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The Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective was a group of professional women playwrights in New York active from 1971 to 1975. They wrote and produced feminist plays and were one of the first feminist theatre groups in the United States to do so. The members' individual works had been produced at the Public Theater, La Mama, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, Café Cino, Circle Repertory Company, Mark Taper Forum, Lincoln Center, and New York Theater Ensemble.
Contents
History
The playwrights' group was one of the first feminist theatre groups in the country. Original members included Helen Duberstein, Helene Dworzan, Patricia Horan, Gwen Gunn, Christina Maile, Sally Ordway, Dolores Deane Walker, and Susan Yankowitz. Megan Terry and Dacia Maraini were among the guest playwrights.
Feminist issues
The plays of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective featured such women's issues as religious patriarchy, work-place discrimination, dominance/submission relationships, historical figures, masquerade, and sexual harassment.
Subsequent to their first production, RAPE-IN, the plays transcended the limiting context of agit-prop theatre by discarding the revenge themes current in much feminist writing at the time, and instead strove to accurately reflect the complexity of women’s lives and celebrate their accomplishments.
The company was especially noteworthy for writing about women's issues with lacerating humor in often absurdist situations. Christopher Olsen in his book, Off Off Broadway 1968 -1970 The Second Wave (2011), noted the playwrights’ abilities to balance a serious social message about the marginalization of women with a sense of humor and a commitment to good writing. Linda Killian, in analyzing the group’s first production, RAPE-IN, wrote that they “used humor, anger, and horror, sometimes in combination, sometimes alone.
Kevin Sanders, in his 1973 WABC Eyewitness News review of WICKED WOMEN stated: “Their two earlier highly successful shows, RAPE-IN and UP!–AN UPPITY REVUE! were sharp, perceptive and fiercely satirical representations of a contemporary feminist viewpoint – a tradition maintained in this new show [Wicked Women]." Gloria Rojas of WNEW-TV Midday Live, New York agreed: “Wicked Women is outrageous, funny and, to me, a little shocking.”
The group’s productions were widely and positively reviewed, and, with its theatrical emphasis, it became one of the first feminist theater groups reviewed in the New York Times on an ongoing basis. Howard Thompson in his NY Times review called the Collective's productions, "witty and original.". Mel Gussow said that the Collective's productions work both as "a course in consciousness raising and a call to arms." Debbie Wasserman in her Show Business review of The Wicked Women Revue noted, “It is certainly a pleasure to see a crusading group which doesn’t use its crusade as an excuse for bad theatre, but rather uses good theatre to assist its crusade.”
Job opportunities
Because it was specifically a women's playwrights’ and producing group, the Collective hired professional actors, and group members did not perform.
While the Collective used both male and female actors - unusual for feminist stage productions in the 1970s – the company offered serious employment opportunities for women stage managers, directors, producers, and lighting designers. Many women currently working in theatre credit the Collective for giving them their first real job experience in theater. All productions featured original songs composed and performed by women musicians. The playwrights strongly believed in collective creation among women and operated a separate theater workshop to explore new works.
Other work
Not limited to theater productions, the playwrights group branched out to produce poetry readings, and film screenings. As a preamble to the opening of JUMPIN’ SALTY - a show about historic women in Greenwich Village – they organized a march through downtown Manhattan complete with speakers at numerous historic sites. These included the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Margaret Sanger’s office, and Henrietta Rodman's Feminist Alliance office at McDougal St., the former Café Society location at Sheridan Square where Lena Horne sang, Bessie Hillman's Women's Trade Union League, and a location of Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad. In 1974-75, the Collective sponsored a nationwide playwriting contest for women playwrights. The prize was a theatrical production in New York City.
As the work of the group grew, so did its administrative needs. At any one time, the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective was filled with women dedicated to good writing who were concerned with women's issues. These included Margaret Croyden, author; Alice Denham, author; Elizabeth Fisher, author and founder of Aphra Feminist Literary Journal; Ellen Frankfort, author and journalist; Carol Greitzer, New York City Councilwoman; Florynce Kennedy, women’s rights activist and civil rights lawyer; Eleanor Perry, screenwriter; Muriel Rukeyser, poet; Alix Kates Shulman, author; Anita Steckel, artist; Tania, artist; and Gloria Steinem, author and founder of Ms. Magazine.
In May, 1974, the Collective hired Nancy Rhodes as Administrative Director. Subsequently she founded the Encompass New Opera Theatre and has continued for the past thirty years as Artistic Director of that opera company.
The Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, was partially funded as a not-for-profit theater company by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
The name of the group is derived from Westbeth Artists Housing – an affordable housing complex for artists in New York City, where most of the playwrights lived and worked, and which made accessible to the Collective free rehearsal space, and sometimes, production space.
Rape-In, the playwrights’ first show, began as a workshop project at the suggestion of a male playwright in a then-mixed Westbeth playwrights' group. But it was the women who wrote on the theme, and when they did, they discovered they were all feminists.
Productions and events
The Collective also presented the work of other feminists:
Disbanding
After five years of theatre productions, the Westbeth Playwrights Collective disbanded, each member to pursue individual careers - some as playwrights, poets, television and nonfiction writers. Others, perhaps encouraged by the avenues of opportunity they had striven to open, became bishops, attorneys, landscape architects, publishers, printmakers, and videographers.
Recently a group of Collective playwrights and directors met in an hour-long videotaped interview to recall the above events.