[In the following essay, Chirico examines the traditional comic structure, characters, and spirit of Uncommon Women and Others, arguing that the formal features of comedy suit the play's feminist perspective on women's place in patriarchal society.]

But when I grew weary or disgruntled—I too, like Emily Dickinson, tired of the world and sometimes found it lacking—the gentler joys of tea, sherry, and conversation with women friends—and I've made many good ones here—have always been for me a genuine pleasure.

Mrs. Plumm

It was all hypothetical.

Kate

For Wendy Wasserstein, comedy is a way of concretizing hypothetical scenarios: “Sometimes funny things are almost like the fantasy, and then it comes real” (Interview 1988, 270). Her comedy Uncommon Women and Others puts this theory into practice by inviting the audience into the all-female world of Mount Holyoke College to witness a group of women create and define themselves in the wake of the feminist movement. Written originally as a one-act play for her Master's thesis at Yale School of Drama in 1975, Uncommon Women grew out of Wasserstein's desire to see an all-women's curtain call at the end of a performance. Uncommon Women, constructed as a series of vignettes, develops out of the collective flashback of a group of five college friends in a restaurant in 1978 to their senior year in college, six years earlier. While the vignettes connect loosely into a narrative, they are mainly episodic, exploring the different personalities of these women, their enjoyment of or irritation with each other, and their means of making (or evading) decisions at critical points in their lives. Wasserstein's play shows the confusion these women experience during a turbulent period of the early 1970s, when the feminist movement offered new opportunities and roles to women, oftentimes without the reassurance necessary to make these decisions (Interview 1987, 420). Nothing changes in these characters' lives during the course of the play except that they graduate by the end, but it is the “emotional action”—a quality which is so much a part of Chekhov's dramatic design—that guides the play (Interview 1987, 430).

As social critique, the genre of comedy is often overlooked by women playwrights, either for its lack of authorial weight or inability to treat serious issues, a bias which originates with Aristotle's dismissal of comedy in the Poetics. Wasserstein's plays are often criticized for their lack of serious subject matter in comparison to other female playwrights such as Marsha Norman and Beth Henley. Benedict Nightingale, writing about Isn't It Romantic, criticizes Wasserstein's humor as “too strong, too infectious” (14), making it difficult to take her characters seriously and preventing Wasserstein from probing beneath the surface of the play to explore the pain more rigorously. John Simon also voices the concern that the playwright and the characters are too young to have had any meaningful experiences in their lives upon which they can reflect, although he seems to ignore the “coming-of-age” paradigm considered crucial in the developmental literature of young men. However, Wasserstein draws on a long tradition of comedy to reify her all-woman space, specifically comedy's emphasis on surmounting obstacles, creating community, and discovering alternative solutions.

Wasserstein's own theoretical reasoning of humor within her plays is that it permits women to disclose painful incidents while simultaneously deflecting that pain, and to discuss distressing events or feelings without naming them directly. “You are there [in the moment], and you are not there,” she explains, adding, “You don't share equally about every topic” (Interview 1987, 425). The dialogue that results is a kind of layered conversation, where the humorous, spoken remarks at the surface belie the pain underneath, creating a subtext to almost every conversation that the audience senses on a nonverbal level (Interview 1987, 425). Holly's speech near the end of act 2 of Uncommon Women, for example, demonstrates this kind of subtext in which she expresses the fears she has for her future. Calling Dr. Mark Silverstein on the telephone, a man she has only met once at the Fogg Museum, she launches into a free-associative diatribe about her life and her friends at college. At one point in the rather one-sided conversation she admits that she giggles a lot and is too cynical: “I had my sarcastic summer when I was sixteen and somehow it exponentially progressed. Leilah—she's my nice friend who's merging with Margaret Mead—says sarcasm is a defense. Well, I couldn't very well call you up and tell you to move me to Minneapolis and let's have babies, could I?” she asks, hinting at the worries underlying her entire monologue. Through her jokes about being in a Salinger story and girls who “good-ga-davened” (prayed correctly) and thus married doctors, she exposes her fears that her life will not satisfy her mother's expectations for her, nor her own, although she is “having trouble remembering what [she] want[s]” (63). Through her use of humor, she reveals her desires and fears while simultaneously distancing herself from the present moment, as if to say, “this is me and not me”—a device which Wasserstein uses with all her characters.

While this example demonstrates how Wasserstein's humor works at the immediate, personal level, it does not illustrate how the genre of comedy supports and frames the play as a whole and permits a serious treatment of feminism. The fact that Wasserstein approaches a “woman-conscious drama” through a comic lens enables her to examine the feminist issues with hopefulness and vitality within a communal setting. While tragedy deals with change and development over time and usually focuses on the individual, comedy leans toward the episodic and the momentary with an emphasis on relationships between people. Through an examination of the play's traditional comic structure, comic characters, and comic spirit, I argue that Wasserstein's comedic form provides an ideal medium to examine feminist issues because it reinforces the female space and stems the patriarchal tides that constantly threaten to undermine the women's world.

STRUCTURE OF COMEDY

The play's temporal structure is a flashback from 1978 to 1972, when the women are seniors at college. This shift in time from the mature, present moment of their adult lives to the period of youthful irresponsibility which defined their college years reflects a pattern traditionally found in comedy. M. M. Bakhtin defines this as the period of “carnival” where normal behavior and rules are reversed. Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber both witness this structure in Shakespeare's comedies, Frye depicting it as the ternary movement from the everyday to holiday and back (171) and Barber comparing it to a “Saturnalian” pattern. This period of holiday is often marked by licentious behavior and subversive temperament. The medieval and Elizabethan customs of mocking religious practices permitted a type of release from a rulebound society, a release which was beneficial for the expulsion of “aberrant impulse and thought” (Barber 13). Within a designated frame of time, unruly, drunken, and ludic behavior was encouraged, as participants desecrated the sacred elements in the church and participated in sacrilegious acts, ruined holy statues, broke traditions, and deviated from everyday protocol. Nor was this behavior merely a release from the strictures of decorum and political life; the participants returned to the quotidian space with a better understanding of the status quo and hierarchical forces that held it in place. Just as Demetrius's experience of the world is altered when he returns from the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream and says, “Methinks I see things with parted eye, / When everything seems double” (4.1 188-9), the dreamlike memories of their college days in an all-women's environment infiltrate the women's present view of the world and shape how they see reality.

