Irish Repertory Theatre

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I Love Performing Those Songs. But What About the Gender Politics?

I Love Performing Those Songs. But What About the Gender Politics?

Originally posted via The New York Times (to view the article with images, click through to the original article)

By MELISSA ERRICO 

“It’s problematic,” my millennial co-star whispered grimly. “The misogyny in this musical.”

“Which moment of misogyny?” I asked cautiously.

We were sitting in the corner of the theater, on the first day of rehearsal for the current revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane’s 1965 musical “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” now playing at the Irish Repertory Theater.

“The misogyny in his immediately deciding he loves her,” my colleague continued, “and then she lets him — that’s where it’s problematic.”

I was beginning work on the part of Daisy Gamble, and the young actress, playing a supporting role, was repulsed at what she saw as the play’s gender stereotyping. Daisy, a forlorn secretary from Queens, comes to understand her “past life” thanks to a hypnotherapist — a male one, of course — who finds inside her another woman from a previous era.

I vibrated to her anxieties. When we had confronted the script at the first read-through, I had been aghast at attitudes that belonged more to the 1860s than the 1960s. At one point, Dr. Bruckner, the hypnotist-psychiatrist has this to say: “What a masterpiece of perversity a woman is. … Oh, God! Why did you not make women first, when you were fresh?”

We all stopped cold. Some of the younger people involved in the production were still shaking their heads a week later.

Of course, I have spent most of my life exploring classic musical theater roles for women, which often turn out to be, when you inspect them, well, problematic and, yes, misogynistic.

I have played Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady,” both in her slipper-fetching mode and once in a production in which she majestically did not.

Just last year, in a production of “Kiss Me, Kate,” I had been turned over the knee of my baritone co-star to receive the famous wallops that the script dictates, becoming in an instant the iconic poster image for the show. Really? I thought, while prone. What will my three preteen daughters in the audience make of this?

Being hypnotized by a white male doctor who manipulates you while you are unconscious and then falls in love with your lost 18th-century self may seem to be a choice exhibit of the unacceptable — right up there with the spirited woman in “Kiss Me, Kate” being spanked for her spiritedness.

But experience tells me that, like controversial but classic parts in the straight theater, the best women’s roles in classic musicals are rich and still worth exploring. They can respond to new kinds of energy informed by our new wisdoms.

Perhaps having once been bent over the baritone’s knee, I can offer a few insights not available to those who haven’t.

It Takes Two to Tussle

Take that scene in “Kiss Me, Kate.” The role is Lilli, a middle-aged actress with a faltering career who reunites with her producer/actor ex-husband to perform in a musical version of “Taming of the Shrew.” T he chemistry in their marriage is instantly revived; the common perception is that both Shakespeare’s Kate and the equally-fiery Lilli are tamed.

Immersed in the part, I came to see the musical as a love song to a woman and her work. Lilli, like most other middle-aged actresses I know, longs to reconnect with her profession. With her former husband, Fred, involved with another woman, she does what all actors do — transfers her fury and fire into performance, speaking her truth through the words of her character.

By her final monologue, she reclaims her power by reclaiming her identity as an artist. (Of the rear-slapping, I will add that these roles are written as two mature performers with an excess of ego and bluster, and Lilli isn’t exactly unafraid to throw things, including chairs and punches. An actress and actor keeping that in mind can play it with consensual relish.)

In beginning to explore Daisy Gamble with my current director, the amazing Charlotte Moore — for three decades the artistic director of the Irish Rep — I sensed that there were ways to play the part far from the passive stereotypes the script suggests. Daisy, neurotic and frustrated and unemployed, goes into therapy with a domineering doctor who hypnotizes her, ostensibly to help her quit smoking.

In therapy, the doctor discovers that without knowing it herself, Daisy had a past life, a complex and interesting existence as Melinda, an 18th-century Englishwoman. Melinda is a self-possessed girl who has been groomed by a warm and smart father to be a writer and an activist, fighting against slavery. Might Daisy’s “past life” be entirely her own knowing invention? Maybe she was making up Melinda, fabulizing to fascinate the doctor, and to claim erotic power for herself.

The problem we found as we considered this more feminist reading was that it was hard to play Daisy as canny when she’s directly described as “a mound of melted marshmallow.” In the first farcical scene, she is hypnotized over and over by accident — and even hypnotizes herself a few times. She also hears phones before they ring and makes flowers instantly grow by talking to them.

It’s also crucial to Act II that Daisy knows almost nothing about Melinda.

I remained confident that there was a real woman in Daisy, if we could find her. Lerner’s musical women, however dated they might seem on the surface, usually offer little parables about living in all our dimensionality.

