STAGE : Sister Acts : A national women’s theater group, formed to put feminist issues in center stage, finds a second home in Los Angeles

You don’t have to know chapter and verse of author Susan Faludi’s popular book “Backlash” to see that women’s rights are still under siege. But feminism in the arts--where race has become the granting category of choice--isn’t as easy a sell these days.

“It’s so hard in the arts to have women’s voices heard that we need to segregate ourselves for empowerment,” Katie Goodman says. “There needs to be a safe forum. There already is the men’s theater festival. That’s what the whole world is.”

Enter a festival of one’s own. Ambitiously dubbed the National Women’s Theatre Festival, Los Angeles, Goodman’s fledgling organization is about to present eight programs of performance, Friday through Aug. 1, at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. The lineup features an array of soloists and a couple of groups--many of whom are familiar to Los Angeles--representing a variety of ethnicities and experiences.

Selections range from the opening-night performance of Joan Hotchkis’ “Tearsheets,” about the analogy between raising cattle and bringing up women, to Marion Ross’ “A Lovely Light,” about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Other highlights include works by Nobuko Miyamoto, Theresa Chavez, Divianna Ingravallo and a night of comedy with Deb Margolin of New York’s Split Britches, Monica Palacios and others.

While there have been a number of local groups and festivals devoted to women theater artists--from such organizations as Women in Theater, the late Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Women’s Project and Highways with its annual showcase--the Women’s Theatre Festival will present more artists at a major venue than any of the previous efforts.

It’s an idea that has plenty of reason to be, even though the ground swell of popular feminism is long gone. “It’s different working for an organization focusing on women,” explains festival vice president Carin Rosenberg, a college buddy of Goodman’s who spent a year at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater. “Having worked in professional theater, I find it frustrating when a theater loses sight of the great things theater can do. There’s a momentum and a purpose behind our organization: to celebrate women and give them a forum.”

The National Women’s Theatre Festival grew out of the Women’s Theatre Festival at Penn, which began in 1990 and has been an annual event since. Launched by University of Pennsylvania professor and feminist author Lynda Hart as a way to bring professional theater artists from New York and Philadelphia to the campus, the Women’s Theatre Festival originally had what Goodman describes as “a lesbian focus.”

Goodman was involved as an actress in the one student production that first year--Holly Hughes’ play “The Well of Horniness,” with the author playing the role of the narrator. The following year, when Hart became too busy to continue producing the event, Goodman took over.

In February of this year, Goodman presented the third annual Women’s Theatre Festival at Penn, although she’d already begun work on a Los Angeles incarnation of the event. For the past year, Goodman has been living in Los Angeles, commuting between the two cities to oversee the festivals, which now have a broadened focus.

The Eastern festival has primarily drawn its audience from the Penn community and the surrounding area. While Philadelphia critics and theater people are quick to praise its PC agenda, they also criticize the operation, although no one wants to speak out against such a “well-intended” group on the record. Most often, the complaint is a lack of quality control in the curatorial process.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s review of the first two nights of this year’s fest lauded only one of six works presented, stating: “The five other works . . . ranged from inoffensive to inexplicable to downright repulsive.”

The liabilities in L.A. are also tied to the selection of artists. While caliber isn’t so much the question, the emphasis on works that have already been seen here may be problematic, particularly with the ones that have bowed recently.

But there’s no denying that the scope is ambitious. In fact, you have to go back to the heyday of the Woman’s Building--the respected arts organization and feminist mecca founded in the mid-’70s that closed its downtown location in the summer of 1991--to find an array of performance comparable to what the festival will offer. The Woman’s Building was not only one of the centers of the feminist art movement, it played a key role in developing performance art as a medium.

Although Goodman and her associates are new in town and too young to have been part of the Woman’s Building scene (Goodman, president of the festival, is 24 years old), most of the work they’ve chosen to present is artistically descended from that breeding ground. The majority of the entries in the festival fall into the category of performance art rather than traditional theater.

“Women are doing more solo work period,” says Goodman, citing the greater financial resources required to produce traditional theater. “Ninety-five percent of the proposals we got was one-woman stuff. Anyway, they tend to be more feminist than the plays we saw.”