This classic comedic shift into the holiday mode that the flashback initiates should not be overlooked; the transition into the fantastical “green world” of their college days permits Wasserstein to demonstrate exactly how the hypothetical space of the all-female world has shaped the characters' adult identities in the “present” moment of 1978. Even though their college experience was real to them at one point in time, the scenes unfolding before the audience are fantasy, and like fantasy, allow the characters to propose situations, to play, and to imagine. Wasserstein's comic frame in this play introduces this gesture of playful abandon not just for comic relief but as a means of exploring and understanding the patriarchal rules underlying society. This move back in time to college—to the “holiday world”—is what permits revelry and licenses nonsense, what allows the women to propose various possibilities and to revel in an “artificial” world away from the rules of patriarchal relationships. As the women in the play overturn gender stereotypes and poke fun at sexual limitation, they participate in a similar form of carnival, of mocking the status quo momentarily only to return to it with a better understanding of who they are as women and how they define their new roles.¹ For example, Rita's strong belief in reversing the power dynamics of sexual intimacy enables her to put feminism immediately into practice: she relates having left “Johnny Cabot lying there after [she'd] had an orgasm and he hadn't,” or choosing to spend time with Clark who is a wonderful lover, even though he is a homosexual, explaining, “He's creative. I've had enough of those macho types” (34). Rita, always the “Lord [or Lady] of Misrule,” also mischievously proposes that men should be forced to menstruate, that they “should be forced to answer phones on a white Naugahyde receptionist's chair with a cotton lollipop stuck up their crotch” (37).² While the image is farcical, what Rita deduces from this hypothetical suggestion succinctly reveals how men gain power over women's bodies through their construction of weakness as biologically linked. As she notes:

The only problem with menstruation for men is that some sensitive schmuck would write about it for the Village Voice and he would become the new expert on women's inner life. Dr. David Ruben, taking time out to menstruate over the July Fourth weekend, has concluded that “women are so much closer to the universe because they menstruate, and therefore they seek out lemon-freshened borax, hair spray, and other womb-related items.”

(38)

What Rita stumbles upon in her hypothetical scenario is that men, if able to menstruate, would privilege the process as something valuable and natural, rather than unmentionable. She also demonstrates how men shape the ways in which women experience their bodies, as in believing that menstruation leads to an immediate desire for borax. Her hypothesis is skin to the kind of “truth-in-foolery” that the figure of the feel or clown offers in comedies, such as Lear's feel who constantly reminds Lear of his error through his puns and paradoxical riddles. Through her parodic proposal, she is able to comically point out truths which underlie patriarchal control, namely that a woman's ability to lead or to work is not affected by menstruating but rather by society's attitude towards menstruation—an attitude that would quickly change if men menstruated.

By placing her characters in a single-sex environment, Wasserstein situates the action in an alternate reality that both critiques the dominant society and offers diverse possibilities. A single-sex education provides women with the space and environment to develop intellectually and emotionally away from the oftentimes oppressive presence of men. Proponents of all-women's education argue that the presence of women in positions of leadership while at college provides models for their experience in the world after they graduate. They believe that altering young women's views of what women are capable of doing will lead them to expect and demand that women fulfill positions of leadership even after college—that the vision of an altered reality leads to the creation of a different world. Wasserstein uses the comic genre to explore this implicit directive behind an all-woman's college because comedy permits such self-fashioning and experimentation with identity by its speculative and hypothetical nature. Through its practice of inversion and its departure from the “everyday” into “holiday,” comedy explores the sense of “what if?” as it probes the possibilities of an alternative world where women have as much power as men and allows the women to try on those roles. George Santayana discusses how this hypothetical mode occurs most readily in the realm of comedy in his essay “The Comic Mask.” He praises the advantage of the comic form for providing the exploration of potential and possibilities:

Perhaps the time has come to suspend those exhortations, and to encourage us to be sometimes a little lively, and see if we can invent something worth saying or doing. We should then be living in the spirit of comedy, and the world would grow young. Every occasion would don its comic mask, and make its bold grimace at the world for a moment. We should be constantly original without effort and without shame, somewhat as we are in dreams, and consistent only in sincerity; and we should gloriously emphasize all the poses we fell into, without seeking to prolong them.

(137)

The all-women's environment that the women inhabit in the “dream mode” is equivalent to this space that Santayana proposes, permitting the women to try out specific roles through their spontaneous playacting and improvisational games. Their uninhibited poses and grimaces appear as the women test their own “uncommon potential” and their friends' wit. They playfully define a society without men as a positive one, as when Kate depicts her ideal society as an all-woman community, where everyone participates in child care and men visit only on the weekends. While this separatist community sounds remarkably similar to her experience at college, she insists that her plan is different because it “doesn't get boring,” since each weekend the men are different and interesting people—“Arabian millionaires, poets, lumberjacks. Not corporate lawyers, or MBAs” (38). In her hypothetical scenario, Kate foresees a society that does not rely on men for economic, governmental, or parental reasons, but only for sexual needs, and in fact willingly excludes them. Holly similarly reveals her own idealistic scenario of being “divorced and living with two children on Central Park West” (38), highlighting the absence rather than presence of men in her life. At this point of the evening, Rita proposes the marriage game.

