Girls who like girls who like girls who like girls

COURTESY PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH These women refuse to be labeled.

It is an unfortunate state of affairs that any play about women is considered a "women's play"-- meaning a play written for a female audience. It's not the same with men--a play all about men is a play for everyone, a play dealing with "universal human issues." So, should a female playwright strive to create a work that will satisfy the interests of both men and women? Or should she give voice to female concerns that remain largely unraised? Plays that attempt the former are implicitly buying into an aesthetic double standard, whereas those that attempt the latter risk being labeled cathartic and unambitious. Thus, the female playwright is in a quandary: if she wants her art to focus on the experience of being a woman, she must create a work that is, by society's skewed standards, limited.

But maybe she doesn't care. Shana Katz, PC '00, has written a play about women. She has pieced together a series of true stories culled from women on the Yale campus to create Snap Peas, a collection of monologues and vignettes to be performed by-- and yes, for--women. Snap Peas is a cathartic work, an expressive work, a series of voices that demand to be heard.

But just because a play is cathartic does not mean that it should be exempt from striving for sophistication, subtlety, and even humor. Snap Peas certainly achieves this trinity in moments, when Katz is less concerned with presenting flat issues and types, and more concerned with conveying the poignancy, humor, and impossibility of the female experience.

An example of this success occurs early in the production when the actresses line up and recite a litany of female expectations-- everything from "Every woman should know how to bake a cake from scratch and how to change a tire" to "You should marry for love, but there's nothing wrong with trying to fall in love with a rich man." This is the most brilliant passage of the play because it's up to the audience to piece together the themes underlying the shopping list of advice: the women simply recite, nothing more. It's a simple scene, but it speaks worlds more than some of the more complex ones, scenes that overwhelm with movement and noise or guide us down the interpretive path with too many signs reading "Theme."

This scene also succeeds because of its visual simplicity: a straightforward line of women presenting a convincing variation of characters. In other scenes, there is a mite of overdirection at work. In her attempt to enrich the monologues with other cast members, director Autumn Leonard, JE '00, often winds up shifting the focus to the contributing actresses and drowning out the primary speaker. This is unfortunate, as many of the actresses deliver their monologues with a powerful sense of presence and character and should be allowed to use the already-small stage to its capacity. Marta Castaing, PC '02, seems most in control of the space around her; she delivers her monologues with a convincing sense of character and her presence onstage is forceful but never overbearing. Lara Rios, CC '02, also has an intuitive sense of emphasis and intensity; she is pained without being whiny. But even during Rios' monologue, which recounts the story of a rape, there is too much distraction. As she delivers the speech, three actresses dramatize the story she is telling while another sweeps the stage floor with a dustpan and brush. The dramatization makes sense, but the sweeping is a bit too much--these stories are often powerful enough to stand on their own, and the speakers would be less restricted if they weren't competing with their peers for space and attention.

Leonard's direction is most effective in the scenes involving several women, such as the meditation on dieting that takes place between elementary school girls comparing their lunches. For any woman who has ever eaten lunch in the presence of her peers, it's a highly resonant moment, and the actresses convey the complexity of intragirl politics with a canny sense of timing and humor. These realistic scenes pierce the core of the female experience, and I wish Katz's work was less concerned with upsetting or moving us and more concerned with just representing truth in a way she is obviously capable of doing. It's like there's a strange critical-mass principle at work here: if we see that much more tragedy, we'll be that much more moved. In fact, the opposite principle is at work: the less we're told, the more we're drawn in.

Testimonial or issue-driven works such as Snap Peas always have a kind of interim quality: that the experiences and voices they represent need to be heard because the larger population has chosen to marginalize or ignore them. Snap Peas represents a necessary voice, and it certainly has moments of greatness, but if it tried to say less, would wind up saying a lot more.

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