Читать книгу Beautiful Chaos - Carey Perloff - Страница 9

I was raised by a working mother and a liberated father and was in high school during the height of 1970s feminism, so it had never occurred to me that of all fields least friendly to child rearing, theater had to be at the top of the list. I was running CSC when I got pregnant with Lexie, and I suppose it was the ignorance of youth that prevented my husband, Anthony, and me from making any sensible plans about how we were going to raise this child in the midst of our already crazy lives. Lexie was only ten days old when I started rehearsals for a double bill of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and Mountain Language, with the great man himself in attendance. This project had been in the works for some time; Pinter’s agent, Judy Daish, had been phoning anxiously all summer to ask, “Have you had that child yet?” in her baritone smoke-filled voice, while I reassured her that the impending baby would in no way compromise our upcoming production. When rehearsals commenced, Lexie was hidden in the back dressing room of CSC, sleeping peacefully in her carry cot until feeding time, at which point Jean Stapleton, who was playing Meg, would sidle up to me and whisper, “The princess needs you now,” and I would disappear for a brief spell to feed the baby. I had been told that Pinter was not fond of babies, so I made sure to keep Lexie well out of sight when he was at rehearsal. I thought I was handling the secret well, so it was astonishing when one day, while advising actor Peter Riegert about a particularly wrenching scene between the political prisoner and his mother, Pinter marched backstage, picked up the sleeping baby in her cot, deposited her (still sleeping) on the table in the midst of the rehearsal room, and said to Peter: “This is your baby. You have been needlessly prevented by the regime from ever seeing her. In fact, you will never see her. Never. Now play the scene.” A startled Riegert quickly found the despair Pinter was looking for, and he and Lexie have been good friends ever since. When the Pinter plays opened at CSC in the fall of 1989, Pinter sent his friend Lauren Bacall to give a report of the proceedings, and the only picture I have left of that evening is “You Know How to Whistle” herself cooing at baby Lexie after the show and pronouncing herself delighted by the entire evening.

CSC had a tiny staff and was two blocks away from my apartment, so I could bring my daughter to work if necessary and (to some extent) set my own rules. The managing directors during my tenure at CSC included Ellen Novack and Patricia Taylor, both of whom had children themselves and were deeply supportive of working mothers, so I never felt I had to defend my decision to have a child and remain in the theater. Being a mother at A.C.T. was altogether a different matter. This was an enormous and complicated institution in which women were, as I have said, relatively absent (with the exception of dedicated employees like Dianne Prichard and Maureen McKibben, who mothered the actors and students with unflagging devotion), and staff children were virtually unheard-of. There was no precedent, and no template for how to behave. Meanwhile, Anthony was a full-time law student at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, competing with mostly younger students who certainly had no children. So we just made it up as we went along.

The subsequent eighteen years witnessed an often hilarious and endlessly complicated stream of nannies that became part of the fragile system we jury-rigged to keep our chaotic working and home lives together. Someday perhaps we should write a sitcom about our child-care adventures, which included a fanatic vegan who hid our defrosting hamburger meat under the sink and was consistently late to work because she “didn’t believe in the tyranny of time,” a narcoleptic Turkish woman who spent most of her working day fast asleep on our living room couch, and a wannabe rapper who blared her latest works from her car’s CD player while the children cowered in the backseat with their hands covering their ears. We had a student of Marxism from Berkeley who read Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” while feeding Nick, and a Southern pastry chef who taught Lexie to make perfect pie dough; we had a compulsive shopper who spent her whole salary on new sheets and towels, and a wise older woman who read the children Victorian stories and brought a big dress-up box to work every day. Throughout it all, Anthony and I shared the joys and tribulations of our mad lives with our two intelligent and often amused children, who were articulate enough to report back their child-care misadventures on a daily basis. I’m certain that if I hadn’t had a remarkably patient and intelligent husband who happened to be a superb cook, and children in whom I delighted, I never would have survived the vicissitudes and setbacks of running a theater like A.C.T. There is nothing like a sweet face smiling up at you as you read your bad review in the morning to provide reassurance that you haven’t completely failed in the world.

