Actress Is ‘Persuaded’ by Country Songs, Feminism

Annie Griffin takes country and Western music seriously--and she hopes to persuade American theater audiences to do the same. In her one-woman “Almost Persuaded” (opening Wednesday at the Tiffany), the actress adopts a variety of voices to speak--and sing--her message.

“The things country and Western songs talk about--are they maudlin and oversentimentalized, or are they about real things that happen to people, using a language and genre that reaches that level of feeling?” she asked rhetorically. “A lot of people turn off when they hear a twanging guitar. But I also think there’s been a re-examination of the music in the past few years.”

Griffin, 27, is one of the converts. New York-born, she went to England in 1980 to attend Cambridge University--and ended up staying: leaving school, joining an experimental theater company, and later striking out on her own. The initial attraction to “Persuaded” was the prospect of “upending stereotypes, doing country and Western in an art gallery (London’s Institute of Contemporary Art) for an art audience who’d be taking my work very seriously--and not knowing whether they could laugh or not. . . . In the end, the audiences were wonderful. I’ve had a lot of support from the art community.”

And the critics. “To me, ICA seemed like such a hip and groovy gallery, that seeing the piece there didn’t surprise me at all,” said New York-based writer Alice Gordon, who reviewed the show in Vogue magazine. “Annie knows exactly what she’s doing. The piece is smart--but it doesn’t take away from the gut reaction. Everyday life is lifted into art. It also felt very generous. Her brand of feminism is not defensive. It’s open-hearted, suggesting that everyone look and see what stereotypes mean, where there’s humanity as well as provocation. She’s got a wonderful sense of humor--and of social justice.”

L.A. Theatre Works’ producing director Susan Albert Loewenberg agrees. Loewenberg (who’s co-producing this run with the Tiffany Theatre) saw Griffin do “Persuaded” last summer at the Edinburgh Festival--and flipped. “It’s got humorous intelligence,” she stressed. “Whereas a lot of women talk about their relationships to men and sexual subservience, that’s not what this is at all. Annie deals wonderful incongruities; she makes incongruity an art. Whether it’s juxtaposing the content of country and Western songs and what she’s actually saying or the place she’s doing it--it’s quite dazzling.”

In addition to “Persuaded,” Griffin’s repertoire includes “The Deadly Grove” (a seven-person collaboration based on the ballet “Giselle”--”although I’m not a dancer; none of us are dancers”) and “Blackbeard the Pirate: A Melodrama in Several Parts.”

“Blackbeard was a real pirate,” she explained. “So I’d talk about that story--then, when it got too awful, I’d leave the story and talk about my dress or my grandmother. Whatever. Although I did it in a big presentational style, I also went in and out of that, played with the relationship with the audience. Afterward, people would come up and ask who wrote (the piece), which was funny because I was talking about myself so much of the time.”

“Persuaded” is no less personal--even though Griffin remains in character throughout. “I like the idea of playing a one-man show and not telling people about your private life,” she noted. “I think it’s much easier to talk about yourself in a different voice than in your own voice. But one of the things about women performers is that audiences have a deeply voyeuristic appetite for the intimate details of their lives. We know everything about famous singers and movie stars: how old they are, who they’re sleeping with, how many times they’ve been divorced.

“Recently, there was a special on Maria Callas. All it talked about was her relationship with Onassis and her weight--nothing about the years of study, how much effort went into her craft. The (assumption) is that a woman’s talent is a result of her emotionality.”

In her show, male-dependency gets a swift kick. “The song ‘Almost Persuaded’ is about a woman who’s tempted to go home with a man--but doesn’t, because she’s married. If you listen to the words, it’s all about her: her desires, what she wants to do. Another is ‘Stand By Your Man,’ which I really don’t think is a song about a man. Tammy Wynette wrote that, and she left five husbands. The irony is clear. These are professional women who spend most of the year on the road and have 10 houses and sing about raising kids--and they’ve all left their kids and husbands behind to go on tour.”

Another musical theme “is the morality of love. These women are, I think, singing about the morality of relationships in a way that’s beyond the sexual--beyond fancying and having crushes. It’s how you treat someone in a proper way, how someone treats you. And if someone doesn’t treat you properly, what are you gonna do about it? It’s about how you live your life.”

How Griffin’s decided to live hers--at least for now--is as an expatriate. Although her mother continues to ply her with clippings about interesting events in New York, London has become home. (“You become rooted in a place before you realize it.”) And in spite of sounding very British this day, her accent is not fixed. “When I go home to Buffalo for Christmas, it gets very Buffalo. And I love talking in a Southern accent. It’s a good voice for telling people off, saying what you mean.”