‘Mirror, Mirror’ will be performed as part of ‘A WAM Welcome’, April 9-11, 2010 at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA. Go to www.wamtheatre.com for more information and to purchase tickets.

Right now I’m working on a piece called I’M NOT A FEMINIST, BUT…. we’re just showed about a half an hour of material and met for discussions and rehearsals. And it’s bringing me back to about 3 years ago when David Baecker at Russell Sage asked me to come in and workshop material I had been wanting to work on for long time: an original piece about young women, body image, media pressure, and the burden we place on ourselves to be perfect. We started with 6 rehearsals, and there seemed to be an abundance of material.

The next semester, I came back and we wrote an hour-long show of original material. Over time, we interviewed over 100 people, ages 5-83, mostly female, about self-image, relationship to food, shopping for bathing suits, and how their family talked to them about their body among other topics. We put all of this together, along with our own experiences, to springboard discussions and improvisations. We all read Courtney Martin’s PERFECT GIRLS, STARVING DAUGHTERS, which speaks to why even the daughters of feminists coming up today are turning up with eating disorders in record numbers.

We created Bitch Woman, the super hero who flies in when a young woman is about to buckle under pressure. Bitch woman’s motto?

“Speak your mind! They’ll call you a bitch no matter what you do!” We created Porcine Peter, whose documentary TV show The Wonderful World of Homo Sapiens takes a close look at women getting dressed to go out on the town, and the Mirror Goblin, who promises a woman that if she just works hard enough she will be perfect, and then he eats her alive. (Don’t worry; she is resurrected in the end. That’s why I create theater, so I can play God.) And we created serious pieces based on interviews and life experiences with anorexia, obesity, and recovery from eating disorders.

When I first directed MIRROR, MIRROR, as the piece came to be called, I was enormously proud of the work, but I thought it might feel a little dated. I mean, really, don’t we all know this stuff? Aren’t all these Title IX girls thoroughly empowered? Turns out I was wrong. The response has been so strong, and the requests to perform the show almost continuous. I have restaged and recast it three times, and we’re about to hit the road again, with a brand new piece about bariatric surgery in it. After one performance and older woman came up and told me by the end of the show she was in tears, because we had just told her whole life story.

One of the freshman at Russell Sage who was in the show and last year’s tour told me that she wanted to step out of the cast to give someone else the experience she had had performing MIRROR, MIRROR. By now, the show has involved about 20 cast members, 2 of them high school students who helped create the original work. Every one who comes into the piece puts their stamp on it in some way – and some even write new pieces. The whole process of this show has continued to be a great lesson in how empowering, and what a community effort, theater can be.

And now we have begun I’M NOT A FEMINIST, BUT…. The workshops have been performed, and the responses varied wildly: you’re not hard enough on men, you’re too tough on men, you’re too tough on women, you’re not doing enough serious work, I like it when you tap dance… it’s all grist for the mill. We go back into rehearsal in the fall. In the meantime, I’ve got a stack of books on feminism calling, and the Feministing.com blog to keep up with (Jessica Valenti’s FULL FRONTAL FEMINISM and Gail Collins’ WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED are required texts for this new work). I’ve also got my life experience, which is what Gail Collins’ book is about: the past 50 years of feminism. The changes in the U.S. have been extraordinary, both a long time coming and very fast. But the inspiration for the piece is that most young people you ask today will be very quick to tell you that they are not feminists. Huh, I wonder, why is that? Can theater expose the stereotype that is keeping them from claiming a rich and difficult past that has made so much of what they take for granted today possible? Let’s hope so.

Stay tuned for more on I’M NOT A FEMINIST, BUT….

‘Mirror, Mirror’ will be performed as part of ‘A WAM Welcome’, April 9-11, 2010 at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA. Go to www.wamtheatre.com for more information and to purchase tickets.

Written by Leigh Strimbeck, Co-Artistic Director of WAM Theatre. www.leighstrimbeck.com