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Each little red star is a clickable link to additional information on whatever listing it appears beside. It might be a link to an article in a local newspaper, or it might be a press release the company has sent me.“A WAM Welcome”
Posted by Gail M. Burns - April 2010
My favorite thing at the opening night performance of the three pieces that make up A WAM Welcome was when writer/storyteller/comedienne Robin Gelfenbien came out for her curtain call with a jaunty yellow Post-It note reading “Nerd” stuck to her chest. After sitting through Mirror, Mirror, a piece which explored the always depressing issue of the media and women’s body image from a college-age point of view, it was refreshing to see a grown-up woman walk out and proudly and publicly embrace her identity. Hooray for Nerds!
What, Gail, you may well ask, is A WAM Welcome?
Well, it is the inaugural event of the WAM (Women’s Arts Movement) Theatre a evening consisting of a selection from Gelfenbien’s one-woman show My Salvation has a First Name: A Wienermobile Journey, a staged reading of Lydia Stryk’s The Last Protestor Standing by Brenny Rabine, and the performance of Mirror, Mirror which WAM co-founder Leigh Strimbeck developed with students at Russell Sage College.
WAM Theatre’s purpose is two-fold – to present work by, with and about women, and to use those performances to raise funds for organizations that work to combat the oppression of women and girls here and abroad. A WAM Welcome’s proceeds are going to Women for Women International, and their November production of Sara Ruhl’s Melancholy Play will benefit the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts.
Strimbeck and Kristen van GinhovenWAM were inspired to start WAM after reading Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Both women are actors, directors, and theatre educators, and the book inspired them to use the talents they had to make difference where they were. It is an admirable effort. When faced with enormous issues like gender oppression it is all too easy to collapse in a heap of hopelessness.
This initial outing is intended to be mere tidbits, flashes of what Strimbeck and van Ginhoven hope WAM will become. The three pieces are not connected, nor were they ever intended to be performed together on the same bill.
Gelfenbien’s piece, which opened the show, was by far the strongest and most entertaining. I love, or maybe I hate, the way we compartmentalize talents. Gelfenbien is an actress, a comedienne, a stand-up comic, a writer, a storyteller… Aren’t all stand-up comics acting? Aren’t all writers telling stories? If you tell a story and then write it down aren’t you a writer? I think what we need to say is that Gelfenbien is smart and funny and worth listening to.
The story she is telling a portion of here is how getting a job after college driving one of the small fleet of Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles around the country helped her find herself and pull herself out of a suicidal depression. I would like to hear the entire work, because while the portion she performed was lots of fun, it only took her up to the driver’s-side door of the Wienermobile and not out on her journey of discovery. I would like to learn exactly how driving a giant hot dog (which, let’s be honest here, is the most embarrassingly phallic vehicle ever to grace our highways – I shudder to think of driving it through the Holland Tunnel) helped her embrace her inner nerd and blossom into the talented woman she is today.
I liked The Last Standing Protestor the least. I either didn’t hear or I didn’t understand the protagonist’s back-story. Where was she? Why was she there? How long had she been there? I mentioned earlier how easy it is to allow great big problems to overwhelm you, here Stryk’s heroine literally does collapse in a heap of hopelessness after attempting to protest not just one, but ALL the problems of the world. But WHY?? What does she hope to accomplish by standing out of doors wherever she is – in this production apparently outside the United Nations headquarters – rattling off the evils of the world, as if naming all the demons can defeat them.
Towards the end the Protestor seems to be demanding direct audience response. TELL ME what hauls you under with despair, she cries. Am I supposed to answer? What about when she falls to the stage begging for help? Am I really being invited to go and help her up? Have audience members done that in the past? What happens then? I felt uncomfortable sitting by passively watching and not responding, which may be exactly what Stryk and director van Ginhoven intended, but I was left feeling unsatisfied with the piece and guilty for allowing myself to refrain from becoming a part of the story.
Mirror, Mirror is a work Strimbeck developed with a group of Russell Sage students several years ago. The original group read Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney E. Martin and interviewed women between 8 and 83 about their experiences with body image and the media. The current ensemble of nine Sage students is the third cast to perform it, and each cast tweaks the eighteen vignettes to reflect their own opinion and experience.
As I understand it, the piece is intended to be performed by college-age women for their peers and for school audiences of younger women and girls. That was not the audience I saw it with, nor do I qualify in any way as a girl or even a young woman any more. From my lofty vantage point at age 53, the piece overall seemed depressing and lacking the perspective that only age can bring. I wanted to run up on the stage and shout “There’s more to life than mascara!” but I know that when you are still in school and college it is easy to feel that your outward appearance and other people’s opinions of you really do matter. Young people cannot help being young.