Looking to Guinevere

On the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, for instance, I once played Guinevere in Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” opposite Jeremy Irons. The problem with Guinevere is that the audience is always ready to turn on her because she is sleeping with Arthur’s knight, Lancelot. She’s an adulteress, and the audience doesn’t like it.

But on inspection, her circumstances aren’t really unsympathetic, and are beautifully delineated in T.H. White’s original book, “The Once and Future King.” Though she is a queen, we learn, she has been compelled to marry a much older, if kindly, man. She’s ultimately torn between courtly idealism with Arthur and another form of idealism, her romantic-erotic relationship with Lancelot. If her early songs are sung in a spirit of innocent high-mindedness, instead of coquetterie, her second act makes sense.

The challenge in putting her onstage today is to make palpable both the purity of Guinevere’s intention and the impossibility of her double love. She’s a woman who made a brave and audacious choice — to love twice, with equal passion — that her time can’t yet support.

A Complicated Eliza

Eliza, the preceding role in the Lerner and Loewe canon, is perhaps more hotly debated than any other right now, thanks to Lincoln Center Theater’s Broadway revival, which opened in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

To play Eliza in our own 1994 production on Broadway, the late director Howard Davies cast me with the understanding that I would be young, but hardly delicate. He wanted to begin the show with Eliza looking very much like a man, dressed from head to toe like Charlie Chaplin. But as she is made to be more ladylike, with a plummy accent and gowns to match, her gender would become a different trap in place of poverty — her makeover leaving her equipped only for the marriage market.

As the show toured on the way to Broadway, however, changes were made to soften the unfamiliarity of this interpretation. And with that went some of the political edge. I returned from a break during the long tour and found the Chaplin costumes were not black anymore. That filthy gray-white shirt was now pink, and my long black coat was now violet, with a purple cap.

The current production, with Lauren Ambrose as Eliza, has her definitively walking out on Henry Higgins in the last scene.

Ours was played in the same spirit, but as a dream sequence. Eliza emerged from behind a giant phrenological head that stood alone on a completely blackened stage. Higgins still said “Where the devil are my slippers?” but Eliza, as I played her, stood there poker-faced. Higgins, reflecting, knew that had lost her, or almost, and by quoting himself, admitted he knew why.

Daisy was tougher to figure out.

As we continued digging into the part over the final weeks, new and more subtle clues to the kind of modern woman she might become emerged. In her first song, “Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here,” Daisy, singing to a flower pot, may seem a little daffy, but the song ends with her singing the lines “Wake up / Bestir yourself / It’s time that you disinter yourself!”

Bestir yourself! There was the woman I was excited to portray.

Not The Victim She Seems

In the second act, Daisy sings “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?,” one of the best torch songs Lane ever wrote. At first glance, it is a victim’s anthem. Daisy even refers to herself that way in the song’s bridge: “I’m just a victim of time / Obsolete in my prime / Out of date and outclassed / By my past.”

It seems to be a song about not being loved for who you are. “What did he like that I lost track of?” the lyrics continue. “What did I do that I don’t do the way I did before?”

And yet Daisy so obviously knows herself right there: baring her emotions directly — guttural, unaffected, heartfelt and earthy. Worried and intimidated, yes, but showing through song that she’s also a woman of jazzy authority and sexual courage.

In the final scene of “On a Clear Day,” the doctor telepathically calls Daisy to him, and she comes back — to tell him the game is fully over. In the script, he’s supposed to convince her that actually he’s missed her, Daisy, more than he misses her alter ego, Melinda, so he unites the two identities.

But, as we moved into previews, I felt that I had cured the passivity in Daisy and allowed her to bring the two women together herself. I didn’t let the doctor unite the women; I even had to get rid of him, for a minute, to let Daisy possess herself as she banishes him from her Manhattan garden.

In a later moment in Act II, I let Daisy sit down, taking a suitcase and making it a throne; indicating just by her posture that she now knows who she is. It’s her first clear day, and she sees — knows — she has to step into her own body, and her present life, before she can step into love.

And literally through her, the doctor also finds the key to his own transformation. Daisy, like Eliza, is the energy that thaws the frozen man. The agent of his change.

I checked in again with my millennial colleague.

“Watching the process has meant that my objections are now … tempered,” she said, temperately. “You and Charlotte have made her less a victim and more a late bloomer. Because you are not … 23 or, say, 24 … one problematic aspect is tempered.”

As a terminal ingénue in her 40s, I felt conflicted being told that I had saved Daisy with my own, well, maturity. But I was glad to hear confirmation that she was becoming not merely a dated role, but a real woman.

Daisy, like all true heroines, comes to own her complexity. As she told her flowers when they were hiding from the sun, the trick is to be seen.

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