As a woman entering the professional artistic world with a BA in English, a passion for storytelling, and many insightful, though unpaid, internships under my belt, I can only speak about my experience as a female artist and leader….
- And already I feel the need to preface and justify my thoughts with a disclaimer! Whether this is due to socially imposed gender norms or just a simple acknowledgement of my relative inexperience, being 22 and just at the dawn of my professional life, I’ll leave to readers to decide! - My early acting career consisted of many ingénue roles. These “classic” roles were rewarding experiences and I look back fondly on them; however, they did not train me well in terms of handling more complex characters. I would watch as fellow male student-actors were given complex roles to grapple with, involving rich subtext and revealing monologues, while my own work consisted of reactionary exclamations and less-lengthy lamentations of love gone awry. Again, I was and still am fond of those productions. But, in looking back now with a critical eye, I realize the majority of the female characters I portrayed consisted of female stock types: naïve ingénue; insane, Brontë-esque “woman in the attic”; bitter gossip; promiscuous, young college student; etcetera. Of course, these women were fun to play, but beyond the form and phrasing of the lines, the character work was noticeably shallower than that of my male fellows. With this in mind, I think a difficulty for female actresses, directors, and artists alike is simply finding and drawing out what complexity they can in works that may not afford such depth of female roles at first glance. This isn’t to say all male roles are inherently complex or that there are no “deep” female roles out there – Every year, high school English classes all over the US introduce teenagers to a famously challenging female character: Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll House” (her transition in the final scenes takes a lot of work for the actress to pull off successfully). - My experience is that male actors have more of a variety in character depth at their fingertips compared with what’s available to actresses. This trend, I think, holds true for film and television work as well. Beyond watching what’s on TV or at the movies, one look at movie producer Ross Putman’s Twitter account (@femscriptintros), a feed dedicated to shedding light on the sexist descriptions for female characters, convinces me this tendency carries over into these industries as well. One of the tweets that was particularly gag-inducing to me was: “JANE pours her gorgeous figure into a tight dress, slips into her stiletto-heeled f***-me shoes, and checks herself in the dresser mirror.” I pity the actress forced to squeeze a believable woman out of that. The screenwriter has provided her with fewer character dimensions than a James Bond-intro silhouette. It’s not all bad news, however. In 2015, when “Fun Home” had the First All-Female Writing Team win a Tony, I cheered at their win! I also cheered when I first learned about Vinetta Strombergs’ all-female Shakespeare productions. An actress reciting “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves”? The possibilities and opportunities that can be born out of that were exhilarating. (Ironically, though, Shakespeare typically provides relatively rich female roles due to the conventions of his era, male actors playing women and girls as well as men.) Beyond the frustrating lack of complex female characters (strong or otherwise), it’s difficult to be a female artist, or indeed, a female professional of any kind. Despite the progress made towards gender equality, women are still paid less and required to prove themselves. Researchers at the University of Washington recently examined how male and female students perceive each other and found: "for an outspoken female to be nominated by males at the same level as an outspoken male, her performance would need to be over three-quarters of a GPA point higher than the male’s.” How do we, both men and women, combat these tendencies for women to be underestimated and undervalued, both in character-work and in reality? I don’t know if there’s any clear answer. For me, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron of “Fun Home” summed up a simple fact in their 2015 Tony Award acceptance speech: “For girls, you have to see it to be it”. I think there’s a lot of truth to that in any situation involving identity, be it gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion - representation and opportunity matters. If we can work together to create and take advantage of these for others and ourselves, then young actresses will have more than stock types to sink their creative teeth into and women in the arts will be able to call themselves “artists” rather than “female artists”. This post cites information that can be found by clicking here. Gabrielle Jaques provided the voice of Mrs. Jenkins for The Witches and will be directing one of AfS' upcoming one act plays.
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AuthorBlog posts are written by various members of Artists from Suburbia's productions and staff. Archives
July 2017
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