Author of ‘Ladies Room,’ in Hot Water of Sorts, Offers a Ready Defense

Robin Schiff does not take kindly to being called an anti-feminist.

Last September her play “Ladies’ Room”--a comic romp in which a gaggle of women check their lipstick and share romantic woes in the restroom of a Mexican restaurant--opened at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood. For males, the semi-risque setting was a chance to “go where no man has gone before.” For women, it was more familiar terrain: often funny, but uncomfortable too in its of observation of friendships and the emotional warring between the sexes.

Yet in the midst of the play’s immense popularity, Schiff has been called on by Los Angeles Weekly writer Jan Breslauer to defend both her characters’ man-craziness (which includes compromising themselves as well as back-stabbing each other) and her own social ethics.

“I’m not a feminist in the sense that I’m political,” the Los Angeles native said, “but I think I’m living my life by the feminist ideal: I’m self-supporting, I’m treated with respect in my profession, I own my own home. I wrote the play to cope with feelings I was having, confusions about relationships between men and women. I was saying, ‘Hey, I feel this way. Other people feel this way. How the hell do we deal with it?’ ”

Although her private life is quite happy now, thank you, Schiff, 34, remembers “the horrible old days when I used to go to bars.”

“I don’t know what I was doing,” she said ruefully, “but I was turning men off. And when I got together with my girlfriends--all of whom were pretty, well-educated, successful women--that’s what everyone was interested in: relationships. I don’t think you should live your life to get a man or that your whole world should revolve around him. And I’m not advocating that people behave that way. I’m just saying that’s how people--through my observations-- are .”

Schiff balks at the notion that she has a responsibility to speak to women’s issues: “I don’t like to be told as a woman playwright that everything I write has to be political, has to be about the oppression of women in our society. Can you imagine what the world would be like if all the plays written about women had to show them in an uplifting light? We’d have a bland, uniform world. We’re also talking about an ideal world--not the way it really is.

“As a playwright and person,” she added, “I’m interested in this mess that we have. And I want the right to write about people who have complexes and flaws. Let David Mamet write the plays about hard-edged people. Let other people write political plays. There’s a place in the world for all of that and I think it’s unfair to apply other people’s criteria to my play. I wrote about what was interesting to me without thinking, ‘OK, I’m a minority, so I have to write about something acceptable.’ ”

It’s not the first time Schiff has grappled with this issue. As a former member of the Groundlings, she acknowledges that the local improv group was often criticized for not being political enough.

“People take away from comedy what they want,” she said. “Some of this is what went on with me and my family. You don’t want to talk about something, you make a joke. So comedy can be a distancing mechanism. I think it’ll be good for me as a writer to not go for jokes all the time, see what else is there and if I can deal with it. When I was a little girl, the way I always gauged how I was doing was if I was making people laugh. If they were laughing, I was doing OK.”

Although she considers herself a writer first (she has a degree in history from UCLA), Schiff recalls her performing days with Groundlings with great fondness.

“It was like a shot of adrenaline, a drug for me,” she said. “To be on that stage when you’re having a hot night and you can’t do anything wrong, and you’re standing there knowing you’ve got a killer laugh coming up and they already love you--the feeling is extraordinary. The difference now, being a writer, is that I can come home after the show and sleep. When I was with the Groundlings, doing two shows on Saturday, I’d be bouncing off the walls till 4 in the morning.”

There are other advantages to writing, she added.

“Unlike acting, where you need a space and other actors and a play and an audience and a director, all you need to write is yourself, a pen and paper. Actually, I had thought of being in the play for a while--but the actresses I found were better than I am. The other beautiful thing is, I don’t have to show up at the theater every night. I’d say I’m a performer, you know, a ham. I like to put on the funny wigs and the false eyelashes and play. But I don’t want to do it for a living. I’m a behind-the-scenes person. I want to write, produce my own stuff.”

After 8 years of writing scripts on spec and in development deals that never made it to production, Schiff has begun to see a light at the end of the tunnel. “I always worked and had enough money to live on,” she said, “but it was frustrating not having my stuff made.” Next month, her first TV-movie, “Cinderella Summer,” will air on NBC; her first feature, the Joan Micklin Silver-directed “Loverboy,” is scheduled for release this spring.

“In television and film, the writer is like an inconvenience,” Schiff said wryly. “They need you, but they don’t treat you with respect. In the theater, it’s your baby. They can’t fire you, they can’t replace you, they can’t change a line without consulting you. I’m not a dictator; I love hearing what people have to say. But I’m the one who makes the final decision.”