The Time-Traveling Sisterhood of Knowing Glances

The phenomenon of men taking credit for a woman's achievements has been in effect for centuries. Whether it takes the form of everyday mansplaining or a woman's suggestion being ignored or dismissed during a business meeting until the same words come out of a man's mouth, the simmering rage many women now feel can be directly linked to feeling abused, diminished, and/or trivialized.

Thankfully, a great deal of "history" is being revised to reflect "herstory." This September, as part of its new feature entitled “Overlooked No More,” The New York Times profiled Alice Guy-Blaché - the World's First Female Filmmaker (a pioneering woman whose career literally began with the birth of movies). Although some of her accomplishments were attributed to the men with whom she worked, Guy-Blaché's work history speaks for itself. According to Wikipedia:

• Born on July 1, 1873, she was the first woman to direct a film and one of the first to make a narrative fiction film.
• On March 22, 1895 Guy-Blaché and her employer, Léon Gaumont, attended the "surprise" Lumière event which became the first demonstration of film projection.
• In 1896 Guy-Blaché's first film was called La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy).

• Her 1901 film, Midwife to the Upper Class, is believed to be the earliest film for which Guy-Blaché can definitely be identified as the director.
• From 1896 to 1906 she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world.
• As the artistic director and co-founder of Solax Studios in Flushing, New York, she made what was probably the first film to have an all-African-American cast (A Fool and His Money) in 1912.
• Along with Lois Weber, Guy-Blaché was one of the first women to own and manage her own studio (the largest pre-Hollywood film studio in America). In 1912 Solax invested $100,000 to build a new studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
• Guy-Blaché wrote, produced, and/or directed approximately 1,000 films (including 100 sound films long before the advent of talking pictures).
• In 1955 she was awarded the Legion of Honour.
• Having become extremely concerned about her lack of inclusion in the film industry's history, during the 1960s Guy-Blaché collaborated with colleagues and film historians to correct previous (and supposedly factual) statements about her life.
• On March 24, 1968 Guy-Blaché died in New Jersey at the age of 94.

Alice Guy-Blaché (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia)

• In 1976 an autobiography that Guy-Blaché had written in the 1940s was posthumously published in French (ten years later it was translated into English with the help of her daughter Simone, daughter-in-law Roberta Blaché, and film writer Anthony Slide).
• In 1995 the National Film Board of Canada released a documentary directed by Marquise Lepage entitled The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché, which subsequently received Quebec's Gemeaux Award for Best Documentary.
• In 2002 film scholar Alison McMahan published Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema.
• In 2013 Guy-Blaché was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
• On May 11, 2018 a documentary directed by Pamela B. Green and narrated by Jodie Foster entitled Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

As part of its December 7th mini-festival (A Day of Silents), the San Francisco Silent Film Festival devoted one program to "Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy-Blaché." With Donald Sosin at the piano, the collection of shorts screened at the Castro Theatre gave insight into Guy-Blaché's impressive skill in filming comedy and satire, especially as seen in 1906's The Consequences of Feminism and Madame Has Her Cravings.




In her article entitled "A Woman’s Place in Photoplay Production" (published on July 11, 1914 in The Moving Picture World), Guy-Blaché wrote:

“It has long been a source of wonder to me that many women have not seized upon the wonderful opportunities offered to them by the motion picture art to make their way to fame and fortune as producers of photo dramas. Of all the arts there is probably none in which they can make such splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman than to a man and so necessary to its perfection. In the arts of acting, music, painting, and literature, woman has long held her place among the most successful workers and, when it is considered how vitally all of these arts enter into the production of motion pictures, one wonders why the names of scores of women are not found among the successful creators of photo drama offerings. The technique of the drama has been mastered by so many women that it is considered as much her field as a man’s and its adaptation to picture work in no way removes it from her sphere. There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.”

Alice Guy-Blaché (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia)

“That women make the theatre possible from the box office standpoint is an acknowledged fact. Theatre managers know that their appeal must be to the woman if they would succeed, and all of their efforts are naturally in that direction. This being the case, what a rare opportunity is offered to women to use that inborn knowledge of just what does appeal to them to produce photo dramas that will contain that inexplicable something which is necessary to the success of every stage or screen production. Not only is a woman as well-fitted to stage a photo drama as a man, but in many ways she has a distinct advantage over him because of her very nature and because much of the knowledge called for in the telling of the story and the creation of the stage setting is absolutely within her province as a member of the gentler sex. All of the distinctive qualities which she possesses come into direct play during the guiding of the actors in making their character drawings and interpreting the different emotions called for by the story. The technique of motion picture photography, like the technique of the drama, is fitted to a woman’s activities. She is an authority on the emotions. For centuries she has given them full play while man has carefully trained himself to control them. To think and to feel the situation demanded by the play is the secret of successful acting, and sensitiveness to those thoughts and feelings is absolutely essential to the success of a stage director.”

Although equally adept at filming period dramas, Guy-Blaché's skill shooting stunts and trick shots is apparent in 1906's The Drunken Mattress and 1907's The Glue.

* * * * * * * * *

With Shotgun Players staging the Bay area premiere of Caryl Churchill's 1976 play, Vinegar Tom, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre presenting the world premiere of Sarah Ruhl's newest work, one thing is clear. There be witches in Berkeley! While both plays find their inspiration in the severely misguided witch hunts from earlier centuries, Becky Nurse of Salem has much greater relevance to contemporary problems.

Pamela Reed stars in Becky Nurse of Salem
(Photo by: Kevin Berne)

After all, with Donald Trump constantly bleating about being the victim of a political witch hunt -- and an opioid crisis devastating many small towns in New England -- the fact that Ruhl's sharp-tongued protagonist has spent 23 years as an outspoken tour guide for the Salem Museum of Witchcraft is just as ominous as the diorama-like figures which move around an upstage platform like silent but highly judgmental robots.

Pamela Reed stars in Becky Nurse of Salem
(Photo by: Kevin Berne)

Truth be told, there's plenty of judgment to go around. A descendant of Rebecca Nurse -- who was infamously executed for practicing witchcraft in Salem back in 1692 -- Becky Nurse (Pamela Reed) has no marketable skills, suffers from chronic pain resulting from past gynecological surgery and, in the wake of her daughter's death from a drug overdose, has been struggling to care for her granddaughter, Gail (Naian González Norvind), while earning minimum wage.

Faced with enough problems to leave any single woman depressed (Gail has recently been released from a psychiatric clinic), Becky also has a dangerous habit of straying from the museum's script for tour guides and telling visitors what she thinks really happened in Salem, Massachusetts so many years ago. With a true local's dedication to historical accuracy, she's more than willing to clear up any misconceptions about whether Gallow's Hill was where the Walgreens or Dunkin' Donuts now stands. And, having done plenty of research of her own, she's developed a pretty good theory about what was really driving young girls to hysterics back in the day. Quick to dismiss long-held theories about the hallucinogenic effects of the ergot contained in rye, Becky is convinced that Salem's problems had a lot less to do with witchcraft than with an older man's stiff dick having no conscience. As the playwright takes care to explain:

“I have been undone and fascinated by the language of the witch hunt used by Donald Trump from his campaign in which he whipped crowds into a frenzy yelling 'Lock Her Up!' with the crowds often replying 'Hang The Bitch!' to his time in office when he’s used the term 'witch hunt' hundreds of times, describing himself as the victim. Not since the burning of witches in Europe was the iconography of witches used with such base hypocrisy and to such great effect. I suppose what strikes me as fundamentally dishonest about The Crucible is the mixture of fact and fiction; the copious historical notes, unusually embedded in the stage directions, lead us to believe we are watching actual history unfold. But we are watching what we always watch onstage: a psychic drama from the mind of a complicated individual relating their psyche to humankind’s larger collective unconscious.”

Naian González Norvind (Gail) and Pamela Reed (Becky) in
a scene from Becky Nurse of Salem (Photo by: Kevin Berne)

“That The Crucible is done at almost every high school, and is in fact the way American girls and boys understand the history of Salem added to my frustration. I thought – all those bonnets – and all those Goodys – and really, Arthur Miller wanted to have sex with Marilyn Monroe. I thought: no one to this day knows why the girls engaged in mass hysteria, but it probably was not the lust of one duplicitous 11-year-old for one middle-aged barkeep. John Proctor, also an innocent victim, became the cultural symbol of the witch trials (rather than the large group of women put to death) because of the outsized success of Arthur Miller at turning Proctor into a tragic hero.”

Elissa Beth Stebbins and Pamela Reed in a scene from
Becky Nurse of Salem (Photo by: Kevin Berne)

After Becky's shrewd insights unnerve visitors from a local school, she gets fired from her job by the museum's director, Shelby (Elissa Beth Stebbins), an academic ice queen who can't relate to her co-workers because she is focused on data and "things." To make matters worse, Becky doesn't trust Gail's creepy, smooth-talking new boyfriend, Stan (Owen Campbell), who was also a patient in the psych ward.

Owen Campbell portrays Stan in Becky Nurse of Salem
(Photo by: Kevin Berne)

With scant savings to pay for her pain medications (much less support her granddaughter), Becky's financial desperation leads her to contact a woman (Ruibo Qian) that Stan has recommended for her powers as a witch. Whether this woman is a con artist, a genuine witch, or both is hard to determine, but she displays a remarkable talent for separating Becky from her money. After Becky gets arrested for stealing one of the wax statues from the museum, both women meet up in jail. Soon Becky's loyal friend from high school, bartender Bob (Adrian Roberts), ends up in jail with her as things continue to get worse.

Pamela Reed stars in Becky Nurse of Salem
(Photo by: Kevin Berne)

Working on a deceptively simple set by Louisa Thompson with costumes by
Meg Neville, lighting by Russell H. Champa, and sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman, Anne Kauffman has done a stunning job of directing Ruhl's play. Becky Nurse of Salem ricochets between being a ghost story, a political thriller, and a contemporary nightmare with subplots involving witchcraft (be careful where you leave your toenails) and the kind of substance abuse that drives people into poverty. While Adrian Roberts shines as the deeply conflicted bartender whose marriage is on the rocks, Rod Gnapp appears as a shapeshifter who portrays a local judge and sheriff.

Pamela Reed and Rod Gnapp in a scene from
Becky Nurse of Salem (Photo by: Kevin Berne)

Developed in the Ground Floor Summer Residency Lab, Becky Nurse of Salem marks Ruhl’s second commission from Berkeley Rep and her sixth production with the company. The play's dramatic strength is directly tied to Anne Kauffman, Sarah Ruhl, and Pamela Reed -- three extremely talented women who (like Shakespeare's weird sisters) conjure up a breathtaking and tightly crafted evening of theatre. With a sharp, New England accent, Reed's feisty portrayal of Becky Nurse begins as a feisty middle-aged woman who is often her own worst enemy and slowly deepens into a bereft grandmother who must call on powers she didn't know she had. It's a magnificent performance that will leave audiences cheering for Becky during the play's final moments.

Performances of Becky Nurse of Salem continue through January 26 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (click here for tickets).