When Women Write the Script

LAST YEAR WILL GO DOWN in history for many reasons. For women, it was the year we came together from all walks of life, said #MeToo—and were finally acknowledged and believed by many. There was and still is hope that this grassroots call for women’s rights and dignity will flow into all areas of life and become more than a symbolic action.

A glimpse of that future is taking form off-Broadway. This season three woman-written and -directed plays, performed by entirely female casts, opened to critical acclaim. It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence, as New York theater has endured a century of male dominance in all the related professions except costume design and stage management. In 2015, the League of Professional Theatre Women, as part of a project called Women Count, tracked the number of women working in all aspects of theater in 22 off-Broadway theaters from 2010 to 2015. Only 30 percent of plays premiering in these venues were written by women, with 33 percent being directed by women. So these multiple women-driven plays offer hope for gender equity in the theater world.

Redefining beauty

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, by Jocelyn Bioh, is a dizzying romp through nasty coming-of-age teen dramedy that pays homage to Tina Fey’s classic Mean Girls. Taking place in a Ghanaian girl’s boarding school during the 1980s, Bioh’s first full-length play addresses cruel, clique-ish competition among adolescents using the template of the American genre, yet something fresh emerges. The story follows the queen of the school, Paulina (MaameYaa Boafo), as she vies to be named Miss Ghana and participate in the Miss Universe pageant.

While the comedic ending is not significantly surprising, there is a poignant and timely theme that emerges through the exploration of African beauty. Paulina wishes to be white so desperately that she dangerously bleaches her skin. When a fairer-skinned Ghanaian-American girl enrolls in the school, Paulina’s jealousy flares. The pageant recruiter clearly prefers the lighter skin and modern style of the new girl, Ericka (Nabiyah Be), who is eventually chosen to represent the school. Bioh’s thematic exploration of beauty carries through to the end of the play as the girls watch the Miss Universe pageant on television and witness Ericka get passed over in favor of white women. Yet the real beauty in the play is captured in the community of support formed by the young school women, which defies all expectations.

Life as a team sport

Community also emerges at the center of another play, on stage at Lincoln Center. Sarah DeLappe’s first full-length play, The Wolves, is a coming-of-age drama about a girls’ indoor soccer team that presents an excellent ensemble of characters. What DeLappe accomplishes is a fierce symphony of adolescent language that leaves one feeling like a voyeur peeping in from the sidelines. The plot unfolds to reveal a struggle with identity and acceptance, where the girls grapple with loving themselves and one another. While they blend together into a girl-power ensemble, DeLappe does well at giving each character a distinctive tone and rhythm. There’s the team captain who struggles to lead, the party girl who becomes pregnant, and her friend who tries to support her. There’s the bulimic who tries to hide her secret and the girl who feels that she can never say anything right or at the right time. Finally, there’s the newcomer from another country who has only ever played soccer for fun and yet becomes the team’s new star, posing a challenge to the existing power structure. Together they do homework and watch Harry Potter, experience parties and periods, and gossip and tease their way through teenage existence. The triumph of the play is that it becomes an introspective exploration of identity as these “wolves” smell one another out, seek who they truly are as young women, and confront a tragic plot twist. The Wolves reveals that, in the midst of tragedy, we must show up to the game and continue to play, despite the despairing moments we all face.

The nexus of suffering and love

Tragedy lays bare harsh truths of women’s existence in Amy Herzog’s new play, Mary Jane. It tells the electrifying story of a single mother caring for her son, Alex, a child with cerebral palsy and seizures. Mary Jane (Carrie Coon) treads a tattered life, daily fighting a war to keep her son alive. She balances doctor visits with trying to hold down a job, and sleeps on a pull-out couch in a tiny apartment, never knowing when Alex’s next attack will wake her from fitful sleep into full-blown panic. We never meet Alex. In an adept playwriting move reminiscent of the Greeks, Herzog keeps the tragedy in the wings—encountered only as haunting beeps and alarms from machines that support Alex and monitor his condition.

The full effect of the tragedy crashes down on Mary Jane when her son endures a prolonged seizure. There is no safety net, no male breadwinner to come to the rescue, yet she endures, as so many women must do. Mary Jane reflects ethically on the struggle to survive the nightmare maze of U.S. health care. The conflicts in the play exist not between people, but between Mary Jane and the fate she fears for her son and herself. The exhaustion comes through in her language as she moves from conversation to conversation with other female characters: nurses and doctors, other mothers, and a Buddhist chaplain. The latter counsels that her struggles and questions would be there even without the possibility of losing Alex. Mary Jane wonders if her existence has meaning outside of this suffering. In a poetic breath, we are left with her questioning God.

The open-ended nature of these three plays leave us, much like Mary Jane, with more questions than answers. Will things ever change for us? Will we endure this dark existence? Will we find an answer for our suffering? Ultimately, these productions remind us that the questions are far more important than the answers.

In some ways, the plays dwell in what are commonly considered trivialities of female existence—the day-to-day living of making ourselves look good, caring for children, and dodging our way through the cliques and the systems of power that surround us. There are many times when the women feel distant from one another, even though they share in the same moments. Perhaps this distance is felt because female narratives have rarely been heard. We hadn’t been permitted to tell our stories. These plays are changing that. As more voices are brought forth, in the arts and elsewhere, new opportunities will arise for both challenge and solidarity among all types of women.