Women Playwrights Confront Fears and Realities of Words Not Written

“I write with a sense of urgency,” declared the 59-year-old part-Maori playwright who goes simply by the name Renee. “There are so many women who wait impatiently for their stories to be told. . . .”

Until nine years ago, she was among them.

“Then I thought: ‘When I am lying on my deathbed, do I want to be filled with regret for journeys not taken, love not spoken, realities not written, all because I was too frightened?’ ”

As the keynoter at the First International Women’s Playwrights Conference on the State University of New York campus at Buffalo-Amherst, Renee struck a responsive chord among 200 or so of her writing peers from 34 countries. (About 50 women producers, directors and academicians also attended.)

For there is a sense of urgency here as the playwrights, putting aside artistic questions for the moment, deal with issues of censorship, self-censorship and downright oppression.

The 6-day conference, brainchild of British-born playwright Kathleen Betsko who is on a visiting fellowship here, ends Sunday. Meanwhile, 12 theaters in Buffalo are showcasing plays and excerpts of plays by women.

While putting together a book of interviews with contemporary women playwrights recently, Betsko realized that most of them were working “in isolation.” Facing discrimination from producers, directors and critics, they needed a forum to air their concerns.

Despite the glittering “and deserved” successes of playwrights such as Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”) and Marsha Norman (“ ‘night, Mother”), neither of whom attended the conference, Betsko said in an interview that the old rule still prevails:

“Women playwrights have to work twice as hard and be twice as good for half the praise, 10% of the grants and 7% of the stage.”

Not much has changed, she said, in 10 years since the Dramatists Guild first compiled statistics on how often--that is, how seldom--women’s plays were produced.

“All you have to do is count up (the plays by women on Broadway) and you’ll hardly ever find any,” said Betsko. When women’s plays do get to Broadway, she said, they “don’t stay very long.”

And yet with an international cast of participants, non-gender political issues have dominated the first half of the conference.

Wednesday afternoon the playwrights quickly passed a resolution condemning Great Britain for passing a law against public funding for school and community projects that seemingly promoted homosexuality. The playwrights have also promised to deal with South Africa.

Politics entered the scene Tuesday during a seemingly apolitical panel on the “multiple roles” women need to survive.

“In my case I came to my art very early,” Diana Raznovich, an Argentine now living in Spain, began amusingly. “My mother wanted me to be a concert pianist, and she had me at the piano eight hours a day practicing, when I was 4 years old.”

Her revenge, Raznovich said, was to make up little skits about the piano teacher, “with my nanny, my dear Lorenza, playing the piano teacher, and I playing the very good little girl. I wrote my first play before I wrote my ABCs.”

As an adult, Raznovich became a playwright whose “artistic destiny” was darkened by the political situation in Argentina. She wrote a play about a pianist who agrees not to touch the keys that she said was misread by the government as a play against censorship.

In 1976, Raznovich said she was asked to leave the country, and police “destroyed my library.” In 1981, after her return, she said the small theater she was connected with in Buenos Aires was burned down.

“In Argentina,” Raznovich said, “it’s very hard to be a playwright; it’s very hard to be a woman; it’s very hard to be .”

Polish playwright Urzula Koziol said that “listening to my friend from Argentina, I realized how many despots fear the (written and spoken) word. Even though they are equipped with all kinds of technologically sophisticated weapons, nuclear weapons, they are afraid of a lady holding a pen.”

Sometimes, Koziol said sardonically, playwrights have their own fear--that their words aren’t being read. “But we are consoled by the fact that there is always a censor, and at least he will judge very carefully.”

It’s not easy to be a writer in Poland, she added: “Too many words have been compromised, especially lofty ones. They have become newspeak and anti-talk.

“That’s why everyone yearns for the authentic word: a word that is as fresh as rain, a word which is capable of rinsing us from the grayness of the dust.”

When asked whether as a woman she didn’t feel caught between an oppressive government and the Solidarity movement that is linked to the Catholic Church, Koziol replied:

“The situation now in Poland is such that our attention is turned away from the issues of the battle of the sexes or gender differences, but rather toward the concerns between the authorities and the rest of society.

“We have a multiheaded monster in Poland,” Koziol said. “We all transform into St. George and try to cut off various heads of the monster: stress, political hopelessness, social hopelessness.

“We cut off one head, another one emerges. Our hands are full.”

Fatima Dike, a black South African, didn’t discuss gender either. During a panel on censorship and self-censorship, she said, smiling, that “every time they try to censor me, I find a way out.”

That process began, she said, with her first play, “The First South African,” in 1977 when a sympathetic white man advised her to turn her offensive lines into an ethnic language. “So I took them out from English and put them back in Xhosa.”

Still she lives “a censored life. Sometimes I want to say something,” Dike noted, “and I find myself stopping myself. . . .

“You know that you are putting your life on the line, that you may end up with a sack over your head and someone hitting you with a rubber pipe. Those things run around in your head.

“But if you think that way, how is anybody else outside in the world going to know the truth?”

For Swedish playwright Margareta Garpe, that was a tough act to follow. But she managed by bringing the censorship issue closer to home, suggesting that in democracies woman have to fight “another form of censorship: self-censorship.”

Maria Giacobbe, an Italian-born playwright living in Denmark, agreed. She saw self-censorship extending “from words that are considered dirty, to feelings which we (women) have learned to disown because they are ‘inferior,’ to arguments which have been designated as vulgar.”

Australian lesbian playwright Sandra Shotlander also agreed. “I write with the feminist critics on one shoulder, the mainstream critics on the other shoulder and my mother on my head saying, ‘This play will not make any money.’

“And I find I am (sometimes) left with a blank page. . . . I go into a deep depression. . . . This mental block is because of self-censorship.”

Leilah Assuncao, one of Brazil’s leading playwrights, spoke about getting around the censors. Little girls have to deal with censorship early, she noted: “What are you doing, young lady? Pull your skirt down!”

Despite the differences in language and background, conference members are striving to think of themselves as a unit.

As Bai Fengxi of China summed up: “We are all strangers by face. But our hearts are so close, because our cause and ideals are just the same.”

Bai quoted a character from one of her plays: “Woman is not the moon. She doesn’t need to reflect herself in the light of others.”