‘The Town Hall Affair’ Recreates a Feminist FirestormBy ALEXIS SOLOSKIFEB. 6, 2017
Betty Friedan was there. Susan Sontag was there. Jacqueline Susann was there. So was Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick, who asked a mischievous question about Norman Mailer’s testicles.
What was this wild night? A 1971 panel at Town Hall in Manhattan, marketed as a debate on women’s liberation and moderated by Mailer, whose incendiary essay “The Prisoner of Sex” had just filled an entire issue of Harper’s Magazine.
The evening was chronicled in “Town Bloody Hall,” a 1979 documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. And it is now the inspiration for “The Town Hall Affair,” a new piece by the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage, starring Maura Tierney (“The Affair”). Rousing and infuriating, cerebral and vulgar, the original event marked a flash point in second-wave feminism. In this Women’s March moment, it seems newly resonant.
The Panel
Occurring a year after New York had legalized abortion and when equality feminism was giving way to something more revolutionary, this debate, a “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” enticed much of the New York literati. Why?
In 1970, the feminist writer Kate Millett had published an unflattering analysis of Mailer in her book “Sexual Politics,” calling him “a prisoner of the virility cult.” Mailer responded with “The Prisoner of Sex,” in which he savaged Ms. Millett, called his penis “the Retaliator” and ultimately concluded, “The prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on Earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself and conceive children who will improve the species.”
Ms. Millett refused to debate Mailer. So did Ti-Grace Atkinson and Gloria Steinem. Robin Morgan agreed, but only if she could shoot him. Finally, a panel was assembled and the event, which ran three-and-a-half hours, began. After a brief introduction by Mailer, Jacqueline Ceballos, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, gave a cogent speech discussing inequalities. The poet Gregory Corso heckled her and had to be ejected.
After a cynical question from Mailer, Germaine Greer, author of “The Female Eunuch” and a woman Life would soon call a “saucy feminist that even men like,” took the stage. Resplendent in a slinky black dress and ratty fox boa, she read a passionate speech that disparaged “the man of genius” (an implicit dig at Mailer), calling for a return of “the artist who had no ego and no name.”
Ms. Ceballos recently recalled Ms. Greer, who declined an interview request, as “her usual bored, superior, disdainful self,” and added, “But she was glamorous!”
Jill Johnston, an essayist and dance critic for The Village Voice, spoke next. Her talk, somewhere between manifesto and tone poem, began, “All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it naturally.” When she exceeded her time, Mailer tried to cut her off. Instead, two women ran up from the audience to embrace her and the three of them fell to the floor in what Mailer described as a mess of “dirty overalls.”
Finally, the literary critic Diana Trilling gave a deceptively fastidious speech that slighted both Mailer and feminist activists while staunchly defending the vaginal orgasm. The Q. and A. session followed, with questions from Friedan, Sontag and the literary critic Anatole Broyard, who asked Ms. Greer to describe women’s sexual requirements after liberation. Ms. Greer declined. “Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you,” she said.
The Film
Mailer gave Mr. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back”), who had filmed scenes for Mailer’s 1970 mockumentary, “Maidstone,” $3,000 to record the evening. But the Town Hall management did not agree, and as Mr. Pennebaker recalled, speaking by telephone from his home, he spent much of the evening dodging security, finally finding refuge onstage.
Afterward, he didn’t know how to sculpt more than three hours of often jerky footage into a coherent film. It sat on a shelf until Ms. Hegedus, now his wife, took an interest.
“For me it was fascinating,” she said, speaking on another line. “These women were some of my heroes in the women’s movement.” She tried to capture the comedy of the event, the seriousness of the arguments, and what she read as the heavy flirtation between Mailer and Ms. Greer. “It seemed like it was some kind of love affair,” she said. (She took the movie’s title from a sardonic remark by Ms. Greer.)
Not many people saw the 1979 film in its first release, though Mailer came to a screening and told Mr. Pennebaker, “This is the night that Jill Johnston turned my hair gray.” Mailer also admitted that at that time, he hadn’t properly understood the women’s movement, Mr. Pennebaker said.
For a long time, Ms. Hegedus said, she used to think of “Town Bloody Hall” as little more than a time capsule, a snapshot of a particular cultural moment. But she finds the spectacle of women arguing over their rights and their bodies newly relevant. She and Mr. Pennebaker hosted a screening in Los Angeles after the election this past November “and I was just shocked how much it resonated with people,” she said.
The Play
A few years ago, the actress Maura Tierney saw a listing for a screening of “Town Bloody Hall” at the IFC Center. She tore out the page and later wrote to Mr. Pennebaker and Ms. Hegedus, who mailed her a DVD. Finding it unexpectedly moving, Ms. Tierney gave a copy to Elizabeth LeCompte, the artistic director of the Wooster Group, with whom she has worked over the years.
Ms. LeCompte liked it, but she didn’t see a play there — until she read Johnston’s account of the panel in her collection, “Lesbian Nation.” Then Ms. LeCompte was sold. In directing “The Town Hall Affair,” a playful and occasionally abstract re-creation of the panel, interspersed with clips from “Maidstone,” she has enjoyed seeing how the panelists’ arguments “crack up against each other and explode into different realms, different places and then return again into a kind of stasis.”
The Wooster Group started working on the piece more than a year ago and it has changed as America has changed, both before and after the election. “It feels like we’re in jeopardy right now,” said Ms. Tierney, on a break from a recent afternoon rehearsal. “Quite realistically.”
The piece has engendered lively discussions in the rehearsal room, though Ms. LeCompte and Kate Valk, a longtime Wooster Group actor who plays Johnston in the piece, wanted to keep those conversations private. “They’re the subterranean root structure that we build everything on,” Ms. Valk said.
At rehearsal on a recent afternoon, a table and a lectern sat onstage, mirroring those in the movie, which streamed on screens behind the actors. While technicians worked on the video, one actor playing Mailer strummed a ukulele; another chatted with Ms. Tierney, who plays Ms. Greer. When the video was operational again, the actor Greg Mehrten stood and gave Trilling’s speech. The cast laughed at his impersonation, though laughter faded when the speech turned to talk of tyranny and a “life-diminishing culture.”
“It used to be funny,” Ms. Tierney said. “Norman Mailer says these outrageous things, outrageously disrespectful and crass things to the women on the panel. But now our president talks like that. I don’t know how it’s going to play.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Feminist Firestorm Redux. Order
www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/theater/wooster-group-town-hall-affair.htmlTheater review: Misogynists and lesbians battle at the Wooster Group’s Town Hall AffairBy Helen Shaw Posted: Friday February 10 2017, 12:02pm
When the avant-garde Wooster Group uses a source, the Elizabeth LeCompte–led ensemble usually tickles it, tortures it, splices it to other styles until it squeals. But in its latest, the swift and vivid The Town Hall Affair, the company shows a scrupulous care towards their main “text,” the 1979 Hegedus-Pennebaker documentary Town Bloody Hall. That account of a raucous 1971 Norman Mailer–led panel on feminism (his misogyny was part of the draw) appears on a monitor as the Woosters selectively reenact it, so we can compare Maura Tierney's Germaine Greer to the original and judge Greg Mehrten on his Diana Trilling. (Tierney's a touch too languid; Mehrten is deliciously droll.)
Mailer's pugnaciousness requires two vessels—Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos—who also imitate Mailer and Rip Torn in Maidstone, the 1970 film in which Torn “accidentally” walloped Mailer on the head with a hammer. (This little peek into Mailer's response to actual violence undercuts his “come at me, bro” challenges from the panel dais. We know what happens when someone comes at him—he whines.) The Wooster way is to layer and juxtapose, so the two films seem to be happening at once. Everyone is in simultaneous conflict: as the twin “Mailers” wrestle on the floor, the panelists turn viperish (“The main characteristic of an oppressed people is that they fight among themselves,” sneers Greer), and the footage of the Town Hall crowd shows it on an ever-increasing boil.
The real fight in this gigantomachia, though, is between the electric Mailer and the gentle Village Voice writer Jill Johnston (Kate Valk), who's determined to disrupt the panel proceedings. Johnston's address “Every woman is a lesbian” was beautiful for its eddying poetry and slightly blitzed humor; if you've never read Johnston before, you'll seek her out after seeing her here. Valk narrates events using the account from Johnston's biography Lesbian Nation, playing a version of the writer that's essentially Janice from the Muppets: spaced-out and dear. What we can see onscreen is much sadder. Johnston has the kind of radical vulnerability that made her too fragile for this world. “Can I finish my statement?” she asks, her smile doubtful, as Mailer barks at her for running through her time. The play then becomes a kind of wish-fulfillment, as Valk eventually escapes the panel, first drifting across the stage and then into a final, virtual presence on a large screen.
It may be Johnston's influence that converts the evening into something buoyant despite all the macho posturing. Certainly the show is a delight, a surprising leap into sweetness and reverence and nostalgia from a group known for a combative attitude to our cultural archive. Chris Hegedus's film has something of this same air. That 1971 night seems dangerous; the crowd wants blood, and you can tell D.A. Pennebaker was shooting it while running from security. But then you notice that everyone in it—Mailer, the audience, Greer at her most affronted—is always laughing. The Town Hall Affair is all-too-relevant; 45 years have passed, and the conversation about feminism is somehow still ugly. But back then, there seemed to be some relish to be found in the battle. You leave the Wooster's latest deconstruction convinced that you can always fight and laugh at the same time. Somehow after all the show's knock-out blows, you leave feeling lighter on your feet.
Performing Garage (Off Broadway). By the Wooster Group. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. With ensemble cast. 1hr 5mins. No intermission. Through March 4. Click here for full venue and ticket information.
www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/theater-review-misogynists-and-lesbians-battle-at-the-wooster-groups-town-hall-affair-021017Review: It’s Norman Mailer vs. Feminists in ‘The Town Hall Affair’THE TOWN HALL AFFAIR
BEN BRANTLEYFEB. 10, 2017
“I’m beside myself. I’m beside myself,” mutters an anxious and excited Jill Johnston at the beginning of “The Town Hall Affair,” the very timely and time-bending new mixed-media piece that’s churning up decades of sexual discontent at the Performing Garage in SoHo. Johnston (reincarnated by Kate Valk), the poetic polemicist whose works included “Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution,” sure isn’t alone in feeling that way.
This, after all, is a production from the Wooster Group, those downtown masters of deconstruction and detonation whose perspective-muddling shows have a way of expanding the view of who and where we are. And “The Town Hall Affair” — which recreates one explosive night of public debate in Manhattan in 1971 — splits some very well-known identities by means theatrical and cinematic, so a number of real-life literary figures are literally beside themselves.
Johnston, for example, who frames this witty and deeply stimulating exercise in cultural archive-diving, shows up as exactly the way she was, in film footage from “Town Bloody Hall,” the 1979 documentary by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker that inspired this show. But she has also been reincarnated in the flesh by the peerless Ms. Valk, the Wooster Group’s longtime leading lady.
In “The Town Hall Affair,” directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, this same double vision is applied to other participants in the fabled and combative “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” which was the hottest ticket in town for the New York literati of 46 years ago. There are the glamorous Australian feminist Germaine Greer and her ratty fur stole, onscreen and in person (in the form of the actress Maura Tierney), and the august essayist Diana Trilling, whose face on film looks remarkably like that of the male actor playing her onstage, Greg Mehrten.
As for Norman Mailer, the M.C. of this fraught dialogue (which was convened in response to “The Prisoner of Sex,” his pugilistic essay on feminism in Harper’s Magazine), he’s really beside himself. When the show begins, Norman Mailer is seated next to the person he most admires, Norman Mailer. He and he are portrayed by Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos. (Wouldn’t you know it would take two actors to contain all that testosterone?)
Mailer, too, is, of course, also represented onscreen but not just in the footage from the Town Hall debate. We also see him running wild (and drawing blood) in the notorious 1970 film “Maidstone,” which he directed and starred in, playing a director.
Feeling a bit confused? Well, so were the audience members for that 1971 donnybrook — er, panel discussion — which lasted three and a half hours and quickly degenerated into name-calling, catcalling and (on Johnston’s part) a make-out session with members of the audience. (“Town Hall Affair,” for the record, is a fast hour.)
Of course, the subject being tackled, the repression of women in a male-dominated society, was pretty confusing, too, since even the debaters who were ostensibly on the same side couldn’t seem to agree on much. Thank heavens this is a matter that we have since worked through, systematically and sanely.
Yeah, right.
Since its founding in 1975, the Wooster Group has taken a fracturing view of life, breaking down — and then remixing — the cultural components of the present and the past that shape our daily lives. Literary classics by old masters like Eugene O’Neill, Racine and Gertrude Stein have been regularly anatomized and reconstituted by means that include the latest in vision-shaping technology (computers, cameras, sound equipment, etc.).
With all its performances, we are asked to see how we are indeed beside ourselves, and on top of, and behind, and ahead of — engaged in inescapable dialogues both with what came before us and with who we think we are now. The troupe’s gutsy and brilliant interpretation of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” which had Ms. Valk channeling the African-American actor Paul Robeson portraying O’Neill’s idea of devolving savage manhood, became an electric consideration of American perceptions of race.
This may sound too academic for your tastes. And the (verbatim) language of the exchanges in “The Town Hall Affair” now registers as rather quaint in its free-floating, self-footnoting intellectualism.
But like most of what the Wooster Group does, this is also juicy, visceral theater, translating outlandish concepts with highly disciplined technique. The synchronicity with which the cast members say what their alter egos onscreen are saying is a jaw-dropping marvel. So is the sudden, subversive techno-layering of voices, so you’re not sure where the sound is coming from.
And for pure, mind-boggling theatrical bravura, there’s the uncanny spectacle of our two-headed Norman Mailer becoming the man he plays in “Maidstone” and the actor Rip Torn (Mr. Shepherd) from that same film. Mr. Fliakos and Mr. Shepherd proceed to enact the movie’s notorious on-camera fight, which involved a hammer and a badly bitten ear. The impression is of Mailer wrestling with himself. But everybody onstage, it seems, is truly divided and truly alone. How can we begin to understand other people, especially if their bodies aren’t anything like ours?
“The Town Hall Affair” doesn’t provide answers any more than the debate on which it’s based did. Ms. Valk’s Johnston, who began the play reading from “Lesbian Nation,” ends with a hopeful passage from the same book about rewriting the ancient myths of womanhood. But that’s not the last word with which she leaves us.
That would be a wondrous, bewildered “Aargh!”
The Town Hall Affair
•NYT Critics’ Pick
Performing Garage
33 Wooster St.
TriBeCa/SoHo
212-966-9796
thewoostergroup.org/
FIND TICKETS
Category Off Off Broadway, Play
Runtime 1 hr.
Credits Based on the film "Town Bloody Hall," directed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker; Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte.
Cast Ari Fliakos, Greg Mehrten, Erin Mullin, Scott Shepherd, Maura Tierney and Kate Valk
Opened February 4, 2017
Closing Date February 25, 2017
This information was last updated: Feb. 10, 2017
www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/theater/review-the-town-hall-affair.htmlThe Town Hall Affair: EW stage reviewMAYA STANTON
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 10, 2017 AT 8:34PM EST
The Town Hall Affair
TYPE:Stage
GENRE:Drama
RUN DATE:02/04/17-03/04/17
PERFORMER:Maura Tierney, Ari Fliakos, Scott Shepherd...
DIRECTOR:Elizabeth LeCompte
File under “history repeating itself”: As Americans take to the streets in greater numbers than ever before, they’re not alone out there — they’re standing on the shoulders of previous generations of activists. The year before Shirley Chisholm would become America’s first female presidential candidate from a major party, when second-wave feminism was in its heyday, and the concept of women’s rights as human rights was a yet-unspoken radical one, Norman Mailer wrote a poorly received — some said sexist — essay on women’s liberation for Harper’s magazine. The backlash was swift and fierce, but instead of retreating, Mailer capitalized on the attention by hosting a publicity-stunt-cum-debate with notable “lady writers” of the day. That chaotic, seminal 1971 event would later become the subject of Town Bloody Hall, a documentary by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, which would, in turn, become the basis of The Town Hall Affair, the experimental Wooster Group’s latest production, now running at the Performing Garage in New York.
In a play directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and bookended with excerpts from Jill Johnston’s 1973 essay collection Lesbian Nation, the seven-member cast re-creates scenes from the documentary as their dialogue seamlessly syncs with the film footage displayed on screens around the stage. And the sense of déjà vu is inescapable as the punchably smug moderator clashes with panel participants Johnston (downtown NYC theater doyenne Kate Valk), a stream-of-consciousness-style columnist for The Village Voice and self-proclaimed “lesberated woman”; writer Germaine Greer (The Affair’s Maura Tierney), author of The Female Eunuch and a “saucy feminist that even men like,” per that arbiter of hip, Life magazine; and renowned literary critic and elder stateswoman Diana Trilling (portrayed, with a gender flip, by Greg Mehrten).
