Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...

Towns Like Ours End in Fire

Please enjoy Towns Like Ours End in Fire.

This piece was directed by me with sound design by Beth Hersh (in collaboration with Sigur Ros) and video by Joe Moore (in collaboration with San Francisco weather).

It was shot on location at 84 Athens Street.

It is dedicated to Emmanuelle.

The video is six minutes long and starts with twenty seconds of black. Keep watching! It's paced more like a modern dance piece than like a Youtube video. Thanks for viewing.

The Glance of Lot's Wife

Looking back is dangerous.

In Greek mythology, the musician Orpheus sings open the gates of hell to save his wife Eurydice, only to kill her again, accidentally, by looking back at her before she'd made it back to the land of the living.

Genesis 19 tells us that, after escaping Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's (nameless) wife "looked back at the calamity of the city" and was turned into a pillar of salt.

Contemporary feminist scholarship has been particularly involved in unveiling the inherent power dynamics of looking. Vision is, for humans, the sense that travels the farthest. To touch or taste something, the body must make physical contact. Smelling and hearing reach farther away from the self. But sight can travel miles on a clear day. With distance comes the illusion of perspective. In that empty space between seer and seen, power relations rush in to fill the void.

The notion of "The Gaze" as having the power to affect the subjectivity of both the viewer and the viewed was brought into critical discourse by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the notion of "The Male Gaze" in cinema to describe the way that the audience, regardless of sex/gender/orientation, is catapulted into the subject position of the straight male viewer who has mastery over the fetished female bodies onscreen. This male gaze also functions outside the movie theatre, dangerously coding "woman as image, man as bearer of the look" (Mulvey,1975).

Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, citing the Orpheus and Eurydice story, describes the "Orphic gaze" as a potentially dangerous way of looking at photographs of past traumas that were not your own. Debate has arisen around the potentially Orphic quality of "looking back" at holocaust photography, pictures of dead U.S. soldiers in the New York Times, as well as the notorious photographs of Abu Ghraib. Why do we want to look? What do we gain from looking? Who might suffer? The line between witnessing and fetishizing can be so thin. How can we avoid "the backwards look that kills again?" (Pollock, 1996a)

Unlike Orpheus, who kills another, the glance of Lot's wife is a suicidal glance that brings her own body to a sudden halt while others move onwards without her. She decides to take a moment -- ever-so-briefly! --to witness and mourn the past, and in so doing her body is frozen forever in the gesture of that single choice.

If I were to theorize "The Glance of Lot's Wife," I would describe it as the calcifying pain that the minoritarian subject feels when she looks back at the long history of oppression against people who look and feel and act like her. The dawning awareness of the past's heaviness can be immobilizing. The attempt to bear witness to shared trauma can leave you unable to see or feel anything other than that trauma's endless aftermath.

I sometimes feel like this, feet and form stuck in place, salty tears running down my hard, salty cheeks. I can't give up my backward glances, yet neither can I give up my gaze towards the distant horizon. I guess that leaves me shuffling forward, trying not to trip over my feet.