The Female Gaze EMILY MANN In 1975 the filmmaker and critic Laura Mulvey wrote a landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she concluded that in the majority of Hollywood movies the “male gaze” of the male filmmaker, male protagonist, and male spectator projected erotic fantasies onto a movie's female images. The result, Mulvey wrote, was that “women are simultaneously looked at and dis- played, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.” In other words, women in these films were merely sexual objects. The phrase “male gaze” soon became almost a code for an attitude that objectified women, whether in the arts or in daily life. In the next essay, Emily Mann, the artistic director of McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her plays Still Life, Execution of Justice, Greensboro, a Requiem, and Meshugah, discusses the possibilities and ambiguities of a female gaze. This essay was distilled from two conversations between Emily Mann and the editor. Do you know the brilliant Luis Buftuel movie called That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)? While Buiiuel was making the movie, he decided to fire his lead~ ing lady —that object of desire. But instead of replacing her with one actress, he put two in the role. And what many found amazing was that male spectators rarely noticed there were two women playing the same part. The female spec- tators saw it immediately. I went once with male friends to see the film, and I asked each one if he had noticed anything about the woman in the title role. Both said, “No. She’s beautiful.” I said, “Did you notice that she didn’t always look the same?” “No.” “Did you perhaps notice that it’s two different women?” And they said, “Oh, my God. You're kidding.” Talk about the male gaze. But this is film, you might say. Things are different on the stage, where there 78Kathleen Chalfant is comforted by Helen Stenborg in MCC Theaters New York premiere of Margaret Edson’s Wit, a finalist for the sixteenth Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 1994 (Photograph: Joan Marcus) is no camera, no editor, to predetermine an audience's focus or blur imagery. I would have to counter with, “Well, not always.” The male gaze is an all- pervasive construct in our society. Sometimes women come up against it so forcefully that its presence is clear and we become aware and upset. At other times, the application of the gaze is very subtle. ‘The male gaze has been the controlling force in Western theater all the way back to the ancient Greeks, I should imagine, perhaps because men have mostly been the playwrights, producers, critics, directors, and historians. But where is the female gaze? There are periods when women came strongly to the fore in the English-speaking theater: in the United States, during the early twentieth century, there were playwrights like Rachel Crothers and Sophie Treadwell. Be- tween 1902 and 1926, Crothers wrote a stream of successful Broadway comedies; she was the female Neil Simon of her day. Then, after the 1930s, she disappeared. Both Crothers and Treadwell were erased from people’s consciousness. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was a different story: women began to break down bar- riers, and theater critics and producers supported them. Women broke through and began to be produced on a national level and to win national prizes, and their plays were placed on college reading lists. Now, if people are studying dramatic literature, they are reading plays written by women, But when I was coming up, I don’t think I read a single play written by a woman, except for Lillian Hellman, Women so often get lost. 76Whaat is the female gaze? I’m not really sure, but when I was beginning to write plays, certain subjects were off limits to women, War was off limits. It didn’t crystallize for me how off limits war was until Still Life (1980) —which involves a Vietnam veteran, his wife, and his mistress—was produced in Lon- don in 1981. I was interviewed by a journalist who assumed, as did everyone he was sure, that I had written this because I was having an affair with the soldier in the play. I was a naive young thing whose head was completely turned, and the play was my erotic fantasy. It was appalling. In his view, that was the only way I could talk about war: I was having an affair with a vet. Still Life was my decision to look, not just at the violence on the field of battle, but also at the violence that was happening at home from a lot of the vets who. came back—violence that was both conscious and unconscious. In the play, the wife has been physically abused and is afraid for her life. I decided to make the play a still life, a testimony, and have the characters tell their stories to us rather than act them out, because I thought there had been an eroticizing of domestic violence in media at the time. I was writing the play in the years after ‘The Godfather (1972) had come out, a movie in which the character played by Talia Shire is beaten to a pulp in the kitchen by her husband. The scene was brilliantly acted, directed, and edited, and unfortunately, I thought, it was also wildly entertaining, There was something sexy about it. Often, when it came to abuse, the media seemed to be saying, “You know, if a man displays that much passion and violence over a woman, it’s got to be love.” So I decided that, rather than show the abuse onstage, I would show its result, I wanted the wife in Still Life to sit onstage, just sit—inert, pregnant, enraged, hiding her bruises and broken bones—and tell her story just as the vet’s wife had told it to me. Mary McDonnell, who played the wife, was all over that part: she portrayed a bloated, angry, beaten-up woman talking about what she knows. I tried to show the cold truth of violence against women from the woman's point of view, rather than write that action-packed scene of a great-looking guy beating up on a lovestruck, beautiful, sobbing woman. Perhaps that’s what the Women’s Movement did most for me, and for many of my fellow playwrights