Wilma's "Age of Arousal' (3rd review)

The right play for the right time

DAN ROTTENBERG

Chicago’s Second City troupe once put on a very funny skit about a football coach hired to teach his game to undergraduates at the ultimate intellectual enclave, the University of Chicago. His students— a diverse assortment of sizes, interests, political affiliations and even genders— seem enthusiastic and eager to learn the sport. But no amount of coaching can alter the fact that nature has made them scholars, not football players.

Age of Arousal, the Linda Griffiths fantasy about the dawn of the women’s movement, conveys much the same puckish spirit. The scene is London in 1885, the heyday of Victorian tradition, which shielded women from worldly concerns, the better to enable them to focus on their families’ spiritual needs. This sheltered treatment often infantilized women, rendering them helpless to deal with financial or civic matters and vulnerable to petty jealousies.

Yet this is the same time and place when the first militant suffragists were being clapped in irons and when Britain coincidentally found itself with 500,000 more women than men. To most observers (see, for example, John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman), this population imbalance produced such miserable creatures as the undersexed spinster, the crotchety old maid and the nagging maiden aunt— all of whom, Victorian society presumed, lacked the fulfillment that only a husband’s embrace and protection could provide. But to Mary Barfoot (Mary Martello) and Rhoda Nunn (Krista Hoeppner), the protagonists of Age of Arousal, England’s female surplus presents an opportunity to create a new community of “happily unmarried women.”

The Bryn Mawr College connection

To this end they have opened a school that teaches typing and other modern skills in order to liberate single women from their dependence on men. And I should point out that much the same notions were stirring then (albeit for different reasons) on this side of the Atlantic as well. In an age of railroads, streetcars, electricity, telephones and telegraph (and, yes, typewriters), warm bodies and strong backs no longer sufficed to serve the new economy’s expanding businesses and industries. These businesses needed workers trained in commerce, finance and technology.

Thus women previously confined to their homes began to be accepted in skilled occupations. “Industrial education”— so called because it served the needs of industry and workers alike— became one of the great progressive causes of the day. Bryn Mawr, one of the first women’s colleges, sprang up in 1885 partly to meet this need. So did Eliza Sproat Turner’s New Century Guild in Center City Philadelphia, which offered practical courses for women beginning in 1881. Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), founded in 1891, was originally conceived as a women’s institute until Anthony Drexel was persuaded to open it to poor people of both genders by his most liberated niece, Mother Katharine Drexel. (Our modern notions of the cloistered life notwithstanding, Victorian women like Katharine Drexel enjoyed greater freedom and control over their lives in convents than they did in the outside world.)

Not the least of the charms of Age of Arousal is its demonstration of the limits of this sort of well-intended education. For the schoolmistresses Mary and Rhoda, problems arise when their students, and even Mary and Rhoda themselves, instinctively resist the “new woman” model that they’ve embraced in theory, instead slipping into such ”traditional woman” behaviors as pettiness, jealousy and the feigning of weakness, not to mention the occasional desire to be dominated by a man. Their students possess vastly different personalities and needs, notwithstanding the fact that they’re sisters: Alice Madden (Monique Fowler) is a confirmed spinster, Virginia (Roxanne Wellington) is a neurotic alcoholic, and Monica (Larisa Polonsky) is a nubile coquette whom men can’t resist and vice versa. When chastised for straying from the path of consistency demanded of the “new woman,” Virginia takes a swig from her flask and replies, “When has anything alive, breathing and farting ever been consistent?”

Reminders of Buñuel

Opportunities to have fun with this state of affairs abound, and Griffiths seizes many of them. Characters intersperse their polite conversations with expressions of the lascivious thoughts that are actually running through their minds. The five women compulsively interrupt or talk over each other. Their noble but unfulfilled effort to elevate themselves reminds me of Luis Buñuel’s elegant dinner party in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which is constantly interrupted by petty annoyances: a servant drops the roast on the floor, a cavalry troop charges through the dining room, a curtain draws open to reveal that the dinner guests are seated on a stage before an audience….

Only in an age when feminists feel secure can one safely kid around about feminism without seeming to be sexist, chauvinist or self-hating. Linda Griffiths is fortunate to live in an age that offers such an opportunity, and so is her audience.

Age of Arousal tends to drag in the second act— the fun lies in the discovery of the characters’ distinct personalities, not in what eventually happens to them— but everything else about this production is first-rate, from the performances to the elaborate costumes to the stage’s impressive uses of light and darkness. My colleague Jim Rutter suggests that Age of Arousal is unsuited to our times. I can’t imagine its being produced and accepted at any other time.



To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.