Plays at Taper Represent Two Steps Backward for Female Playwrights

The Mark Taper Forum seems to be having a festival of female playwrights at the moment, first with “Tongue of a Bird” by Ellen McLaughlin and now with Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive.” The former was

done in England, among other places, and was written by, directed by and featured women. The latter, also by and about women, came to Los Angeles after a successful run in New York and a Pulitzer Prize. I looked forward to both of them, assuming that, given their credentials, I would be experiencing groundbreaking theater.

The L.A. Times critics seem to feel that the praise these plays have garnered is merited

(“Navigating a Tricky Road,” by Michael Phillips, Feb. 26, and “A Soaring Adventure,” by Don Shirley, Jan. 15). I, however, was disappointed in both of them and felt that they are a step backward for female playwrights. There is a small, parochial quality about both plays, and I left the theater feeling that I had heard these stories, told in just these ways, too many times before.

The main female characters in both plays are sufferers with little substance to them. There is nothing that makes them unique apart from the wrongs that were done to them. The airplane pilot in “Tongue of a Bird” is crippled by her past, and we watch the girl in “How I Learned to Drive” become crippled by the past that we are eavesdropping on. There is a whining, defeated, psychobabble quality to both plays, and the voices we hear are the pathetic little girl squeaks of wounded inner children.

The subject of “How I Learned to Drive,” sexual abuse of children, is of momentous import, but the way it is dealt with is close to the vest and out of a textbook. There is so much to explore on the subject. What does it mean that some huge percentage of females reports having experienced sexual abuse at some time in their lives? If it’s true, what is it about our society that leads large numbers of grown men to prey upon little girls? If it isn’t true, why are women saying it? What is it that is askew in the culture?

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Aren’t there some terrific plays in those questions? But “How I Learned to Drive” tells us nothing but that the woman “retreated above the neck” as a result of her experience.

“Tongue of a Bird,” similarly, is about a woman attempting to “find” herself after having been emotionally deprived in childhood. Phooey!

Both plays are distinctly “feminine” in the worst sense of the word because I cannot imagine a man writing them, not just because males are less often sexually abused but because males are less likely to write about their wounds in this insular manner. They have been socialized to think of themselves as citizens of the world with collective interests and, in the past, women have not. I had thought that that had changed, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at these plays.

One’s inner life can, of course, be a rich subject for drama, but in these particular works, the search employs only popular wisdom. Where are the full, rich, complicated women? The best plays about females were, I am afraid, written by men--Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. The women in many of Williams’ plays and in Albee’s “Three Tall Women” are gloriously flawed, guilty of all sorts of sins. McLaughlin’s and Vogel’s women do not sin; they are sinned against.

True self-examination would find the sins. And why do the women in these new plays react with only internal turmoil? Don’t some women react to abuse with outrage? And if they don’t, shouldn’t they? I would like to see plays in which women are not lonely, dysfunctional “cases” but citizens with a history and conflicts, like me and every woman I know.

These theatrical portraits of females are not only not groundbreaking, they deny the leaps forward that women have taken. In the real world, most women have stopped defining themselves by their maladies because they have better things to do. I doubt that Madeleine Albright spends a lot of time picking at the scabs of her psychic wounds. She’s too busy helping to control the destiny of the world.

Victoria E. Thompson is a writer, actor and editor. She lives in Sherman Oaks.