But in so many ways I knew I could never compete with my male and/or childless colleagues, who could jump on a plane at a moment’s notice to see a show they’d heard about or an actor who was receiving attention halfway across the country; my rehearsals always had to finish in time to relieve the babysitter, and sleep was in short supply. It was also clear to me, from the moment I arrived in San Francisco, that the way I was written about in the press would have been different if I’d been a man. No one could wait to prove that this little girl was ill-equipped for the job. When I look at photographs of myself from that first year, I am astonished at how I dressed, in severely tailored suits that had nothing to do with my personality or my taste. I must have been desperately trying to look like I had a degree of authority that internally I felt I lacked.

So I was grateful for every encounter with, and encouragement from, the women who had come before me: producer Lucille Lortel, who at age eighty (when I met her) had more appetite for theatrical adventure than people a third her age; JoAnne Akalaitis, whose imagination captivated me as soon as I moved to New York and who took me under her wing and supported me early on; Women’s Project Theater founder Julia Miles, who taught me how to develop new plays; founder and director of La MaMa E.T.C. Ellen Stewart, who had a genius for rallying audiences to embrace unusual work; Manhattan Theatre Club’s Lynne Meadow, who urged me to become an artistic director; and Fran Smythe, who chaired the board of CSC and took a huge leap by hiring me as artistic director when I was twenty-seven and knew nothing.

Much has been written about the paucity of female voices in the contemporary theater, and about how rarely stories by and about women dominate. Yet it was only in the process of writing this book that I began to realize how long it actually took me to stop playing at being a man and to acknowledge my own personal point of view on the world and on the work. The juggling act required of female artists in the theater, particularly those in positions of authority, is acute, and our failures are often seen as failures of our entire gender. We have little power to fall back on. One of my first experiences as a young director came back to haunt me: When I returned from England to the United States in 1981, I brought back a pile of plays I wanted to direct, including Steven Berkoff’s classically inspired Greek, which I managed to persuade L.A. Theatre Works to let me stage. When Berkoff himself arrived on the scene two weeks into rehearsal, after I had cast, designed, and prepared the entire production, I was suddenly relegated to driver and junior acting coach, while the great man took over and directed his play. The producer said nothing. I remember Berkoff asking me in extremely patronizing tones whether I would like to warm up the cast before he began work. His behavior was never questioned; I was simply supposed to be a good girl, accept the authority of the great man, and support his wishes. I realized then that I could never take for granted that it would be assumed I knew what I was doing. I would have to prove that, again and again.

In the early days at A.C.T., I was often quizzed about why my choice of repertoire had a “feminist agenda,” when I knew full well that if I did a season of Mamet and Shakespeare no one would ever accuse me of having a male agenda. I watched female students in our school struggle to take center stage, and I thought long and hard about power and how uneasily it is granted to women. I also learned how women personalize failure, and how hard it is for us to be resilient in the face of a doubting culture that rarely believes we have it in us to succeed at the highest levels.

