Culture Junkie: On playwriting, lousy roles for women, and fixing a big mistake

Last week I attended the rehearsal of a new play, one that will have its world premiere this weekend at Left Edge Theatre in Santa Rosa, in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. It’s called “Drumming with Anubis,” a supernatural comedy about masculinity, heavy metal music, camping, the lies men tell themselves, fear of aging and death and, um, Egyptian mythology. Directed by David Yen, it features a cast of six veteran Sonoma County actors.

I was at the rehearsal last Thursday because I happen to be the playwright.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is how Sonoma County actor Ivy Rose Miller came to be in the cast of “Drumming with Anubis.” Specifically, why there is a part for a young female performer at all in a play initially conceived as the story of a male-bonding encounter group in the desert, a story with absolutely no female characters in it. That was my original plan. Until, that is, I happened to have a casual conversation with Miller in the lobby at Main Stage West Theater in Sebastopol, and - after experiencing one of those stunning, lightning bolt moments of inspiration – suddenly realized my original plan was wrong. Not only was I writing a potentially sub-par play. I was missing an opportunity to make a small but positive contribution to an art form I care about, one that is currently in the middle of a seismic cultural shift.

But first, let me back up.

In 2016, an actor/playwright named Erin Pike performed a bit of theatrical/political performance art at Seattle’s Gay City Calamus Auditorium. The piece, created by playwright Courtney Meaker (“Chaos Theory”), was titled “That’swhatshesaid,” a one-woman-show in which Pike performed a collage of scripted lines and stage directions representing every role written for a female actor in the 11 most produced plays in America during the 2014-2015 season, as determined by American Theatre Magazine. Out of 78 total roles, roughly half were for women. Fair enough, right? But since only two of those eleven plays were written by women, it means that men wrote 28 of those female roles. Again, fair enough … maybe. After all, if those plays were good enough to be among the 11 most produced plays in America, then the writing of those female roles must be pretty good, right?

What was so revolutionary and eye-opening about “That’swhatshesaid” – and what drew national attention and quite a bit of conversation – was not so much the number of roles for women in those 11 plays. It was the conspicuously clumsy, misogynistic and laughably stereotypical ways that the women in those 11 plays were presented. Not just in the lines they were asked to speak, but also in the (often outrageous) stage directions they were asked to interpret and perform. If they were asked to perform, that is. At least one of those plays had no roles for women whatsoever.

In Meaker’s script, a sole performer (Pike) puts herself through a physical and emotional obstacle course, alternatively shrieking, scolding, apologizing, cooing, seducing, viciously mothering, running around in high heel shoes, demonstrating a low I.Q., using a high I.Q. to verbally castrate males, acting dangerously deranged or adorably deranged (a whole lot of deranged), often while being very, very sexy. What made “That’swhatshesaid” so amazing to experience, or even just to read, was how one woman playing all of that on stage, as convincingly as possible, makes for both a bravura, tour de force performance and a shocking excoriation of how badly men often write women. For what it’s worth, the few breaks that Pike got were when a stage manager would flip through the many pages of those plays where no women made an appearance.

I had only recently read about this production when, back in 2016, I started chatting with Miller after a show. I asked her about what shows she was working on. She mentioned a few projects she was considering, and then said something interesting.

“Most of the plays I’m offered roles in are just the same kind of poorly written woman over and over,” told me. “Usually they are minor roles, girlfriends or wives or assistants or whatever. And even when they are not minor, they are still often supporting roles. They almost never have a real emotional arc of their own, beyond supporting the emotional arc of the men in the play. At the same time, there are a lot of great roles for men, just not so many for women - if there are parts for them at all. That’s why I’ve decided to only read scripts by women playwrights. It’s a lot less frustrating.”

Then she asked what I was working on.

At the time, I had just accepted a commission to write a play for the San Francisco Olympians Festival, which had accepted my pitch for a play about the Egyptian god Anubis, the lord of mummification and death. The Olympians is a playwriting festival, in which a different pantheon of gods is offered each year, and playwrights compete to be involved by choosing a god from the list and submitting a rough outline of the play they would write if accepted. My pitch involved a grizzled group of middle-aged guys on an annual drumming circle trip in the desert.

As imagined, it’s a Men’s Movement kind of group founded by a recently deceased heavy metal drummer with a thing for Egyptian myths, especially Anubis, who shows up as the newest member of the group, unbeknownst to the others, who’ve no idea they are banging on drums beside an actual death god.

Anyway, as Miller was speaking with me, I recalled what I’d recently read about “That’swhatshesaid,” and immediately recognized that while I had every right as an artist to tell any story I wanted, “Drumming with Anubis” was exactly the kind of play that would end up being paged through without a word in a show like Meaker’s.

My internal voice defended myself, of course, stating, “But it’s a play about a male bonding group. How could I possibly include a part for a female actor?”

And before the thought was finished in my head, I suddenly saw how I could, in fact, include a female character in my story. And as that role sprung into existence in my mind, I not only realized that I could write her, I saw that I should write her. Because that character – the newly dead rock star’s recent wife, who I’d named Nicki Tree before I even ended my conversation with Miller – would completely shift the dynamics of my story and make it something very different, something even better.

It’s not like I’ve never written parts for women before. My previous play, “Mary Shelley’s Body,” was a one-woman-show about the creator of “Frankenstein,” and another, “Pinky,” gave as many lines to the sole female character as to the sole male character. But still, I recognized that in writing a play about men that entirely shut out women as characters, I was not just making an artistic choice.

I was making a mistake. I was becoming part of the very problem – certain men’s lack of awareness about their impact on the world and their own lives – that I was writing the play to address.

By the time I got back home to Petaluma, I’d “written” Nicki’s opening lines and established her full arc, and even figured out her final few lines and actions. And I knew, with a fair amount of “how’d-that-happen?” excitement, that Nicki Tree – who initially appears to be just another supporting player to a bunch of guys, but very much isn’t – had turned my little supernatural comedy about men into a far more powerful, funnier and richer story. For what it’s worth, San Francisco actor Marisa Darabi, who initially read the part of Nicki in the SF Olympians reading of “Anubis” in 2016, was similarly instrumental in my shaping of the character. As was, to a large degree, Meaker and Pike and the lingering lessons of “That’swhatshesaid.” Clearly, we are at a major cultural shifting point right now, with important conversations taking place that will alter the direction of the art we all - women, men, non-binary, all of us – choose to make. ?It’s easy, as artists and humans, to defend our position when it’s challenged, and just stay where we have been. That’s a natural enough response. But it’s better to accept responsibility and move ahead, taking chances, trying something new, and making better art as a result.

Three years after the post-play conversation that led to the creation of Nicki Tree, it’s a pretty nice ending to the arc of that story that Miller herself is playing the role in the play’s world premiere, beginning this weekend.

And for what it’s worth, the new play I’m currently writing has parts for two women and two men. It’s about robots.

By the way, the Olympians has just announced that in lieu of another list of gods, its 2020 festival will be stories adapted from fairy tales. I’ve already thought up my pitch. Though I’m not ready to reveal which fairytale I hope to adapt, I can say that the play will feature six major roles, all of equal weight and importance - all of them women.

I can’t wait to meet them.

(Culture Junkie runs every other week in the Argus-Courier. Contact David at david.templeton@arguscourier.com)