Gender Politics
'A Feminine Ending' and other works ponder women's roles
By Don Shirley
Presidential politics enters unexpected arenas these days. After I watched Sarah Treem’s lively A Feminine Ending, at South Coast Repertory, the younger Hillary Clinton came to mind.
Not that the play’s Amanda (Brooke Bloom) is an aspiring lawyer in the 1970s. At 25, in the present day, Amanda wants to be a composer, having already reached the limits of her oboe talents.
In grad school, she’s attracted to a classmate. Jack (Peter Katona) isn’t a classical musician – he’s preparing for what everyone assumes will be a red-hot career as a dreamy Justin Timberlake type. Why he would do this in grad school is never explained. But the physical attraction between the two students is palpable, so suspend disbelief and accept that Amanda and Jack are soon lovers – and then become engaged.
Amanda begins writing advertising music to support the two of them, letting her serious compositions slide. While she’s visiting her parents (Amy Aquino and Alan Blumenfeld), who disapprove of Jack, she unexpectedly encounters her first flame (Jedadiah Schultz), a mail carrier. And she’s dragged into her mother’s creeping regrets about her own choices when she was Amanda’s age.
Meanwhile, Jack’s career advances with the help of an offstage manager named – Hillary, who is determined to turn Jack into a star, even at the cost of his relationship with Amanda.
I have no idea if Treem’s decision to call this calculating manager Hillary has anything to do with the famous Hillary. But as I watched Amanda’s anxiety over marrying a future celebrity and how that might sap her own accomplishments (amid maternal predictions that Jack would eventually leave her for other women), guess who came to mind.
The current candidate, you’ll recall, initially kept the name Hillary Rodham after her marriage – until Arkansas politics intervened, and she became Hillary Clinton in deference to her stellar husband. Now, despite her obvious skills, her status as a feminist trailblazer is somewhat tarnished by the fact that she let Bill take his turn first. Her candidacy is also at odds with those who are simply tired of letting two dynasties dominate presidential politics. Could she possibly have succeeded just as well as a Rodham, without Bill?
Anyway, Treem writes remarkably engaging dialogue and direct-address monologues. Her comedy is witty and provocative without becoming windy or pretentious. Timothy Douglas’s staging is perfectly in tune with the script, with especially notable contributions by composer Vincent Olivieri (whose gender might nevertheless raise Amanda’s eyebrows – couldn’t she at least write the music for her own play?).
Because of Treem’s script, I started thinking about some of the other young women’s roles in plays I saw last weekend. In Alexander Carver’s Naked Yoga, at Unknown Theater, set right now in L.A., gender roles flip to the extent that a 23-year-old woman completely dominates her 28-year-old would-be boyfriend. The chances that these two would consider marriage are slim.
Harrison, Texas is a wonderful trilogy of Horton Foote one-acts, magnificently directed by Scott Paulin at the Lost Studio. In the first, The Midnight Caller, Foote paints a melancholy group portrait of single women in a small-town boardinghouse in 1949. These women won’t escape except through marriage. That they might compose music or run for president would sound like life on another planet. The lighter Blind Date depicts an ornery teenaged girl, in 1933 Texas, resisting her aunt’s efforts to tame her. (It’s followed by a grimmer but woman-less glimpse at class divisions, The One-Armed Man.)
Although Foote’s young women are constricted, the tension in their inchoate longings is intense. If only a time machine could let them glimpse the young Amandas and middle-aged Hillarys of 2008 … .
A Feminine Ending, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa,
(714) 708-5555. Info: Scr.org.
Harrison, Texas, Lost Studio,
130 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (800) 595-4849.
Info: Harrisontexas.org.
For more on Naked Yoga and other shows, see Stage listings.
Published: 01/18/2008
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