Talking Truth About Semiliberated Women : Tales of the ‘80s send a message that has some feminists yelling, ‘Retrogression!’

Liz: “I hate this place. There must be 50 guys lined up at the bar just leering.”

Kathleen: “I know . . . . Isn’t it wonderful?”

--”Ladies’ Room”

Perhaps the tacky decor is the first clue to the temper of the piece. Gloria Steinem wouldn’t be caught dead in the Green Enchilada Bar and Restaurant, let alone in its ladies’ room ( not the women’s room, you’ll notice).

If walls could speak, what tales those ladies’ room walls would tell. But walls don’t, playwrights do, and we, the audience, are the only ones whose ears are blistered by the goings-on in Robin Schiff’s “Ladies’ Room.” This is a rowdy tale of derring-do in a female inner sanctum in the basement of a business high-rise during that euphemism known as Happy Hour.

For some reason, few pieces of theater have so irked feminists as this Schiff comedy, playing to packed houses at the Tiffany since September. To a lesser degree, so have A.M. Collins’ “Angry Housewives” (recently closed at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble) and, for still more recondite reasons, the Gina Wendkos-Ellen Ratner “Personality,” now in its second year at the Odyssey--and counting. Writer Jan Breslauer of the L.A. Weekly, confessing that her “leftie-feminist upbringing” had not prepared her for “these dark days,” took the plays to task not for what they are but for what they aren’t.

Then along comes the film “Working Girl” (written by a playwright--and a male, Kevin Wade) and here we go again, with a clamor of “retrogressions” spicing up the old feminist stew.

Somebody give me a break.

What’s the fuss about? Plays and films that, like it or not, tell it as it is instead of as it ought to be? The last time I looked, that’s what screenwriters and playwrights were expected to do. Nothing was mentioned about how salutary that truth ought to be.

Schiff’s comedy is everything its attackers call it. Vulgar, sad (the women who run in and out of this toilet are all obsessed with men--having one, getting one, making it with one) and nasty (the office queen of trash, Kathleen, doesn’t see that her self-destructive vengefulness not only compromises her and her friends but does damage all around).

A liberated play? Not by conventional definition. But, as written by Schiff, it is a scathingly truthful if somewhat overcooked one about today’s late-blooming baby boomers who have suddenly wakened to the sound of their biological alarm clocks and are rushing headlong into having babies before the final, fatal stopping of the bell.

That’s the reality, as uncomfortable as it may be for radical feminists, let alone “leftie-feminists.” And it is the one thing that Schiff’s astute ear for the sounds of retrogressing feminism has picked up and faithfully set down in a biting, clever, raunchy and even wistful piece of work. Her women may be bimbos, but they’re neither wimps nor Phyllis Schlafly throwbacks. They’re women struggling to survive--and they manage to rally ‘round each other long enough at the end to send the male junior executive who’s been playing them all for suckers packing.

What they demonstrate, in their short, unhappy lives, is how easy it is to become trapped in a semiliberated world still dominated by males and made more confusing by the array of options it presents. It doesn’t mean anyone wants to go back to arranged marriages and walking 10 paces behind the donkey-riding male of the household. It does mean that it’s a mine field out there and that it takes some complex navigating to come out of it relatively unscathed. What’s a woman to do?

A.M. Collins’ “Housewives” are also in various stages of entrapment (economic, marital, societal) and also struggling to survive. Feminism is not what this play’s about. Get angry at it, if you must, for its terminal puerility, for its poor taste or its loudness, because, despite the shrillness of the platform from which these “Housewives” plead their case (the original production at Seattle’s Pioneer Square was even more hyperkinetic and raucous than the one at the Odyssey), getting mad at them for their lack of feminist values is like berating starving Ethiopians for having no table manners.

