Women's Lives Center Stage

205 Pages·2015·0.98 MB·English

Lehigh University
Lehigh Preserve
Teses and Dissertations
2014
Prism, Not Mirror: Women's Lives Center Stage
Sarah Perkins Albano Wascura
Lehigh University
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Albano Wascura, Sarah Perkins, "Prism, Not Mirror: Women's Lives Center Stage" (2014).Teses and Dissertations. Paper 1409.
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Prism, Not Mirror: Women’s Lives Center Stage

by

Sarah P. Albano Wascura

A Dissertation

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee

of Lehigh University

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

English

Lehigh University

May 2014
© 2014 Copyright
Sarah P. Albano Wascura
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Approved and recommended for acceptance as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Sarah P. Albano Wascura
Prism, Not Mirror: Women’s Lives Center Stage

Mary C. Foltz, Dissertation Director

Approved Date

Committee Members:

Elizabeth N. Fifer

Barbara H. Traister

Pam Pepper

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As a younger woman, I was the embodiment of Kate’s words from Uncommon
Women and others, “I have a stake in all those Uncommon Women expectations. I know
how to live up to them well” (56). Fifteen years later, I was given a copy of The Vagina
Monologues. Those two experiences started my musing as to how and why women’s drama
had changed in the twenty-five years between the two works. And, what were other women
dramatists doing? This question sent me to Barbara Traister, then the Director of the English
Graduate Program at Lehigh. It took me quite a few years to act on her sage advice and I am
grateful for her gentle patience and ongoing support. I thank Betsy Fifer specifically for
encouraging me early on to deliver a conference paper on plays I hadn’t read on a playwright
of whom I had no knowledge. While I matured “dramatically” (literally and figuratively)
with Wendy Wasserstein, my research for that Horton Foote Conference with Betsy made me
realize Tina Howe is the playwright of my future. Chasing Manet inspires me to believe that
the QE II will transport me back to Paris with my good friend, Beth Dolan, sitting on the
adjacent lounge chair waiting for our pizza delivery. I am also grateful to Pam Pepper for
her comments and bold choices for Lehigh’s Department of Theatre.
On the subject of patience, inspiration, and encouragement, no one surpasses Mary
Foltz. From her first month at Lehigh to Sunday morning telephone calls and accompanying
me on theatre trips into New York City and Philadelphia, Mary’s insightful reading of and
conversations about my work made me want to be a better writer. I guess I’ll never be too
old to want to please the teacher, especially one of Mary’s extraordinary quality.
I must thank my parents Sally and Michael Albano who support all of my pursuits. I
am grateful to the extraordinarily “uncommon women” in my life for being role models:
Beth, Susan, Annette, Flo, Laura, Erin, and our matriarch, Iva. The ultimate thanks for the
last nine years must go to Bob, Emily, and Graydon. Without their patience and support I
never would have begun this process, much less completed it.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract 1

Introduction 2

Chapter 1 Growing Up Woman 55

Chapter 2 I do, don’t I? 88

Chapter 3 Playing Mother 116

Chapter 4 Post[modern] Menopause 154

Works Cited 187

Vita 199
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ABSTRACT
For the last fifty years feminist drama critics have had radical expectations for plays
by and about women. Any commercial success a woman playwright has is immediately
suspect and dismissed as pandering to hegemony. Using a postmodern theoretical viewpoint
with feminist sensibilities and various sociological theories, I analyze plays from the last
forty years as they examine specific aspects of a woman’s life. Through studying how
women playwrights dramatize women’s roles and viewpoints on maturation, marriage,
motherhood, and later life, there is proof of radical instances even if the entirety of the plays
does not satisfy radical critics. Contemporary women playwrights continue to dramatize the
facets of feminist sensibilities even if they overtly eschew the label of feminist. Rather than
present idealized feminist roles for women, contemporary playwrights offer roles that present
women who struggle with maintaining subjectivity as they attempt to fulfill their perceived
quotidian roles. The image of a continuum of a woman’s life, rather than a linear cause and
effect, affords a plurality of experiences, allows for differences among women’s
understanding, and provides elements of satisfaction in seeing women’s lives portrayed on
stage.

