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INTRODUCTION
They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new
world is beginning.Monique Wittig.
In her novel, Les Gurillres, French lesbian-feminist author Monique
Wittig envisioned a world where women were rising up in armed
rebellion against patriarchal institutions. In attempting to describe this
new world they wanted to create, Wittigs women warriors found
themselves perpetually frustrated by the limitations of the language
they had learned from their colonizers:
The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis
tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made
up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you
speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what
men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on,
whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of
prey, does not appear in the language you speak.
This is specifically the difficulty with lesbian theatre. The symbolic
gestures, tropes, metaphors, bits, stock characters and formulaic
situations that facilitate the compressed telling of a story in real time
on a stageall of these derive from a canon that has traditionally
employed female characters chiefly as rewards or obstacles for men,
in narratives that presume an audience identified with the principle
male characters and their issues.
Whatever they have not laid hands onthat is, the paradigms and
archetypes belonging to female-identified narratives, and especially
to lesbian narrativesdo not appear.
end of the play suggests the possibility that Virginias integrity around
her feelings for women may impel different choices.
At this point in their lives, all these women can do is steal an embrace
together, but their connection is profound and life-changing for
Virginia, and the witnessing of this may also prove to be life-changing
for Nance.
Our performances do transform us, for better or for worse, and
lesbian attraction has the power to disrupt not only our roles, but
often our most deeply cherished notions about who we are and what
we value.
Little Sister
In 2010, Amnesty International published a report titled, Maze of
Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual
violence in the USA.
This play was inspired by a desire to respond, as a playwright, to the
situation documented in that report, by my personal experiences in
witnessing stories from Native American women within my TwelveStep recovery community, and by my ongoing commitment to the
cultural reclamation of lesbians and so-called masculine, or butch
women who have been erased from history.
According to the Amnesty report, Native American women are at
least 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes
than other women in the United States, and at least eighty-six percent
of reported rapes or other sexual assaults against Indigenous women
are committed by non-Indian men who are rarely prosecuted or
punished.
The failure to pursue justice in such cases is due to a number of
factors, the report noted, including chronic under-funding of police
and health services, and a complex maze of tribal, state and federal
jurisdictions that is so confusing that it often allows perpetrators to
evade justice entirely. While tribal governments have substantial
autonomy over their internal affairs, the federal government has
Entitlement can derive from ill-gotten privilege, but it can also come
from heritage and historical antecedents. The stories of Lozen
generate
a
paradigm
of
empowered
women
warriors,
uncompromising in prioritizing the welfare of women and children.
Lozen, as noted in the play, was nearly erased from history because
of her Two-Spirit identity. Generally erasure of the masculine woman
is a function of misogyny and/or homophobia, but in this case,
Lozens near-erasure was motivated by a desire on the part of her
Chiricahua people, to protect her reputation.
In my play, I attempt to incorporate the conflicting views about use of
histories recorded by white people, and also the problematic nature of
ascribing a lesbian or butch identity to a historical, indigenous figure.
The Two-Spirit tradition has by no means eradicated homophobia in
Native American communities, and I wanted to write a play that
celebrated the out lesbians in these communities and that
addressed the prejudice they face where the traditional values of the
Catholic church have become interwoven with the fabric of Native life.
The Ndee (Apache) culture includes the Sunrise Ceremony, a fourday communal celebration that marks the first menstruation of an
Ndee girl as she enters puberty. I was interested in the contradiction
between this empowering heritage and the disempowering
expectation described by Sarah Deer. How would a young survivor
of sexual abuse relate to the ceremony, when the arrival of the
menses translates to increased vulnerability via potential pregnancy
and changes in the body that can lead to sexual objectification?
Who are ones people? Where are the limits of family? These are
questions that inform survivor cultures, and questions with higher
stakes for an entire population that has been targeted for extinction.
How and when does compassion for those impacted by
intergenerational trauma translate to enabling of the cycles?
Finally, in Little Sister, I wanted to explore the tensions between a
partner whose focus is on external enforcement and a partner who is
preoccupied with the challenging of internal paradigms.
