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MISS LULU BETT(photo at right)
Miss Lulu Bett, a comedy of manners, examines the awakening of an overworked spinster who rebels against her exploitative family and achieves happiness on her own terms. Miss Lulu Bett garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921--the first time a woman received the prestigious honor.
Acclaimed songstress K.T. Sullivan will sing songs from the period, including "I Want To Be Bad" and "Goodbye My Lady Love." A discussion will follow the reading, led by Joan Vail Thorne and scholars Susan Jonas and Judith Barlow. A reception will follow.
THE BEAST OF BURDEN by Susan Jonas
“‘I know them’… overshadowed, brow-beaten women, wives or Lulus…
[enslaved by duty,]… “dead duty.” — Zona Gale
When Miss Lulu Bett premiered in 1920, Zona Gale was among a number of women who were challenging the stereotypes of women on the stage and off. Her playwriting peers included Susan Glaspell (Trifles, The Verge, The Inheritors), Rachel Crothers (A Man’s World, Susan and God), Zoe Akins (Declassee, Old Maid), Gertrude Stein (A Circular Play, The Mother of Us All), Georgia Douglas Johnson (Plumes, Safe) and, slightly later, Sophie Treadwell (Machinale). These women wrote in a breadth of styles, from Realism to Expressionism, and a variety of genres. Their frequent subjects included the double standard for men and women regarding chastity and promiscuity; the choice between family and career; the outrages of biological determinism; the lack of control women have over their own bodies; and the prison of marriages compelled by economics rather than free choice and genuine affection. The first four issues continue to be concerns for the contemporary American woman, and the last is hardly irrelevant in too many parts of the world.
Many plays of the time focused on the consequences of economic dependence of married women, and some even indicated the possibility that, for educated women, living independently might have benefits. But while educated women now had options, women lacking education had few. The poorest did factory work or menial labor, or went into domestic service – all paying barely enough for subsistence much less advancement. And the middle class spinster, beyond the age that was considered marriageable, would be taken into the home of a married relative, and expected to do household labor in exchange for some degree of shelter and sustenance.
Women like Lulu, generally considered “too weak to work,” were nonetheless expected to clean, cook, serve, market, do laundry and mending, and provide child-care. Without the financial or emotional resources, much less the social status, to participate in any community or leisure pleasures, except possibly the Church, she would be a virtual prisoner of the house and household.
In Miss Lulu Bett, Gale shows not only the plight of the spinster, but also, in the spectrum of alternatives portrayed by Ina, Di, Monona and Mrs. Bett, a range of options, none of which present appealing alternatives. Ina has been stripped of personality and scarcely exists individuated from her husband Dwight. Like Lulu, Di attempts to run off with a boy—not for love—but to get some affirmation of her value and to escape her oppressive home. Though her tactics are the most persistent and obvious, the child Monona is like the others in her desperate need for attention, which achieves only through transgression and obnoxiousness. And finally there is the feisty widow Mrs. Bett, who survived her difficult life only to find herself utterly dependent on the son-in-law she despises.
The most scathing portrayal is reserved for Dwight Deacon. “At once a caricature and a realistic figure,” Dwight Deacon is a “smug bundle of clichés,” as Judith Barlow so aptly puts it. But beneath the banalities and the malapropisms is a petty, self-congratulating tyrant who demands obedience and gratitude of every member of his all-female household. His genial parasitism personifies the corrosive pretense of good intentions, and demonstrates that the preservation of the status quo benefits only the privileged, and denies others life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Yet the bitterness of Gale’s satire is counterbalanced by a vein of wit that runs through the play, manifesting itself in the extreme if familiar comic behavior of the characters, the acerbic derision of Mrs. Bett, and the dry sarcasm of Lulu. Her humor shows that she is capable of insight and defiance, and cultivates suspense as to whether, when and how she might rebel.
Much like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Edgar Lee Masters, Gale strips away the veneer of Americana—the folks, small town life, and family all too often romanticized – and shows the pettiness, boredom, and absence of compassion underneath. In fact, the pointed banality, use of repetition, provinciality, careless cruelty, oppressive absence of event, and balance of pathos and humor are reminiscent of Chekhov, though distinctly American.
It has become part of theater lore that Gale’s novella and the original and revised scripts of Miss Lulu Bett have among them three different endings. The novella concludes with Mrs. Bett watching from her window, as “Mr. and Mrs. Neil Cornish were hurrying toward the railway station.” Feeling her audience would not accept two marriages in under two and a half hours (which one critic described as dramatic bigamy), she altered the ending in her first dramatized version. Here Gale came closest to approximating Nora’s slamming of the door in Ibsen’s Doll House, a play to which critics immediately likened Miss Lulu Bett. In 1920–the same year the Ninth Amendment was passed—Miss Lulu Bett opened on Broadway. A week into the run, allegedly due outraged audiences who felt deprived of a romantic union, Gale revised the script. Her “Hollywood ending” is neither credible nor persuasive in light of the picture of domestic life she has presented, and though it guaranteed the success of the production, it now reads as ironic.
