The curtain rises on eleven women of all shapes and sizes, lined up across the stage, facing the audience. For a minute or two they are silent, allowing the audience to take them in. Finally one of the women speaks. “My name is Dorothy, daughter of Lucille, daughter of Elizabeth, daughter of Mary Rose.” After a pause, the next woman says, “My name is Amy, daughter of Harriet, daughter of Esther, daughter of Rachel, daughter of Millicent.” The women continue down the line, naming their maternal ancestors in a ritual known as The Motherline.
“My name is Marcy, daughter of Rhoda, daughter of Lily, daughter of Bema.” That’s as far back as I can trace my motherline, and while I now know that my great-grandmother’s surname was Rose, I prefer using the name I always knew her by—it came from Rhoda’s early attempts to say Grandma. I am not alone in my attachment to family monikers: “My name is Judith, daughter of Marjory, daughter of Bubbe, daughter of Hildy.”
Sometimes we’d vary the exercise, adding the names of sisters, aunts, even a beloved family “maid” (nannies weren’t integral to our class and generation), but onstage we stuck to the mother/daughter format. The Motherline opened and closed each performance of Daughters, Womanrite’s second full-length play. For the closing ritual we invited women from the audience to participate. They’d crowd onto the stage, eager to pay homage to their female ancestors. Some couldn’t go further back than their grandmothers, or even their mothers—but no matter how far back they traced their motherline, most of the women cried.
I did The Motherline exercise dozens of times, but I only performed it once in public, and then it was to make a statement, not about the women in my family, but about and to the women in the theater group. But that was later, at the end of a long strange trip.
Depending on how much fringe culture you’re aware of, you may have heard of a group called the Women’s Experimental Theater (W.E.T.), who ultimately claimed ownership of and performed the play called Daughters. The three women who formed W.E.T., however, no more own the play than I own the Taj Mahal.
I came to Womanrite via a classified ad in The Village Voice. The group’s philosophy and methods were influenced by a wider movement in experimental theater dating back to the late 50s, in full swing by 1974. It was led by people like Julian Beck and Judith Molina of The Living Theater; at
least one Womanrite member had worked with Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater, an offshoot of the former group. This avant-garde movement injected political, artistic, and social issues into the creation of dramatic productions, and invented radical new forms and techniques, with an emphasis on exploring interior experience. Into this mix Womanrite added a hefty dose of feminist consciousness-raising and principles. Rather than impose a completed script on the actors, we worked on exercises that allowed drama to emerge from our lives and experiences. Each woman’s contribution was rarely replicated exactly, nor did it remain “her” material; it got mixed in with everyone else’s. The result was a rich gumbo of our history as women, intensely personal and profoundly political.
A commitment to the principles of feminism and collectivity meant that every member of the group was considered equal. No woman got higher billing than any other. No member was officially designated the director—instead, we rotated facilitation of workshops among individuals or pairs. Most of all, nobody in a production got star billing, and diva-like behavior was theoretically taboo. At the end of each work session we would gather together in a circle for what we called “The FA,” or Feminist Analysis, a discussion wherein we analyzed the dynamics of whatever went on during the work session from a feminist point of view.
If you’re laughing, or, more appropriately, shuddering, then you’re seeing what we failed to see: that actors need directors, that stardom inevitably comes to some and not to others, and that “The FA” was a recipe for disaster. I dreaded the Feminist Analysis: it made me so damned anxious that half my energy during the workshop was consumed with worry about what I ‘d say later. I worried my remarks wouldn’t be clever enough. I worried about being politically correct. I don’t know if the other women shared my concerns, but I suspect that each person probably had her own issues according to her particular personality and her situation within the group.
Like everyone’s relationship to the group, mine was unique. I was the only mother in a group working on a play about daughterhood. My life experiences were very different from everyone else’s—not that theirs were all alike, but they did share certain commonalities that I did not. Nearly all of them were college graduates who’d done some amount of travelling and had lived as single New Yorkers for a decade or more (we were in our late twenties or early thirties). I’d been married at eighteen and at nineteen was a mother; by the age of twenty-four I was a single mother, and now, four years later, I was a non-custodial parent, living alone for the first time in my life. These differences translated, in my mind, to a position of inferiority. The others, I thought, came from a higher class background, although this was not strictly the case. Class distinction in America is complicated and fuzzy, hard to nail down with precision. My lack of a college education and what I saw as narrower life experience made me less worldly than the other women—or so I thought.
