The Female Role in Theater: A Year's Reflection

By ABBY FOSTER '19, NATASHA ROY '19, LIVIA WOOD '19

Note: In this article, we use the terms “female” and “woman” interchangeably. We understand that “woman” typically refers to gender, while “female” typically refers to sex, and that these two concepts are different. However, for the purpose of this discussion, we use both terms.

This year, the three of us created and studied our own curriculum in an Independent Study about the female experience in theater, an interdisciplinary cross between Drama and Women’s Studies. Along with reading and performing plays, we had the chance to speak to women actively involved in theater as playwrights, directors, and actresses. Through these interactions, we not only heard real stories about what it’s like to be a woman working in the performing arts, but we also learned about the typical ways in which women are portrayed in the arts. We want to share with our community the lessons we’ve learned this year so that we can offer ways in which to improve gender equality, not only in theater, but also in the world at large.

Complex Women: A Playwright’s Perspective

In the fall, we read Things You Can Do, a play centered around female characters, and spoke with the playwright, Kristen Palmer. Our exploration of this play and our conversation with Kristen nudged us towards a key realization: female strength exists outside the confines of the “active” character. A woman can be equally powerful existing just through her sorrow as when she’s driving the plot forward. Kristen’s writing allows her character, Stevie, to resignedly struggle with her life, being passive, yet remain compelling because struggle can be just as truthful and powerful a narrative as that of a woman “driving” her story.

Male characters are allowed to just exist and move through their lives, whereas female characters must somehow be perceived as strong and active to be taken seriously. In writing and revising Things You Can Do, Kristin received a lot of criticism about how Stevie, the heroine, wasn’t “active” enough, because “how can it be her story if she’s not driving it?” Kristen doesn’t have a particular answer to these questions; in her mind, Stevie is struggling, and her struggle is her story. As a playwright, she’s drawn to actors who can “find the power in the struggle.” Her insight into writing complex and natural women pushed us to realize that strength in female characters doesn’t have to translate to conventional Erin Brockovich style self-righteousness.

In this class, we talked a lot about how, as female actors, we need to give power to roles that were perhaps written without power. Yet, in speaking with Kristen Palmer, the conversation shifted instead to performing female characters written with unconventional power. If we were to operate with a narrow minded idea of female power—that a character must be driving her story in order to be strong—we would only do a disservice to complex female characters.

Kristen also noted that she wrote and revised Things You Can Do based in part on her actors’ performances. In this case, not only were the actors able to bring power to an already written role, but they actually informed the writing of the role. In studying Kristen’s work, we gained clarity on relationships between playwright and actor—specifically a female playwright and the actress who realizes the playwright’s character.

The Vagina Monologues:

Studying and ultimately performing scenes from The Vagina Monologues was one of the most empowering and educational experiences of our Independent Study. When we first began planning our class, we knew we wanted to examine The Vagina Monologues—it’s a text entirely devoted to women’s sexuality, and it was perfect for our class. When we began reading the material, however, we made an unsettling discovery: most of the monologues made us uncomfortable to read, let alone perform. We spoke with Vicky Kuperman, a professional actress who had recently performed The Vagina Monologues, and she offered useful advice about discomfort; she told us that she, too, had felt uneasy at first, until she realized that “it was for no reason other than the framework of society.” Keeping in mind that the material is powerful precisely because people are uncomfortable with it, we found the monologues much easier to work with and grew more confident in our performances. In fact, acknowledging the discomfort we felt allowed us to feel more at home in the pieces we were performing.

The three of us each performed a series of monologues. Some of the monologues were dark and serious, others humorous, but they all accomplished the same goal: to give voice to the overlooked plights of women. Using humor as a tool to examine female sexuality was something we were previously unfamiliar with, but working on The Vagina Monologues enabled us to discuss serious issues about women through a lense with which we were much more comfortable. It also helped immensely to perform The Vagina Monologues in front of an audience; not only was it empowering for us to present such compelling pieces, but we were moved to see the audience agree with and be touched by the material. We also saw that, in the same way we had been uncomfortable working on the monologues, the audience was uncomfortable at times. While we strive to make topics around female sexuality and empowerment less taboo, we also understand that discomfort is natural and must be embraced in order to be worked through.

Moving Forward:

We’ve learned many valuable messages this year, and we hope to apply this knowledge to the broader world by both addressing the problem of female representation in theater and by investigating how our findings can be taken out of the context of theater and applied to the female experience as a whole.

After this course, we’ve taken away three major lessons as performers: to give characters backstories, to give performances power, and to build relationships with women. Firstly, it is important to give each character an individual backstory, especially if she is written without one. As an actress, one of the most important things one can do is show the audience the character’s journey. If the audience does not know where a character is coming from or why she is doing what she is doing, it will have a hard time being empathetic towards her and her struggle. We must also always give power through the performance. Like the actors that Kristin Palmer mentioned who could “find power in the struggle,” we, too, must embrace what makes our characters difficult and lean into that difficulty, instead of away from it. This is especially important for those playing female characters, as these characters are typically written in positions of low to no power. Finally, we noticed that it is important to build and emphasize relationships between women on stage.

We’re convinced that the door must be opened for women at every step of the theatrical process in order for female representation to increase in the arts. There shouldn’t just be more female actors, but more female directors and playwrights. Additionally, non-female playwrights must focus on writing more roles for women. One cannot act a part that does not exist. Furthermore, these roles should have depth and complexity; ideally, as we learned in this course, every female role would have a backstory, be written with power, and be connected to several other women through strong relationships. However, if these roles do not exist, it is the actresses’ responsibility to give power to the parts they have, or to write scripts with more roles.

We realized that every aspect of what we encountered in our course reflects the broader female experience. All too often, women are stripped down to their simplest emotions because people would rather not deal with complex humanity. It is much easier to say a woman is “crazy” or “bitchy” than it is to explain what motivates her to act the ways she does. Additionally, women are rarely put in or assumed to be in positions of power. Often times, it is up to the woman to find power in the role she is given, instead of being handed that power. Both of these phenomena—being labeled in simple terms and being given a position of low power—mirror exactly what we found through looking at various plays. This course has been a lense for us to look at our experience, and the universal experience of all women, through the small world of theater.

We all have appreciated this class more than we can say and will carry what we learned throughout the rest of our lives.