Reassured by Rita that this is “a nice game for nice girls,” each woman chooses a friend who would make a good wife and gives reasons for her choice: Rita selects Samantha, for example, because she is “the perfect woman,” while Kate picks Carter because she is more imaginative than she is. This scene of homosocial bonding allows the women to reverse society's dictates on marriage if only temporarily, a gesture reaffirming the women's desire to stay together. The game expands Kate's previous notion of an all-women's society and encourages the women to indicate the very qualities about one another that they admire and love. While Kate is quick to denounce the game as frivolous, protesting “It was all hypothetical” (42) when Carter discovers Kate's choice to marry her, this game goes beyond mere play by demonstrating the possibility at least of choosing a life partner of the same sex rather than unquestioningly following society's view of marriage as strictly a heterosexual union. Arguing precisely against this premise that women are innately heterosexual, Adrienne Rich demonstrates in her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” how this belief ultimately undermines or harms any kind of female support of one another or any kind of female relationship as lesser value than marital union to a man. These women use their “game” to weaken the institution of heterosexual construction of marriage and to grant them a greater appreciation of their own intimacy; as Susan Carlson notes, “Its direct substitutions of female-female marriage for the traditional male-female kind must be read as a challenge to a world and comedy that expect otherwise” (570).

As Shakespeare completes his comic dramas with multiple marriages and a dance, Wasserstein uses the dance as a means of unifying this group of women. Rita, moving the women's game back to a “safe” heterosexual level by announcing that they should celebrate the fact “that none of our marriage proposals have been reciprocated” (41), suggests that they dance—the typical comic convention of a society righting itself. However, this dance subverts the usual convention. Dance, as an activity rooted in the body, has traditionally conveyed heterosexual union in performance, from ballets to ballroom dances, to Hollywood musicals, to folk dances. Wasserstein adopts this classical idiom and reverses it to show these women physically enjoying one another's presence and bodies; they compliment Kate on her dancing and encourage Samantha's grotesque imitation of her fiancé's dance moves. The marriage game, coming at a culminating moment at the end of act 1, represents a lesbian continuum in Rich's sense of the word, not necessarily sexual intimacy, but rather as a woman-identified experience—any form of intense and intimate relationships among women. The placement of this dance at the end of act 1 rather than at the end of the play as in traditional dramas can be read several ways. Susan Carlson sees this placement as indicative of Wasserstein's avoidance of comedy's easy endings; knowing that the play could not realistically end with a glib gesture of a dance, “she indulged her dreams and her characters' dreams of togetherness in this wish-fulfilling pseudo-ending” of act 1 (570). However, I read this dance as one of many signifying moments of union that occur throughout the play, such as the circular grouping in the restaurant or the group hug at the play's end. This dance permeates the drama's structure; rather than the traditional unifying gesture at the play's end as a goal to be reached, the placement of dance suggests that the group's sense of togetherness is a constant force. Just this one scene introduces three female spaces in three different representational modes: the narrated suggestion of Kate's all-women community, the dramatized proposals of marriage, and the communal dance which usurps a heterosexual ritual and challenges it. This dance represents feminism powerfully and immediately, more so than any theory would; Kate invokes Germaine Greer's name, in fact, asking, “Do you think Germaine Greet remembers the night she danced with her best friends in a women's dormitory at Cambridge?” to which Rita responds, “No. She was probably into dating and makeup” (41), dismissing theory in favor of female friendship.

Thus the holiday moment of the collective flashback allows the women to move back in time to a place where they played with possibilities of identity and of visions for their world, freeing them from the constrained attitudes of their adult lives. The audience, witnessing their lives at college, is privy to how this space of potentialities shaped their adult identities as independent and “uncommon” women. Wasserstein does not rely merely on comedy's structure, however, to explore feminist issues; she utilizes specific, comic character types that possess certain functions within the comic tradition, chiefly the Lord of Misrule, the scapegoat, and the benevolent grandfather.

COMIC CHARACTERS

Comedy, known primarily for its extravagant characters that are exaggerations of human idiosyncrasies and foibles, provokes our laughter as we perceive ourselves or others in the mimicry, as in the case of Molière's Tartuffe or Shakespeare's Falstaff. These caricatures appear in Uncommon Women in the guise of Susie Friend and Carter. “Susie Friend was a device,” Wasserstein explains. “If you see Uncommon Women as a spectrum of women: on one end, there's Susie Friend, and on the other, there's Carter, the intellectual. … Lots of women I know have grown up with Susie Friends. Now that's a woman's story! There have always been these little organizers in women's colleges. Of course, now they're organizing banks!” (Interview 1987, 422-3). She uses these two women as shorthand devices for stock character types with whom women can readily identify from their own experiences, as figures who represent certain distinctive traits—the officious, ingratiating organizer, or the ethereal, eccentric intellectual—and who add a comic and realistic texture to the play. But in addition to these rapidly drawn Stereotypes, Wasserstein uses characters typical to comedy, characters not defined by their personalities but rather by their function in advancing the comic plot. Frye discusses “typical characters of comedy” in his essay “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy,” but he is quick to stipulate that he does not intend “to reduce lifelike characters to stock types.” Rather he explains that characterization depends on what function the character fulfills within the comic plot, either by acting as an obstacle to the protagonist's happiness or providing the solution to a problem. He therefore defines the scapegoat and the benevolent grandfather figures by their purpose within the comic structure. He mentions the scapegoat in his discussion of comedy's scenario: “Comedy often includes a scapegoat ritual of expulsion which gets rid of some irreconcilable character” (165), while the grandfather is a type of eiron figure, or self-deprecator.³

