IS THE THEATER SEXIST? TWO VIEWS : YES : Attitudes That Date Past the Greeks Don’t Die Fast

We’re deep into the ‘80s, the decade when women’s liberation is supposed to be embedded in our culture, and sexism is alive and well in the theater.

It’s bad enough that Gloria Steinem is modeling miniskirts in the pages of Vanity Fair. But theater should know better. It has provided us, after all, with some of the essential character icons of feminist liberation. Any man has to think twice about his own prejudices after seeing the plights of “The Trojan Women,” or the tenuous victory of Nora, departing her “Doll’s House.”

It’s precisely because theater has paved new roads for women and men to think of themselves outside of some permanent hierarchical structure that theater has a higher standard to live up to.

The standard was set when theater was young. Despite the sad fact that women weren’t allowed on the Greek stage, its male playwrights created some of history’s most startling and dynamic heroines. And this in an entrenched patriarchal society.

It’s not that we need a contemporary Sophocles or Aeschylus to redress discriminatory views of women. Playwriting that avoids sexism, or that even exposes it and wrestles it to the ground, does not require genius. But it remains theater’s burden that, in the conception of female characters in our supposedly more liberated era, nothing matches Lysistrata’s or Antigone’s claim on our hearts and minds.

What we have instead is typified by the comedy of Tom Eyen, the purveyor of “Women Behind Bars,” that trash fantasy for the misogynist. Eyen’s “Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down,” whose central image--of Hanna letting her skirt get blown a la Marilyn Monroe by a draft, all to the pleasure of carnival voyeurs--confirmed a view of women that was frozen, for this playwright, in a hormone-driven adolescence.

It also confirmed that just making a woman your central character doesn’t rectify the legacy of theater sexism. It goes deeper than that. Playwright Lee Blessing commented in Calendar (July 19) that he found it easier to write from a woman’s perspective rather than a man’s.

That’s exceptional for a male writer, but more to the point is the emphasis on perspective . Getting inside a woman’s consciousness, the way Craig Lucas managed to do with his “Three Postcards,” is not only the surest way to see the war between the sexes through female sights, but an artistic challenge (for a male writer) as well.

Yet even when a man tries to do this, he can still botch it. My favorite example is William Mastrosimone’s “Extremities.” A woman is raped, and then she turns the tables on her rapist. Sounds ideally feminist, except for a couple of problems. Mastrosimone turns the woman’s roommates who are trying to help her into stereotypes of female hysteria and indecision. And the revenge itself is nothing more than a woman adopting a macho solution. A lot of women are as embarrassed by this response to rape as they are by Margaret Thatcher being the model of a woman leader.

So sexist attitudes arise even when theater men are trying to avoid them. Jerry Colker and Michael Rupert’s “Mail” (just closed at the Pasadena Playhouse) goes to great pains to dramatize an independent woman. Dana is further along the road of adulthood than her boyfriend, Alex. She knows what she wants.

This includes, however, wanting Alex’s baby without marrying Alex, which, for a liberated woman in the ‘80s, is a truly retrograde decision. The Dana we’ve seen up to this turn in the story would be smart enough to know about the enormous economic and emotional pressures of single motherhood. The device also reinforces the notion that women are only truly fulfilled in motherhood.

The contradictory messages this show was sending out were crystallized in the scene where Alex opens up his bill from the power company. Buxom female utility workers in hot pants wiggle and strut into his living room. “Mail” surrenders its enlightened views to burlesque. The crowd loved it.

It was another reminder of the notion that sex sells--usually men’s view of sex. (The picture of Alex and the women was used in the show’s ads.) The “Mail” routine is also a matter of staging, which can turn women into sex objects almost by the sheer power of theater’s live presence before the viewer. In a recent production of Max Frisch’s “The Firebugs”--the text of which calls for no female sexpots with pouting lips--there they were on the stage. More than a few men in the audience were audibly amused. My female companion squirmed.

In fact, my companion is having second thoughts these days about coming with me to the theater at all. She knows that she doesn’t want to get near “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and I was glad not to subject her last February to Anthony Newley’s “Stop the World--I Want to Get Off,” which preened its offensive maleness while, in the end and too late, it poked fun at the preening.

Of course, they don’t quite make them like that anymore. There are simply too many women in theater now (producing, directing and writing, as well as acting and designing) to let matters devolve to How Things Used to Be. One woman, certainly, is Caryl Churchill, whose “Cloud Nine” and “Top Girls” conjure art out of feminist thought. Even better, Churchill manages to erect clever satire to conceal her polemics, and uses ideas to replace traditional heroines.

Theater, traditionally, possesses a progressive conscience to be proud of, allowing artists of color, of unpopular political views, and with little money, to be heard from. The Living Theatre, for example, was at the barricades in the ‘60s when a lot of well-paid rock ‘n’ rollers were buying up real estate.

But it was as much Judith Malina’s Living Theatre as it was Julian Beck’s. Even in that anarcho-feminist collective, the man dominated. Attitudes that date back past the Greeks don’t go away quickly. It’s an old and current problem; an art form with the high ideals theater boasts can’t afford to rest on its laurels.