and directors. It enabled us to wrestle with assumed truths and question them —turn them on their heads. In that scene in The God- father, we watch the violence from the outside. What about how the woman is receiving those blows? If you jump to a much later film—Boys Don’t Cry (1999), which was directed by a woman, Kimberly Peirce—the horrific rape scene is shot, and experienced by us, from the victim’s point of view. The women who grew up during the 1960s and came to theater in the 1970s and early 1980s were writing about war and politics and other societal issues. We had marched for the Equal Rights Amendment, we were turning our gaze outside the home. We had 7also come through a sexual revolution, which allowed us to look at our sexu- ality on the stage, We weren’t sticking to the so-called domestic female issues. We felt that we didn't have to, And if we were, we were seeing them in new ways. Quite consciously, Ihave used traditional female settings. I have set two plays in kitchens: Annulla Allon: Autobiography of @ Survivor (1977), later retitled An- nulla: An Autobiography, about a Jewish survivor of World War Il; and Having Our Say (1995), about two African American sisters, both of whom are over one hundred years old. In each play, the characters cook and prepare food while talking to the audience. got the idea to set a play in a kitchen the first time I was going to use oral his- tory asa jumping-off place for creating a play. My father was head of the Ameri- can Jewish Committee's Oral History Project on Survivors of the Holocaust. The committee wanted to make oral histories of concentration camp survivors, and my father, who was a historian, felt that professional historians should not be conducting these studies. He thought the interviews should be conducted by family members or close friends, who could delve deeply into personal recollec~ tions. The oral history I happened upon was of a Czech woman who had been interviewed by her American-born daughter. They had talked in the mother’s kitchen, and it was one of the most extraordinary mother-daughter scenes 1 had ever read. The daughter had finally found a way to ask how her mother had survived Treblinka, and the mother had told her about it for the first time. asked my father if I could use the interview as a one-act play, and he said, “No, it’s the property of the young lady and it’s going into the American Jew- ish Committee's archives. Why don’t you do your own interview?” So I did. 1 went to Europe in 1974 and met Annulla Allen, the aunt of my best friend anda Jewish survivor of World War II, and as luck would have it, we interviewed her in her London kitchen while she was making chicken soup. The conversations were life-changing for me; the interviews became the basis for my first play. Cooking in akitchen, or watching someone cook and talking to them as they prepare food, is a familiar and often comforting activity. A kitchen is usually an unthreatening location to the people in it and, in a theater, to the audience watching, You can be talking about a whole lot of politics while dicing onions or making chicken soup. You can be talking, as Annulla does, about how the Ge- stapo came to her house on Kristallnacht, or what she had to do to get through the guards at Dachau in order to save her husband, In Having Our Say, which Talso set in a kitchen, Bessie Delany tells how she was nearly raped by a white man in a colored-only waiting room at a Georgia train station. During much of the play, she tells why she doesn't like white people very much, She tells uncom- fortable truths that are hard to hear. But she speaks these remembered truths in her kitchen, and this is familiar territory for an audience. Many of us have 78learned profound life lessons in a kitchen, our elbows propped up on a Formica table while we listened intently to the talk of our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, or neighbors as they prepared meals. I find that audiences drink in the stories they are told this way, just as they once did when they were young. Rather than hear political truths as- saulting us as polemic, we feel that we have had a long and informative talk with a dear friend or member of the family. Annulla Allen and Bessie Delany. were funny, irreverent, and searingly honest. Bessie’s sister, Sadie, was sweet, gentle, and equally candid. Through laughter and tears, audiences were often stunned by what they learned from these women, just as I was when | first heard their stories. By being welcomed into this traditional female space, our hearts opened; we heard and learned. It hasn't always been easy telling these stories. Betsey Brown (1989), the rhythm and blues musical that Ntozake Shange, Baikida Carroll, and I collabo- rated on for eight years, is about a young girl’s coming-of-age. It was very suc- cessful my first season at McCarter, but I remember a few male critics saying, “Well, she’s such a passive central character. She doesn’t do anything.” At first I was baffled, and then I thought, “Oh, thank you. That's such a helpful (though idiotic) comment. Now I understand your problem: she is a girl!” When Bet- sey Brown got her first kiss, she didn’t run after the guy and smack him on the lips; he ran after her. She received her first kiss. She received her first kiss, and her whole life changed—her world changed. Her insides turned upside down. This is huge, and she sings about it. She is not the pursuer in that event, but she plays a very active part. Several reviewers clearly wanted to follow the boy who ran up and kissed her; they wanted to know what happened to him. And ‘we were saying, “Well, this time why don’t we see what's happening to her?” Asa director, I told that story by focusing the audience on Betsey rather than the boy. Onstage, we were in a school yard; everyone was playing, and a boy came up to Betsey and gave her the kiss. She drew an enormous breath. He ran offstage, the lights isolated on her, and she sang about how she felt. It was like a film cut, As the director, and in this case also as coauthor, I controlled the audience's gaze. And I do that all the time. But still, the audience was watch- ing a young gir!’s internal journey —her coming-of-age —which did not always interest some of the critics. I think, or, rather, hope, that this would be an easier story to tell now than it was in 1989. ‘Meshugah* (2002), which | adapted from a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is about a writer named Aaron. He falls in love with an extraordinary, young, Jew- ish refugee named Miriam, who is having an affair with one of Aaron's friends, an elderly Jewish man, ‘To me, the center of the story was the young refugee. Singer adored women; 7he couldn't live without women. And out of a lot of love and a lot of know!