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.
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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.
