Jonathan Alexandratos

Natacha Roi in the world premiere production of Emilie by Lauren Gunderson at South Coast Repertory

by Jonathan Alexandratos

As you read this, a revolution is changing the art of playwrighting. At its heart? Science plays. Its vanguard? Women playwrights.

A director whose work I greatly admire told me that, when you’re in the center of this movement, it feels more like evolution than revolution. I couldn’t agree more. Yet, whenever I discuss women changing the look and sound of 21^st Century drama through science plays at conferences or lectures, tragically few seem to have heard the news. That’s okay, though; we’re all here to learn, and we all take good notes.

So, in the hopes of broadening the discussion, I’d like to recognize the women playwrights at the heart of this shift and highlight how their work is reshaping the form and content of modern theatre. All of the women I will discuss have used the science play to alter the way plays are written and/or seen.

The term “science play” refers to any play that aims to use theatre to discuss aspects of science. It is not science fiction, in that most science plays are not speculative – they refer to verified, though perhaps not certain, events. The fact that these plays usually contain some aspect of experiment puts them in a unique position to abandon theatrical tradition. They might, for instance, break certain dramatic rules because experimentation is already a prominent theme in the plot. If the story features an experiment, why not allow the form to test boundaries, too?

And this is precisely the reason women playwrights in particular are revolutionizing the way we write plays: they have spectacularly married experiments in plot with experimental form to constantly challenge the traditions of playwrighting.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll list a selection of women playwrights, below, and brief notes on how their science plays have changed the craft. For the sake of convenience, I’ll go in alphabetical order. This list is nowhere near comprehensive. Read more

Posted on March 9, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism Leave a comment

Screamin’ Janine action figure

Gender Focus welcomes guest contributor Jonathan Alexandratos! Jonathan Alexandratos is a playwright living in New York City. He is a professor at Plaza College and Queensborough Community College, and is a co-founder of the non-profit playwrights’ lab Playsmiths.

With the recent buzz around the Django Unchained action figures, we can see the power of a seemingly benign hunk of molded plastic to stir significant social debate. The purpose of this post, however, is not to explore questions of race in action figures, as the Django debate does, but to look at gender issues.

Here, via three examples, I argue that the female form is dangerously mis- or underrepresented in action figure lines geared toward the Ages 3-and-Up male demographic. This threat manifests in the fact that female bodies are being mass-produced to fit certain unfair social conventions, and is magnified by the fact that, for many young consumers of these figures, said artificial women are the first they will touch beyond the family members around them.

This argument is certainly made with full awareness of the fact that action figure manufacturers are tied, to some extent, to their source material; however, I don’t think this excuses them when they skew certain lines not just masculine but macho. It’s also not reason enough to discredit discussion of the social relevance of action figures.

Screamin’ Janine

In 1986, Filmation created an animated kids’ TV series based on the Ghostbusters franchise. In 1989, Kenner produced an action figure of the series’ strongest female character, Janine. At the start of the series, Janine was hardly ever frightened by the mysterious goings-on that the Ghostbusters tracked. However, as the series went on, executives scaled back Janine to make her “softer,” thinking that her tough image was a bad role model for girls.

They even went so far as to round the cat eye rims of her glasses, thinking the former looked too harsh. The action figure, then, exemplified this change, rather than the earlier,stronger Janine. On top of this, Janinehad a feature where, if one wound her torso up and pushed a button on her lower back, her lower half (assuming one was grasping the top half) would spin rapidly, causing her cloth skirt to fly up. None of the male figures had any sort of fabric clothing, and certainly none of them were capable of a feature so sexually derogatory.

Posted on January 16, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

In the Lab: Women Playwrights Changing Theatre Through Science Plays

This is Not a Toy: Our Action Figures, Our Selves

Screamin’ Janine