The Lord of Misrule is the person chosen in medieval carnival practice to lead the festivities and incite the rebellious behavior. Rita, described in the list of characters as having walked with the Yale Crew Team through the Yale Cross Campus Library wearing cowbells on her dress, serves as the primum mobile of mischief for this group of women. She stirs up unknown emotions and reveals the unexpected, ultimately forcing her friends to view their world differently. Paying more than lip service to feminist ideas, she applies the theories pragmatically. She informs Leilah and Holly that the “entire society is based on cocks,” citing the New York Times, Walter Cronkite, and shopping malls as examples, concluding that the reason she feels alienated is “'cause I came into the world without a penis” (34). Not only has she has made Rorschach tests with her menstrual blood to summon back the ghost of Edvard Munch, but she also announces to her friends in one scene that she has tasted her own menstrual blood because Germaine Greer has designated this “the test of the truly liberated woman” (37). She derides authority and tells the new student Carter that their housemother, Mrs. Plumm, has syphilis. As the instigator of disobedience and the spirit of chaos incarnate, Rita alternatively shocks and delights her friends as she invites them to join her in her exuberant overthrow of sexual limitations. Thriving on smutty comments and bawdy topics, Rita leads the women into conversations that are sexual in nature, requesting they discuss such topics as masturbation. Smut is usually the domain of men, as Sigmund Freud notes in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. He writes that “smut was originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction” (97) because it forces the listener to imagine the particular body part mentioned and to become sexually aroused as a consequence. Thus Rita, reveling in a locker-room discourse usually identified with men, claims power by reversing the gender identification associated with bawdy humor. The joke is now on those members in the audience who believe women to be demure creatures hesitant to make ribald comments, let alone think about sex.

In one of the first scenes in which Rita appears, she stands up in front of the group to do a lewd impersonation of Susie Friend, the exasperating super-achiever:

Hi, I'm Susie Friend. I love finger sandwiches, Earl Grey, and Cambridge. I'm a psychology major, head of freshmen in North Stimson Hall, and I wax my legs. I'd let a Harvard man, especially from the business school or law school, violate my body for three hours; Princeton, for two hours and fifty minutes, because you have to take a bus and a train to get there; Yale, for two hours and forty-five minutes, because my dad went there and it makes me feel guilty; Dartmouth, for two hours and thirty minutes because it takes them time to warm up; Columbia, I just don't know, because of the radical politics and the neighborhood. I learned that in psychology. Now, if I could have a Wellesley girl, or Mrs. Plumm, that would be different.

(20)

Through this preposterous litany, Rita not only mocks Susie Friend's time-management attitude towards sexual intercourse, but she also derides the Ivy League for its long history of excluding women.⁴ Rita's list of Ivy League colleges with Susie Friend's supposed sexual responses reveals the hypocrisy of a system which deems only men educated at prestigious, Ivy League schools as worthy of marriage, a system which perpetuates a snobbery among the educated elite of this country and implicates the women, such as Susie Friend, in this attitude as well. More importantly, through this monologue cum stand-up routine, Rita creates an audience about her and brings the women together through the act of watching and listening to her. For as much as clowning figures disrupt the social order, they also unite disparate individuals. Remarking on their ability to create and guide an audience in Hopi Clay, Hopi Ceremony, Seymour Koenig attests to clowns' ability to “constantly work to include, interest, and amuse the spectators” (quoted in Babcock 120). Rita's impulse to draw attention to herself creates a focal point around which the group of women congregates and coalesces.

Rita's sense of jest enables her to retain her individuality and belief in her capabilities, and she provides a role model for her friends. She describes an interview with a publishing house in New York to edit beauty hints for women. At the end of a “delightful” interview, when asked by her “delighted” interviewer whether she had experience with a Xerox machine, Rita snappily responded, “Yes. And I've tasted my menstrual blood” (60), clearly ruining the interview but showing her remarkable spirit and rebellious attitude towards a regimented world. Taking her lead from Germaine Greer, albeit out of context, she voices a fundamental belief of feminism, not that a woman should not take a secretarial position, but that she should not live “down” to expectations—no matter whose. But more than a feminist stance, her laughter frees her from the oppressive forces working to quell her individuality. Nancy Wilson Ross, in The World of Zen, quotes a Zen student saying “When we laugh we are free of all the oppression of our personality, or that of others” (quoted in Babcock 116), justifying the gesture which underlies Rita's dalliance with authority.

On the other side from this iconoclastic “Lord of Misrule” stands the scapegoat figure, the character who prevents everyone's fun and who must be eliminated. Kate and Leilah's competition with one another demonstrates another way in which women relate, although not necessarily a positive one. Kate's best friend for the first three years of college, Leilah has recently grown distant from Kate, does not appear at tea, and spends all her time in her room. She avoids Kate because Kate's successes diminish her own sense of self-worth. Instead she hovers at the periphery of the circle of women as a dark, shadowy character who is unable to join in the festivities. Wasserstein touches on the forbidden topic of female competition since competition's emphasis on power and domination flies in the face of sisterhood and solidarity and is ultimately “a way of measuring accomplishment that is utterly patriarchal in its conception” (Rosenblum 175). Competition implies that one person's success means another's failure, which is a belief antithetical of feminism's tenets of collaboration and nurturance of one another's goals. Furthermore, because women have traditionally competed for men, one would suppose in an all-women's environment this competition would disappear, and yet the male judgmental eye is closer than would be expected; Muffet tries to reassure Leilah of her worth by quoting her boyfriend: “Pink Pants says you're prettier than Katie” (49). Leilah's father, too, congratulates Leilah on her choice of Kate as a friend, which encourages Leilah's desire to be like Kate in order to please her father. Likewise, an academic setting based on a patriarchal system of awards and acceptance to graduate schools instills in these women the competitive drive associated with male behavior, encouraging them to compare themselves to others in order to increase their own sense of worth; as Kate reassuringly tells Leilah: “Just think, you could be Muffet, or Samantha, or, God forbid, Rita. What are they going to do with their lives? At least you and I aren't limited” (31).

