‘Nice Personality’: Liberating Saga of the Happily Unmarried

On Oct. 12, The Los Angeles Times carried a letter to Dr. Joyce Brothers from a college woman who honestly believes she will never marry. She asked, “Bachelors are always thought of in positive terms, but whoever thinks of a happy spinster? Why this negative attitude about single women?”

Her question has even become an election year issue. Dan Quayle has his opinion. Playwright Cathryn Michon has hers.

Susan, the central character in Michon’s “A Nice Personality,” at Hollywood Actors Theatre, lives both in the world of the spinster of yore whom, in Michon’s words, “everyone thought of as crazy,” and that of today’s woman who is unmarried by choice.

“It’s about what it’s like to grow up being the smarter one,” Michon said, “the different one, the less pretty one in a group of friends. It’s about what she thinks is going to be the American Dream, and what she longs for, and how her friends get it, and it isn’t entirely perfect.”

Michon, a graduate of Chicago’s Second City, founded the On The Edge Theatre Company in the Windy City. She has been on the writing staffs of “China Beach” and “Sisters,” and is in her second year of writing “Designing Women.”

In defining the leading character in “A Nice Personality,” she explains: “That’s where the title comes from. She’s told early on, in a rather devastating fashion, that since she’s not ever going to be very pretty, she’d better get a nice personality.”

Eric Vennerbeck, Michon’s husband and director of the play, gets a big laugh from Michon and actress Ellen Ratner, who plays Susan. “If you say someone has a nice personality,” he quips, “that means they’re a dog.”

The play is a little bit about what Michon calls the Beauty Myth. “It’s sort of become an interesting topic lately,” she said. “Looks, and how we think about looks, affect just about everything in our lives as women. More than it does for men.”

It made her think a lot about beauty and how that defines a woman, and what that means. In Susan’s case, it means that she devotes herself to her first love, art, and ignores her friends’ queries about when she’s going to get married and have a baby. The outside world’s recognition of Susan’s art contrasts with the small-town pressures that surround her.

Vennerbeck, who is remembered for his direction of the award-winning “Road to Nirvana” and “archie and mehitabel” at the Odyssey Theatre, agrees that most people think beauty is important, but says it’s not the major thing.

He continues: “I know a lot of women my age, in their 30s, who have either done careers, or just not done what our parents did, which is get married at 20 and have kids. Then they get to the point in time where they have to start making that choice.”

“Alone is more accepted now than it was during my mother’s time,” Ratner said. “Now that is a choice a woman can come to. If a woman hasn’t met a man who’s going to fit her, who loves her and she loves, maybe she’s going to be alone. Years ago woman thought they couldn’t be alone, be a spinster, and the terrible things that accompany that, work in a library, no life, no fun.”

Ratner, who has appeared in “Kvetch” at the Odyssey, and played the same theater for three years in “Personality,” a one-woman show she wrote with Gina Wendkos, also had a recurring role on Fox’s “Stand By Your Man.”

“The choices women have made,” Ratner said, “getting married later, having a child much later, are choices that have come out of her spirit, that were there in the woman of the ‘50s, and maybe the woman of the ‘60s, but what did you do? If you asserted yourself and your views then, you were a weirdo. Cathryn and I are lucky enough, being in our 30s, to have grown up in the ‘60s. I wanted to fall in love and marry. I wanted to have the dream-book marriage. Now I don’t picture that in my life. It was like a passage through life, like maybe I missed that. And maybe not.”

Vennerbeck reflects: “There’s a lot less stigma for women doing it now--going out and having a career, and staying single for a lot longer. The problem is that it’s not so much the perception of other people, but the perception of women for themselves, when they get to be 35, and think, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not married yet.’ Society said go ahead, do your thing.

“But then 15 years later, let’s face it, a lot of guys are still jerks. They want a 25-year-old girl, here’s a 35-year-old woman, and nobody wants her. It’s not as bad as they gave the impression of it being 10 years ago, that if you’re 35 and you want to get married, you have about as much chance of getting hit by a meteor.”

Michon admits, “If you have any respect for traditional values, you’re kind of judged by them if you don’t live by them. But why should there be one definition? Women are made to feel guilty. If you stay home, you don’t do anything for a living. If you work, you’re abandoning your kids. If you don’t have kids, you’re a cold career bitch. You cannot win.”

“A Nice Personality” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, continuing until Nov. 29, at Hollywood Actors Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. $15; (213) 466-1767.