One of the pleasures of writing this blog is giving myself permission to take the time to read plays and do a little digging, and I enjoyed learning something of the history of the five historical playwrights chosen for the Alcyone festival.

They were all from the educated class, were celebrated in their time, and are largely but not completely forgotten today. What was interesting was that they had many things in common with contemporary playwrights and shared many of the same concerns and passions.

There is so much to say about them all and I don’t want to wear everybody out, so I’ll talk about Hrosvitha and Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor today and the rest tomorrow.

The works of Hrosvitha inspired EMLewis’s Strong Voice.

Hrosvitha, who lived from 935-1002, was a Benedictine canoness, born into German nobility, and highly educated. She studied the Greek and Roman classics; Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Plautus, and wrote her six comedies as a Roman Catholic alternative to Terence. They seem to be closet dramas, to be read or perhaps listened to by a small group, and I couldn’t find any information about their being produced. (A nunnery is, of course, a captive audience.) I can relate to that, having a few plays that meet that category.

She hasn’t disappeared from contemporary consciousness. She is frequently referred to in John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces, in which she is called Hroswitha. The Guerrilla Girls on Tour are keeping her name alive and in 2006 issued a First Annual Hrosvitha Challenge to any theater that scraps plans “of producing yet another production of a Greek tragedy and instead produces a play by Hrosvitha, the first female playwright.” I don’t know if they’ve awarded a prize to the Halcyon Theatre on not.

Maria de Zaya y Sotomayor’s La Traicion en la Amistad, was freely adapted by Caridad Svich and called A Little Betrayal Among Friends.

Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor of Madrid, Spain, also came from the aristocracy. She lived from 1590-1661 and wrote during the Spanish Inquisition. An early feminist, she describes the abuse of women and their inferior role in society, one determined by a paternalistic society and the Inquisition.

She considered women as intelligent and capable as men, and saw the convent as a haven for women’s independence. Perhaps, Hrosvitha shared that point of view. Like Hrosvitha, she was admired by her contemporaries, including Lope de Vega, but in the nineteenth century was censured for “perceived vulgarity,” and faded into obscurity.

Here’s a quote from one novel, The Enchantments of Love, translated by H. Patsy Boyer. (Thank you Wikipedia).

“Why vain legislators of the world, do you tie our hands so that we cannot take vengeance? Because of your mistaken ideas about us, you render us powerless and deny us access to pen and sword. Isn’t our soul the same as a man’s soul?…. [Later the husband listens her laments and approaches Laura] moving closer to her and incensed in an infernal rage, (Diego) began to beat her with his hands, so much so that the white pearls of her teeth, bathed in the blood shed by his angry hand, quickly took on the form of red coral.”

I don’t know if her language is vulgar but it is vivid. And pretty darn good.

…Eve Ensler who received the Isabelle Stevenson award for founding the global movement, V-Day, to end violence against women and girls.

The movement began with The Vagina Monologues, which opened in 1996. The Monologues were considered shocking at the time. “If you had told me then,” says Ensler, “that small towns in Alabama and in Pakistan and Mongolia would have productions of this piece, I’d have told you that you were crazy.”

Two years later, there was a Valentine’s Day performance with celebrity actresses, including Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon and Glenn Close. Called V-Day, it became an annual event and has become a global movement that raises funds through benefit productions. So far, V-day has raised over $80 million. Ensler estimates that there were 5,000 performances of the play last year alone.

She and her colleagues interview women in different places around the world, asking them what kind of help they need from the money raised. “Our experience is that the women we work with are visionaries,” Ensler says. “They don’t need direction. They just need support.”

Several years ago, the question was put to women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. V-Day was particularly interested in the Congo, where women and children have been suffering for years from hundreds of thousands of rape by Rwanadan and Congolese rebels. What the women of the Congo wanted was a community for women survivors, which they would run, operate, and direct themselves.

The community is now a reality. The City of Joy opened in February, 2011 in the city of Bukavu. Its mission is to be “a place where women turn their pain into power, where they get healed, where they are trained in civics and self-defense, where they receive economic tools and resources.”

When they go back to their communities, they will be capable of teaching what they learned.

Lynn Nottage, who is Eve Ensler’s friend, is also a supporter of City of Joy and funds from her widely produced play, Ruined, support the Bukavu Panzi Hospital.

Here is Eve Enler’s speech at the Tony’s:

“This all began when I said the word vagina in a little tiny theater way, way downtown in this very city. I said it again. I said it endlessly. I said it so many times over, women began to say it. I saw what happens when millions say vagina and when millions hear it. What I learned is that when you say what you’re not supposed to say, when you share your secrets, when you tell the truth, the world changes – people get free, they come into their power.”

