By Melina Paris, Contributing Writer
The Wooster Group’s The Town Hall Affair, based on the 1979 documentary, Town Bloody Hall plunges its audience into the women’s liberation movement of the early 1970s. The REDCAT Theater presented the play, capping Women’s History month.
The play opens with a first-person account from the perspective of Jill Johnston, a panelist who was also a dance critic at the Village Voice (cofounded by Norman Mailer). She explains why she participated in the debate.
The play that depicts the film as the world’s first reality television show set in a loosely structured space with known antagonists and provocateurs as they broadly engage in conversation about sex and women’s liberation. All of it was moderated by Trump-like public intellectual Norman Mailer.
The Town Bloody Hall is set in the wake of Kate Millett’s feminist exposition, Sexual Politics, which was published in1970.
In Sexual Politics, Millett argues that “sex has a frequently neglected political aspect” and she goes on to discuss the role that patriarchy plays in sexual relations. She particularly takes shots at the works of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. She called Mailer “a prisoner of the virility cult.”
Mailer publishes Prisoner of Sex as a retort to Millett and a defense for himself, Miller and Lawrence. This is the crucible that made possible the 1971 panel debate.
Somewhere along the line, someone (likely Mailer) thought that this battle of the sexes that was taking place in the world of ideas might make for a lively panel discussion. The film received critical acclaim when it was released several years later. The place the film holds as an influence in activist and liberation circles bears this assessment out.
“(This) could be a disaster for women and a minor triumph for me,” Johnston said. “I’m not sure I want to further acknowledge Mailer by promoting his sport … women’s liberation as a debatable issue. It has the pretense of a trial.”
Millet refused to debate Mailer. So did radical feminists, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Gloria Steinem.
Johnston probably had similar thoughts, but she ultimately joined literary critic Diana Trilling, author Germaine Greer, Village Voice columnist Jill Johnston, president of The National Organization of Women Jacqueline Ceballos, and Norman Mailer. The three hour event was sponsored by the Theatre for Ideas, a series of events which hailed as the forum for New York’s intellectual elite which Mailer moderated. Greer referred to it as an idea founded on privilege.
Johnston promoted the idea of “lesbian feminism,” which consists of understanding womanhood as perpetual lesbianism. Johnston argued liberation follows the ability of women to love themselves and from that position, practice self-determination. This makes them lesbians.
Trilling focused on the intersections of gender and sexuality, arguing that women’s sexuality is consistently repressed and that sexual liberation, regardless of orientation, is required for women to be liberated from social norms.
Ceballos focused primarily on second wave feminism, without any intersectional approach.
Greer deconstructed gender roles and argued that women should strive to free womanhood, rather than for women to strive to become equal to men.
It’s been said that Mailer was adept at identifying social and political phenomena but struggled to describe the experiences of women, African Americans, and other groups in his works without typecasting them from his own experiences.
This particular attribute of Mailer’s combined with the explosive emergence of the women’s liberation movement in all of its diversity, served as a perfect foil for the drama that played out during that three hour panel discussion.
“Are we good debaters? Do we hear each other?” is what the play ultimately asks its audience.
In this reality show of sorts, Mailer provoked feminists with his responses to the panel’s’ opinions. He claimed more than once that they had misunderstood his writings.
When Johnston launched into a stream of conscious monologue during her allotted time to speak and declared that “all women are lesbians except those who don’t know it naturally,” Mailer interrupted and cut her off. He took an audience vote to see if anyone wanted her to continue. In response, two women suddenly ran onto the stage and began cavorting, rolling, kissing and groping in a display of sexual affection with Johnston.
Mailer frequently offered soundbite descriptions on panelists’ philosophies and positions. He called Greer’s exposition of a feminist revolution, “Diaper Marxism.”
When Trilling noted that nothing in the recent sexual culture has been more justifiably attacked than the idea of a single definition “normal” sexual desire or response, Mailer called it “left-wing totalitarianism.”
Wooster’s Town Hall Affair provides a striking addition to the dialogue by making the footage of the original panel debate part of the play. As each actor approached the podium to speak— reciting highlights of the panelists’ speeches. They spoke in unison with the panelists in the film — every pause, stumble and laugh. Their voices, as well as the panelists in the film, were simultaneously audible. The skill in doing this accurately and emotively was remarkable. And it worked well leaving the unsettling effect that we still haven’t progressed.
LeCompte noted that while these people could debate in public and make loud coherent responses, they were all intellects from the same race and class. Reality shows and social media have now opened the “debate” setting for all races and classes to talk.