Wasserstein, with unflinching honesty, explores their friendship by examining how the patriarchal gaze disrupts and threatens same-sex relationships. Leilah's sense of inferiority begins on their trip to Greece when their two male companions fall in love with Kate, and continues as the philosophy department selects Kate for Phi Beta Kappa but not her. She candidly reveals to Muffet how she feels about Kate:

Sometimes when I'm in the library studying, I look up and count me Katies and the Leilahs. They're always together. And they seem a very similar species. But if you observe a while longer, the Katies seem kind of magical, and the Leilahs are highly competent. And they're usually such good friends—really the best. But I find myself secretly hoping that when we leave here, Katie and I will just naturally stop speaking. There's just something … Begins to cry. It's not Katie's fault! Sometimes I wonder if it's normal for one twenty-year-old woman to be so constantly aware of another woman.

(49)

The two have grown so close in their friendship that they are even viewed as a pair by others, like the other “Katies and Leilahs” she sees in the library, causing Leilah to view herself not as a separate entity but always in relation to Kate, because of the comparison that she believes occurs when others see the two of them; “I just want to get out of here so I'm not with people who know me in terms of her,” she remarks (49). Her last line, “Sometimes I wonder if it's normal for one twenty-year-old woman to be so constantly aware of another woman” (49), hints at a homoerotic desire for Katie, suggesting a kind of prior intimacy between the two women that occurs in a lesbian-identified relationship. Leilah's description of her friendship with Katie as “always together” and “very similar species” indicates a union or a sense of oneness between people that is usually associated with a sexual relationship. In her essay “The Shattering of an Illusion: The Problem of Competition in Lesbian Relationships” (1985), Joyce P. Lindenbaun examines the particular nature of competitiveness within lesbian relationships, which can be applied to Kate and Leilah's friendship. Lindenbaun draws on Nancy Chodorow's premise that sexual relationships between women reproduce the primal intimacy between mother and daughter. Lindenbaun discovered in her psychiatric work that lesbian couples who are initially attracted to one another by the very qualities they would each like to exhibit actually imagine they possess these qualities during the illusionary phase of merging. However, Leilah's realization that Kate possesses talents she does not have—achieving Phi Beta Kappa, attracting the men in Greece—makes her experience a “felt difference” between the two of them which causes “a deep sense of abandonment and, depending on the pathological extent of the merger, a perceived loss of self” (Lindenbaun 200)—the very loss of self that Leilah experiences in relation to Kate.⁵ Whether we read the relationship as repressed homoeroticism or not, the situation attests to the competitive force driving these women apart initiated by the patriarchal gaze, one that disturbs the same-sex community these women have formed.

As the malcontent figure who troubles the consciousness of this group of women, Leilah presents a dark tone to the festive atmosphere. Susie remarks to Kate, “I notice your nice friend Leilah never comes to dinner anymore” (19). Wasserstein resolves the problem through the use of a character device typically associated with comedy: scapegoating. Comedy naturally inclines toward inclusion of as many people as possible in the final grouping: “[T]he blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated. Comedy often includes a scapegoat ritual of expulsion which gets rid of some irreconcilable character, but exposure and disgrace make for pathos, or even tragedy” (Frye 165). Wasserstein does not reconcile Kate and Leilah; to reconcile them would only diminish the poignancy of Leilah's distress and undermine the original intensity of their friendship. Instead, Wasserstein makes Leilah the scapegoat figure, not through any group act of exclusion, but rather by having her ostracize herself from her group of friends and book a flight to Iraq the day after graduation. Not only does she not join the women at their reunion in the restaurant, but she has married an Iraqi journalist-archeologist, given up her citizenship, and converted to Islam (68). Leilah's act of removing herself from a liberated society full of opportunities for women to one of complete repression hints of self-immolation, as she struggles to escape from Kate and the competitive society by selecting a culture far removed from choices and opportunities and the inevitable judgmental system that results. Using Leilah as a dark, gloomy feature on the periphery of this close group of women allows Wasserstein to acknowledge the malevolence often underlying female friendships and also to retain a comic ending through the ritual of “scapegoating” a character.⁶

Lastly, Frye's figure of the benevolent grandfather “who overrules the action set up by the blocking humor and so links the first and third pans” (171) and “begins the action of the play by withdrawing from it, and ends the play by returning” (174) bears a resemblance to Mrs. Plumm, the loving and slightly eccentric college housemother of the women. Frye depicts a figure who is present at the initial stage of society before the status quo is disturbed, who observes the Saturnalian society that comes into being, and then aids the leading characters to solve their problems so that the stable, harmonious world moves back into place. Mrs. Plumm, though not physically present at the restaurant at the play's beginning, is called into being by the collective memory of the women and, as she recites a poem by Emily Dickinson (an early student at the college), provides a conduit for the characters to move back into their past lives. She resides quietly among them as a chaperone, giving advice, serving tea and sherry, and listening to their plans. Mrs. Plumm is also a contradictory figure for she represents a previous generation's values and reminds them of the traditional behavior for women even while she encourages their liberated career choices. For example, she admonishes Holly to take her feet off the furniture and to wear skirts to tea so their house does not develop a “reputation” (18) and she encourages Gracious Living, a regular event at which women elegantly dine by candlelight, in order to perpetuate good manners and hostess skills. But even while she affirms traditional proper behavior for women, she constantly talks about her dear friend Dr. Ada Grudder who organized a theater at the Christian Medical College in Nagpur, India. She speaks fondly of their friendship as bird-watching enthusiasts while at college together, and of how they bought rifles, set up a firing-range, and re-enacted the Franco-Prussian War. Mrs. Plumm exhibits the traits that the college was founded upon: she maintains traditions that foster community among women and exemplifies a pioneering spirit as she leaves the women to travel to Bolivia for its “ornithological variety” (67). Mrs. Plumm provides the balance between two periods, the figure who conveys the traditional wisdom of experience yet who still points out alternative directions. True to her role as benevolent grandmother, she serves the graduation tea at the end of the play, supporting each woman's choice of plans after graduation, and leading the women from the holiday moment back to the present, returning them to the everyday world. Not only is her function intrinsic to the comic plot, but her quirky spirit and kindliness permeate the comedy; we laugh at her because she reminds us of an antiquated grandmother, but we admire her pluck and her optimistic belief in the young women. This indefinable mixture of eccentricity and promise—the Life Force according to George Bernard Shaw—moves us the most in the world of comedy and consists of the belief that even against great odds the characters will triumph. Wasserstein, without resolving the feminist issues she raises, uses the spirit of comedy to reassure us of her characters' flexibility and tenacity in a changing world.

