Though the number has been climbing in recent years, less than a third of plays produced on American stages this season were written by women, according to the annual gender count of American Theatre magazine.
This spring Dallas is defying the statistics with productions of female playwrights by four of the city’s major theater companies.
All but one play puts its characters in distressful and violent situations that reflect the position that women found themselves in historically — as objects, servants or victims of men. In each case, the women find their way out, sometimes by extreme means, and emerge as the heroines of their stories.
But even when they're in peril, there's more to these stories than victimhood. And even their eventual triumphs might not qualify as typical happy endings.
For instance, in Lela & Co, the title character opens her monologue by talking about the important role that women have always played in society, "to sing the songs, the early songs and the late songs, the songs of sleeping and the songs of mourning. That's how it works here, women wake you up and they put you to sleep, they bring you into life and then they ease you into death ... Men handle the bits in between."
Beyond subject matter, the playwrights are experimenting with structure and form. Fur emphasizes poetic language for its bizarre love triangle and Wolf at the Door twists classic fairy tales that have endured because they help us think about the darker ways that human beings relate to one another.
Dallas Theater Center's production of Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves may point toward the future. Unlike the other plays, it's about teens, not grown women — a fierce team of high school soccer players that required the actresses who took the nine roles to undergo physical training. They are only in peril from each other's intensity.
Local theaters are producing these plays because they're interesting, complicated and well told, and rather than taking a polemical political position they leave space for the viewer to draw her or his own conclusions.
If they succeed, it's because the female writers know what it means to be a woman and also have the artistic tools to raise more questions than they answer. Rare is the good play that hits the audience over the head with a morality lesson.
'Wolf': Folk tales
"My protagonists are always women, but when I first started doing it, I did it instinctually," says Marisela Treviño Orta, a native of Lockhart whose allegorical play Wolf at the Door is being mounted by Kitchen Dog Theater. "Actresses said, 'Thank you for writing roles for us.' The roles were interesting. They were the heroines of the story. The fact that I focus on women is in its own way political."
Orta started out as poet but switched to playwriting after she went to work for a Latino social justice theater troupe while studying for a master’s degree at the University of San Francisco.
Her first play, Braided Sorrow, premiered in 2008 and won two major literary prizes. In it, she dealt with the epidemic of hundreds of women and girls murdered in Juarez since the early 1990s through a character who comes to the city to work in a factory.
“It was hard to write about politics in that form,” she says of her poetry. “When I discovered theater, it was easier. I saw issues being handled. If I can get people to care about my characters, they’ll ask, ‘Why is this happening to them?’ I could bring all that I learned as a poet, my personal poetics — lyricism, rhythm, imagery, metaphor — into playwriting.”
Wolf is part of a trilogy of Orta's plays inspired by fairytales and folklore. Set in a hacienda in colonial Mexico, where a pregnant woman lives with her abusive husband, it crosses a Meso-American myth about what happens to our spirits in the afterlife with the dark Brothers Grimm stories about big bad wolves that she grew up with in sanitized Disney versions.
“She starts out very resigned and isolated, far from her family at a time when the idea of divorce wasn’t even a possibility,” Orta says. “That dynamic changes when one new person enters the group. Having this other woman come into the household, the wife begins to stand up to her husband and moves toward regaining her agency.”
"I read it and fell in love with it," says Christopher Carlos, who as co-artistic director of Kitchen Dog chose Wolf for the company's season and is directing it. "It's got that fantasy feel to it."
It’s the second of the play’s four productions across the country during 2018-19, a “rolling world premiere” sponsored by the National New Play Network, which aims to give extended life to new work.
Carlos found Wolf to be timely in the era of #MeToo, record-setting women's marches and renewed feminism. "I don't see it so much as about women in distress but women empowering themselves."
'Fur': Love stories
Twenty years ago, Carlos played the only male character in Kitchen Dog's production of the surreal Fur by another Latina playwright, the Bronx-born "Nuyorican" Migdalia Cruz. Teatro Dallas has brought it back with a new cast under the direction of the company's new artistic director, Sorany Gutiérrez, who relocated here four years ago from her native Colombia.