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Prism, Not Mirror: Women’s Lives Center Stage
Introduction
Drama by American women has evolved because of and in spite of literary theorists,
feminist theorists as well as theatre/dramatic theorists. The critics in these last forty years,
Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan, and Helene Keyssar among them, have created divisive litmus
tests for which works could be considered feminist or further contributing to hegemony.
Anything resembling a standard theatrical narrative, or set in a kitchen, or with a female
character indecisive in her identity is to be immediately perceived as undermining women’s
liberation. They maintain that plays written by women like Wendy Wasserstein, Beth
Henley, and Marsha Norman in the last forty years do not do enough to further liberating
representations of women. They would announce that the playwright had succumbed to
hegemony by using a more quotidian—domestic—setting or not showing more liberating
facets of women. Critics, feminist theatrical ensembles, and various women’s organizations
have been so focused on their feminist mold that they ignored subtle feminist identities.
Ultimately, the prescriptions they projected were as limiting as the social realism they
censured.
In spite of the major feminist drama theorists finding fault with them, playwrights like
Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman persevere. Therefore, having a
woman center stage muddling through her life much the way the audience muddles through
their lives can be inspirational and need not, necessarily, be reductive. Even though the work
might not represent women’s causes, it does represent women. No longer can feminist drama
critics expound on their belief based on an oversimplified essential expression. Aspects of the
content, not necessarily the entirety, will remain feminist regardless of how it is shaped.
Contemporary plays must be analyzed for what they do to foster feminism, rather than be
critiqued for not being feminist enough. Most recent criticism observes that “[m]ore porous
and less rigid theories are evolving as a finite system’s ability to describe itself is by
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definition limited” (Jenkins 329). What if plays could be put through a prism to break them
into multiple facets for examination? Contemporary critic Susan Bassnett-McGuire has
observed that there is “a movement towards ‘a kind of breaking up things,’ a refusal to accept
that life is linear” (462). These actions afford a plurality of ways, even if contradictory, to
mine the plays for their feminist aspects, for the ways in which the works celebrate women’s
lives in addition to encouraging future endeavors. What the feminist movement has proven
is that a woman is more than the sum of her actions or roles; it is impossible to dramatize
even the majority of those responsibilities simultaneously.
In Prism, Not Mirror: Women’s Lives Center Stage, the feminist aspects of
contemporary plays prove that feminist drama is not as prevalent or as visible as it could be,
but the current playwrights have not succumbed to political and academic pressures to
conform to a feminist prescription, and have continued to foreground the multiple facets of a
woman’s life. Current debates about feminist plays arise out of and contribute to larger
conversations about feminism. Indeed, an historical overview of women playwrights in their
feminist contexts and within feminist theory gives insight into how these women sought to
engage and trouble the larger feminist movement. Today’s plays by women no longer need
to impel action as much as they will force their audiences to question their ideological
assumptions and postmodern theory will enable this. The plays addressed do not offer radical
visions of liberated women, but instead call audiences to question their ideological
assumptions.
Opening this introduction with a discussion of Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern theory
foregrounds an intentional troubling, rather than a radical dismantling, of the hegemonic
definition of womanhood and will underscore the necessity for “a reconsideration of both the
context of historical narrative and the politics of representation and self-representation”
(156). Then, I will turn to a brief history of the early feminist movement to illustrate the
parallel between the feminist movement and burgeoning prescriptive feminist drama
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criticism, which advocated abandoning realism and embracing avant-garde techniques.
Subsequently, I illustrate the origins for the oftentimes contradictory assumptions about
women’s plays by examining the critical celebration of Carolee Schneeman’s and Karen
Finley’s performance art, the biting critiques of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles,
and the confusion generated by Tina Howe’s One Shoe Off. Finally, I explore the evolution
that has come with contemporary feminist dramatic criticism. It has taken seminal feminist
drama critic Jill Dolan thirty years and editors Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins
three editions of Women in American Theatre to accept and value Wendy Wasserstein’s and
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her contemporaries’ oeuvres. As these critics have noted, Wasserstein and others’ works
perform an important feminist project by portraying that women wrestling with their ways in
the world, wrestling with what others expect of them and, more importantly, wrestling with
what they expect of themselves is feminist. As such, these playwrights’ works are worthy of
careful examination for what light they can shed on the past, present, and future lives of
women. Creating new theoretical instruments, as well as challenging previous ones will
demonstrate that, “female identity in fiction can no longer be studied in the context of
traditional ego psychology that fails to take into account woman’s fluid ego boundaries”
(Hirsch 218). I, too, move into the first decade of the twenty-first century prepared to
abandon a prescribed set of feminist ideals to show the myriad ways contemporary
playwrights’ works are able to address and portray the complex lives of women.
Destabilizing the Base: Postmodernism
Plays by American women in the last forty years have been created, produced, as well
as rewarded in a capitalistic, hegemonic society that values rigid gender roles. Critic
Catharine Stimpson questions societal inflexibility in between and among these roles, “Why
do we insist on an integrated self that is the center of the world? What if we are fragmented,
decentered? Can we not be postmodern enough to accept, even to enjoy, this?” (236).
Hence, as the new millennium proceeds, feminist drama finds itself firmly grounded in both
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