SPIRIT OF COMEDY

The action of comedy, as Frye notes, is one of surmounting obstacles placed in the hero's way, usually by a domineering father who sets certain laws, while the tone of comedy is subversive, propelled and conditioned by a desire to break them. The rules in this play are not set by the parents but rather by the patriarchy, Rita's entire “society based on cocks” (34), and the subversive force these women wield comes from their new-found wisdom in feminism, from role models such as Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, and Rosie the Riveter, as well as from their own wit and sense of humor for which they applaud one another.⁷ But the women in this play face two central obstacles: first, the prominence of men, and second, the need to define new roles for themselves.

The influence of patriarchal rules and the prioritization of men in this environment seems a curious obstacle considering that the play occurs in an all-women's college, but Wasserstein presents female characters who have been made to view their lives with respect to male counterparts. Men, though physically absent from the play, infiltrate this world as the ‘male long-distance callers’ who periodically interrupt conversations, or in the guise of Professor Chip Knowles, whose book on female sexuality prescribes their knowledge of their own bodies, or during the Father-Daughter Weekend festivities that raise some innuendoes (“Hi, Daddy!” Samantha yells exuberantly to the “fathers” seated in the audience. “Hi, Mr. Stewart,” Rita follows, with a wink [45]). Even though these women are in a private environment separated from the masculine world, the male gaze penetrates this space, and as much as an all-women's education prioritizes the experience of women in their private domain, it is ultimately defined by the absence of men. Holly voices this prioritization of men most specifically when she talks about her friends on the telephone to Dr. Mark Silverstein: “Sometimes I think I'm happiest walking with my best. Katie always says she's my best, … Often I think I want a date or a relationship to be over so I can talk about it to Kate or Rita. I guess women are just not as scary as men and therefore they don't count as much” (63). She instantly recants, but it remains an honest statement of how female relationships are valued. Because Holly has experienced such easy intimacy among her female friends, she assumes that intimacy between women cannot be worth as much as with men. Yet comedy provides a means for these characters to cleverly diminish the importance of men and to validate their own sex in turn.

The song these women sing at the Father-Daughter Tea offers a prime example of the kinds of mixed messages the women receive. This song, handed down by generation upon generation of Mount Holyoke women, reinforces certain beliefs of gender relations and expectations of women. The song “We're Saving Ourselves for Yale” amusingly relates tales of women who hold onto their virginity long enough to catch a Yale graduate to marry. That this song is performed in front of a crowd of fathers reinforces the economic system of marriage as the daughters “promise” their fathers not to let themselves be sold off “cheaply” but to “hold out” for the Ivy league man:

For thirty years and then some
We've been showing men some
Tricks that make their motors fail.
And though we've all had our squeezes
From lots of Ph.D.ses
We're saving ourselves for Yale.

(45)

After the song ends, Mrs. Plumm gives her curiously mixed story about her strong friendship with Ada Grudder and her marriage to Hoyt Plumm, relating how she was the “dutiful daughter” and married at her father's wishes. As the benevolent grandmother figure, she relates her past predicament and decision to these women in her care, emphasizing the significance of her relationship with a woman as well as the importance of obeying her father. She implies that even though they continue the College's father-daughter traditions, their world offers them different choices than hers did. And these college seniors have certainly found ways of undercutting the song's meaning. Their subversive interventions, such as Rita's whispered “These women should have been in therapy,” or Carter's ironic pronouncement at the end of the song, “I knew we had a purpose,” both serve to illustrate their parodic treatment of the song's beliefs. As their individual spoken voices rise in counterpuntal opposition to the harmonious singing voices, they acknowledge the message society perpetuates and alter this message to their own liking.

As this scene clearly demonstrates, even while the women are urged to pursue “uncommon” careers after college, the traditional choice of marriage still resounds clearly within the halls of the college, especially when one of the women, Samantha, announces that she is getting married. Her friends, disappointed and jealous, do not know how to react; as Carlson mentions, “The others envy her not because she can so easily choose an established role, but because she can fit into it: they could not” (570). More importantly, her marriage is an outside threat to their community; it reminds them that they will no longer have the security and intimacy of their female world after graduation.

Rita attempts to dispel her anxiety over losing Samantha through a typical comic gesture of mimicry. She approaches Samantha in her room after the announcement, impersonating a man in a denim jacket and cap, and says, “Hey, man, wanna go out and cruise for pussy?” (52). Since language is the means by which we create a particular reality, especially in the theater, Rita's adoption of masculine-identified language modifies the reality of the situation; she interpolates Samantha as male and demands that Samantha acknowledge her as a man in turn—a man desirous of female bodies. Samantha catches on to the game but avoids the heavily sexual topics that Rita encourages; Samantha prefers being “the corporate type” she says, and suggests going out “to buy Lacoste shirts and the State of Maine,” (52) but Rita brings the conversation back to aggressive sexual baiting. She picks up a bag of nuts and says, “Nice nuts you got there” and “I'll give you a vasectomy if you give me one” (53).

