Albertine, in Five Times might be to call it the French-Canadian equivalent of Three Tall Women. Like Edward Albee's award-winning play, Albertine is a character study of a woman born in the early 20th century, in which multiple actresses play the protagonist at various ages of her life. The five Albertines (plus a sixth actress who plays Albertine's sister, Madeleine) converse with one another across space and time. They argue and accuse and debate the best attitude to take toward life and its hardships. Should you act with rage or with resignation? Blot out the past or confront it?
Although written by a man, Albertine is a fiercely feminist play, full of anger at the limited options that the patriarchal society of mid-century Québec afforded to women. I was also intrigued to learn that Michel Tremblay has written many other plays and novels about Albertine and her extended family, and that they are based on his own relatives. (Does this mean that Tremblay is the French-Canadian August Wilson, rather than its Edward Albee? Tremblay's series is called "Traversée du Siècle" -- Crossing the Century -- while Wilson's plays are the "Century Cycle"...)
In the circles I run in, there are a lot of conversations going on lately about women in theater, feminist-themed plays, the lack of good roles for women in general and for middle-aged or elderly women in particular, etc. Albertine, in Five Times features six powerful roles for women between the ages of 30 and 70, and as such, I think it deserves to be better-known outside of Canada. 40-year-old Albertine is bitter and exasperated; 50-year-old Albertine has turned her back on the past and is determined to make the best of things; 60-year-old Albertine, her past having caught up with her, has started popping pills. Even the 30-year-old Albertine is no ingenue; she's a war widow with an 11-year-old daughter. Each of the five Albertines represents a specific age and a specific point of view. But together, they show us the complexity of this woman's life.
View all my reviews
Albertine in Five Times by Michel Tremblay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The easiest way to describe Albertine, in Five Times might be to call it the French-Canadian equivalent of Three Tall Women. Like Edward Albee's award-winning play, Albertine is a character study of a woman born in the early 20th century, in which multiple actresses play the protagonist at various ages of her life. The five Albertines (plus a sixth actress who plays Albertine's sister, Madeleine) converse with one another across space and time. They argue and accuse and debate the best attitude to take toward life and its hardships. Should you act with rage or with resignation? Blot out the past or confront it?
Although written by a man, Albertine is a fiercely feminist play, full of anger at the limited options that the patriarchal society of mid-century Québec afforded to women. I was also intrigued to learn that Michel Tremblay has written many other plays and novels about Albertine and her extended family, and that they are based on his own relatives. (Does this mean that Tremblay is the French-Canadian August Wilson, rather than its Edward Albee? Tremblay's series is called "Traversée du Siècle" -- Crossing the Century -- while Wilson's plays are the "Century Cycle"...)
In the circles I run in, there are a lot of conversations going on lately about women in theater, feminist-themed plays, the lack of good roles for women in general and for middle-aged or elderly women in particular, etc. Albertine, in Five Times features six powerful roles for women between the ages of 30 and 70, and as such, I think it deserves to be better-known outside of Canada. 40-year-old Albertine is bitter and exasperated; 50-year-old Albertine has turned her back on the past and is determined to make the best of things; 60-year-old Albertine, her past having caught up with her, has started popping pills. Even the 30-year-old Albertine is no ingenue; she's a war widow with an 11-year-old daughter. Each of the five Albertines represents a specific age and a specific point of view. But together, they show us the complexity of this woman's life.
View all my reviews
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