Wedging.

 

That's the word that comes to mind, wedging. Wedging in. 

Looking back at my career it's difficult for me not to be angry with myself. That I gave so much away. But, I honestly don't think any part of me would have it any other way. I had gigs. I could land acting jobs and I was writing. I was writing wild things and auditioning with them. Which was a no-no. One monologue I wrote was about a pill that could give women an orgasm. This was in the 80's before men had viagra. I remember the faces of the people I auditioned for. 

Worth it.

I remember being invited to audition for one of the exclusive equity companies after I'd stepped in and taken over a role there. I couldn't stand the environment. It was toxic. Very externalized. Very judgy.

So, I wrote a monologue in the voice of Nicole Brown Simpson begging to be raped and murdered again. Mission accomplished. That company never called me to audition for them again. On the outside this sounds like sabotage. But I was wedging. 

With every solo show, every show I wrote, staged, produced, I was wedging women in. Trying to at least. I produced three summer festivals with no admin support. I always believed in the work more than the paperwork. And they came back to bite me so many times. But that was also a form of wedging.

Once I decided to make Venus Theatre a nonprofit I wrote Daughters of Molly Maguire. It was a suggestion that came out of a symposium at the Women's National Gallery of Art. I went to a panel discussion that featured every female director in DC at the time. This was 1999 and there were five of them. From there I gave a fellow attendee a ride home and she put the idea on me. 

What about the women of the Molly Maguires? And that set me on a decades-long exploration. Every objective angle I executed became personal. It was such an interesting experience. 

It seems that before I could wedge myself into the appropriate social ranking, I first needed to wedge some unknown women from history. It was interesting because there was so little to find about these women. I took to storytelling. Which is really my thing. I used Celtic Archetypes and then spun coal mining stories about them.

The fascinating thing about that is the descendants that attended would whisper things in my ear that confirmed my spin but for the actual historical women. This taught me a lot. It taught me about the power of aural tradition in storytelling. Especially for women. 

I have met so many offspring from the characters I painted. I met one granddaughter of the woman the play featured in an Olive Garden in Tysons Corner and told her about her Grandmother over endless breadsticks. And I met another woman online, now that the internet is a thing. She lives in Ireland and together we pieced together a lot of things that had not made sense before. During the pandemic last year, I thought I would purchase a coal mining house in the area and make it an immersive Air B&B stay with treasure hunt maps taking its guests to all of my research stomping grounds. 

There is a spirituality to the wedging that I do. It slides in the story of women but it does so in a way that hopefully honors them. The big hope is that more women will be inspired to find out what their gender heritage is really all about.

I had to look into it. My bloodline heritage was terrifying for me and I needed role models. I needed to know about strong women. Because looking at my own family, they were few and far between. So, I wedged these characters into my life. It was a way to launch Venus but it was also a way to find my own identity. 

During the Bad Girls festivals over three summers, we featured female spies from the Civil War. This was also fascinating. They were impactful and effective. Largely because they were grossly underestimated. The men did not think they had the mental capacity to do much, and so it was a free for all for these ladies on both sides of the war.

As I learned and explored and built the worlds of historical women, I have also had the huge honor and pleasure of creating fictional characters out of the minds of great playwrights. This is where the wedge was widening more space for more artists to come in and explore this with me. 

The biggest problem I have faced is being treated as an institution instead of a wedge. There seems to be an assumption that women have already found equality in the arts. This is a false assumption. Just look at the massive collection of Suffrage plays. They are still mostly out of print. And, those ladies were organized. Just as the Suffragists had card catalogs of every politician on the Hill, their theatrical counterparts had organized groups with a lot to say. Edwardian comedy is funny stuff. 

Silencing all of those voices is a kind of crime.

There seems to be a presumption that women have yet to really start writing plays. It's just the most ignorant presumption in the world. Women have been writing as long as men have been writing. It took Virginia Woolf purchasing her own used printing press to get anything published. 

And, as we have staged in 731, heaven help the woman who was born without means. We may never know their stories.

And, when I speak of the wedge what I mean is that their stories matter. A LOT! And, I'm going to keep wedging them in because we have yet to live in an age where they were welcomed with opened arms.

Therefore, I have not been welcomed with open arms. In fact, I have been erased. My work has had an erasure rubbed all over it. But, I kept creating. So, this is where things get interesting.

Because if you hold the wedge in long enough, no matter how insignificant it may seem, eventually it will have an impact. 

So now, as I watch both the blame and the erasure come at me again it's all too familiar. Every single time I set my company up to produce what needs to be produced there is usually a man somewhere giving me more and more jobs that I never signed up for. I'm supposed to be flattered by this, I think. Something like, "oh wow! He really believes in me, I'd better not let him down." But the truth is, I keep running the businesses of other people with no acknowledgment or pay. I end up managing all that they have neglected just so that I can keep doing what I'm doing. Usually, it's a minimum of five times as much work as they are doing without the pay. And an expectation that I should say thank you. 

There are two options for me societally. I speak quietly so no matter what the words are no one has to hear them. Or, I speak up loudly so that I will be heard which lands me in labeling prison. That's it.

If I don't have the "nice" reaction scripted in their play of misogyny then I am immediately the bully, the witch, the blame for all that goes wrong. And sometimes women have been the biggest misogynists of all. I could tell many stories.

I've watched women die from the stress of trying to please checked out men. More than once. 

And, I've gotten super depressed about this state of patriarchy. More than once.

But I've also laid into the wedge. And that's what no one seems to know about. 

I have slipped things in every chance I could. 

And now, the timber creaks as the culture shifts.

Exciting and terrifying times.