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I very much enjoyed attending the Wilma's production of Age of Arousal with the students from my Critical Feminist Studies class; it created a rousing finale for our course. During the conversation we held afterwards, one of my students asked Walter Bilderback, the dramaturg, Blanka Zizka, the director, and Eric Brown, one of actors, whether they thought the play was "feminist." Walter responded that "theory wasn't at the center of what one thinks about when staging a performance"; the questions one is working with are very different ones.

My own emotional reaction to the play was a complicated one, and those complications had a lot to do with my understanding of feminism. I experienced the first act as hilarious: the gap between what characters were actually saying to one another, and what they were saying to themselves in "thoughtspeak," was fertile ground for funniness. I laughed a lot. I also experienced that first act as a space of tremendous possibility and opportunity--if the unspoken thoughts were as wild as these, what might not happen?

In the second act, however, there seemed to be less thoughtspeak (I don't know if this is quantitatively true, but my experience was that there was far less dissonance between what was being said aloud and what was being thought inside), so this act seemed corresponding far less funny to me. The play seemed to shift, then, from being a comedy to being a tragedy. It seemed to retreat from Griffith's "wild inspired" version of Gissing's novel The Odd Woman back into the heaviness of Gissing's original text. My experience was of a change from a performance of multiple possibilities to the melodrama of there just being one script, and that a very sad and truncated one.

To me? That diminishment of possibilities isn't feminist. And/so/of course I'd be most curious to hear how others experienced it...