When female artists first adopted performance as their own, it was partly because the form didn’t have the misogynist history associated with theater and the visual arts. It allowed women the freedom to showcase issues of identity and experience in an experimental format.

Since 1980 or so, however, it’s been downhill for women’s art in Los Angeles. Around that time, the Woman’s Building began to experience ideological schisms over separatism--meaning both the exclusion of men by women and the exclusion of heterosexual women by lesbians--and this issue also comes up for the National Women’s Theatre Festival.

The ‘90s group isn’t interested in excluding men, as were some women associated with the Woman’s Building. “We’re not man-haters,” Goodman quips. “There are men (in supporting roles) in the festival and on the staff. One of the best pieces ever written (for the Penn Festival) was by a man. We support male feminist work. It’s just not a lot of it comes our way.”

The argument for separatism--or at least for a festival devoted to women--is that the isolation allows women to define themselves apart from the male-dominated environments of most mainstream theaters. “We need to go through this stage of women figuring out what we need to do,” Goodman says.

A majority-female environment also makes a difference in the artists’ relationship with the administrators. “Women come in and we sit with no desk between us and them and talk about their work,” Goodman says. “They know our orientation is feminist and theirs is feminist. We come on equal footing. They know we’re not going to look at their legs when they walk in the door and they’re not waiting for some obnoxious sexist comment to come out. They don’t have their guard up.”

Whether or not this festival can bring back any of the sheen to L.A.’s image as a center for women artists, it does address a specific need for access to production, especially at a time when the politics of race and class have eclipsed feminism.

In the theater and art worlds, women continue to ride the back of the bus. At the end of the ‘80s, estimates from Theatre Communications Group and other industry sources said that between 90-92% of plays produced by mainstream theaters were written by men, and that data hasn’t changed much. Most playwriting groups are still predominantly male and men continue to dominate the occupations of director and producer.

According to statistics cited by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Feminist Majority, women artists earn only 65 cents to every dollar brought in by their male counterparts. And according to the Council on Foundations, men still make up about two-thirds of the ranks of granting foundation boards.

If all goes well this month, Goodman, who’s her organization’s only paid worker right now, plans to expand the National Women’s Theatre Festival to live up to its name--in such cities as Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco.

While these organizations may share Goodman and mission statements, there are no shared budgets or staffs. “It’s not like a national organization with one staff, just sister organizations in philosophy and mission,” Goodman explains. “I’m overseeing (the Penn organization), telling them how to run a nonprofit.”

Meanwhile, there are a number of kinks to be ironed out of the local festival, which is considerably larger in scope than the Penn version ever has been.

The biggest problem, Goodman says, is that too much of their budget has had to go to renting the UCLA space, something that wasn’t an issue when they had a rent-free hall on a host campus like Penn. Of this year’s $54,000 budget, nearly $12,000--including technical fees--will go toward the venue.

“We had no idea what we were getting into,” Goodman says of the costs. “We originally wanted the festival scattered all over the city where you can draw a more multicultural audience, but we thought it would be a mistake in the first year when we didn’t know L.A. that well.”

Then, too, the festival might have gotten more attention if they’d had a high profile name on the bill. “We can’t afford Karen Finley,” Goodman says, noting that the festival will spend only about $15,000 total for artists’ salaries. “And Holly (Hughes) is so busy she couldn’t do it.”

Yet, not even stumbling blocks such as these seem to be able to dampen the spirits of a group that proclaims it “will change the face of the arts in our nation.” But then, starting a feminist art movement in the backlashed ‘90s requires a certain amount of gusto, rhetorical and otherwise.

If nothing else, you have to believe in the power of theater, even in a city as media-saturated as Los Angeles. “People walk out of these performances angered, exhilarated, confused and questioning,” Goodman says. “They are so glad that they’ve found women’s voices who are saying what they feel about real issues.

“These are real voices, not manipulated to fit into the mainstream like TV and film,” Goodman continues. “We haven’t edited anything out. It’s important for there to be a forum like us that accepts these artists on the basis of integrity, not mass media appeal.”