- edge, he wrote absolutely thrilling female characters, like Miriam in his novel ‘Meshugah (1981). Miriam has survived the camps and survived World War Il by any means possible, Abandoned in Warsaw, she becomes a whore. Later, again to survive, she becomes a Kapo in a concentration camp and the mistress of the commandant. She is put in charge of the women's barracks, for many Jews the worst possible sin. Better you should have died than collaborate in order to survive, Miriam comes to the United States and falls deeply in love with Aaron, and that spurs the central question and action of the play: At what point do you draw a moral line between what you can or cannot accept in the behavior of the one you love? What is and what is not forgivable? ‘When I directed the play at McCarter, Miriam was the center of the drama. When the director Jason Slavik later staged Meshugah in Boston, the play be- came Aaron's. In part, that’s because I wrote a new draft for the Boston pro- duction; | pared the script way down, and the play became more about the love affair, and Aaron became more present. He now has a stronger through-line, which is good, because Miriam is such a glorious character that Aaron can tend. to disappear. But Jason also had a great personal investment in Aaron’s role. In my staging at McCarter, the character of Aaron came and went. In Jason's production, he never left the stage. In my production, for example, when Miriam telephoned Aaron, you saw her onstage; in one scene I had her reclining on her bed upstage ina pool of light, with her hand between her legs, while Aaron was downstage, talking to her on the phone. But where do you think the audience was looking? In Boston, you saw him and only heard her; she was in voice-over. A director could choose to do it either way, and I can’t remember what has been published for those scenes, Jason's stage directions or mine (shame on me). But both di- rectorial approaches work. The story is the same, but the emphasis is different. Perhaps that is a good example of the unconscious female gaze. I did not realize until Jason’s production that, even in Aaron's scenes, I was focusing on Miriam. Sexuality is so complicated on the stage. You never know what baggage orex- perience an audience member brings to it. The most erotic scene I ever directed involved a fully clothed woman alone onstage. In Miss Julie (1888), Strindberg wrote an interlude that takes place between the time the servant, Jean, takes Miss Julie into his room and seduces her and the time they come out. The play calls for dancing and peasant jollity and antics, and in my 1994 production at McCarter, I had two peasants come into the kitchen, drunk and happy, and start to make love on the kitchen table. The peasants wake up Kristine, the cook, who has fallen asleep alone in her room. Furious, she kicks them out and makes herself a pot of coffee. Then she notices that Jean’s door is closed and she’s sus- Bopicious—after all, she knows him; they’ve been lovers for years. She sits down at the table with a cup of very black coffee, and on the table there’s a bowl of hard sugar, and she just takes a hunk of sugar and dips it into her coffee and sucks on it. The lights slowly change, isolating her, and the music gets gradually louder and more erotic, and from her face, as she sucks on the piece of sugar, you see her picturing everything that Jean is doing in his room with Julie. It takes a very long time. Kristine finishes her coffee and, enraged, goes into her own room and slams the door. Whomp—the lights change, and suddenly the long narrow room, which has been effulgent with midsummer trees and sky, becomes gray like a tomb. Now it is morning, an after Jean and Julie have made love. Jean has had his sexual fantasy fulfilled and is scared about the potential consequences, but Julie is completely besotted. Sexually awakened, drunk with it, she still can’t get enough. She wants to hold him, she wants to touch him, she’s willing to change her life for him. She’s in postcoital throb. Another woman might stage the scene differently, but that’s an absolutely female gaze on that play. Many of us obviously operate from the female gaze, but we've trained our- selves not to label it, because if we label it, then we risk becoming dogmatic rather than creative, It’s definitely a game I play with myself. 1 know the female gaze is operating, but I try to push that analysis aside and deal simply with the artistic truth, In other words, I just do my work—simply, instinctively, and very, very personally. Recently, I was at a retreat with the playwright and actor Dael Orlander- smith, who writes brilliant multicharacter plays that she often performs herself. She stunned me with the new writing she was doing. It was very much in pro- cess, but she read some of it for me. Dael is African American; in this new play she became an Irish girl, a gay white man, an Italian American stud —all talking about race. Dael can write everyone, perform everyone, and it was thrilling to see all these people pass through her. Is the female gaze operating in this work? I don’t know. What | do know is that the Dael Orlandersmith gaze is operat- ing, At the end of the day, what makes great art, for me, is the individual artist unself-consciously speaking the truth as only she knows it.