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DORIS BAIZLEY’S WOMEN IN A DUTY CONTEST

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Have we come a long way, baby?

Doris Baizley isn’t so sure. Her newest play, “Mrs. California” (opening Sunday at the Coronet Theatre), is a seriocomic homage to the anti-feminist movement that followed the end of World War II, a sentiment, she claims, that is still very much with us today.

“Look at that Woody Allen movie (“Hannah and Her Sisters”), where at the end, all the happy women are the ones who decide to have babies and give up their careers. Now that’s straight out of Ladies’ Home Journal, 1953: ‘I Denied My Femininity by Wanting to Fly a Plane’ or ‘How to Lose in a Tennis Game.’ Just recently, there was an article in The Times about how women with careers have made their husbands less successful. It’s crazy .”

The Philadelphia-born Baizley, 40, has developed an effective means of dealing with her anger: She writes about it. In the case of “Mrs. California,” the inspiration came with her reading of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and “hearing about women who had been contestants in the real Mrs. California pageant.”

“It really happened in the ‘50s,” she said. “There was a Mrs. America contest, and a local one for Mrs. California.” The 1955 event, held at the Ambassador Hotel, principally honored housekeeping skills: “There were 22 ovens on the stage of the Cocoanut Grove, and the women competed in sewing an apron from an original pattern, preparing a meal and ironing a man’s white shirt.”

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Will women of that time feel a twinge of shame in the portrayal?

“Not at all,” Baizley stated. “For me, they’re the heroes. It was a very bad period for women; they did what they were supposed to do. Often, it was at great personal cost.

“What happened was that the women’s movement came to a grinding halt in the ‘50s. Now that was my mother’s generation, but it certainly affected my generation, because the movement had to start up all over again.”

She recounted with bitterness an episode with a former male Vassar professor who, when she returned for a visit, “said he was surprised that a couple of us were working in theater in New York. I asked why. He said, ‘You’re not ready to be working in New York theater; we don’t prepare you for that.’ I said, ‘What do you expect us to do?’ He said, ‘Well, we expect you to be good audience members in the communities you go to live in with your husbands.’

“At the time, I didn’t really put it together with the whole anti-feminist movement that was going on, because basically I’m sort of stubborn. I wanted to write plays--I always wanted to write plays--so I just kept doing that.”

Her credits include an in-the-works screenplay for 20th Century-Fox; “Catholic Girls” at L.A. Theatre Works; “Daniel in Babylon” for the L.A. Stage Co.; and, for the Mark Taper, “Bugs” and “Guns,” done by the Improvisational Theatre Project, and an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”

“Mrs. California” had its beginnings at the Taper as well, as part of last year’s New Theatre for Now. “When it got chosen,” she acknowledged, “the play was basically right off the typewriter. We went through a second draft five days later with the actors, then they worked on it for five days before we went onstage. So this was not really a finished piece. Since then, we’ve filled it in quite a bit.” (However, the original production ensemble remains intact: director Warner Shook, cast members Fred Applegate, Frances Conroy, Gregory Itzin, Susan Krebs, Sharon Madden, Deborah May and Jean Smart.)

Baizley’s attachment to things theatrical manifested itself at age 10, when she wrote her first works: a treatment on “an ancestor who was hanged in 1660 for being a Quaker” and an “absolutely accurate play on Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh; it was about the irony of history. In the first scene, Raleigh puts his cape on a puddle and she walks across it. In the second scene, he’s beheaded. The actor playing him wore fake shoulders and held up this basketball as his head, then the ball would roll into the audience.”

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Baizley furthered her attachment to theater during the ‘60s in New York, “where I learned from people at the Open Theatre and the Ridiculous Theatre. And I always took writing jobs that would teach me--rather than, say, going to graduate school. I’m glad I did. I always tell people, ‘If you want to write, be in the theater. Hang lights, sweep the lobby--make yourself absolutely necessary. Because then, when you’re writing a play, it’s coming from someone who’s part of the theater.’ ”

She credits her seven years with the Taper’s ITP (which tours Southland schools) for the ability to take topics from the outside world “and apply them to what I think. Take ‘Guns,’ for instance: “I’d thought about gun control a couple of times, realized what a serious issue it was. But as soon as my imagination gave the guns voices, they just talked and talked. And I was involved.

“With ‘Mrs. California,’ I had no idea that the feelings would come out so passionately. I just wanted to say, ‘Look what a terrible thing you’re doing with your life, when you’re educated and productive--and then not to use it fully. . . . ‘ At the same time, it’s very funny to see four people sewing.”

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