Gloria: A Life
Seating
Humans are communal animals.
We're meant to be sitting around campfires telling our stories, learning from each other.
We've been doing it for millennia.So, Gloria Steinem’s opening plea is for a circle.
Some theaters have that modular moveable seating. You could set it up in a circle like this production did at the McCarter. Or you could achieve an almost circle by putting some bleachers on the stage, like at A.R.T.
Most rooms are capable of hosting a great talking circle. A small class of 12-24 students + 1 teacher, perhaps in a room that is 24’x24’, or another rectangle with similar square footage, would be able to achieve three levels of seating and maintain sightlines:
Folks leaning against the wall in the back, or sitting on a desk
Chair sitters
Floor sitters…ideally on a cushion, or in a semi-recline. I can’t think of how they could lean against something for back support. Do young’uns need back support?
My kids attend a public Montessori school. The Brutalist building was not designed for Montessori, but it works beautifully with that style of class. The rooms are hexagons. So, your circle is already drawn for you. But! Montessori classrooms have an ungodly quantity of furniture (at least in my experience). Every single classroom I have seen achieves levels of organization unthinkable in my home, while having fifty times more stuff. In those classrooms, though, even the older kids seem to have a big round rug for circle time. When adults are invited in for an event, they usually squat into those tiny chairs and stand behind. Impromptu stadium seating around a circle.
I would love to hear from some experienced teachers about how long circle-time can last before folks get antsy. If you are in a middle or high school classroom that is not typically set up in a circle, does the re-organization unsettle the students and cause too much of a stir to re-focus folks?
Some playwrights are very clear about how they want you to stage their plays. If they could check up on every single production and make sure their one or two top priorities are being honored, they would. I know one who does just that.
Let’s pretend the multiple mentions of sitting in a circle in this play are a mandate that this show must be performed in a circle. Those first lines above, invoking campfires, could be a cri de ceour for live theater - the actual first lines have to do with removing Gloria’s famous glasses to fully appreciate being in a room together instead of “alone in front of our computers or on our phones! [big cheers]”.
However, close to the end of play “ a blinding light goes on in [her] brain” when our protagonist sees that cultures can organize in a power sharing, non-hierarchical way when Wilma Mankiller, the chief of the Cherokee nation explains the origins of the United States’ democracy:
At the heart of our governance is the caucus, an Algonquin word that means talking circles.
It's a consensus among women and men.
The paradigm of human organization for us is the circle, not the pyramid.So, let’s think of all the ways to make a successful circle out of a classroom, cafeteria, courtyard, gymnasium or parking lot. Someone please ask me to draw up a groundplan for a football field, that could be a great setting for this play. Any problems that come up with this seating plan are solvable - experiencing this configuration is worth it.
Set Dressing
Do you have to choose a decade?
Whatever you decide, I think you just want to make sure to honor Gloria Steinem’s desire for “cheerful rooms”. It seems that a lot of the work she describes, including the writing, happened in her home. It is a “the personal is political” kind of protest to put effort and care into a home designed for one woman, her friends and her work - not a “family” in the man-wife-kids kind of way.
She talks about her home, an apartment in a brownstone townhouse in Manhattan, just before she has the revelation about the circle, the quote we started with above, and after the low point of a hurtful interview on Larry King. She notices that her hotel hopping life is starting to look like her childhood homelife.
As usual, the welcome music in the lobby is unbearably depressing.
[ Muzak playing ] All I ever heard in those rooms with my mother in Toledo.
But I put all those years behind me.
Those years made me strong, a survivor.
Nothing could ever be that bad again, right?
All I ever wanted was to escape that house, and I have!
So why, why do I still feel like I don't matter?
Okay, I always joke "the examined life isn't worth living," But as un-introspective as I am, I start to see how much I missed not having had a mother or a home.
I go back to my apartment for the first time in two years.
