What with the babysitting situation, and the financial situation, and the laziness situation, Your Humble Blogger hardly ever actually goes out to see plays. I love seeing plays, and if I were to somehow become insanely wealthy, I would spend a truly vast sum of money on the theater, but I don’t actually see many of them. However, having been in a bunch of plays, I can get a lot of enjoyment out of reading playscripts. Or I assume the theater experience is relevant; I know a lot of people can’t picture the play as they read, and I can generally picture two or three possibilities as I read. Well, and not the visuals, often, but the sound of the thing, the characters and their interaction. The problem is that my local library doesn’t stock a lot of plays.
I did pick up The Mammary Plays, a volume with How I Learned To Drive and The Mineola Twins by Paula Vogel. I hadn’t read or seen any of Ms. Vogel’s plays, but of course had heard many good things about her, and particularly about Drive. It’s a good play. I wasn’t that knocked out by the characters, although they are clearly juicy parts, but I loved the Brechtian techniques of presentation, of using the presentation to comment on the play. In particular, since one of the concerns of the play is the way children and adults tread around the borders of knowledge, innocence, imagination and pretense, the use of chairs-as-car, the way that children play, to present to the audience the pretense of an actual car, or of the memory of a car, was very interesting. The way that children imagine themselves adults, the way that adults imagine children as adults, the way adults imagine that their children aren’t adults, the way the imaginary lines of demarcation (license to drive at sixteen, license to fuck at eighteen) fundamentally change our view of the people on the other side of them.
And, of course, the nasty and tricky way she implicates the audience in eroticizing the lead character, who after all is an adult actress, being consensually (and imaginarily) pawed by an adult actor, but who is portraying a child and teenager being pawed by a trusted older relative in a situation where consent is given but should not have been accepted. The scenes are horrible. And they’re hot. Is the audience actually disappointed when the Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck eventually part without going all the way? Is she? Creepiness.
I also liked Mineola a lot. It was (to use the reviewer thing discussed by Gentle Readers not long ago) like Craig Lucas crossed with Wendy Wasserstein. Appallingly funny, nasty-minded, humane and clever. But hard to pull off on stage, I bet. And no good part for me. Oh, and from the production note:
There are two ways to do this play:Personally, I prefer the second way.
- With good wigs.
- With bad wigs.
I should also note, given the name of the volume, that the main characters in the two plays have as a ... substantial ... influence on their characters’ development, their breast size and the reactions of people and society to them. In Mineola, the titular (sorry) twins are identical except that one has a flat chest and the other is busty. While there’s no claim that the difference in bra size causes the difference in character, it’s clear that as they head down their different paths, the body-type difference affects what happens to them in significant ways.
As a guy, I can acknowledge that, sure, I quite likely treat busty women on first glance somewhat different than flat-chested women, and that first glance and first moment of contact probably influences the whole rest of our relationship. And I admit that this is true for doctors, teachers and clerks, even those I entertain no romantic or lustful thoughts for at all. I can also acknowledge that I have no real idea what that is like for women. I mean, I have often thought about how my perception of the universe would be different if I were, say, unusually tall. If I were taller than most people I met, if I looked at rooms from eight or ten inches higher than I do, if people had that moment of reaction that people do when they meet someone very tall. How much of my personality would be the same? Presumably, I would have developed a rather different conversational style, presumably I would have developed a rather different method of presentation, including different preferences in clothes and hats. Would I have been attracted to different women in my high-school and college years? If so, given how strong an influence various romantic entanglements have had on my life, would I have developed different principles, goals, habits? All that stoned college-dorm speculation, you know? And then, I could speculate, in what ways would my life have been different if I had an unusually small or unusually large penis? Presumably, it would not have the same impact on casual acquaintance that unusual height or weight would have, and therefore affect my social development much less. On the other hand, it’s possible that my sexual relationships (which, for me, were essentially a subset of the aforementioned romantic entanglements) could have been very different, and again, these were quite influential. On the other other hand, I am told that size is not ... well, not conclusory, at least not if the individual is eager, empathetic and knowledgeable. Which I could conceivably have been.
My point is that the two questions are substantially different for guys. There’s the first-glance stuff, like height, weight, coloration, etc, which is of course tremendously important, and then there’s the privates, which are certainly important as well, but in a ... private way. For women, presumably, the distinction between social and sexual presentation is difficult to draw. Not useful to draw. None of which is news to any of you, but what is interesting is that Paula Vogel addresses it, humorously and effectively, in mainstream plays. And other than a few jokes here and there, I don’t think the topic is addressed in a lot of other stuff.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.