While the imitation of men introduces a comic convention into the play, it also indicates the cause of Rita's anxiety. On one level, mimicry provides a person with the means of mastering that which frightens her; behavioral theory argues that people tend to imitate and mock those forces that disturb them the most, and that deeply rooted fears are at the basis of such imitations. Thus Rita's play-acting a man and encouraging Samantha to do the same is ultimately an indication of Rita's anxiety over Samantha's choice to marry and be in an intimate relationship with a man. Rita, as noted earlier, is sexually involved with a gay man and constantly defines her “ideal husband” as Leonard Woolf because he allowed his wife the creative freedom to write. She fears being stifled by a man in a relationship and is distressed by Samantha's choice to marry. However, following this analogy, if Rita identifies with Virginia Woolf, she would also have the freedom to love other women—a desire which can be inferred from the aggressive nature of her behavior in this scene. When Samantha becomes anxious and threatens to leave the room, Rita drops her masculine role to tell Samantha how much she admires her and that she wants to be her because she is the “ideal woman.” In light of Rita's earlier choice to marry Samantha during the marriage game, this statement hints at Rita's desire of intimacy from Samantha and her fear of losing her. Thus Rita's wish to engage her in sexual dialogue, the slight punches on the arm, and the manner in which Rita grabs Samantha from behind and wrestles her momentarily all touch on the homoerotic undertones of this scene.⁸ Only through her initial comic impersonation is Rita able to create a space where she can convey her affection towards Samantha (“I do want to be you” [54]) and express to Samantha her sense of loss. Samantha, responding to Rita's fears at some level, spontaneously creates a poem about Rita, in which she expresses her fondness and diffuses her anxiety over her own abandonment of their all-female world. With her poem, she moves Rita from the masculine role of aggressor, one who “talks of cocks and Aries blocks,” back to the stereotypical notion of femininity as charming and kind, “I know secretly she's very sweeta” (55), diffusing her worries as well as her sexual aggression.

The spirit of comedy, as Susanne Langer points out, comes from the behavior of the individual facing obstacles and adopting to change in a tumultuous world (68-69). It is the energy to rise above malignant forces and the resiliency to accept change without losing a sense of identity. Rita, in the preceding example, adjusts to her friend's marriage by asking for reassurance of their intimacy. On a larger scale, however, all of these women must face the overwhelming vertigo of defining themselves within a society in flux as the roles for women shift from traditional homemaker to pioneer, where fulfilling expectations means not only being successful, wealthy, and married with children but being exceptional and “uncommon.” These demanding ideals penetrate their consciousness through the male voice-over which initiates each vignette. This voice—supposedly the college bulletin being read aloud—intones the benefits of an all-women's education, setting the tone for each of these scenes and delineating the function of an all-women's college.⁹ He mentions that the College contributes to society women “whose intellectual quality is high, and whose responsibility to others is exceptional.” The hyperbolic adjectives he uses denote the pressures that these women face as professionals, wives, and mothers, but he still promises that they are prepared to meet any and all challenges “without loss of gaiety, charm, or femininity” (7). This disembodied voice seems superior and distant from the action, as he acknowledges that educated women sometimes fail to view themselves as successes because their talents are so diffuse, but he encouragingly and ingratiatingly concludes, “Just like the pot of honey that kept renewing itself, an educated woman's capacity for giving is not exhausted, but stimulated, by demands” (23). The convention of the voice-over suggests that the women do not hear the voice, but rather have absorbed its message through other means, as when Muffet reads the course catalogue out loud to herself in scene 4. However, these women challenge the voice through their actions as each scene grows more and more mocking and their very actions eschew his directives.

Carter provides one of the first examples of this defiance in scene 5, where she ironically mimes modern dance movements to the Man's Voice. He intones how Mary Lyon commanded her early students to “Go where no one else will go. Do what no one else will do” (27) and relates how these 25,000 alumnae blazed new trails for women in different professions, fields, and different parts of the world. While Carter originally begins by physically parodying the voice's directions, “marching” along with the “pioneers,” the impressive litany of women's accomplishments ultimately frustrates her with its high expectations of the College's young women.¹⁰ Carter, as a freshman, is new to this atmosphere of high achievement and tries to mock the demands that the “Voice” has decreed, but sits down at the end, exhausted. The older group of students, however, fares better.

These upper-class women have internalized the voice to some extent, but their communal activities show their ability to follow their internal voices and support one another's choices. At the beginning of act 2, scene 2, the Man's Voice boasts that “employers of graduates of the college seem to be looking for a readiness to work hard at learning unfamiliar techniques” (47), but the onstage action shows Muffet “putting on makeup” (47). The oxymoronic juxtaposition between women's ability to learn unfamiliar skills and the sight of Muffet performing a highly iconic gesture of femininity is comic. More than a slight at women's cosmetic predilection, however, this action serves as a direct refusal to acquiesce to the male authorial voice. Further, the private act of putting on makeup denotes a relaxed space in which Muffet and Leilah can interact intimately in a way that most women cannot in a public sphere. The scene immediately following again satirizes the Man's Voice; as he extols a liberal arts education for exposing students to “a wide range of opportunities—that is to say, uncertainties” (50), the lights reveal the group of women attacking large jars of peanut butter and spreading the Fluff on crackers with great gusto. Finally, in scene 6, the male voice insists that “The college places at its center the content of human learning and the spirit of systematic disinterested inquiry” (57). The scene focuses on the women's debate over whether or not they have experienced penis envy, which is admittedly a method of inquiry, but neither disinterested, when it becomes a personal question, nor systematic, when Holly's reply is “I remember having tonsillitis” (57). Again, the questions are of their own choosing, the topics of their own design, and their personal lives and values lie at the center of their conversations.

