Feminist Follies

I Read About My Death In Vogue Magazine

written and directed by Lydia Sargent

at the Newbury Street Theater

IF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT COULD muster the kind of certainty of purpose and unity of action displayed by the seven actresses who parade through Lydia Sargent's sharp-toothed comedy revue, there would be no need for a dramatization of the troubled past and uncertain future of feminism. But as the players constantly remind is in I Read About My Death In Vogue Magazine, the movement has not been so lucky.

Instead, feminism has suffered a variety of injuries, some self-inflicted, some sustained in assualts from without. The result has been a movement which has never quite been able to set its own terms. Of late, those terms have required the movement to buck a favorite conclusion in some quarters of the popular media--namely that feminism, having attained its goals, is dead, or quite nearly so. As Sargent and her team point out, the reports of that death are greatly exaggerated.

But I Read About My Death is much more than proof that feminism is alive and well and living at the Newbury Street Theater. It is also a gritty, razor-sharp cultural critique which blends satire, sight gags and profanity to create a history of the last three and a half decades of the feminist movement in America.

The characters are named not as individuals, but as archetypes, each representing a different figure in the movement. There's the "Woman who writes plays," portrayed by playwright Sargent, who says she's writing the play even as it unfolds before us. She is joined by six other women representing a range of experiences: the single mother, the women's studies teacher, the anarchist, the anti-imperialist, the nun and the activist.

Together they skewer just about everyone and everything in sight, first by mocking the 1950s feminine ideal of the "pretty little thing," then by carrying the motif through the next three decades. The 50s woman parades before the audience in fashion-induced euphoria, troubled only by the urgent need to find a husband. But the 60s woman is not so superfluous: she's the "active pretty little thing," equipped with a "pretty little scarf" to keep out tear gas. The 70s bring the "independent pretty little thing," liberated to the point that she can say "fuck you" over and over with only the slightest provocation. Finally, we arrive at the woman of the 80s who, among other things, "dares to bust union drives without losing her femininity." Each decade's woman drives home the message that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Between these parades of caricatures, the players recount the ups and downs, but mostly downs, of the feminist movement. The cause is alternately vulnerable to infighting, anti-feminist women firmly entrenched sex roles, and a society which for the most part refuses to yield.

As each sketch, joke, song and story is delivered, the play tilts from funny to bitingly sarcastic. A playful bit targetting female images in popular media, from those of Father Knows Best to Charlie's Angels to Tootsie, comes only after a caustic routine in which cast members playing male children are told that because they have a penis, they can grow up to be anything they want, while the girls are told that because they don't have a penis, they cannot.

It's the wide range of postures which lifts I Read About My Death in Vogue Magazine above the diatribe while still allowing it to respect the complexity and seriousness of the the issues it takes up. Were it not for the frequent injection of humor, one might even say silliness, the play would enter that danger zone where the only receptive audience is the one already converted.

As it is, the play nearly crosses the line. Nonfeminist women are depicted as vacuous trifles and virtually every man is an evil, swaggering oppressor--"Let's go back to my place and struggle over sexism" leers one of the predatory "male feminists," who sees the movement as a potentially fruitful pick-up ground. The issue of abortion is resolved neatly with one utterance from a player.

But it's unfair to demand fairness from this kind of play, and any injustices done by the characters is minor compared to those suffered by them. The play's raucous tone often leaves us free to choose what to take seriously and what to read as self-parody anyway. This self-protective stance allows the playwright and her company to plead "just kidding" to any protestation, but it also drives home the absurdity of rigid sex roles and sexism.

The run of I Read About My Death In Vogue Magazine has been extended several times since the play premiered in 1985, and the theater now says the show will play "indefinitely." No matter how long the company can keep performing, it probably won't be long enough to render the show obsolete. As Sargent's character, the one writing the play as it unfolds, confesses toward the end: "I just wanted to change the entire cultural system." With such a mighty goal as this, the play will have to run a long time indeed.