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Lizzies jury found her innocent because there was not one shred of
physical evidence linking her to the murders. The book upon which
the historical record was based has been shown by subsequent
researchers to be biased and inaccurate. Much of the scapegoating
of Lizzie that occurred in her day appears to have been motivated by
homophobia and resentment of her status as a single woman with
financial resources, which she chose to spend on herself. Her will
also testifies to female-only social networks, with the majority of her
bequests going to either single women friends or servants.
The fact that Abigail Borden was murdered a good ninety minutes
before her husband baffled the police. Original theories posited that
Borden had been murdered by some disgruntled business partner or
employee (of which there had been many), and then Abigail, who
witnessed it, had been chased upstairs and murdered. When the
coroners report proved the impossibility of this scenario, the police
were at a loss to discover a motive for Abigails murder unless it
was the desire to inherit from both parents. Because Abigail was a
stepmother, it would have been imperative to murder the stepmother
before the father, in order to have the money pass to the daughters.
The police never made a connection between the abusive incident
regarding Bridgets illness and a motive to kill. This may have been
because of the protective role the police, who were Irish immigrants,
took toward Bridget, which began the very day of the murders. She
was allowed to leave the house with an uninspected bundle, and,
quitting her job a day later, she was hired by the police to clean the
jail. She also began to date a police officer during this period.
I wrote the play with an interest in countering the ubiquitous
assumption that Lizzie got away with murder, and also to establish
that her lifelong silence about the actual identity of the killer, with the
penalty she paid for that silence, was an act of great heroism.
The archetype of the rescuing lesbian butch is absent from the canon
of literature, as are all positive lesbian archetypes. (The seductive,
vampiric, embittered, or self-destructive stereotypes, on the other
hand, abound.) No one seems to note that Lizzie had an
extraordinary previous record of volunteer work in the area of social
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lesbianism did turn up, but it was her sisters, not hers. Eva GoreBooth had lived with Esther Roper for over three decades. The two
women had met in 1895 in an Italian boarding house, where both had
been convalescing. Eva had been so taken with Esther and what she
did for a livingsocial reform and suffrage workshe immediately
returned to England, moved into Esthers home, and began to share
her work. They were together until Evas death in 1926.
Not only did the two lesbians appear to be involved in every political
movement, both radical and reform, that had anything to do with
women, but in 1916, the same year of the Rising, Eva started her
own revolution of sorts by founding a remarkable journal named
Urania, with Esther serving as one of the co-editors. Urania identified
gender as a social construct and made the astonishing argument
that, in order to challenge the gender categories, the system of
compulsory heterosexuality would need to be challenged. Marriage
was consistently represented as an unhealthy institution, and the
journal celebrated both declining marriage rates and broken
engagements. Female same-sex relationships were presented as
healthy alternatives to heterosexuality.
Needless to say, both their relationship and their political views on
gender and sexuality were sources of uneasiness among their
colleagues who were fighting on more traditional fronts, and they
found themselves frequently ostracized. Eva and Esther, on the
cutting edge of the First Wave, may have felt more at home in the
Second Wave.
Fortunately for me, because my whole purpose was to write a play
about Ireland, Eva and Esther, whose lives and work were in
England, left an extensive written record of their interactions with
Constance at the time of her arrest and during her subsequent
imprisonments. Constances letters to them from her various jails had
also been preserved. The first draft of my play was titled Ireland Was
Free for a Week, a statement that Constance made to her sister
during the first prison visit. It was an attempt to explain her actions to
her pacifist sister.
This version of the play was a dramatic adaptation of the writings of
the three women, much like my adaptations of Rachel Carsons and
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Jean was, literally, behind the scenes. For thirty years, she lit Martha
Graham and her company, as well as many professional shows.
Martha had given her her first lighting job, and from her initial
infatuation with Martha, Jean went on to light (and write about
lighting) some of the most glamorous lesbian actors on Broadway. I
called the play Lighting Martha, and spent almost a year working on
it. Finally, I had to abandon it. The premise of the work violated a
cardinal rule of dramaturgy: Never tell what you can show. The
more Jean talked about working with Martha Graham, the more clear
it became that it was Martha one wanted to see, not Jean. Martha
was the flamboyant one, the one with the flair and the dramathe
one with the high profile and turbulent romances. The more Jean
demonstrated her lighting for one of Marthas dances, Errand into the
Maze, the more it became clear that it was the dancers we wanted to
see, not the lighting. Light was really the subject of my play, and Jean
was a human metaphor. How could I have overlooked the fact that
light is not visible until it strikes a surface and even then, we perceive
the light only as it is reflected by the object.