I have given a lot of thought to the live/work conflict of working mothers in the theater, as I try to support my younger female staff members in their efforts to raise children on the schedule and uncertainty of a theatrical life. When I look into their eyes, I remember the incredible exhaustion of trying to get through a day that often begins at dawn with tearful babies and ends at midnight with tearful actors after a rocky tech rehearsal or first preview. So many times during those early years, I felt like a guilty failure for leaving home after dinner to go back to the theater while my toddler son stood on the front porch and howled with his arms stretching out toward my disappearing car (a true drama queen, he!). Many evenings I would call my own mother in tears and worry that my children would begin to think that the nanny was their mother. (“Don’t worry, they’ll figure it out,” she always reassured me.) If I hadn’t had as my own role model a mother who worked throughout my upbringing and managed to be remarkably present and engaged as a mother at the same time, I’m not sure I would have attempted it. I kept her good humor at the back of my mind on the occasions of maternal failure, when in my haste I sent Lexie to the Jewish Community Center preschool with a ham sandwich for lunch (and received a note back in her lunchbox alerting me to my faux pas) or missed her starring role in the Shabbat service while other mothers turned up with homemade challah. (“Just tell them you don’t compete on that level,” my mother was fond of advising me.) Attempts to separate my roles as mother and artistic director were rarely successful and often yielded comic results, as when I went to a photo shoot for Hecuba wearing an expensive borrowed “Grecian” gown and proceeded to lactate all over it because I hadn’t nursed Nick on time. This was the same small boy who had been in utero and ready to emerge while we were casting our epic production of Angels in America; my casting director, Meryl Shaw, famously called me between contractions while I was in labor to make sure that she could issue offers to the actors before I gave birth. So it went. In the days before cell phones it was especially hair-raising; I still remember with horror a board retreat during my first season, in which I was being excoriated for The Duchess of Malfi, when I suddenly realized there was no one to pick up Lexie from child care at six o’clock; unable to reach Anthony, and panicking that my sweet three-year-old daughter would be left wandering on Arguello Street, I interrupted the meeting to find a pay phone and beg my assistant, Larry, to go fetch her, earning the opprobrium of both my board and the JCC for months afterwards. Now that my children have grown up, it is almost impossible for me to figure out how I and they managed to survive those years in one piece, but we did.

Both of my children were weaned on the theater and grew up within its institutional embrace, riding the waves of euphoria and despair with their mother almost instinctively. (I am somewhat ashamed to admit that whenever an obituary was read at our breakfast table, the children would immediately inquire whether that person was a member of A.C.T.’s Prospero Society, the group of donors who commit planned gifts to the theater after their deaths.) I was constantly re­assured by my friend Veronica’s dictum: “Just remember that the days are long, but the years are short.” My own counsel to young women in the field who get discouraged and are tempted to give up is that a career is long and children are young for a very short time. It’s worth sticking it out during those chaotic sleepless few years, because in the long run, if you stay with it, you may have a career that will sustain and nurture you later on.

Interestingly, I never thought about my struggles and compro­mises as “women’s problems”; I always thought they were my problems. I tried not to share these problems with anyone else, as clearly they were mine to solve and they only made me vulnerable to attack. It has only been in recent years that I have begun to pick my head up and realize that the challenges of being a woman in this field are serious and continue unabated. Indeed, few of the women directors I knew and admired in New York in the eighties (particularly those with children) have gone on to run major theaters (which one might have expected to be the trajectory, as it has been with our male colleagues), and I have slowly begun to understand the depth of the gender-disparity issue in the American theater.

Still, when A.C.T. Executive Director Ellen Richard returned from a League of Resident Theatres (LORT) conference in the fall of 2012 and informed me that the percentage of women running LORT theaters had not increased in the past twenty-five years, I was completely taken aback. How could that be? There are huge numbers of women in the lower echelons of the theater—directors, writers, administrators. Why were they not making it to the top? The answer to this question is complex and will require serious study. Indeed, A.C.T. recently entered into a partnership with the Wellesley Centers on Women to undertake comprehensive research on this subject. Clearly there are a number of factors at play: For one thing, as I have already mentioned, having children is extremely challenging when you are living a life in the theater, a problem exacerbated by long hours and low pay. In addition, the two major search firms in charge of hiring artistic and executive directors in the United States are run by middle-aged white men, who perhaps replicate themselves in their search lists. (It astonished me that in June 2014, when the Women’s Project in New York was seeking a new artistic director, its board immediately contacted one of these two men to lead the search, instead of seeking out a female headhunter who might have had a better track record in recruiting female leadership.) Furthermore, I would hazard that boards unwittingly play a role in the paucity of women leaders. This is a difficult thread to tease out, and leads to the larger and often thorny issue of nonprofit governance in the arts. American nonprofit theaters are led by boards of directors who are responsible for their fiscal health; because this is a country with little government subsidy for the arts, a theater rises and falls on the generosity and tenacity of its board. Theater boards tend to be comprised of individuals who have been successful in their communities and have a desire to give back by supporting a civic organization. These are not necessarily individuals with a deep knowledge of theater, yet in addition to fiscal oversight, the primary responsibility of a board of directors is to hire the leadership of the organization.

