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.

Re-telling "A Wrinkle in Time"

Tracy Young's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, playing at OSF through November 1st, is a beautiful re-telling of a beautiful story about learning to live and let live and love.

Alejandra Escalante

Young, who also directs, is credited in the Playbill as an adaptor, but this play is really a staging of L'Engle's original text, abridged. This devotion to text, already a hallmark of OSF's work, brings L'Engle's classic tale of embracing your flaws and allowing yourself to love directly from the private pages of a book to the public space of the Angus Bowmer theater.

Meg Murry (Alejandra Escalante) is swept away from her suburban home with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Sara Bruner) and friend Calvin O'Keefe (Joe Wegner) by the three Mrs. Ws (Judith-Marie Bergan, K.T. Vogt on opening night, and an unaccredited actress as Mrs. Which) to save her father (Dan Donohue). The children learn from the Happy Medium (Kate Mulligan) that all good things in the universe are at war with the Black Thing, a heavy evil presence. Some of the best fighters in this war have come from our insignificant planet - Jesus, Crazy Horse, etc. The Mrs. Ws tesser the children through space-time to the planet Camazotz where Mr. Murry is being held captive by IT, a malevolent intelligence through whose influence the entire planet has succumbed to the Black Thing. In order to defeat IT and save her family, Meg has to embrace her flaws - particularly difficult for an awkward adolescent girl - and to discover the thing that "she's got that IT hasn't got."

At its core, that's just what L'Engle's story is - an adolescent girl learning to accept herself for who she is. L'Engle and, by staging her text, OSF invest us in Meg's journey by establishing a binary moral code. This isn't hard for the audience to accept - we're brought up on binary moralities, whether they be God versus Satan or American freedom versus foreign oppression. In L'Engle's story, the Mrs. Ws are the standard bearers for Good, and teach Meg to accept herself as an individual. IT, whose modus operandi is to subvert the wills of others to ITs own, bears the standard for Evil. This simple devise is the key to A Wrinkle in Time's longevity and continued appeal - it encourages us, especially the young adults among us who need it the most, to simply be ourselves and to encourage those we care for to be themselves.

A Wrinkle in Time is a joy to read and a joy to see on the Angus Bowmer stage. People of all ages need stories that encourage them to love themselves. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is deeply invested in English and American theater classics, and A Wrinkle in Time is a welcome addition to the OSF canon.