No question that in our culture, the deck is still stacked against women. A woman still doesn’t get paid as much as a man for doing the same work. A woman just won the Oscar for Best Director for the first time in Academy Awards history (better than 80 years, people!). A woman has never been elected president. Hell, a woman can barely get elected senator. And look at the covers of magazines: Women paint their faces, blatantly expose their bosoms and legs, inject their lips with collagen, and insert implants into their breasts, all ostensibly to be more attractive to men. Certainly, we’re all objectified – can anybody say “wage slave?” – but women are most certainly objectified more than men. For crying out loud, a woman gets nominated for vice president and inspires a porn movie! (Someone please point me to a porn movie starring a Joe Biden or Dick Cheney look-alike. On second thought, don’t.)
The deck is no less stacked against women in theatre. Most plays are by men and about men, and plays by women have a harder time getting produced. Charles P. Stites is trying to help change that. To follow his newly formed Paladin Theatre Company’s debut production of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (which Stites directed and acted in), he’s staging a play by a woman, Caroline Kava’s Early Girl, with an all-female cast of seven. “I would like to do a lot of female-dominated plays,” says Stites. “Whenever you put a casting call out for five men, you’re lucky to get seven auditioners, and only four of them will be good actors. So for that fifth part, you’ll use somebody you really wouldn’t have cast normally. But you put out a call for five women and you’ll get 30 or 40 actresses, and you’ll always have to turn away somebody who’s terrific.”
Now, chances are you’ve never heard of Early Girl (although it did serve as Demi Moore’s Broadway debut). Stites hadn’t. “This is one of the few times in my life that I’ve hunted for good luck and found it. When I was looking for spaces for this season, I had to plan around theatres that were available, and it happened that I was going to have to do back-to-back shows. This is the first play I’ve directed that I haven’t acted in as well, and a friend of mine told me that if I tried to do all of that back-to-back, I would kill myself. So I had to choose a play that I couldn’t possibly act in. I spent hours over several weeks looking for plays, and I read the synopsis online and went ahead and ordered it.” Stites was impressed with the individuality of the characters, but he was most impressed that the play, even though it’s set in a brothel, isn’t about sex. Rather, it’s about relationships, the corruption of competition, and breaking free.
A play about prostitutes that isn’t about sex? This I gotta see. Maybe you do, too.
Early Girl runs July 29-Aug. 22, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 5:30pm, at Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd. For more information, call 474-8497 or visit www.paladintheatrecompany.com.
This article appears in July 30 • 2010.