Imagine someone offered you the main role in a 5 minute-play about a failed reconciliation between lovers. You would have to perform the same scene a hundred times over with a hundred different partners who are previously unknown to you, uninterruptedly across 24 hours. Would you take on that role? What if I told you you have to touch these strangers, dance with them, or that you will be exposed to their evaluation that is theirs’ to chose – from debasement to affirmation? Would it matter for your decision that in the end you remain on the stage, telling them to leave, but they have the choice to deliver one final emotional blow?

Does it matter if you are a woman or a man, or gender neutral, if you are reading this? Does your age matter? Would your answer differ along these parameters for taking on the role?

I was going to introduce some women across this week who made me think about courage or other desirable attributes, whose work is astounding or admirable, or both. And, as is so often the case with this blog, that plain intention soon morphed into something somewhat unanticipated.

I had read about the endurance performance of Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s The Second Woman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month with Alia Shawkat in the main role. Why would you expose yourself to such physical duress, I wondered? (For some actresses teetering on high heels for 12 hours let to such swollen feet that they could no longer kick of their shoes, as the play required.)

Why allow yourself to be touched and manipulated and psychologically potentially hurt by strangers? (The men all volunteers without acting training, having just memorized the few lines they could chose from.) Why sit in a stiflingly decorated little box with gauze surrounding you, the audience watching you like peeping Toms on video screens as if you were in one of those German and Dutch brothels where pedestrian can amble along street rows of lit windows displaying the workers? Why endure the fact that you are stuck for 24 hours wile the audience is allowed to come and go as they please? Why could I not see myself as a spectator to all this if you promised me a reward to last me a life time? Much less as the actress?

The (longer) answer to why the actress did it can be found here. The short version:

What lives inside all of us, but definitely inside of me, is genderless, shameless, doesn’t feel guilty about her body, about her sex, doesn’t feel incompetent, doesn’t feel like she has to perform — just gets to play, just gets to have fun. Gets to connect no matter what anyone has that they’re willing to offer. And if they don’t offer anything, I get to turn off the music, so it’s time for them to leave.

Empowerment, in other words, in contrast to my own assessment of dire objectification. Off I went on a hunt for interviews with other actresses who performed in this play that has been around for 4 years or so, and traveled across the world, using local factory workers in Taiwan as the 100 strangers, or neighborhood folks in Australia, or now the open call in Brooklyn. I could not find a single additional interview.

I did find, however, a great number of reviews, all really passionate, all focussed on gender relations, male power, subjugation, show-casing of hierarchy and misogyny and the mesmerizing lure of watching these ever unfolding same scenarios for a potential path-breaking difference.

Reviews all written by women. Some representative samples can be found here, here and here.

And then there was the single review by a man that I came across, and believe me I searched. His assessment? Maybe the play was designed as an experiment to test our patience. Maybe it wanted to test how strongly we desire not to be stuck in ever repeating roles and expose how we are forever auditioning in relationships. His view of the men – and I quote: “the men so much passing flotsam, a few amusingly embarrassed, others eager to impress, still others too stiff to make an impression.”

One Woman, 100 Men, and 100 Arguments

I cannot, of course, do a fair comparison of one against many, with this outlier not picking up on the preoccupations offered by everyone else I read. Maybe it was just this single male’s idiosyncratic take. But maybe not.

In the end, it made me think less about the actress’s feat and her motivation and more about how we might be influenced by what we are reading about art depending on the interaction with the gender of the reviewer. It is not about the quality of the review per se, but about shared – or distinct – preoccupations and concerns that feed our receptivity. Then again, that is not necessarily always tied to gender – best example: I am still reeling, writing this on a Sunday morning, from being disgusted about a review by Rachel Cusk in the NYT about women artist’s ability to be just an artist.

Oh well. we won’t solve this this week or the next. But we will search this week for interesting women and what they pull off!

Music today is a most orthodox opera performance (of the war between the sexes) off-setting the unorthodox theatre I introduced. Fritz Busch conducts in a 1935 (!) recording performance of Cosi fan Tutte at the Glyndebourne Theatre. A blissful entry into the week!

Photographs are of old, dying ferns taken last week. Connection? Funny you ask. The stage set for the The Second Woman” is in reference to a 1977 John Cassavetes movie “Opening Night” which is about an aging actress facing her decline. I can empathize with wrinkly skin akin to wrinkly ferns…. but in all honesty I just wanted to show the ferns for their fall beauty!