It occurs to me now that a more secure person might have reacted quite differently in my position: I could have easily felt superior for having borne and raised children, for being the only one in the group with an inside track on the mother/daughter divide. I could have been proud of having shouldered so much responsibility while still managing to develop the discipline of daily writing. I might have adopted a reverse snobbishness toward these women, dilettantes who fell apart if the Chinese takeout place delivered chicken moo shu instead of shrimp. Not a one of them could have survived the life I’d been living before my brief respite from motherhood. This kind of attitude, however, would have gone against my entire psychological makeup.
This is the baggage I carried with me into Womanrite. While it made me feel lesser than the other women, it served me well in the creative realm: the work we did was deep and rigorous, at times emotionally exhausting, and my life had put me on intimate terms with heavy emotion. I was also no stranger to hard work.
If the life fed the work, it went the other way as well: sometimes theater work gave me clear, even astonishing, insights. For instance: in an exercise calledTableaus, one woman would set up a scene, directing others to fill specific roles in a silent portrayal of some situation. On one occasion I set up a tableau to represent my mother’s childhood. I seated four women close together on a blanket in an attitude of contentment; these represented my mother’s step-siblings. I placed two other women—representing Rhoda and Janice—a little apart from the others. I then directed someone to play their stepmother, and had her slowly circle the blanket, pausing to pet and hug the four contented children in turn, ignoring the other two, who sat by themselves and watched. When I looked at what I had created, I was floored. I felt—but really felt—Rhoda’s and Janice’s painful childhood, their terrible sense of being less valued in relation to the other children.
As if this wasn’t enough, the scene began to remind me of something even more devastating: as it evolved, Rhoda and Janice changed into Daryl and Stacy, my own children, with the four beloved step-siblings representing their father’s new family—his wife, her daughter, and the two girls they’d had together. The pain I’d felt for Rhoda and Janice was a pinch in the arm compared to the searing blow this new picture delivered. I had set this up, not just in make-believe but in real life. With crystal vision I saw that I had subconsciously foisted my mother’s childhood onto my children. I could barely breathe—I was drowning in a swamp of guilt. Then and there I made my decision, a silent commitment to take my children back as soon as possible. It had been nagging at me for nearly two years, but now it felt like an emergency.
Ironically, to act on this decision I would have to leave Womanrite. By the time I did, events made it a little easier for me to go.
In the fall of 1975, fourteen women began a work-in-progress called The Daughters Project. By the winter of 1977, eleven of us were either gone, broken-hearted, or both. In the thirty years that have since transpired, I have, mysteriously, written not one word about what happened.
What happened : Three of the women in the group, two veterans and one of the newbie’s, secretly took the script-in-progress and had it legally copyrighted in their names. Understand, this was not a script written in the usual fashion. No individual writer had sat down and imagined these lines, invented these scenes. This collage of a script had been messily assembled during group workshops, to be polished and refined later on. It had emerged from every woman’s work—our skits and monologues and songs and poems. It thundered with the blood, rage and tears of each woman who’d contributed to it. These stories came straight from our lives. If the organized material could be said to belong to anyone, it was to all of us who had lived, processed and regurgitated it. For three individuals to claim it as theirs was a crime, legally and ethically. And it came out of nowhere—I for one had no clue or hint that such a plot was being hatched. It was an act of treason.
It was a huge shock, especially to us newer Womanrite members. When we’d first signed on, we knew next to nothing about the complex relationships among the group’s veterans. Occasionally I would sense what seemed to be unrelated issues popping up, or emotions simmering between various people, but for a long time I had no idea what was coming from where. Besides, I was too dazzled to see or care about anyone else’s sexual arrangements. I’d fallen in love, and our relatonship, my first with a woman, was played out against the backdrop of the theater group, with its tacit rule against overt romantic display. Between that and the intensity of the work, I was too overwhelmed to go looking for trouble. During the first few months I lived in a state of elation in which everyone and everything sparkled with hope and beauty. I thought every single one of these women was brilliant, beautiful, and hugely talented. I felt blessed and grateful to them for inviting me into the group.
The fact is, they were brilliant, and I was blessed, and I was right to feel grateful. The work I did with Womanrite was life-changing. Some of our creations fit into a category we called awful/wonderful, a category exemplified by, for instance, Tillie Olsen’s stories, or Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Like any art that delves into darker realms, the results frequently transcended the pain of the raw material.
The Birth Story
Close your eyes.
Spread your legs.
Feel the heat
between your legs.