By the play's end the Man's Voice is superseded by a Woman's Voice who admits that women still have not attained all the goals and recognition they have hoped for because “society has trained women from childhood to accept a limited set of options and restricted levels of aspirations” (68). Her voice does not blithely depict the road for female pioneers as a surmountable and an exciting challenge, as he has, but demonstrates an awareness of the fears that women face. This reasonable voice leads the women back to the present moment in the restaurant, where they admit their worries of being judged by one another about their chosen career paths. Their insecurity and uncertainty comes across clearly, but what sustains them and blesses them at the end of the play is their ability to share this uncertainty through their laughter. Rita closes the play with a phrase she has been repeating throughout the play, “When we're thirty [or thirty-five, or forty] we're going to be amazing”—a comic device which Wasserstein borrows from Chekhov's Three Sisters (Interview 1996, 382)¹¹ in which the sisters always imagine they will return to Moscow some day. The phrase is funny in its unincremental repetition¹² but we also laugh at Rita and with her—at her ability to adjust the deadline to accommodate for their current circumstances and with her steadfast belief in their uncommon talents.

The spirit of comedy comes as much from the performance as from the script—the lewd faces, the accompanying ironic gestures to the songs, the communal dance ending act 1, and Rita's impersonation of Susie Friend. Wasserstein describes this sensation that occurred during the rehearsals for Uncommon Women: “There was something special between the actresses and me. I can remember being in the dressing room with Swoosie Kurtz and Jill Eikenberry and Alma Cuervo, and Anna Levine, Glenn Close, and Ellen Parker and there was the sense of embracing, a sense of all starting out together … again, that feeling of community. And I would say I feel it more at the laughter than at the applause” (Interview 1987, 429). She speaks here of the indefinable quality of renewal that comes not only from a successful opening performance but rather from the collaborative efforts of these women and the laughter that echoes this communal spirit. For comedy, as Langer reminds us, more than offering solutions to a predicament, heightens the vital feeling: “The conflict with the world whereby a living being maintains its own complex organic unity is a delightful encounter” (82). As spectators we have a secure emotional realization that the uncommon women before us will continue to strive and grow because of their laughter and wit. “Laughing at something is the first sign of a higher psychic life,” Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, and Wasserstein fully relies on this sense of the comic spirit to draw the spectators into the triumphs of her characters in performance. “The comedy itself is a spirit,” she remarks. “It's not an application form, a resumé, it's life. This life spirit creates a current, a buoyancy which, getting back to drama, is very important. It's important to reach the essence of that spirit in what you create” (Interview 1987, 421).

Notes

1. It seems Wasserstein wanted to create an unreal world by the play's complete lack of any references to contemporary politics. For instance, she remarks how originally the play had some pieces in it which were highly political, such as Susie Friend's organizing a strike for Mark Rudd when he came to visit Mount Holyoke College, but she eliminated these scenes because she was concerned that this would open up discussions on the Vietnam War rather than permitting the women's voices to be heard (Interview 1987, 426).

2. I am borrowing Wylie Sypher's term of the “Lord of Misrule” from his essay “The Meanings of Comedy.”

3. The other characters being the alazon (impostor), buffoon, and churl (172).

4. Princeton and Yale admitted women in 1969, Amherst admitted them in 1976, and Columbia held out until 1983, partly due to Barnard College's association with the school.

5. I thank Professor Gayle Austin of Georgia State University for pointing out the book Competition: A Feminist Taboo? as well as for suggesting that the relationship between Kate and Leilah could be read as repressed homoerotic desire.

6. For the 1994 revival of Uncommon Women and Others at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York, Wasserstein updated the ending, changing Leilah's outcome from a “subjugated Iraqi wife” to an Oxford don (Feingold 97), a choice that weakens the scapegoating device.

7. Wasserstein prioritizes humor from the very start of the play. Her opening descriptions of each character illustrate this, from Kate who “always walks with direction … [so] it's fun to make her stop and laugh” (4), to Samantha, “a closet wit, or she wouldn't have made the friends she did in college” (5), to Holly Kaplan, the figure who most resembles Wasserstein and who uses her wit on those people who intimidate her (5).

8. The staging of these gestures occurred in Theater Emory's production of Uncommon Women and Others in October 1996, directed by Rosemary Newcott. In the filmed version of the play televised for PBS Great Performances Series in May, 1978, this scene takes place in the women's locker room where Rita makes lewd gestures at women changing their clothes while Samantha joins her antics. The homoerotic tension is decidedly nonexistent; Rita appears more distressed about not being an “ideal” women like Samantha, who chooses to marry and fulfill her role as wife.

9. While the identity of the voice is never specified, the copyright credits show that Wasserstein took these clips from the Mount Holyoke College Bulletin 1966/67, and from Richard Glenn Gettell's inaugural address as president of Mount Holyoke College in 1957.

10. The backdrop for Theater Emory's 1996 production showed faces of famous women staring out at the audience and staring down on these young women, both inspiring them as their role models and beckoning them not to let down the cause of sisterhood.

11. Wasserstein sees Chekhov as having influenced her work, in this line especially, but also in the ways she is fascinated by examining “moments in people's lives when they could turn to the right or turn to the left, or why they don't turn at all” (Interview 1996, 382).

12. Northrop Frye discusses this “principle of unicremental repetition” in his essay, “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy.”

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———. Uncommon Women and Others. The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. 1-72.