The mélange of endings probably indicates Gale’s own struggle between the desire to be truthful and the desire to be successful. The well-publicized controversy surrounding the endings sent ticket sales soaring. The play also toured nationally, with great success, and was bought by Paramount and brought to the screen in 1921. And despite Alexander Woollcott’s assertion that Gale had “no instinct at all for the idiom of theatre,” she was the first female playwright to win the Pulitzer.
We may be tempted to see Gale’s work as “merely” feminist, however, as Harold P. Simonson puts it in his biography of Gale:
"Underneath her social criticism and domestic satire was the conviction that people have dignity which no individual, business, or government has the right to exploit. [Gale intended] to show…people heroically fighting to stave off doubts about their own human value. [We confront] the contemporanity of her theme; it is the little man in a world he never made. [She] took the side of the immigrant, the employee, the child-laborer, and the helpless underdog ruthlessly exploited…"
Surely the fight for civil and human rights transcends gender, geography and time.
Susan Jonas is a dramaturg on faculty at New York University, board member of the League of Professional Theatre Women, on the advisory board of Women’s Project, and a co-founder with Women’s Project and New Perspectives of “50/50 in 2020.”
BIOS
ZONA GALE: A novelist, playwright, and short story writer, Zona Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin in 1874, where she lived for most of her youth until getting her B.L. and M.L. from University of Wisconsin. Like her peers, Susan Glaspell and Edna Ferber, she was a journalist for a time, working in Milwaukee then New York. But after a few years she returned home to Portage to focus on writing fiction, realizing the environment provided her with the material she needed. Beginning in 1908, she published a series of acclaimed short story collections and novels set in the fictional world of “Friendship Village.” While most writers focused on cosmopolitan life among the affluent, Gale, as Judith Barlow says, “painted the small town as a place where neighborliness overrides the occasional problem of prejudice and provincialism.”
Her early work was, though popular, considered sentimental. Her mid-period yielded her best work, the novels Birth (1918), Miss Lulu Bett (1920), Faint Perfume (1923), and Mister Pitt (1925), all of which she adapted for the stage. Her great success was with Miss Lulu Bett, which she said she adapted in ten days. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, making her the first woman playwright to be so honored. The play was quickly made into a film.
Gale was an active member of the National Women's Party, and she lobbied extensively for the 1921 Wisconsin Equal Rights Law, helping to craft its language. In 1933 she was Wisconsin’s representative to the International Congress of Women.
At the age of 54, Gale married for the first time a 64-year old widower she had vowed in her youth to marry. They reconnected after many decades of separation and Gale suddenly became the stepmother of her husband’s 14 year old daughter from his previous marriage, and a 3 year old girl the couple adopted. Gale continued writing and publishing until her death in December 1938.
JOAN VAIL THORNE: Upon returning from a year of Fulbright study in the United Kingdom, Joan Vail Thorne began her professional directing career at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. She was Assistant Director to the renown American director, Alan Schneider, on various Broadway productions and went on to direct independently at regional theatres such as The Alley Theatre of Houston, The Asolo Theatre in Sarasota, The Dallas Theater Center, Florida Stage, and People’s Light and Theatre Company in Pennsylvania. Her first directorial work in New York City was on Milk of Paradise by Sallie Bingham for Women’s Project, and she went on to direct two plays by Julie Jensen, also for Women’s Project. Other Off Broadway theatres for which she has directed include the American Place Theatre, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Jewish Repertory Theatre, among others.
Ms. Thorne is also a playwright whose play, The Exact Center of the Universe, starring Frances Sternhagen, premiered at The Women’s Project and then moved to The Century Theatre for an extended run. She has written and directed two short films, Last Rites, shown on PBS, and Secrets, shown on Cinemax and was the librettist for two operas composed by Stephen Paulus: The Woman at Otowi Crossing, presented by Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and Summer, presented by the Berkshire Opera and a third opera, Pocahontas, composed by Linda Tutas Haugen, presented by the Virginia Arts Festival. She wrote the texts for three pieces for narrator and orchestra, also composed by Stephen Paulus, available on commercial CD.
Ms. Thorne has served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Pace University, and the Playwrights Horizons Studio of New York University, where she currently teaches directing. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the League of Professional Theatre Women, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and Women’s Project.
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