Imagine yourself
becoming wet
and the muscles
of your legs
and pelvis
pulling back
becoming tighter
as you open.
There is a great pressure
bearing down
bearing down
inside your pelvis.
All your muscles are pulling back.
You are splitting open.
You look down
and see
and feel
a hard
round head
Emerging
Emerging from your body.
Do you wonder why you feel
so connected to your mother?
I’ll never forget watching R. as she stood in front of us, softly presenting these lines. She was a short, squat woman who could have passed for one of the indigenous peoples of the world: a Mexican peasant, a Russian farmwife, a goatherd in the hills of Peru. Everything about her was dark: her psyche; her slow, almost ominous delivery; her pitch black hair, deep brown eyes, ruddy skin, and ample body hair. Although the words she used were profound, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d recited the dictionary: her impact was always intense.
She apparently came up with The Birth Story right there on the spot, inspired by some exercise we’d just done. That’s the way we worked—whoever was facilitating would direct the others in an exercise, usually on some kind of theme, perhaps with a vague goal in mind. The key word is vague: nothing was prescribed, but discovered. After an exercise we’d spend a while just hanging out; eventually someone would jump up, take center stage, and present something that had popped into her head and/or her body—much of the work was purely physical. If her presentation resonated with others, they might join her to riff on the original, or take it to a new place. That’s how The Motherline came into being. The Birth Story went into the script verbatim, with not a single word altered, and in performance it was sung in rounds by the whole group.
In time I became immersed in the process of getting my kids away from their father and the wicked stepmother, and moving them back upstate, to the town where we’d previously lived. This was no quick fix; from decision to execution took a full year, weekly therapy sessions, and a nine-to-five-or-later secretarial job so I could amass enough money to set up house. By the time the Gang of Three revealed their act of treason, I had already distanced myself emotionally, and I didn’t have the bandwidth, energy or desire to attend workshops.
Even if I hadn’t been moving, though, and even if the betrayal hadn’t occurred, there were other reasons for me to leave Womanrite. I saw that I wasn’t going to have much of a role in the production; the (unofficial) director’s lover seemed to get all the best parts, with the rest of us being relegated to playing her supporting cast. Nor did much of my work find its way into the script. At one point I’d been so frustrated by the lack of any mother perspective that I wrote a ten-minute script, a sequence of scenes between a mother and toddler showing the barrage of criticism aimed at mothers in our culture. We played with the script in a couple of workshops, but eventually it vanished from the repertoire.
I was already upstate by the time the other women decided to take the Gang of Three to court. They sent me the papers, and I signed on the dotted line. Lengthy legal documents arrived in the mail, and I did whatever Stephanie told me to—but the truth was, I was too precoccupied readjusting to motherhood to care all that much about Womanrite. I was working yet another secretarial job, shoveling snow from the driveway, carting the kids around to school, music lessons, occupational therapy. Becoming Mommy once more took every ounce of my brain and blood. Compared to what I was going through, the machinations of Womanrite seemed trivial.
Meanwhile, the Gang of Three put together a new theater group and, under a new name, began performing their script around New York. I went once to picket outside the theater, distributing flyers that detailed the history of the script. Stephanie and the others mounted a vigorous campaign, organizing benefits to raise money for our defense. I’ve forgotten how it ended, but many months later–and I cannot tell you how this came about–both plaintiffs and defendants put on a series of performances together.
It was at one of these performances that I did The Motherline in public. At the end of the play, when the cast invited the audience to participate, I got up on stage to join my former colleagues. My kids were in the audience; only they and Stephanie knew what I was about to do. When it was my turn to name my foremothers, I took a deep breath, and, staring at a point somewhere across the room, announced, “My name is Marcy, daughter of Rhoda, sister of Helen…” and I proceeded to name as my sisters each and every woman who had left Womanrite over the years for whatever reason, even those who’d preceded me. Stacy later told me that R’s jaw dropped and her mouth hung open. After the performance, while I stood chatting with someone, S came over, put her hands on her hips and spat out, “That was a really shitty thing you did.” Then she stomped off.
I wonder: Did she honestly believe that what I did was shittier than copyrighting scenes from my life in her name?
Coda: In the process of writing this chapter, I Googled Womanrite Theater Ensemble and found several books on women’s theater that, predictably, quote the Gang of Three as the founders of Womanrite and creators of The Daughters Project. The rest of us—Stephanie and the other founders; newbies and other contributors—have been erased from history. A familiar female story.