There were two vignettes in Mirror, Mirror that concerned adult women. One, which appeared in small segments throughout the show, about an anorexic married woman narrated by her husband (played by a woman), and another one-shot piece about a 42-year-old breast cancer survivor. Because all the rest of the vignette’s were very clearly focused on the concerns of women under 21, these pieces, while interesting, seemed out of place.
My favorite part of Mirror, Mirror were the B.I.T.C.H. Woman segments. (B.I.T.C.H. stands for Babe In Total Control of Herself.) In each of these we saw a young woman faced with a choice between speaking the truth or playing the traditional, submissive feminine role. Just as her dilemma reached its crisis, in swooped B.I.T.C.H. Woman!! a cape-and-tights wearing super heroine who reminded her that society would call her a bitch whatever she did, so she might as well make the choice that was right for her. Thus empowered the young woman does what she wants and lives happily ever after, but not before sharing a cheerful Boob-Bump with B.I.T.C.H. Woman!! (I like to put exclamation points after that name!!)
While the majority of the vignettes sounded like the women were swallowing the media hype and allowing their body image and self-esteem to be controlled by outside forces, B.I.T.C.H. Woman!! felt much closer to where I am, and much closer to the advice I would give young women about how to handle the bullshit the world dishes out. That’s why I felt so liberated when Gelfenbien came out with that Post-It note on her chest. Accept who you are, what you look like, and the gifts you’ve been given and go out and DO SOMETHING!
There are an awful lot of issues at play here, not the least of which is the question of whether art has gender. Artists certainly do, but do they imbue their creations with their hormones and chromosomes? We certainly speak as if they do, particularly female artists. We talk about Chick Flicks and Chick Lit, and what those terms generally mean is that this is art that men won’t understand or enjoy. This is art with a limited audience.
That was certainly what the general public heard when WAM announced its first evening’s entertainment. The audience was sparse and predominately female. When you brand art as feminine, or, God forbid, feminist, you limit its popular appeal.
This is a sad state of affairs, but it is obviously true. Read Theresa Rebeck’s Laura Pels Keynote Address. All in favor of sending B.I.T.C.H. Woman!! flying through her window to cheer her up, say “aye.”
Every spring I am invited by The Women’s Times to look at the upcoming summer theatre season and ask the question: “Where are the women?” I jokingly refer to this exercise as “Putting on my gynocentric glasses” and in the past have found it rather annoying in its limitations because I don’t spend the rest of the year worrying about the gender of the playwrights, composers, lyricists, directors, and choreographers whose work I review.
And yet I know that I, too, look at “women’s theatre” as less appealing. For example, I really hate The Vagina Monologues. Nor would I be caught dead at a performance of Menopause: The Musical or the Four Bitchin’ Babes in Hormonal Imbalance. But I am looking forward to seeing The Secret Garden – a musical written by women based on a book by a woman about a little girl – and I am already plotting how to get a press seat for the premiere of Rebeck’s The Novelist at the Dorset Theatre Festival this summer.
Now this opinion is clearly solely my own. The shows I mentioned disliking are doing a booming business and I do not mean to trivialize the hard work and artistry that has gone into their creation, nor the genuine enjoyment they give their audiences. Its just to me those shows are exclusionary. They seem to me to imply that you cannot enjoy them if you are not female. If someone told me I couldn’t enjoy a play by August Wilson because I was white or a Woody Allen film because I’m not Jewish or La Cage Aux Folles because I’m not gay, I would take umbrage. I want art that welcomes and includes everyone. I want to end war, poverty, and famine too. Now I’m standing out in the cold with that Last Protestor…
As a result of reading Rebeck’s piece and meeting with my Women’s Times colleagues, I have decided to invest a chunk of my time and energy this year profiling the women active in theatre in this region – starting with van Ginhoven and Strimbeck – and considering gender issues. It is something that interests me and it is something that needs to be written about. God grant me the time and energy to get it done!
WAM Theatre presents “A WAM Welcome” at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 9; 2 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 10, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 11 at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2, 36 Linden St., Pittsfield, MA. The show runs two hours and ten minutes with one intermission and is suitable for ages 13 and up. A free post-show discussion with the actors and creative team will follow the April 10th matinee.
Tickets are $20 for the general public and for $10 students. $10 tickets are also available for groups of 10 or more. All tickets available at the door, online at www.barringtonstageco.org or by calling the Barrington Stage Box Office at 413-236-8888.