On Women & The 'F'-Word (Feminism) #RaptureBlisterBurn

Recently, Lisa Timmel, the Huntington’s director of new work, exchanged emails with playwright Gina Gionfriddo about her play Rapture, Blister, Burn. Their conversation centered around feminism and the eternal bonds and conflicts of mother/daughter relationships.

LT: When you started writing Rapture, Blister, Burn, were you thinking consciously about feminism today?

GG: Actually, I was fascinated by the way access to pornography has changed in my lifetime. I read a lot of books about the impact of internet pornography, and what I found was there are books that say it’s the end of American civilization, and there are books that say it’s no big deal, and there are books that say nobody knows. So it was a fascinating thing to research, but I didn’t come away with any useful conclusions. I knew I had to start something and I had the germ of a situation: Catherine coming home. I knew that I wanted this stuff to be Catherine’s area so that all that research wouldn’t be in vain. And it sort of spun out from there.

With so much of the culture regarding feminism as undesirable, and even young, independent-minded women saying things like “I’m not a feminist but...,” were you surprised at the positive response the play received critically and/or with audiences?

I was very pleasantly surprised. Every so often we (the theatre community) get together to talk about why more female playwrights aren’t being produced. One reason, I think, is that plays about male protagonists in turmoil about who they are versus who they want to be are regarded as classic coming-of-age tales, whereas the same kind of play about a female protagonist is often seen as a story about a neurotic. So I was very concerned that the women in the play would be written off as neurotics and harpies rather than very normal women asking questions about their lives. I thought women would enjoy the play. Perhaps the biggest surprise was how many male audience members got excited about it. It’s the first of my plays that my brother really got excited about and that just shocked me.

During the play’s premiere last spring, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” was published in The Atlantic and, of course, Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In was recently published. Like all great playwrights, you have your finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Do you have any thoughts on why this conversation is happening now? Does the high-profile nature of the conversation about women and leadership change how you think about the play at all?

I feel terrible that I don’t have an answer for you here! I would love to know why this discussion has moved to the front burner recently. I wonder if Hillary Clinton being a serious contender for the presidency may have nudged the door open some, but I don’t know. And I think, perhaps, that women get gutsier about having these conversations and using the “F word” (feminism) when they feel their rights are really, truly in danger. The only thing I had my finger on the pulse of was my own 40-year-old anxiety about being a childless woman with a very old mom. I was in the process of trying to have a baby, but it wasn’t happening easily, so I think I was just interested in looking at women who did and did not start families. What are the pros and cons of that very major choice?

Many of your plays include wonderful, complicated mother figures, Ashley in After Ashley and Susan in Becky Shaw. In Rapture, the mother-daughter relationship between Cathy and Alice is the central emotional bond. What does the inter-generational conversation give to your plays?

I think, speaking really generally, we grow up determined not to make our parents’ mistakes. We kind of scrutinize their lives and plan accordingly. We plot how we’ll do better and be happier. You see that with the college student in my play, the way she imagines her life will be better than the middle-aged ladies she’s in class with. I think in our teens and our twenties we often feel we know better than our parents and then as we get older... that dynamic shifts some. I think in both Becky Shaw and this play, we see women who tried really hard not to live their mothers’ lives wind up sidling up to them in search of wisdom.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Post-Post-Feminism But Were Afraid To Ask #RaptureBlisterBurn

From Lisa Timmel, Director of New Work

“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”— Dante's Inferno

“I guess the grass is always greener. It’s just . . . It’s what you said, right? It’s that forty-something thing where you start thinking about the life not lived.”— Gwen, Rapture, Blister, Burn

A popular assumption about feminists — not just among certain right-wing personalities — is that they are ugly, sexless, humorless harpies that no man wants (unless women advocate for access to birth control, then they are common sluts). In Rapture, Blister, Burn, Gina Gionfriddo grapples with the realities of women’s lives and pulls off a popular comedy about feminism. Fortune favors the bold and, as noted by Variety, “Gionfriddo’s some kind of genius.”

Originally, Gionfriddo tried to write a play about the possible psychological and sociological effects of internet pornography. As she told Playwrights Horizons’ artistic director Tim Sanford in an interview, “I was a child of the ’70s; when we wanted information about sex, it was extremely hard to get. We would try to steal a Playboy Magazine or find a dirty book in the library. Now it’s just like Sodom and Gomorrah at the click of a mouse. And I am fixated by the idea that there has to be some hideous psychological trickle-down from that.” She sketched out a character, an academic who would lecture on the topic, but lectures, she realized, are lousy theatre. Shifting gears, she developed plot ideas that would allow the character to confront her area of academic expertise in her life. Gionfriddo says, “From there, the play evolved into a story less about porn than the state of male/ female relationships at this particular time in America.”

The protagonist, Catherine, disenchanted with her life as a hotshot public intellectual, latches onto her mother’s recent heart attack as an excuse to return home. Home includes her friends from graduate school, specifically her ex-lover Don who jilted her for Gwen. Gwen, began in the same place as Cathy, but chose another path, dropping out of school to be a stay-at-home-mother. Both women wonder what life would be like on the path not taken.

Life meets theory when Catherine convinces Don to let her teach a summer seminar on her topic: “The Fall of American Civilization.” In an awkward twist, only two students enroll in the class has just two students: Gwen, and her erstwhile twenty-something babysitter, Avery. Cathy’s mother Alice is along for the ride, joining the women at the end of their sessions with martinis and yet another perspective.

A reconsideration of one’s life path at middle age is a near-universal experience, however, for women, the questions are fraught with political and social significance. Writing in The New York Times, Gionfriddo frames it this way: “The dream, then and now, postfeminist and post-postfeminist (or whatever we choose to call this moment) is still simple and still incredibly hard: How do men and women figure out how to negotiate their equality better? As Cathy in Rapture advises a female student in the throes of love and ambition, “My middle-aged observation is that, in a relationship between two equals, you can’t both go first.”

Catherine’s existential crisis prompts her to reflect, “My mother is going to die soon, and I find myself wondering if there isn’t some . . . wisdom in the natural order. In creating a new family to replace the one you lose.” She ultimately gets a chance to create a new family, but not in the way that we expect. Gionfriddo wanted to create a stage picture, “which was something about women without men who are both frightened and excited by what their future holds . . . ” Real feminists, as opposed to popular culture caricatures, never claim to be able to have it all. All human rights movements, fundamentally, are concerned with self-determination, for good or for ill, with the costs of freedom being well worth the price.

Gina Gionfriddo's biting new comedy Rapture, Blister, Burn plays May 24 — June 22, 2013 at the South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. Learn more at huntingtontheatre.org/raptureblisterburn.