So, with sadness, I put away a massive amount of research and a
not-inconsiderable number of drafts. But the issue of the behind-thescenes heroine is raised again in The Countess and the Lesbians,
when Nan questions Constances credentials as a revolutionary.
Nans point is that the people like Eva and Esther, who work for
decades behind the scenes, doing the tedious, thankless, repetitive
work of real social change, never gain the spotlight. Is it more
revolutionary for women to live an openly lesbian life and publish a
magazine that challenges compulsory heterosexuality, or for them to
take up arms and join a mens brigade to liberate a city park in the
name of the Irish Republic? And it is a coincidence that the leading
lady is a married woman with a titleher husbands?
As Kathleen points out, and as I learned painfully with Lighting
Martha, it is the romantic figure and the impulsive gesture that take
focus in the theatre. As Kathleen points out, . . . if you want to try
your hand at writing a smash hit about sitting on endless committees
and gathering signatures for petitionsgood luck!
In the end, Nan insists that Kathleen allow Eva and Esther to be
physically close on the stage, and Kathleen offers the spot for the
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Gillian loves Sarah and refuses to accept her decision. At the same
time, she is aware that it is not her issue to decide. Gillian appears in
the dream sequences as a passionate and steadfast lover, the mirror
that provides the key to Sarahs finding a voice for her body, instead
of seeking a new body for the voice. Sarahs final decision is left
unresolved in the play, but she has welcomed her body as a
participant into the discussion.
Deep Haven
Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the most famous authors associated with
Maine. Her home in South Berwick is an official national landmark
and a popular tourist site. Touring the home, I was disappointed that
the docent never made reference to Jewetts lifelong romantic
attachments to women. Her partnership with Annie Fields was
downgraded to a close friendship, and most folks would come away
with the impression that Jewett was a lonely, if prolific spinster.
Several of Maines most celebrated women writers had intimate
friendships with other women: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rachel
Carson, May Sarton. Sarton, who died in 1995, outed herself and
liberated a generation of lesbian writers with the 1965 publication of
her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.
I began to envision what I called a Maine Lesbian Traveling
Chautauquaa programme of four one-acts about each of these
authors, highlighting the excerpts from their writing which made
explicit their lesbian relationships. Copyright issues compromised my
ability to proceed with this plan, and the only play of the four that I
can market is Deep Haven, Jewetts writing being in the public
domain.
Working on this project, I was struck by how different Jewetts
experience of her lesbianism was from the other three Maine writers,
who all came of age in the twentieth century, after the sexologists had
begun to pathologize same-sex relationships. The accepted and
respectable Boston marriage of the Victorian era was now the
subject of prurient commentary.
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Jewett did not have to disguise, defend, or explain her life. She did
not have to resort to strategies of denial or defiance, nor was she
self-conscious about the gynocentric and matriarchal themes of her
writing.
Yes, she struggled with the pain of falling in love with heterosexual
women and being rejected by them. It might be more accurate to say
that she fell in love with women who may have also been lesbian, but
who married for financial reasons, or because they wanted to have
children. In any case, she writes of feeling suicidal over these
rejections.
She and Fields also struggled with a need to have the legitimacy of
their union validated. They attended sances together in order to
obtain posthumous blessings from Jewetts father and Fields
husband.
Deep Haven is intended to celebrate the aspects of Jewetts life that
have been ignored or misrepresented, highlighting the intensity of her
desires for other women, her appreciation of her fathers recognition
that he had a lesbian daughter, and her very tender and intimate
relationship with Annie Fields.
Since I Died
This play is part of I Have Come to Show You Death, my collection of
dramatic adaptations of the writings of four 19th-century, New
England women writers, dealing with lesbian life partners and death.
Its based on a short story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps titled Since I
Died.
Phelps was born in 1844 in Andover, Massachusetts, and came of
age during the War Between the States which claimed so many
fathers, sons, and brothers. In addition, the young men who did
survive the war were being lured away from rural poverty and toward
the promise of westward expansion and the rise of industries in the
cities. The populations in many New England villages and towns at
this time were predominantly female and elderly, and Boston
Marriages were common.
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