Fur is the strangest of the four current or upcoming plays written by women and featuring female lead characters. The plot reads like a story out of the tabloids: Citrona, a hairy sideshow attraction, is bought by Michael, a young man with an animal fetish, to be his bride in post-apocalyptic L.A. He keeps her in a cage, where she falls for Nena, the animal trapper he hires to catch and bring her rabbits to eat. Nena, in turn, is in love with Michael.
“It’s a really intense play, and it’s going to be annoying for some people,” Gutiérrez says. “There’s a reality to it that we try to hide sometimes in theater. We want to have beautiful costumes, beautiful ends, everyone’s happy. But I like the idea of giving the audience different feelings. You can laugh but it’s also tragic at the same time. What is love? Sometimes love can be freaky. Each of them has a beast inside of them. But they also have an idea of love that is beautiful for them even if it isn’t for us.”
Full of poetic language, the key to approaching Fur is to not take it at face value. "A cage doesn't have to be a cage," the director says. "It can be a house where a woman does many things for a man, and he has her as his object, not a real human being. Citrona dreams of having a house for two and the real idea of love. It's a story of many women."
'Lela & Co': War stories
Based on a true story and first produced in 2015, Lela & Co by the British playwright Cordelia Lynn is a monologue by a woman who has been through hell in an unidentified war zone. As a teenager, she marries a charming man who sets her up as a prostitute for soldiers fighting in the conflict. One actor portrays five male characters, including Lela's husband, who are constantly interrupting her storytelling.
“What appealed to me is that she talks about truly terrible things, but she does it in a way that’s sharing her story,” says Kara-Lynn Vaeni, who is directing the play for Second Thought Theatre. “She’s not hash-tagging #MeToo, she’s not attacking anybody, she’s not blaming anybody. She’s so brave and entertaining, it allows us to see ourselves in it if we want to. It allows you to engage with it at the level at which you’re ready. It’s not going to shame you or make you feel less than.”
War stories are common but they are not often told by women. "And there are lots of plays about people who are abused, but there's something in the tone of this play that's unique," says Second Thought artistic director Alex Organ, who chose Lela & Co for his company's season. "It has something to do with Lela's attitude. She remains so vibrant and so vigorous during the devastation happening in her life. It becomes a love letter to the tenacity of the human spirit."
Reason for hope
There's also hope in American Theatre magazine's latest figures. While only 30 percent of the plays staged this season were written by women (up from 21 percent in 2015), the number for new plays by female playwrights produced in 2018-19 was 40 percent. Also, 8 of the 11 most-produced plays were written by women while 11 of the 20 most-produced playwrights were female.
Vaeni, who before she moved to Dallas was literary manager of a New York theater company that only puts on plays written by women, cites The Kilroys as a factor. Since 2014, the group of Los Angeles playwrights and producers has compiled a list of recommended plays by women and trans-identified writers that have received no more than one professional production. Since then, 28 of the 47 plays on the initial list have been staged.
"I've been watching the field and I've seen the conversation really shifting," says Wolf at the Door's Orta. "There are very vocal conversations clamoring for more inclusion on stage of lots of different people. I feel fortunate to be coming up in this moment. When I look back at the generation of playwrights who came up before me, my mentors, I know I'm going to get opportunities that they weren't able to access."
Or, as Second Thought's Vaeni notes: “Something I never would have expected when I moved to Texas from New York is that I would be in the midst of a theater season that was really interested in a woman’s experience from different viewpoints, whether a teenage girl or a bearded lady in a cage or a woman hiding from a soldier in a bathtub.”
Manuel Mendoza is a freelance writer and a former staff critic at The Dallas Morning News.
Details
Fur: through March 30 at the Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St. $15-$20. 214-689-6492. teatrodallas.org.
The Wolves: through April 14 at Wyly Studio Theatre, 2400 Flora St. $20-$95. 214-522-8499. dallastheatercenter.org.
Lela & Co: April 3-27 at Bryant Hall, 3400 Blackburn St. $25. secondthoughttheatre.com.
Wolf at the Door: April 11-May 5 at Trinity River Arts Center, 2600 N. Stemmons Freeway, Suite 180. $15-$30. 214-953-1055. kitchendogtheater.org.
