In a Battle for Female Personhood, These Plays Are on the Front Lines – The New York Times

A tale of domestic horrors and perhaps an egalitarian manifesto, too, by a playwright who got married during previews Hamills Dracula is about the expectation that women will bend themselves to the rigid frame of ladylike behavior, no matter how it deforms them. They mustnt be brainy, lest their menfolk feel slighted; they mustnt be willful; and they surely mustnt let too much of their real personalities show.

When a grieving Seward buries his fiance, Lucy, he says: She will be laid to rest, in peace, as she lived an angel, beyond any reproach!

An angel? her best friend, Mina, erupts. Lucy was vulgar and funny and clever and complicated. She was not some porcelain idol for you to worship! You didnt even know her.

Whats so offensive to Mina is that this intended compliment, calling Lucy an angel, is in fact a denial of her very humanity. Mina herself, in the meantime, is pregnant and thus assumed by those around her to be in a diminished state physically delicate and mentally frail. One outlier: the vampire-hunting physician Van Helsing, a woman who takes no guff from anyone and taps Mina as a kindred spirit.

If Mina suffers from any condition, its being female in a society designed and run by men, for men. She and Van Helsing do fight back, and they notch a win. Which is what makes this fantasy so much fun because in the real world, theater being no exception, men still hold outsize power.

So many plays, including whole acres of Shakespeare, are about struggles for dominance. Grand Horizons and Dracula wage a more elemental battle: to grant women their full personhood not lesser than, but equal to.

You cannot tear down all of the old ways alone, Dracula says menacingly.

Wohl and Hamill are not alone, though. And those old ways are crumbling.

The rest is here:
In a Battle for Female Personhood, These Plays Are on the Front Lines - The New York Times

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero