Published: May 3, 2001
Women at Work: Creating Art
Story by Sara Piazza
What began as a weekend festival two springs ago, All Women All Weekend, and grew into a week-long event last year, All Women All Week, this year has blossomed into a month-long celebration of women in the arts. Women at Work: Creating Art, which opened last night, May 2, and will run through May 26 at the Vineyard Playhouse, under the guidance and inspiration of co-producers M.J. Bruder Munafo and Sally Cohn, promises to be a veritable feast of mostly Island and mainland women’s talent.
About 10 years ago, M.J., who has been working with Vineyard Playhouse since 1986, and has been its artistic director for the past seven years, had the idea of doing a women’s festival that would incorporate dance, theater, music, and poetry. “I applied for a grant, and they wrote back to me and said, ‘there’s too many disciplines involved, your application is disqualified.’ So I shelved it. I thought we needed money at the time, but now I find you just have to do things and then get the money. If you have an idea, don’t let financial restrictions hold you back.”
Nothing seems to be holding M.J. and Sally back from having created this extravaganza that will feature, in the first two weeks alone, the music of Gabriella Camilleri, Corinne de Langavant, Helen Stratford, Niki Patton, Jemima James, and Madeline and Sebastian Baverstam; the poetry of Ingrid Goff-Maidoff and Kathryn Leonard Peck; dance by Vineyard Dance, Abigail Bailey, and Ena Liv Thulin; readings by Deborah Medwin, Laura Roosevelt, Jennifer Brown Baverstam, and Nancy Slonim Aronie; a monologue by Glenna Moore; an evening of storytelling with Susan Klein; and performances by special guest artists the Estro Tribe and Patti Dobrowolski and Nancy Cranbourne, who perform “Two Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization: A Hormonal Cabaret.”
“This all started two years ago,” explains M.J. in a downstairs office overflowing with chairs and boxes. Next door, in the main room, Janet Woodcock and Sally are hanging photographs. Jamie Alley is moving chairs. Upstairs Jenik Munafo and Pam Benjamin are painting the floor of the set. Amy Cohn is in and out of the office, running errands and making copies. “We thought we’d have a little pilot program, I called it All Women All Weekend, and we did two nights of mixed evenings with all local performers and an art show downstairs. There was something so special and so electric about it. But it was very unwieldy; it went on for three hours. We were trying to accommodate everybody. It was a big mess, but a wonderful mess. Last year we thought we’d let it grow and it would be four nights, which would allow twice the amount of women to participate, but it was still messy and unwieldy and we still had three-hour nights because we were trying to include so many people. So it seemed, instantly, from the time we started it until now, that it just burst at the seams.
“What’s different this year is we have these visiting guest artists. Previously it was mostly local women, and women who have ties to the Vineyard. We found the Estro Tribe because my husband, Paul, was at his uncle’s funeral and he met his second cousin who said, ‘My girlfriend is a singer and we’re part of this feminist group.’ He said, ‘Okay, talk to M.J.,’ and they did. They’re great, a special event next week.”
Patti and Nancy, the two women of “Two Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization,” found their way to the playhouse after Nancy and her husband were visiting the Island last September. “My husband said, ‘you should check out the little theater,’ and I walked in and saw Sally, who was really friendly, and she said I should send in a script. I did and they loved it.”
“Two Women,” which won the Denver Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play in 1999, bills itself as “A hilarious two-women send up of the culture of women’s retreats! Two women, a dozen characters and an audience laughing so hard they walk out holding their aching stomachs “
Patti and Nancy have been working on this show, which they wrote together, for about five years. They are high energy, animated, and very funny.
“Our show addresses a lot of women’s issues and is very funny,” begins Patti in an interview this week with the two women. Nancy adds, “We go to a women’s retreat called Sandy Pines, a retreat for perimenopausal women. My character thinks it’s going to be a spa – an Aruba kind of experience – and it turns out to be a nightmare. It’s rustic, the food is terrible. It’s like a tough love camp and it costs $1500 to go, and you know, I’m thinking, hot tubs and facials, all of that kind of stuff. Patti plays a woman who’s struggling with infertility.
Patty: “I also play a facilitator, Dr. Diana Doramus, author of ‘Mood Swing, Mood Swung,’ and I play a woman from Texas; she has kids and she’s into beauty.”
Nancy: “She thinks she’s coming to be rejuvenated. There are lots of little stories within the main story. I play Jane, a jilted gay woman, and Liddie Madrigal, who gives a lecture on the beauty of fat. We do it all through gestures and physicalization. There are very few costumes. I think what the show does is directly relate to so many women’s experiences. We started writing the show and friends of ours told us about all these perimenopausal things that happened to them.”
Patti: “And then we started putting them all together. When I was living in Oakland, we were traveling back and forth from city to city, shopping and going to lunch – all these things that women do – and everywhere we went people would ask about what we do, and we’d tell them we were working on a show about women and aging, and people would tell us the most amazing things that have happened to them, and some were hysterical. Like Nancy’s friend who was in the store and wanted to introduce her daughter and she couldn’t remember her daughter’s name.”
Nancy continues, “The reason it went so well everywhere we’ve gone is because these women would come and see it and they’d say, ‘I’ve got to bring my girlfriends,’ so they’d come back three or four times to see the show. The reason we love it is because that is our true audience; it’s who we are as women, a true exchange.”
Patti: “And when we come off stage and we go back and change our clothes and come out, women are hanging out, waiting to talk to us about what they experienced in the room. We knew the show was funny and good, but we had no idea what kind of impact it made, because it’s a mirror right now at the right time.”
An excerpt from “Two Women” performed on the couch of the little office provided a tiny glimpse of the energy and synchronicity of the women’s performance.
Patti, standing behind Nancy, with her hands over Nancy’s eyes, in her Texas drawl, asks, “Hi, is anyone sittin’ here?” To which Nancy’s character answers, “Oh, no, please sit right down.”
“Now you’re Marylynn, isn’t that right? Oh, I thought that was so funny ’cause I’m Maryanne.”
“Oh, thanks for reminding me. You know, people tell me their name and I forget it in the next second.”
“Oh, I know what you mean, like when I pick up my messages if I don’t write them down right away I forget who called. I wanted to go to the Addled Mind workshop, but it was canceled I think. Oh my goodness, oh my, now is it just me, or is it really hot today?”
“Well, I’m hot, but it’s not hot hot.”
“Oh, are you hot?” “Well I was warm before, but I’m much cooler now.”
“I’m hot now, just look at this moisture. But look at these hands – crinkly! Beads of sweat, but bone dry.”
“Well, God has a weird sense of humor.”
You have to see these two women, with their blonde punk hairdos and expressive faces, and experience the energy and the syncopation of this performance to truly appreciate the humor in this conversation that many of us will recognize as our own. “Two Women” runs this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, May 4, 5, and 6.
M.J. and Sally, “Women at Work” co-producers, met for the first time a few years ago when they were both asked to help out at Mary Payne’s funeral reception. Mary was the founder and former artistic director of Island Theatre Workshop until her death in 1996.
“The day I met her,” says M.J., “I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve met my match’ in terms of energy and organization. Sally is a wonderful energy, I love working with her.”
Sally, whose official titles at the playhouse are staff photographer and property master, is excited about the show and affirms, “It’s wonderful working with M.J. I love her energy. I think it’s wonderful having all of this Island energy, this women’s energy. May is a great month. Everything is new; it’s a rebirth.”
For more information about the show and for a schedule of events, call the Vineyard Playhouse at 508-696-6300, and check the Directory of Information pages of The Times. Oh, and M.J. is pleased to announce that this year all the performances will be a very manageable hour and a half long.
