Striking Set in Daryl Roth Theatre
The setting is striking: the spacious interior of the Daryl Roth Theatre, a converted bank edifice abutting New York’s Union Square, is set up as a theatre in the round, with six tiers of seating surrounding a large oval stage. Hundreds of multihued pillows are placed neatly along each bank of seats, creating a colorful, welcoming environment, and the audience enters to a medley of woman-themed oldies: You Don’t Own Me (Lesley Gore), It’s a Man’s World (Etta James), and I Am Woman (Helen Reddy).
The carpeted space is sparse, a few fabric-covered storage boxes that double as seats, a stool, and here and there several piles of books, messily stacked.
Enter Christine Lahti, embodying Gloria Steinem, right down to the blonde hair cascading past her shoulders and the trademark aviator glasses. Tall, lanky, and impossibly slim, Lahti sports black slacks and a black pullover, highlighted by an oversized silver belt. Above, projected on the walls above the audience, are ironic clips of Father Knows Best and a 1950s-style ad, a housewife grinning at her vacuum cleaner and the tag line, “She’ll be happier with a Hoover.” And Lahti gets right to the point: “You aren’t crazy, the system is crazy,” she says, circling to address the audience surrounding her. “And you aren’t alone.”
For the next ninety minutes, Lahti as Steinem takes us on a march through the history of feminism – sometimes barefoot, sometimes in heels – from her start as a journalist (including her legendary stint undercover as a Playboy bunny) through the founding of Ms. magazine, the sisterhood-is-powerful movement of the 1970s, the dark Reagan era, Steinem’s close collaboration with African-American feminist activists, her dive into Native American lore with Wilma Mankiller, issues of gun violence and violence against women, and finally into the current moment: the election of Donald Trump, the Women’s March, and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Steinem was seemingly everywhere for the past half-century, and so remarkable is Lahti’s performance that within minutes of the play’s outset it’s as if Lahti isn’t acting as Steinem, she is Steinem.
Along the way, the audience is treated to many of Steinem’s celebrated one-liners, both her own and those she borrowed from ordinary folks, including a cab driver, over the years. Among them: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” (that, Lahti/Steinem attributes to an Australian feminist), “If you could sleep your way to the top, there would be way more women at the top,” “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off,” and, of course, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” (that’s the cabbie). Each of these got appreciative laughs from the audience, but the show itself is hardly a comedy. It’s full of genuine anger, pain, and sometimes outraged disbelief that things were and, well, still are they way they are.
The play, recently extended through March 31, is unusual in that virtually the entire team – the playwright, director, the seven-member cast, and nearly every member of the crew – are women. Lahti, the veteran Broadway and Off-Broadway actress, and winner of an Oscar, and Emmy, an Obie, and a pair of Golden Globe awards, benefits from the strong support of six ensemble members who play Steinem’s family, friends, colleagues, sister activists, and various male critics, bosses and the like, sometimes serving as a kind of Greek chorus. A particular standout, in this writer’s view, is Joanna Glushak, a Broadway actress currently seen in Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, who portrays, among others, Steinem’s mother, Ruth, and the late Rep. Bella Abzug.
It’s when Lahti’s interacts with Glushak’s Ruth that Lahti hits a series of emotional high notes. Near tears, she relates the story of her mother’s life, a fierce journalist herself who ended up as the Sunday editor of the Toledo Blade, despite a hardscrabble life, and who suffered what Lahti calls, ironically, a “nervous breakdown.” In pain, she asks Ruth why she didn’t fight back harder, why she didn’t leave her husband, and concludes: “Like so many women, I am living the unlived life of my mother.”
Another moving segment of the play is when, after Ms. surprises its many doubters by selling out its first issue and becoming a culture-changing success, members of the ensemble reenact some of the thousands of letters-to-the-editor from its readers. Indeed, Steinem and Ms. allowed countless millions of women to see themselves reflected in its pages, and Steinem was one of the leaders of the consciousness raising women’s circles that proliferated in the 1970s.
Finally, in what Lahti calls “Act Two,” the lights go up and the audience, overwhelmingly female, was encouraged to take part in a makeshift consciousness-raising group, with exchanges between Lahti and perhaps a dozen members of the audience who raised their hands to speak. One woman recalled her participation in the 1977 National Women’s Conference, led by Abzug. A young women in her 20s, in tears, described her inability to discuss abortion with her conservative mother. And another, pointing to two companions, said that she’d come to the play with members of her own consciousness-raising group that first met 45 years ago. Lahti responded to each with a combination of her own thoughts and Steinem’s aphorisms. This, a nightly feature of the show, has been joined at least once by Gloria Steinem herself.
Several powerful one-woman, true-life shows in recent years come to mind, including the late Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Perhaps Steinem, in her 80s, doesn’t have the stamina to do her own life story night after night, or who knows? Maybe she does. But in Gloria: A Life, thanks to Christine Lahti, we get the next best thing.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Cast:
Christine Lahti
Joanna Glushak
Fedna Jacquet
Francesca Fernandez McKenzie
Patrena Murray
DeLanna Studi
Liz Wisan
Written by
Emily Mann
Director
Diane Paulus
Creative:
Amy Rubin
Jessica Jahn
Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Robert Kaplowitz
Andrea Allmond
Elaine J. McCarthy
When:
Through March 31, 2019
Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 pm
Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 pm, 8 pm
Fridays at 8 pm
Sundays at 3 pm
Where:
Daryl Roth Theatre
101 East 15 Street
New York, NY 10003
Bob Dreyfuss is an independent journalist based in New York City and Cape May, New Jersey, who has written extensively for Rolling Stone, The Nation, The New Republic, Mother Jones, and many other magazines. He has served as a member of the board of directors for Cape May Stage, an equity theatre in New Jersey, where he profiled dozen of actors for the company’s weekly newsletter. He currently serves on the board of The Upstart Creatures, a New York theatre company. Onstage, he has appeared as Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and as Delivery Man in Barefoot in the Park, and he is currently writing a full-length play about the late Senator John McCain. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including the PBS Newshour, Fox News, Democracy Now!, and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and has traveled widely, including reporting from Iran, Vietnam, China, and Tanzania.