So by what criteria are those hiring decisions made? The disturbing truism is that men are typically hired on their potential and women on their résumés (a practice thankfully not employed by A.C.T.’s board when hiring me). As long as that is the case, it is no wonder that theater boards hire men far more often than women. No résumé can adequately measure an individual’s ability to engage with a community, appetite for public speaking, imagination and resilience in tough times, or, most important, aesthetic and artistry. So when looking for an artistic director, boards tend to rely on a given director’s track record in the commercial theater, where things like a New York Times review and proximity to celebrity are comfortable metrics. Again and again, interesting women get passed over for artistic director jobs because they have fewer such credits and relationships to their name, yet these are often the artists who would be most adept at charting a long-term relationship with an audience, investing deeply in local artists, and sustaining interesting work over time. Furthermore, it seems to be a commonly held assumption that men are better fundraisers than women. Perhaps this goes back to the days of solicitation on the golf course, but I am here to tell you that being nine months pregnant and walking up a steep San Francisco hill to a fundraiser is also an effective means of encouraging donor participation! In hindsight, I recognize that it wasn’t insignificant that A.C.T.’s early board of trustees included two formidable women leaders, Edith Markson and Joan Sadler, whose torch was carried later by powerful and compassionate women chairs—Toni Rembe, Cheryl Sorokin, Kaatri Grigg, Mary Metz, and Nancy Livingston—and that the search committees that hired both Ellen Richard and me included strong female representation.

When Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, published her best-selling book on women’s leadership, Lean In, I recognized much of the behavior she describes, from anxiety about asking for better compensation to women’s propensity to assume they don’t have a certain skill set if they haven’t demonstrated it before, or to take responsibility for tough times or failure even if the conditions were adverse and the results beyond their control. Perhaps that’s also what makes women good leaders, that sense of commitment to and responsibility for the whole. But it’s also what makes female leadership a complex and often lonely proposition.

Over the years I’ve relished the chance to direct and write plays that have allowed me to wrestle with these contradictions theatrically. One such play was Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which I staged at A.C.T. in 1998 and then took to the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston two years later. A fictional account of the tortured but obsessive relationship between Queen Elizabeth of England and her cousin Mary Stuart of Scotland, the play explores the near impossibility for a woman to achieve political power and romantic or maternal satisfaction simultaneously. While power seems to make men ever more desirable (I have always found it amazing that Henry Kissinger was repeatedly named one of the world’s sexiest men), it tends to make women more vulnerable. Queen Elizabeth (played in my production by Caroline Lagerfelt) is in love with and longs to marry the dashing Earl of Leicester but is forced by political expediency to keep him at bay. Her rival, Mary Queen of Scots (Susan Gibney), on the other hand, forfeits her political power in order to pursue her heart’s desire. It broke my heart, during rehearsals, to watch Caroline learn to mask her desires, fears, and vulnerabilities in service of the power Elizabeth needed to exercise to keep her fractious government from erupting. The actress, let alone the character, acutely experienced the price she was forced to pay: audiences thrilled to the romantic and sexual Mary and were critical of the brilliant but controlling Elizabeth, a situation that mirrors exactly how our society views those female choices today. Elizabeth holds on to her throne and ushers in an unprecedented period of prosperity and stability in England, at the personal price of solitude and childlessness. What a cautionary tale! The choices confronted by those two women onstage were choices I had confronted myself, on a smaller scale, again and again, and I loved that Mary Stuart triggered lively debate in our audience about what happens when personal and professional lines are blurred and a woman is in charge, a theme that reemerged when I directed Racine’s Phèdre and one that I explored much later in my own play Kinship.

But in those early days, I wasn’t always aware that my own struggles would enrich my work; I just felt exhausted by the fight. I had no idea that my introduction to San Francisco would be so fraught and contentious, and I suppose it was lucky that Lexie was only three when I began at A.C.T., so she didn’t have to read the 750 hate letters I received during the course of my first season.