“I accept this award on behalf all those who found their voices, their vaginas, their courage in the theater. And I call on all of us to remember why we were drawn to the theater, and to be braver, bolder, and more outrageous. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Eve Ensler

photo by Paula Allen

Just a short one today. Here’s what the Guerilla Girls thought of the Tony Awards.

There are many of aspects of life in the theatre that drive one into the ground – rejection, harsh criticism, plays languishing in drawers and computers, the fear that our labors of love will never be produced.

And then there are the times in that life when we feel nothing but joy. One of those times for me was the three years I spent as a mentor to young playwrights in a program called HOLA (Heart of Los Angeles), which was then hosted by Immanuel Presbyterian Church on Wilshire.

I was in a workshop called Wordsmiths at the LATC with Kitty Felde when she was looking for volunteers and I, always sucker for long drives on a Saturday, raised my hand.

A group of us, Kitty, Melanie, Dan, Dick, Jim, and more, met Saturday mornings with kids from the neighborhood, who were different ages, from seven to twenty. We plunged into writing. We started with a scene and wrote to the clock. I think we had five minutes. Everybody, kids and mentors, read his or her scene out loud and then we moved on to crafting the plays.

Kitty taught with a simple technique to jumpstart the process. Before beginning the play, we would write our Protagonist Profiles with these headings; Name, Age, Family, Habitat, Job, Greatest Wish, Secret Fear, Antagonist, and Extras. Here’s one: Name: Orgel, Age: 47, Family: None, Habitat: The backroom of a pound with only a cot and a hat tree, Job: Watering and feeding the dogs, Greatest Wish: To have a dog of his own, Secret Fear: That he’ll be alone for the rest of his life, Antagonist: The owner of the pound, Extras: He is skinny and tall with a big moustache.

The play grew from there.

At the end of each session, we went to the youth hostel in San Pedro for a weekend of polishing and cooking and fooling around. Kitty’s husband, Tad, would take the kids on a hike and terrify them around a campfire with ghost stories. We all took turns cooking meals and cleaning up, kids and adults played basketball and collected shells on the beach, and in between, we wrote, wrote, wrote. Each kid had a mentor and we had time to forge a working relationship.

We ended with a performance of the plays, some at the church, and one memorable one at the Central Library, in which the plays had been inspired by a trip to the Armand Hammer Gallery. A play called Return of the Landlord featured a spectacular use of black light.

Many were very talented, and one teenager, Paul Park, had a collection of his plays, called Out of the Park, presented at the Evidence Room. All the kids were fearless (or learned to be). Their stories were fresh (sometimes silly, sometimes sad, sometimes scary), and all gave me an insight into worlds I would never have been a part of without them.

About a month ago, Enci of Bitter Lemons (http://bitter-lemons.com) wrote asking for reminiscences from people who played at The Complex. Our production of my play, Sunday Dinner, was way back in 1997 and I had to think about it.

The Complex was bijou. Everything was small, the lobby, the lighting booth, the dressing rooms, the stage. Sunday Dinner took place in a living room (what else, you may ask?) and the stage was the size of one. Perfect. A couple of chairs, a sofa, and a table, and we were home.

We put up our very own sign outside and although everything was pretty clean, we dusted and swept and vacuumed inside. We had a few hitches setting up and our lighting designer began to fret after one of the actresses plugged in her hairdryer, turned it on, and blew the electrical system. However, by opening night, the lights and sound worked like a charm.

There was a narrow dirt alley behind the theater, leading to a chain link fence on Wilcox. Between acts, we could hang out in costume, listening to street noise, and the production in the theater next door. There was a mysterious shack back there, too. I never discovered what it was for.

It was part of the ambiance. There was lots of ambiance. There was walking to rehearsal past the triangular plastic banners above the car lots on Santa Monica Blvd., the feel of the hot sun bouncing up from the sidewalk, the oasis of the corner store where the clerk served us from behind a Plexiglas shield (I think we couldn’t find a place to eat), a fierce fight between two ladies of the street in front of the marquee, the race day and night to find a place to park, the humungous fine one of us got for parking 3-1/2 inches into the red curb, the volatile valet parker we never gave our keys to for fear the car would disappear; and the proximity to The Blank and The Hudson.

We were on Theatre Row.

We didn’t know then how hard we had to push and arm twist, how much we had to plea and cajole to get everyone to come to our absolutely amazing, fabulous, splendid, did we mention?, not to be missed production, so I remember, too, the not so large crowds who made us glad that the space was cozy, comfortable and intimate.

