Theatre Review, Female of the Species: Ha. Ha.

If we’re going to poke fun at “old-school feminist dogma,” as playwright Joann Murray-Smith says, or even just do a “really funny play about feminism” as director Allison Narver describes in her program notes,  I think it would help if we could first acknowledge somewhere that feminism has been made fun of before. 

Have you heard this one? “E. R. A.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ah, feminism. You sure know how to keep a crowd rolling together across the aisles.

...

I’m not saying feminists shouldn’t laugh at themselves.

When I interviewed Gloria Steinem at Hedgebrook two years ago, I would have killed for even a smile from that woman.

I’ve been through difficult interviews – but this was painful. She bristled at my suggestion that women of different backgrounds could benefit from “healthy conflict” when forced to share a dinner table – and she cooled off entirely when I pointed out that I graduated from an MFA program and asked her what she thought of the proliferation of such programs in America. “I don’t think of them at all!” she said, laughing dismissively.

Having grown up the daughter of a second-waver, I was stunned to find myself not only not connecting with Steinem, but causing her to avoid eye contact with me.

Licking my wounds on the ferry ride back from Whidbey,  I wondered, “since when did being a feminist mean you had to have a humorless, unfriendly stick up your you-know-what?”

But my dear old dad, a feminist thinker in his own right, encouraged me to reconsider: Steinem, like other early feminists, had been fighting on the front lines for a long time, and she and others like her had taken quite a few arrows in the back for their attitudes. They had survived, but they were battle-worn. I was advised to just be thankful that I, a meager foot soldier, had been granted an audience with the general at all.

That characterization is one of a few things that Australian playwright Murray-Smith gets right in The Female of the Species, a contemporary play that flippantly lampoons a few generations of radical feminist theory in an hour-and-a-half long farce based on a real-life incident: when feminist author Germaine Greer was held hostage in her country home by an obsessed college student.

Read the full review after the jump.

The fictional celebrity feminist author in this play is Margot Mason (Suzy Hunt), a self-described war horse approaching her pasture years: she’s impatient, intolerant – impotent outside of battle – and entirely self-absorbed. And Hunt’s owlish grimace is perfect for the role.

The caricature is intended to be a mash-up of Steinem, Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug (I recognized – or projected – strongest glimmers of the former). And the character delivers plenty of zingers: at one point, bemoaning the fact the internet has replaced “the war” as a influential force over our lives and love stories, she cries: “Oh the banality!”

I have no complaints about the acting. The physical comedy is top notch, with Paul Morgan Stetler as Mason’s clueless son-in-law and Morgan Rowe as the hysterical homemaking daughter leading the pack. Highlights include Stetler walking backwards from the room in order to sustain obnoxiously long eye contact, Rowe thrashing in pleasured-abandon on an ottoman, and Hunt removing her bra through her shirt sleeves (a nod to old school feminist dogma I can get behind).

But much of the best work of the play labors under a script that already feels outdated and sluggish — despite its rapid fire one-liners.

One by one, characters parade into the house, dodge a loaded gun wielded by an inept woman, comment on the cow on the doorstep, and do their best to keep revving up the screaming hilarity, until finally everyone is partnered up with a new lover, their throats are hoarse from all the shouting, and Margot is apologetically resolved to just write about herself (instead of lecturing everyone else — as intellectuals, and even worse, women — are wont to do). Finally, she just lets her hair down and does a little dance.

Cue laughter...

It is good to laugh after all.

But like so many over-simplified expositions of radical feminist theory, this play felt like 400 milligrams of sitcom-ready anesthesia: “Gee, baby, lighten up. Try to get laid more! Too old to get laid? Well then, maybe write some poetry!”

Mind you, it takes skill to craft a dig we haven’t already heard at the expense of that old horse that gets kicked over and over again.

But for me it’s telling that in order to make us laugh the playwright was compelled to employ so much violence against the main character (and only her) in this play: she binds and gags Margot Mason — chains her to a desk at gunpoint — dumps a trash can over her head — and even shoots her.

But I guess she has to. If she didn’t keep the spirit of witty and daring feminists quiet, the playwright wouldn't get a word in.

Image: Suzy Hunt as Margot Mason and Renata Friedman as Molly Rivers in The Female of the Species. Photo by Chris Bennion.

The Female of the Species
ACT Theatre
Runs through July 18
Buy tickets online or at 206.292.7676