The Feminist Spectator

Picnic

The Feminist Spectator — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 03:55:05 +0000

Watching this William Inge play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, through the lens of 21st century America offers some interesting frisson between past and present. All the sexual repressions of the 1950s radiate palpably from the stage, but the overlay of a 2013 sensibility lets you see how gender performances [...]

Bethany

The Feminist Spectator — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:28:02 +0000

Laura Marks’ incisive new play, given a lovely, spare production by the Women’s Project, in residence at City Center, considers the stakes in a faltering economy for those middle-class workers who never imagined they’d somehow lose everything. Set in 2009, in the darkest days of the recent recession, Bethany tracks the [...]

On Women Directors . . .

The Feminist Spectator — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:23:03 +0000

The status of women directors has received relatively less airtime and press space compared to the perennial woe expressed over the paucity of women playwrights represented on Broadway (or Off, for that matter) and in regional theatre seasons.

Patrick Healy’s recent New York Times article, “Staging a Sisterhood” (2/3/11 issue, [...]

Zero Dark Thirty

The Feminist Spectator — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:52:04 +0000

Although I hadn’t yet seen it when the Oscar nominations were recently announced, I was already miffed that Kathryn Bigelow wasn’t among those listed as Best Director contenders for her movie about the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Here was the first woman director ever to win the award, in 2010, for The Hurt Locker, [...]

The Great God Pan

The Feminist Spectator — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:53:37 +0000

In another excellent Playwrights Horizons production, director Carolyn Cantor and playwright Amy Herzog create a beautiful mood piece about memory from Herzog’s latest play, The Great God Pan. Though essentially a small domestic drama, Cantor and Herzog and an accomplished cast collaborate to make each intimate moment of emotional and historical ambiguity resonate with questions [...]

Les Miz

The Feminist Spectator — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 04:44:47 +0000

I’m not a Les Miz person. That is, I don’t know all the words to the show; I can’t keep the characters straight; and I didn’t see the Broadway production until well into its run, when the actors seemed tired and the audience was mostly comprised of people who didn’t speak English. I wasn’t, in [...]

Silver Linings Playbook

The Feminist Spectator — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 20:11:22 +0000

There suddenly seem to be a number of recent films that boast a revised view of white male masculinity, from Your Sister’s Sister to Jeff, Who Lives at Home, to Liberal Arts. I’m not referring to the awkward, insistently not queer stylings of the modern bromance, a category that seems formed to skirt the issues [...]

Any Day Now

The Feminist Spectator — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 08:54:47 +0000

I came out as a lesbian in Boston in 1977, into a subculture of women’s bars, women’s music, women’s theatre, and feminist newspapers and political activism. To my relief, I became part of a thoughtful, creative community that formed itself against the era’s dominant culture, which mostly sneered with dismissive antipathy at lesbians and gay [...]

Hello I Must Be Going

The Feminist Spectator — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 21:32:23 +0000

In this sweet, small indie, Melanie Lynskey plays Amy, a heart-sick, recently divorced woman who moves from New York back into her parents’ house in Westport, Connecticut, because she can’t fathom where else to go. She spends three months without leaving the (lavish, waterfront) property, wearing the same frayed shorts and faded red t-shirt, her [...]

Nashville

The Feminist Spectator — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:47:20 +0000

During a fall semester so busy that I haven’t been able to blog for almost eight weeks, one of my guilty television pleasures has been watching Nashville (ABC), which is now on hiatus until January 9. How could I resist a series starring Connie Britton, much beloved from five seasons on