Good friends come over.There is an exhibition about her home called, “Home for a Movement” by the Smithsonian. And you can watch Steinem give Oprah a guided tour through her house preceding that exhibition. In that interview, Oprah points out the enormity of the “personal is political” decision to love one’s home, by pointing out that all those years previous, her personal life was contradicting her message.
Gloria, “I was brought up to think that you didn’t make a home except for women and children. You didn’t make it for yourself.”
Oprah, “Wow. Wow, so even all those years when you were helping us along the path to our own feminist self-discovery; you weren’t there yet yourself.”
Gloria, “No. No.”
So, the physical evidence of Gloria Steinem’s triumph is that set. What would triumph look like for you? or your community?
I would introduce the set dressing to my team thus: “Hey guys, she worked and travelled for decades. When she realized she should make her home a testament to her life’s work, her apartment became famous, too. Which should we use, the 1970 Vogue spread, the 1990 New York Times photos, or the 2012 Oprah interview?”
Second Wave Feminism welcomes the House Proud Crowd.
Props
Search Ohio in the 1940’s in a press archive and you will find many photos about the wonder of women working during the war. Pre-war, though, there are a few stand-out women from Toledo that appear to me like important predecessors. One of them is Gloria’s grandmother:
These women don’t show up in this play - so we won’t talk about those awesome frocks they are wearing or from where one ascertains a printing press. But we should have these confident and competent people in mind when we think about Gloria’s mother. In the play we are already looking at an actor as Ruth Steinem when Gloria describes her as, “a loving, intelligent, terrorized woman.” Just five lines earlier she claimed the epithet assigned to feminists, “crazy woman”, for herself. She then has to consider her identity in the company of the mentally ill mother. In the scene that follows, Gloria is in 7th grade.
I moved to Toledo with my mother to take care of her. I was 11 years old. From the age of 11 to 17, my mother and I lived in what was once her family house, but now it's condemned, rat-infested, and there's no heat. [ Music playing ] Lie down, Mom. It's cold. It's cold.
If you remove the dog and the fire from the above photo of their home, I think you can see that the warmth has already left that home. The softness and coziness of the furnishing in Gloria’s New York home are totally absent there. The photos below are from homes in 1945 in Ohio and Pittsburgh. Houses that were once as loving and warm as the houses below, have a heavy sadness to them when they have no heat. The diffuse blue-grey light of a winter with moisture in the air makes warm colors look cool - and cold. Could a lighting designer deaden the warmth of that red and orange carpeted set for this scene? What cool gel could we stick on a lamp that we turn on just for this scene?
The state of high alert that living with rats produces cannot be recreated with design (I think). Other animals have their own unpredictable rhythm, and inhuman speed. I say this as the squirrels that live in my walls scuttle and shuffle and tap a foot from my face. For this scene, I think Gloria wants a chair next to her mom’s “bed” that she can pull her feet up onto. She probably wants to scan the floor and bed for droppings before she enters and occupies. That chair should be 1940’s ornate, like the maker and buyer took care and pride in its curves. Too uncomfortable to happily perch in. None of the flash and shine of the ‘50’s. I would want to look at that chair and see the grandmother above, full of progress and promise seated happily, and then know that something went wrong when her granddaughter huddles into it, cold and scared.
Let’s get the blankets right, too. That old wool, stiff and scratchy.
Is it worth it to print out the 1950 edition of A Tale of Two Cities book cover and glue it onto a current edition…I think so. That cover is so dramatic, and the words inside wonderful, but hard to read for most modern 7th graders. I read dense things for a living, and I needed a moment to reset my brain when I picked it up recently.
That is a lot of words to give parameters to a chair, a blanket and a book. But that level of care strengthens the throughline that starts with the playwrights words and radiates out through the actor’s body to all of the items they touch, finally landing, with impact, at the audience. This level of care can be applied to all of the scenes in this show.
Super bonus: you avoid igniting the ire of the costume designer - who tried so hard to find real gloves from the 1950’s - when they spot those carefully gloved hands holding a book you just bought on Amazon.
Let’s talk about those persnickety costume designers next time. Woohoo for wigs!