No Actors Need Apply: Feminist Playwright Writes Only About Women

Playwright Patricia Montley, whose feminist play “Dancing the God” recently opened at the Burbage Theatre in West Los Angeles, finds nothing unusual about disowning male characters.

Her last two plays produced here are exclusively female dramas about intimate relationships, and a third one was a feminist satire of Bible stories (“Bible Herstory”) with a woman as God.

“Male playwrights and male roles have always dominated theater,” Montley said. “Shaw wrote tons of plays about feminism with tons of men. I’m a feminist, and I write about women and women’s issues. I want to work with women.”

Montley teaches at a private women’s campus, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she is an associate professor and chairwoman of the theater arts department. She won’t say whether events at Chatham inspired “Dancing the God,” but her teaching background certainly inspired the play, which she sent to Burbage producers Andy Griggs and Ivan Spiegel on a whim. She also flew here to work with director Spiegel on rehearsals.

In the “Rashomon”-like drama, complete with balletic dance sequences, a lawyer returns to her alma mater to investigate the alleged seduction of a student by her dance teacher.

Montley, who makes a point of traveling to theaters around the country to check out productions of her work, also talked to the three actresses (Debbie Devine as the lawyer, Katherine McGregor as the dance teacher and Patricia Ponton as the student who accuses the teacher of molesting her.)

“The play is about the nature of education,” Montley said, “about what happens between a mentor and a student. It’s the story of a four-year relationship, of intimacy. We see the student identify with her teacher and see the girl develop as a person and a dancer.”

“Dancing the God,” which runs at the Burbage through Aug. 19, suggests the dynamics of “Agnes of God” or Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour,” but Montley cringes at those comparisons. “I don’t mind, though, if you want to call it Pirandello-like,” she says with a smile.

The play was a finalist last year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville National One-Act Play Contest.

Another of her plays that captured attention at several play-writing competitions in the 1980s (from Wo/man’s Showcase to the obscure At the Foot of the Mountain Festival) was “Sisters,” staged two years ago at L.A.’s exclusively gay Celebration Theatre. It’s about a nun and ex-nuns denying, hiding or embracing their lesbianism. The play had a number of themes, including the concept of a gay Catholic ministry, but only gay audiences saw it here.

Montley said she wasn’t happy with the production. “When I saw it in rehearsal I wanted to start all over from the beginning.” And surprisingly, in the light of its gay theme, she denied that “Sisters” was about lesbianism.

“I resist that description,” she said. “For one thing, it’s much more easy to mainstream a gay male play than a lesbian play.

“Mainstream theaters don’t want to deal with women, let alone a lesbian play. Even the Women’s Project Theater in New York won’t let you do a lesbian play.”

Montley has been writing plays and teaching theater for 15 years (the last seven at Chatham, whose 500 students attend classes in the old Andrew Mellon estate). And many of her play titles whimsically reveal her feminist ardor: “Alice in Collegeland,” “The Prodigal Daughter,” “Founding Mothers,” for examples. In her Old Testament takeoff, “Bible Herstory,” the women keep bailing the men out of trouble.

A scholar in dramatic literature (she’s an Ibsen expert), she is rankled by the prominence of male characters throughout theater history. “Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw wrote more roles for men than women. At least Aristophanes was on the right track. In ‘Birds,’ the whole chorus was women, and ‘Lysistrata’ is a high point for women in literature.” (Even there, for the record, male players outnumber female characters seven to four.)

Montley also decries the inequity she says persists in the comparatively low ratio of produced female playwrights. “I’m in the Dramatists Guild, and the membership is pretty even between men and women, which means a lot of women are sending out scripts that don’t get produced. The Old-Boy network still dominates.”

Her favorite playwrights are Caryl Churchill, L.A.’s Milcha Sanchez-Scott (“Roosters,” where machismo is knocked off its legs), Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”), and two turn-of-the-century figures who were ground-breakers for women in American dramatic literature: Alice Gerstenberg, credited with writing the first expressionistic play, “Overtones” (1915), and Susan Glaspell, who was a founder of the Provincetown Players and whose play “Trifles” (1916) dramatized the provocations that drove a farm wife to kill her husband.

Montley says one of her favorites is “Quilters,” by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, “because it glorifies the resourcefulness of all pioneer women, who strongly supported one another.” Another favorite is “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” adapted by Jay Presson Allen from the Muriel Spark novel.

Montley is now on a sabbatical to write a play based on the life and work of Rachel Carson, who wrote “Silent Spring.”

“I picked her,” said Montley, “because she was a Chatham college girl--class of ‘29--and she pioneered the environmental movement.”

Montley spent last week soaking up some of Carson’s past by living in Carson’s cottage in South Port, Me. Like the young dance student in “Dancing the God,” Carson was “deeply impressed by a mentor who taught her biology at Chatham,” Montley said. “Carson even switched her major from English to biology because she identified so intensely with the teacher. But Rachel Carson wasn’t well-liked by her fellow students--she was too serious for them, dancing to a God that they didn’t understand.”

“Dancing the God”

Burbage Theater, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles, (213) 478-0897

8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday through Aug. 19

Price: $14, $12 for students and seniors