This is an 18th century etching of a Jewish ritual bath (mikvah in Yiddish) in Amsterdam.
Observant married women must purify themselves every month in the mikvah
after they menstruate and before they have sex with their husbands.
I haven't been blogging lately, because I'm deep into writing a new play. I'm not a good multi-tasker. I know, I know, I shoulda just SAID I was taking a break from BAUMblog. But of course I THOUGHT I was going to blog AND write MIKVAH. Anyhow, my apologies for being missing in action for so long. Later today, we are having a ZOOM reading of the first draft of MIKVAH, for a few friends. Having a first draft is a very big deal for me.
MIKVAH takes place in the women's ritual bath house in a small Jewish village -- a shtetl -- in Poland in 1905. We're talking FIDDLER ON THE ROOF time and place -- but a very different take.
The story concerns the intense love affair between Chava, the unlettered mikvah attendant and Rachel, a highly educated young woman who has just married an abusive and controlling man.
The theme of MIKVAH is:
WOMEN'S RAGE AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY!
The seed of MIKVAH was actually planted in 1974 at a women's music festival in the Santa Cruz mountains. At the time, I would never have believed it would take 47 years for me to actually get around to finishing a first draft.
THE STORY OF THE CREATION OF MIKVAH:
I moved to Santa Cruz in 1974 to join some college friends to start a new theater. All these college friends happened to be of the male persuasion. I was not yet a lesbian, but it was still a great big drag to be the only woman. The men were perfectly nice. But they found my ideas strange or uninteresting or both.
Carolyn relates what happened next in her Introduction of ONE DYKE'S THEATER, and she does it well. So I'll let her tell it:
- "That summer of 1974, a bunch of us from Isla Vista crowded into my old VW and drove up the California coast to Santa Cruz to visit Terry. We went to The Amazon Music Festival, where there was great music and two hundred women dancing ecstatically, mostly shirtless. This was our first time in a women-only space. We were luxuriating in our new-found feeling of safety and sisterhood under the towering redwoods, when a group of tough-looking men on motorcycles roared up to the gate, hostile and aggressive, shouting, demanding to be let in. A few of us recognized that things could get bad quickly, and tried to reason with the five of them. We were followed by 195 angry women, including Terry, itching for a fight. Our ad hoc negotiating team pointed out to the men that they were outnumbered forty to one, and that even masculine superiority might not save them. Just before the point of conflagration, the bikers turned around, and roared off. That night, Terry told me, when she was part of the legion of women warriors, she had received a vision of a play about women's rage against the men, created by an all-women theater troupe. She was going to move to the Bay Area to realize her vision. This is the mythological, yet true, creation story of Lilith Theater (named for the Bible's first uppity woman)."
So I DID move to Berkeley and I DID start a women's theater collective. But did I create a theatrical attack on the patriarchy? ABSOLUTELY NOT! And why not? Because I discovered that people were really not all that interested in seeing women's rage portrayed. I would say they were intensely interested in NOT seeing women's rage portrayed. In fact, when Lilith Theater tried to talk about men oppressing women, we were perceived as man-hating females who exaggerated how bad men were!
The clearest example, of this universal distaste for women's rage, occurred during the development of Lilith's 1977 play, MOONLIGHTING, about women and work. Strange as it sounds, way back then it was groundbreaking to talk about WOMEN AND WORK! Of course, women WERE WORKING at jobs everywhere! But still, the culture held onto an image that MEN worked JOBS and women just lolled around the house all day cooking, cleaning and taking care of children. That is, they did not go to JOBS and WORK!
So Lilith created a play through improvisation that was inspired by the jobs that the collective members had actually worked.
Carolyn had been a forest fire fighter on a crew in the National Forest a few years before. Her crew was the very first crew in California to have any women on it, and her boss did everything he could to humiliate and intimidate her in front of the other crew members. We created a scene that portrayed what her boss actually did and said, interspersed with Carolyn's fuming fantasies of what she'd like to do to him in return.
But when we showed an early version of the firefighter scene to a small group of friends -- all women and feminists -- their response was: "Why are you making the crew chief so evil? It's not believable and it makes you look like man-haters!"
MAN-HATERS! An identity to be avoided at all costs!
In response to that critique, we toned down the portrayal of the crew chief. The scene no longer accurately reflected Carolyn's experience. BUT we hoped it would be palatable to our supposedly liberated audience. However, audience members -- from straight women to separatist dykes -- STILL took us to task. Why were we going out of our way to make doctrinaire feminist points in the Firefighter scene -- points that had no basis in reality?
So it turned out that, living under patriarchy, feminist women in the Bay Area did not want to hear about the true extent of men's oppression of women. Men's violence had to be muted, normalized.
And while it was rather impolite to portray the extremity of men's oppression of women, it is also true that men oppressing women seems, well, kinda normal. Just think about how frequently women are killed, both in reality and in fiction. Under patriarchy, we've gotten USED to men killing women.
Woody Allen's 1989 movie, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, is about a man who murders his wife, largely because her existence is inconvenient for him. He gets away with it and goes on to live a pleasant life, thank you very much. Nobody was shocked by that! For many fans, this is Allen's greatest film. It was considered a great philosophical statement about the INDIFFERENCE OF THE UNIVERSE. But in fact, it was a statement about the DEPRAVITY OF THE PATRIARCHY. Not only did Woody Allen fail to notice that, nobody else noticed it either! (Well, I did, but I'd been thinking about women's rage against the patriarchy since 1974.)
But, on the other hand, if you want to show a woman killing a man -- oh then, everyone's all concerned. Did she really HAVE to do it? Couldn't she have run away? Did he really treat her THAT badly? Couldn't she have just hurt him without killing him? Was she mentally ill to do that? Why didn't she go to the police and ask for help?
Really, a woman is not entitled to kill a man UNLESS SHE HAS ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER OPTION AVAILABLE. And even then, she's not supposed to do it. And she can NEVER just get away with it, like Allen's creepy hero! The best she can hope for is to pull a Thelma & Louise and drive over a cliff to her death! Yes, when it comes to violence, women are held to a completely different standard than men.
And that is why it has taken me FORTY-SEVEN YEARS to finish a first draft of MIKVAH, a play about women killing oppressive and violent men and getting away with it.
I got started writing MIKVAH several years ago in a playwriting workshop that my good friend, Martha Boesing, was teaching in the Tenderloin. In this rough neighborhood of San Francisco, many of the budding playwrights were living in homeless shelters or seedy hotels. There were some very talented writers in that group. Martha would give us assignments, and we would write in class. I used those assignments to start exploring MIKVAH for the first time.
I know that finally finishing the first draft at this moment has a lot to do with the MeToo Movement. This worldwide uprising of women, who refuse to live any longer for the exclusive benefit of men, has helped me give myself permission to explore this story. And completing a first draft was greatly facilitated by finding a director (a straight married woman at that!) who believes in the play and is pushing me to make it happen.
So in a few hours, MIKVAH will take a step into the world. This reading is for an audience of a few friends. There will be a discussion after, and I'll know more if the world is prepared for this story. And if it is, I'll keep on writing MIKVAH. And if it isn't, I'll keep on writing it anyhow.
All for now, my dear Bloggelinis. I'm pretty excited. I'll tell you how the reading turns out. Terry
