Women who move me in the field of theatre, 2024 version

    One of the spunky women I like to perform is Helen of Troy, Helene of Sparta, the Helene who Euripides wrote about, the one who when cornered by circumstance and by men who wanted to use her, literally rose above them.  She didn't bow down, and never let her supposed beauty be an excuse for war. In performance, I may exaggerate her defiance, but I see it in her.  She never went to Troy with Paris.  The gods lifted her up to a place in the clouds where she lived out the war.  From up above, Helene watched an image of herself interacting in Troy.  While her husband tried to return home to Sparta after 10 years of war, she went to Egypt to make new friends and a new life.  The public image of Helen had nothing to do with the real Helene.  If her face launched a thousand ships, it was because she was the figurehead on their bows.

Helen

    Contemporary drama is populated with women who defy stereotypes and depart from the paths expected of them.  In a sense, Lady Macbeth is one of them.  She's deliciously wicked, duplicitous, strong, and then piteous to play.  But all of Shakespeare's women are complicated by being written for men in drag.  Whether they are obedient or independent, they are male fantasies. 

Lady Macbeth

    One of the fun parts of the feminist theatre of the 1970s and 1980s was that women played these characters.  While some feminist troupes deconstructed the narrative by changing male parts into female ones, I enjoyed watching women inhabiting the male parts from their ideas of males.  I would love to play Prospero in The Tempest both ways: trying to understand the maleness of the character AND transforming the character into a woman.  I'd like to see the royal Prospero as containing the beast Caliban and vice versa, as if they are two halves of the same character.  I'd like to play Hamlet with the same double analysis.  Even the great Sara Bernhardt played Hamlet.  Jean Arthur and Mary Martin both played Peter Pan on Broadway.

Sara Bernhardt as Hamlet

    Truth be told, however much I might wish to play these parts, I have incredible stage fright when I’m not holding a script in front of me.   The only way I can perform is by multiple-choice acting, a technique introduced to me by the feminist troupe Split Britches.  I’m mainly a stage director, one greatly influenced by theatre artist Ellen Stewart. 

Ellen Stewart

    I was the stage director for the feminist theatre company This River of Women when I met Ellen Stewart, the woman who taught me how to use the stage and the place of performance in a whole new way.  She was both a producer and a theatre artist.  I saw the tall, elegant, African-American Ellen Stewart speak at 2 separate conferences on Women in Theatre before I dared to ask her if I could write her biography as my doctoral dissertation.  She had spoken about the importance of expanding space, about “filling the need of artists to grow within their craft.”  A larger space, she said, “was an increase of the imagination for the musician, for the actor, for the designer, in what each can give, and writers, in what they can write.”  She said, “You have to make a space, see?  Like the venders’ carts on Delancy Street.  You move the pushcart along and invite persons in—and they all take you to where you want to go.”  Her ideas of and uses of space fascinated me.  They seemed an application of Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space.

She said no to a biography, said that she only talks about her theatre, without which she would be a zero.  She invited me to capture what La MaMa is and does, but warned that I’d never be able to explain La MaMa, because as soon as you say it is one thing, it changes.  But she opened the doors of La MaMa to me, and I moved in for parts of 1988 and 1989, including accompanying a production to Italy. 

In short, Ellen Stewart was the creator of LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club at 74A East 4^th Street in Manhattan’s East Village.  Over the years it expanded from the two theatres at 74A, to the Annex at 66 East 4^th Street, to 9 floors of rehearsal halls on 3^rd St., and an Art Gallery on 2^nd.  As producer at La MaMa, Stewart is the mother of Off Off-Broadway experimental theatre just as Joseph Papp of the Publik Theatre is the father of OOB. Whereas Papp straddled a commercial and OO Broadway world, Stewart worked in poor theatre and international theatre.  Living space, for example, was part of the pay for theatre makers.

She was the first producer to create a space for international theatre in the USA.  Historians who label such things should note that the contributions of the Black Arts Movement included Ellen Stewart’s international theatre.  They don’t, partly because the Black Arts Movement didn’t accept that Ellen Stewart’s stages were not reserved for Black folks only.  According to Amiri Baraka, for example, Ellen Stewart was, quote, crazy.  She did the impossible, both in NY City and as a guest and UNESCO diplomat theatre maker that traveled the world.

In NY City, the first thing I noticed was the fore staging of the arts and the back staging of business.  In the lobby of 74 A, the walls were a collage of color from past productions.  The few captions were in more than one language and alphabet.  English was in the minority, which reflected what you were likely to see on the stages and in the rehearsal halls.  The theatre at La MaMa was small and intimate, a second theatre above it worked as a café, and the third, the annex stage two buildings away was a vast open space, a place to set up like a forest, a journey of many resting places, or a house with many rooms. Here sets were taken down completely between shows, and few set pieces remained, in keeping with Mama Ellen’s idea that once an item existed it tended to limit the imagination of the artist using the space. 

I had expected to see a great amount of cross-fertilization of the productions here, but LaMaMa was not a melting pot.  Each production team retained its own style and story, though curiosity compelled artists to visit each other’s work and come to know the artists involved.  La MaMa was a bee-hive of intensive activity.  Influences definitely occurred as did future collaborations, but like a United Nations of theatre, or vast quantum theatre, the shows over the years showed evidence of expanded artistry rather than a narrowing into zones of fashion.

Ellen Stewart’s own productions within the Great Jones Theatre Company were environmental, with the audience moving along with the actors.  In this company, artists such as Tom O’Horgan who worked with Hair, and Andre Serban and Elizabeth Swados who worked with ancient Greek texts established the environmental style and kinetic audience experience of each production.   Ellen Stewart took this further as a director.  In the Italian production of The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter which I documented, the action extended throughout an entire village and included a hanging and a suicide, both in full view of the traveling audience.  This staging invited the audience to move along with the emotions of the actors, a kinetic experience which differed greatly from seated audiences.  It was up to each audience member how close to the action they wanted to be.   In an earlier environmental production of Romeo and Juliet, at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies on Reinhard's estate in Austria she cast the play with actors and musicians form 16 different nations.  With the assumption that everyone on stage and in the audience was familiar with the story, she had them keep their original languages, and cast without regard to race or gender.  Again, the audience moved with the actors and experienced what they experienced

I would love to bring this exceptional Woman to the stage herself in a visceral performance revealing how she expanded expectations and acted as if boundaries did not exist.  I would love to show what the United Nations saw in her work—the bringing together of diverse peoples in projects where true cooperation could begin.  I would love to show her ability to have multiple productions share space and resources without feeling the need to alter their individual arts.  I would make it clear that curiosity is a driving force of love which has the power to bring people together.  As Mama Ellen knew, this doesn’t happen through war or détente, but when people build a work of art together.

#

Aside: I used the unseated audience techniques as often as I could in my classroom as a HS English teacher, and noted the same benefits.

#

Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast