I am an....Actress

I love the early morning hours.  Dawn just peeping through the trees.  The fur babies creeping about.  As now I light a few candles and make myself a cup of tea and relish the quiet and the complete un-necessity of being anywhere or doing anything.  It's been a frustrating week.

I've been thinking about a good-natured debate I had last weekend with a woman I've shared the set with on occasion.  It was over the term "actor" as applied to women who act.  That's the trend now in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere, but let's keep a good thought) and I seem to be bucking it by referring to myself as an actress.  I've heard the argument that it just makes sense because, after all, you wouldn't refer to a female doctor as a "doctoress."  But does it follow that we should call a female lion just a lion and not a lioness?  Now we're getting silly.

My acting colleague was of the opinion that it was good to apply one term - actor - to both males and females because it felt "inclusive." Oh please. Oh heavens.  This goes hand in glove with the trend of staging Hamlet (or pick your play) with an all female cast.  The message is, women have always been so oppressed and put upon and we want to make damned sure that men know that we know that they've been getting all the good parts and we've been getting the...! Well, it strikes me that what is really being said is that women are something less than men, so we have to pretend that we are men.  Self hatred?  How progressive is that?

Kathleen Warfel as Queen Margaret

If the point is to rail against the fact that women were kept off the stage during Shakespeare's time, then it should be understood that this temporary condition was only in Britain due to the political influence of the Puritans (like Carrie Nation and Prohibition.) Everywhere else apparently women have acted for as long as there have been plays to act. Moreover, the ban, while it lasted, didn't prevent Shakespeare from writing strong leading roles for women - Queen Margaret, Lady MacBeth - and roles open to interpretation, like Katarina, which is after all what acting is about.

I guess dropping the term actress wouldn't bother me so much if the term used previously had the word "man" in it and there was a gender-neutral alternative.  Like changing fireman to firefighter or fisherman to angler.  Then it makes sense.

Marilyn Monroe

But lumping us all together under the traditional term for males who act seems to me a denigration of women who act.  Worse, it cuts women off from a long line of wonderful "actresses" - from Sarah Bernhardt and Clara Bow to Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe (no dumb blonde) - who succeeded regardless of the political and social climate of their day.

So I remain an actress.  I enjoy being a woman who acts.  I celebrate it. Which reminds me that Mark Westbrook has a wonderful post at his blog directed at up-and-coming actresses.

As for my frustrating week, I have lived long enough to know that when all the doors seem closed you just have to hang in and trust that there's a plan to all this and that at some point you will understand why things unfolded as they did.  It's daylight.  Time to get moving.