TRUE BELIEVER Joan Allen and Peter Friedman in the original 1989 Broadway production of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles.” Who knew that Betty Friedan hated the play? Carey Purcell did.
AT THE END OF last year, not long before the pandemic inflicted a serious wound on Broadway, Carey Purcell, a New York-based theater writer, published “From Aphra Behn to Fun Home: A Cultural History of Feminist Theater.” To be honest, I didn’t know if Aphra Behn was a who or a what. Because I know Purcell — we first met at an Off Broadway Sunday matinee and the after-party at Sardi’s — I would not dare review her work. But I can share some of the things I learned from it.
Aphra Behn (1618-80), was one of the earliest acknowledged female playwrights. Her plays, which often satirized marriage, included “The Luckey Chance” and “The Town-Fopp.” Her husband died when she was in her 40s, and she needed money. Male playwrights of the era found her “unwomanly,” Purcell writes.
The subject matter of Lillian Hellman’s play “The Children’s Hour” was considered so shocking that the Pulitzer Prize committee refused even to consider it. The plot: A little girl starts a rumor that two single female teachers are lovers.
Aristophanes (446 B.C. - 386 B.C.) found the idea of women running things inherently comic. In his play “The Assemblywomen,” a group of women take over a city’s government by disguising themselves as men. Then they institute “radical reforms, including communal property and sexual liberation, with the aged and unattractive having first choice of sexual partners.”
Emily Mann’s college adviser told her that women couldn’t work in real professional theater — and advised her to consider a career in children’s theater instead. Nope. In 1990, Mann became the artistic director and resident playwright of the prestigious McCarter Theater Center in Princeton. After 30 years, she retired.
Jesse Green never applied for the job as co-chief theater critic of The New York Times. They just offered it to him. When he wondered aloud why the newspaper wasn’t going for more diversity in its hiring for this spot, he was basically told not to worry about it.
Julie Taymor, the first woman to win the Tony Award for best director of a musical (“The Lion King”), majored in mythology and folklore at Oberlin.
Betty Friedan, the feminist author, hated “The Heidi Chronicles.” That was Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a smart, single art historian who feels abandoned by the women’s movement.
Some loopy critic at The New York Times thought “The Vagina Monologues” was a comedy. Oh, wait, that was me. I just observed that one of the playwright Eve Ensler’s great strengths was her humor.
When Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin in the Sun,” was a little girl, her parents’ dinner guests included the likes of Duke Ellington, Jesse Owens, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois. Her father was an activist.
When “Fun Home” (2015) won the Tony Award for best score, it was the first time two women had won in the category. Lisa Kron wrote the lyrics; Jeanine Tesori wrote the music.