Echoes of Mailer’s condescending responses abound today, both to Greer’s thoughts — her sentiments were exquisite, he said, but the means offered weren’t up to his standards — and to Johnston’s levels of decorum. (She caused a bit of a scandal when she made out with two women on stage, with Mailer scolding her to “Be a lady!”) Perhaps the parallels were most notable during the recent election, when another female presidential candidate ran up against a series of double standards: Required to be a lady while her opponent was less than gentlemanly, she was criticized for the manner of her delivery instead of the merits of her positions and forced to address not-so-thinly-veiled sexist questions about her health, stamina, and ability to act rationally, not emotionally.
In a year in which millions marched in protest of such attitudes, only to be told they had few complaints in comparison to the “real problems” facing women in other countries, that sense of familiarity is a stark reminder of how much gender equality work still remains.
Both on-screen and as portrayed, in alternate moments, by Wooster company members Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, Mailer is so insufferable that it’s hard to believe the term “mansplaining” wasn’t spontaneously willed into existence when he opened his mouth on the subject of feminism 45 years ago. Mehrten so thoroughly embodies the snooty Trilling you nearly forget he’s not a woman, while Valk is a tour de force as the way-out-there Johnston. (The fact that she’s a dead ringer for Kate McKinnon only lends another layer of surreality to the proceedings).
The action briefly detours from the debate for a glimpse of Mailer vanity project Maidstone, a star vehicle that he wrote and directed for himself about a celebrity who runs for president and films his experience (timely!), but to say much more about the play’s nonlinear structure and unconventional approach might give too much away. Though the subject matter is often infuriating, the performances are engaging and the presentation is fascinating. A challenging but accessible downtown theater experience, this Affair is one to remember.
ew.com/theater/2017/02/10/town-hall-affair-stage-review/In New York, Still Arguing After All These YearsFEBRUARY 10, 2017 5:13 PMby LYNN YAEGER
Maura Tierney, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos, and Kate Valk Photo: Paula Court
April 30, 1971: In Washington, D.C., Richard Nixon is secretly taping conversations in the White House. Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” is at the top of the charts. And at Town Hall in Manhattan, an extraordinary debate, later billed as “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” with Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, Jacqueline Ceballos, and Jill Johnston,” is taking place. Mailer, perhaps an almost cartoon version of a condescending male chauvinist and the then-recent author of the polemical
The Prisoner of Sex, parries with the four women, though Greer is likely meant to be the star. (The May 7, 1971, issue of Life magazine put her on the cover with the headline: “Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like.”)
Now, the Wooster Group, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, is presenting a deconstructed version of this historic evening: The Town Hall Affair, at the Performing Garage through March 4. In this production, D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s 1979 documentary film of the original event, Town Bloody Hall, unspools behind the actors, who read from the actual debate transcript. (The level of eloquence, the sheer verbal pyrotechnics on display that night, makes one hang one’s head in shame over what has happen to public discourse in the last 46 years.)
Literary critic Trilling, played by Greg Mehrten, discusses the absurd ranking of orgasms (believe it or not, this was a major topic in the ’70s); Maura Tierney as Greer offers a heartbreaking analysis of the two roles open to women—menial or goddess—“We broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean,” she declares. Experimental writer Johnston reads a long prose poem that includes the crazy proposition that a president of the United States has just appointed a lesbian. (Some things do get better! Obama did this!) The production is interspersed with mysterious bits of feature film, also re-created by the actors. (At first baffling, at least to me, these turn out to be snippets from Mailer’s 1970 independent film Maidstone.)
Who can say what lives on in the memory of those who were fortunate enough to be in the hall that night? In this retelling, the heroine is clearly Johnston, played by Kate Valk, clad in bell-bottoms and a hippie patched denim jacket. As Valk skillfully depicts her onstage, we see the real Johnston on the screen behind her—winsome, nervy, and desperate to be heard.
www.vogue.com/article/theater-wooster-group-the-town-hall-affair
