Women's work

Perishable's annual Playwriting showcase

by Bill Rodriguez

Theresa Rebeck is the perfect person to speak on "Why a Woman's Playwriting Festival?" She has also had success writing for television and film, so when she speaks as a playwright Rebeck does so from a wider perspective than most can.

Which is why Perishable Theatre is having her give a talk on the subject. The keynote address will be on Friday, May 30 at 7 p.m., before the opening stagings of the fifth annual festival. Festival producer Vanessa Gilbert has fielded occasional complaints, mostly from men, she says, that the competition is restricted by gender. Hopefully, some will attend the talk.

This year the evening of three one-acts was drawn from more than 300 submitters, as far away as Nigeria and Korea. The chosen plays are: Self-Obsession in Blue, by Kelleen Conway Greenfield, of Seattle, about two women stranded in the desert; Henry's Holiday, by Julie Lewis, of Utica, which involves a battered wife and her imaginary friend, a man-sized sausage; and Some Asians, by Alice Tuan, of Providence, which examines imperialism's impact on a fictional dynasty, the Bongs.

Cincinnati-raised Rebeck has had a writing career as varied as it's been successful, launched after getting her MFA at Brandeis University in 1986. Her screenplay for Harriet the Spy helped make a beloved children's book classic into a potential screen classic. "Torah! Torah! Torah!," an episode from the third season of NYPD Blue, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Her career as a playwright has been none too shabby either. Last year her A View of the Dome was chosen to open the season at the New York Theatre Workshop. Ten years earlier her first full-length play, Sunday On the Rocks, was picked by the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald as one of the year's 10 best. In the decade between, her plays have been performed from LA to Washington, from Brazil to London, and one of them garnered her the National Theatre Conference Award.

She spoke from her home in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where she lives with her husband and child.

Q: Have you found yourself treated as a female playwright rather than just a playwright?

A: It's hard for me to say, because I just know from the people I've spoken with, in work environments where they've seen producers and other people deal with male playwrights.

The last time I had a play done at New York Theatre Workshop, we did a talk-back with the audience as part of the preview process, to see what the audience is getting. And the literary manager who ran them said that because this was a theater that hadn't done a new play by a woman in like 15 years and she said that this was the first time she'd seen people standing up in the audience and telling me how to rewrite my play. Rather than trying to figure out why the central female character is doing what she's doing, rather than trying to understand those actions as part of the story, their minds went to: she didn't do what she should have done, what she should have done was this. That was how they spoke to me. And that was also something that came up in some of the reviews of my plays. I found myself getting lectured to by the critics in terms of how you should have written the play. Which is apparently a tone they take much more with women than they do with men.

I think that these are things that women deal with in the culture in general.

Q: I would have thought that the enlightened theater milieu would have gotten there a lot earlier than society at large.

A: I would have thought that too. But my experience is that many of these theaters are really more conservative and backward in regards to gender issues than film and television.

We [women] do tell stories from a different cultural perspective than what is generally acknowledged as the mainstream culture. And I think that sometimes our stories are perceived as being less significant because women's lives are perceived as being less significant.

Q: It seems that nothing could be a more male milieu than traditional police procedurals. Were you able to change the exclusively male perspective, producing and writing for NYPD Blue?

A: I wrote an episode -- for which I won a Writers' Guild award -- about gender politics and gender point of view in the squad on a date rape case. It was called "Girl Talk." It was a story in which all the women in the squad believed the woman's side of the story and all the men believed the man's side. The fact is, when those things happen everybody decides that the other gender is being unprofessional and emotional. I also did another story in the same episode about Sipowitz being outranked by an Hispanic woman detective, and he feels that she got her grade promotion because they were promoting minorities. It comes down to a big confrontation between the two of them, where she says, "Every white guy in the department thinks that I got my promotion on my back, but I deserve respect because I'm good at what I do."

Q: There's been a lot of lamenting over young playwrights going into TV and film as soon as they can. Do you see this as a drain on American theater or a boon for writers?

A: I would like to think that's what it could be, a boon. I've always done both. And I have to confess I'm disturbed by the critical assumption that if you work in television that you've sold out. When you come back to theater there's a kind of snobbery too: oh, she went off to television -- she's not a real playwright anymore. I find that difficult.

I have a small child. And if I only worked in the theater I couldn't have children. That's not an artistic decision. I shouldn't be asked to choose between having a child and my commitment to my art.