E Is for Empathy, F Is for Fingersmith

Augusto Boal, in his Theatre of the Oppressed, takes a cynical view of dramaturgy that excites empathy. He describes that the dominate powers in a given society use empathetic theater as a means to normalize systems that reinforce their control. Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, as adapted for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Alexa Junge, demonstrates how empathetic theater can be used to assert the rights of an oppressed group in the face of belligerent social systems.

Fingersmith's impact centers on the work of Waters, Junge, Sara Bruner (who plays Sue Trinder) and Erica Sullivan (who plays Maud Lilly). Waters and Junge craft a suspenseful love journey between Sue and Maud, and Bruner and Sullivan deliver grounded performances that inspire empathy in the travails of the protagonists.

The first act is told through the point of view of Sue, a "fingersmith," or jill-of-all-crimes in Victorian England. She's hired on to a con by the Gentleman (Elijah Alexander) to defraud Maud Lilly. The Gentleman is paying court to the heiress whose inheritance is in trust until she marries. Sue is to hire on as Maud's servant to support the Gentleman's suit. Once the pair are married, they plan to dump Maud into a mad house. Her inheritance will go to the Gentleman, and he and Sue will split the take. As the women spend more and more time with each other, however, they develop a friendship that blossoms into an illicit love affair. After a cliff-hanger chapter-end at the end of Act I, Maud takes over as the point of view character. Act II likewise ends in a cliff-hanger, whetting appetites for the climactic Act III.

It's hard not to draw parallels between the drowningly homophobic milieu that Waters writes in Fingersmith with Indiana and Arkansas' attention-grabbing attempts at passing discriminatory anti-gay laws, and Oklahoma's acquiescence to gay-conversion therapy. When gay kids are being driven onto the streets by parents who are too caught up in their own prejudices to love their offspring, when American Protestant morality equates itself with discrimination on the basis of sexuality, we need stories that normalize homosexual love. Fingersmith, at least with Bruner and Sullivan in the protagonic roles, takes the audience on a journey on which we root for Sue and Maud to overcome the homophobic road-blocks thrown in their path by Waters' Victorian England. Whether or not we in the audience are lesbians, we can empathize with this love story. Since non-heterosexuals are gleefully and anachronistically oppressed in the U.S., empathy plays the opposite role in Fingersmith of how Boal describes it. Instead of normalizing systems of oppression, this dramaturgy in Fingersmith normalizes equality.

Fingersmith uses classic empathetic dramaturgy to assert the rights of our homosexual citizens. Since some of our other, more Victorian, citizens, are currently in the process of trying to take homosexual rights away, Waters' story is especially timely.

Action or Ennui?

Ron Menzel

We live in a world rife with inequality and oppression. Loraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, currently playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, asks us, will you take action and die for the uncertainty of an egalitarian future in which you would have no part, or will you take no action and survive with the certainty of oppression?

A realist mid-century American play, Sign brings us a group of marginalized individuals asking that question. Not one of them finds a satisfactory answer. Therein lies the plays strength: Hansberry asks the question, and, while she may tend towards taking action, she doesn't presume to answer for us.

The story takes place in 1964 Greenwich Village, and revolves around Jewish Sidney (Ron Menzel) and his mixed-race Cherokee wife Iris (Sofie Jean Gomez). Sidney is a leftist agitator who surrounds himself with a cast of like-minds, all in a friendly competition to out-proletariat each other. There's Alton Scales (Armando McClain), a proud black man who is constantly mistook for a white man, due to his mixed-race ancestry. There's Wally O'Hara (Danforth Comins), the political candidate whose sign is in Sidney Brustein's window. And there's David Ragin (Benjamin Pelteson), the gay playwright upstairs. Iris is a showgirl, generally considered within the cast of characters as talentless. Nevertheless, she has dreams of making it big on Broadway. Her sisters, the anti-Semitic Mavis (Erica Sullivan), who is caught in an unfaithful and stable marriage; and high-end call girl Gloria (Vivia Font), who is addicted to pills, round out the cast.

The first act is filled with dramatic dialogue, fraught with characters' objectives and conflicts. Its function is to allow us to get to know these people, and serves as the foundation and context for the second act. It's in the second act that the characters offer their answers to the question of action versus ennui. It's monologue-heavy, with most of the characters laying out their case to Sidney, who is struggling to answer the question himself.

"Monologue-heavy" may sound like code for "pedantic, declamatory and boring," but, in this case, it's not. The monologues are dramatic in that they represent a struggle to between action and ennui. And, in the context of the Freedom Rides and the threat of violent death posed by a monolithic conservative resistance to egalitarian agitators, it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you do, you could be brutally killed. And your death may not matter. There's no way to know that things will change. But if you don't, you'll live, but live oppressed. You will never be able to realize everything you want out of life, but at least you'll still have life.

Loraine Hansberry took action. A black gay woman, she certainly did not fit the description of those who held the key to the kingdom, the white straight men. But she was a playwright - she spoke out. She could very well have taken the pedantic, declamatory, boring route. But she didn't. She wrote complicated characters from a realist perspective, not simplistic caricatures who are little more than propaganda. As humans, their struggle rings true from a human perspective. By showing us people who share our strengths, our weaknesses, our hopes, our fears, she forces us to ask this question for ourselves: action and a meaningful death, or ennui and a meaningless life?

So how do you answer that question? Do you have an answer, or are you still working on it? Because you oughtn't for a minute think the Civil Rights Act solved everything. Class in America is still race-based: the top 1% is mostly white, and the bottom 1% lives on reservations. Our LGBT neighbors are still not afforded equal protection under the law. It's worth noting, however, that going to see plays implies a certain level of privilege. And, as Wally opines, one needs the power that privilege affords to be able to effect positive change. But, if one simply goes to plays that struggle with issues of equality in order to feel progressive, one is little more than a salon socialist. The function of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window isn't to make us feel like good leftists. Instead, it asks us a complicated question that we are then to take home with us and struggle to answer.