Ted Marcoux and Chris Innvar, "The Bells"

When I first started writing plays, I was a Woman Playwright. I was living in Boston at the time. One of my first plays, Sunday on the Rocks, had recently been produced to some acclaim in the Boston area and I was invited to a dinner party that included several local theatrical luminaries. One of the other guests, an accomplished director (male, mid-50s), turned to me and said, “Maybe you can tell me. Why can’t women ever transcend their identities as women and just write as playwrights?” I said, “Do you mean, why can’t we write like men?” and he said No, that wasn’t what he meant at all. “Yes it is,” said his wife, but he persisted in his position and went on to explain that male playwrights somehow, innately, are able to transcend their gender and write about the human condition, while women playwrights, also innately, are not. As a side note, let me add, this gentleman had never seen or read any of my plays. I was merely the woman playwright who happened to be at the dinner table.

As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me. I am a feminist in that I believe that women are as fully human as men and that their experiences are as worthy of representation, as universally significant, as men’s. I believe that the hero’s journey is both male and female. I believe that, as a rule, women are as deeply flawed as men are. I’m interested in writing about the way both genders make mistakes and the ways we grow, or don’t grow.

Unfortunately, as we live in a sexist world, these beliefs are still perceived as radical and dangerous by some of those who have appointed themselves the protectors of the culture. Frank Rich’s response to Spike Heels, an essentially dark comedy about sex and power which hinges on an episode of sexual harassment, was to compare it to pillow talk. He clearly didn’t understand the play and dismissed it as half-baked fluff; four months later, when Oleanna opened off-Broadway he wrote “finally, someone has written a play about sexual harassment” and commended it as a searing commentary on our times. Apparently, when a woman writes about an actual incident of sexual harassment, it’s pillow talk; and when a man writes about a woman lying about sexual harassment, it’s a searing commentary.

At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder why it’s not okay for me to have a feminist agenda, but it is okay for Mr. Mamet to have a misogynist agenda. It is a question that plagues me still. Apparently, if men are angry, that’s cultural, but a woman’s anger is something else altogether.

I spend a lot of time thinking about America, who we are as a people and a culture and a nation, and I have always felt that the theatre is a truly appropriate place to examine these issues, the way David Hare examines what it means to be British, or Brian Friel examines what it means to be Irish.

I am a woman, I am an American, I am a mother, I sometimes write for television, and I sometimes write movies; I play the piano, I knit, I rail at the universe; I am angry, I am sad; I am a comic realist, a misanthrope, and an idealist. There are many ways to categorize me, and my work. But for myself, I would most like to be considered a playwright.

Excerpted from the Introduction to the Complete Plays 1989-19989 by Theresa Rebeck
Reprinted with permission from Smith & Kraus
But the book: www.smithkraus.com