We didn’t sell out but the Complex gave us a great time. And we won a Dramalogue award!

Thank you, Ella, for posting Theresa Rebeck’s Laura Pels Keynote Address on your blog.

I was so intrigued and impressed by her heartfelt defense of women playwrights and her eloquent plea to producers to give us equal representation that I went online to the library to look up her work.

I had seen Spike Heels at the Red Brick Road Company and Bad Dates at the Lounge Theatre (an outstanding performance by Samara Frame) and loved them both. I started my reading with The Butterfly Collection, because it was vilified by a New York Times reviewer who saw it as a feminist diatribe and portrayed Rebeck as a man-hater.

He must have seen a different play from the one I read.

The Butterfly Collection is beautiful, skilled, and complex. It’s like a Shaw play in which vivid characters argue passionately about art and life and love in language that bites. It’s about the relationships between men and women, among members of a family, between employer and employee, between young and old. It’s about infidelity, envy, ambition, exquisite things, and about living one’s life based on false assumptions.

The last idea was the one that got to me. The protagonist is considered and considers himself a genius, and he and everyone in his family think that gives him permission to destroy and demean his children, betray his wife, and seduce his young assistants, all in the name of his art.

He prides himself on his “outrageous statements”.

Here are some that he addresses to his actor son:

“You want to know what’s wrong with the theater? All those people, all those fucking people everywhere, on the stage, in the audience. Wrinkling their candy wrappers. Turning on their hearing aides, talking on their call phones. You sit there going, where the fuck are the words, you’re so drowning in people you can’t find the damn words. They‘re there, they’re gone, and no one even notices! Half the actors can’t speak but that’s fine, because half the audience can’t hear. Or think for that matter. All that emotion. Bad one liners. Every other word is fuck. Every character’s a victim, some battered woman or unhappy homosexual. Don’t talk to me about Shakespeare, we’re talking about the theater.”

His wife says to the young assistant whom he’s tried to seduce, “I hope you don’t take any of that personally. I certainly don’t.”

The middle aged actor son, emotionally adolescent and his father’s bitter rival, (he seduces the assistant because he knows his father wants to) is crushed by the man, but behaves exactly like him and puts his career above everything.

The other son, so reduced by his father’s bullying that he can’t finish a sentence when his father is present, says “They’re different things, life and art; you shouldn’t get them confused.”

The butterfly collector kills his butterflies for his art. Does the beautiful collection justify their death?

There’s a lot more and I’d love to see it on its feet, then go out for drinks, and talk about it.

In the meantime, (when we are not writing, of course) there are more plays to be read – Mauritius, The Water’s Edge, Abstract Expression, The Bells, View of the Dome, Sunday on the Rocks, The Scene, Omnium Gatherum, The Family of Mann: a comedy in two acts, Loose Knit, 2010’s The Understudy; two novels, Twelve Rooms With A View, and Three Girls and Their Brother; and a non-fiction book, Free fire zone: a playwright’s adventures on the creative battlefields of film, TV, and theater.

She’s done all that and takes the time to fight for us, and our art. Good on you, Theresa.

Happy New Year Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative!

I can’t believe it’s been a year since instigators Laura Shamas, Jennie Webb, and Ella Martin told me about the formation of the LAFPI. I’m so happy to be part of it.

I’ve met so many women who really do support each other and care passionately about playwrighting. I’ve been introduced to some excellent work and have made connections that I wouldn’t have made otherwise.

I love writing and reading the blogs. Thanks so much Nancy, for your comment on writer’s block about the necessity of being emotionally connected to one’s characters. It put my problem in perspective. If one isn’t emotionally connected, something is wrong. I think I have been utterly lost, casting (flailing) about, looking for inspiration from “subjects” or “big matters” or “issues,” and hadn’t recognized that until you commented on my blog! Thank you again.

Thinking about that further, I wonder if looking for something, I don’t know what the word is, maybe it’s “important”, to write about, comes from the frustration of trying to get produced. That thought probably proceeds from the effort of trying to be noticed and the thought that those in power are not interested in plays written by or about women and what follows becomes, “How do I write something meaningful that will knock people’s socks off?” rather than, “Oh, that tickles me. Let me get it down!”

On reflection, I think, too, that the ideas that came to me on Thanksgiving were more ideas about weighty matters, and I’m going to let them sit. Instead, I’m going to step back, reassess, and with luck, recharge.

Happy Holidays to everybody.