It’s simply not the point. Any more than it’s the point of “Personality.” The genius of “Personality” lies in capturing the pathos of a self-effacing daughter who has to carry a pushy, crushing elephant mother on her back. We’ve all met this mother. We recognize her. That Wendkos and Ratner can make us laugh at this situation is to their credit. This daughter is not unrelated to Wendy Wasserstein’s heroine in “Isn’t It Romantic,” who can never seem to be able to please her well-meaning but intrusive parents, let alone please herself. She, like the daughter Ratner so skillfully presents in “Personality,” merely feels stranded in a world that everyone tells her should by rights be her oyster.

Oh, yeah? In some ways, plays such as “Ladies’ Room,” “Personality,” “Isn’t It Romantic” are what you might call Gap Plays--plays designed to fill in the blanks between what is expected of women in the ‘80s and what they really face: Problems--the choice to work as hard as men for lesser wages, the choice to be locked into jobs still perceived as women’s jobs and the choice to be passed over and over in favor of a man. Which brings us down to the much-debated ethics of “Working Girl.”

The main complaints about this Mike Nichols movie are that (a) the heroine’s goal is too materialistic, (b) that she ends up resorting to subterfuge to get what she wants, (c) that what she wants is no better than what the men want (that is a put-down of the men) and (d) that the true feminist in the picture, Katharine, played by Sigourney Weaver, is depicted as a self-centered, self-serving barracuda.

Granted, the Weaver role is woefully underwritten, lopsided and far too negative. But Melanie Griffith’s young secretary, who is trying very hard to pull herself from one class of worker into another, is dealing with an unacknowledged but absolutely real corporate barrier. That she resorts to plucky subterfuge to achieve her goal is to her credit. Her plot has more chance of failing than of succeeding, so her life is on the line, and that she happens to become romantically entangled with the guy who’s going to help her make it work is simply the stuff of commercial screenplaymongering.

Bear these things in mind: Writer Wade and director Nichols never made a wrong turn in terms of the character’s personal integrity. She’s the one who is repeatedly double-crossed by co-workers; by a boyfriend who treats her as a sex object, and, perhaps most lethally, by a female boss who sees her as both a potential threat and a generic inferior.

In that position, you do whatever you have to do to get to wherever you’d rather be. In this case, it’s making mergers on Wall Street instead of typing letters for someone else’s mergers. This is not a put-down of secretaries (a patently absurd notion) but simply the statement of a person who feels she’s cut out to do something else.

So, yes, you take chances (what can you lose?) and you use subterfuge--if you’ve got the goods and the guts. But never once does Griffith betray herself. And if any scene is telling of the confusion women feel in Yuppiedom, it’s the scene at the bar where she won’t let the guy buy her a drink. It wouldn’t be corporately or feministically correct to let him do so. When she discovers that it’s an open bar, and that nobody pays, she finds it necessary to explain that were this not an open bar, she would be paying for the drink.

That’s what a short way you’ve come, baby. And that’s the way it really is. In the ‘70s, feminists were so anxious to make desperately needed points--such as equal pay and equal rights and a woman’s right to have an abortion--that they deliberately and, at their peril, ignored the rest of the biology. Now feminism is in a difficult new transitional period. It’s doing some catching up. And the plays we’re seeing, at least the honest ones, are reflecting the mixed messages of feminism in trouble.

The theater was never a pulpit, and the last time I looked there was a difference between true and false and between tacky-on-purpose (as in “Ladies’ Room” and “Angry Housewives”) and just plain tacky. Such as “Sugar Babies.”

Speaking of which, where were all the latter-day self-anointed superfeminist intellectuals and their indignation when “Sugar Babies” blew through town some 10 years ago? In swaddling clothes? Asleep at the wheel? Now there was a show that in its grotesque resurrection of burlesque set not only feminism but theater as a whole back a few hundred years.

At least Robin Schiff, Gina Wendkos, A.M. Collins, Wendy Wasserstein and Kevin Wade are tuned in to their times, illustrating what has come to pass or perhaps not pass, but sticking pretty rigorously to the truth of circumstances as they see them. And while blanket statements cannot cover all of their shows, each in its way has pursued its own truth. They report on what they see and hear, showing us, at the very least, resourceful women, often women in pain, coping with society not as they wish it were, but as it is.