A Room of Their Own?–or a Space Not Quite Theirs

On a recent Thursday in New York, I had an odd experience transitioning from my matinee (The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee) to my evening show (Liberation). What was so odd was that these two wildly different shows were both set in that quintessentially American public space: a high school gym.

The resemblance between The 25^th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee and Liberation largely ends there. Still, the shared setting says something a bit depressing about American civic life. Our public architecture is so impoverished that a high school gym has become the default setting for our gatherings, whether spelling bees or consciousness-raising groups—or the knitting circle one of the women in Liberation thought she was attending. I count myself fortunate, in fact, that I was able to see both shows in proper theaters. Small community productions (of Spelling Bee, if not Liberation) might very well take place in high school gyms when their communities lack any dedicated theater space at all.

But what struck me most was how differently these two shows use the same setting—and what that difference reveals about who gets to transform a space, even temporarily, into something of their own. That high school students would gather in their gym for a spelling competition makes sense. In fact, there’s a nice bit of irony there: these nerds, who are no doubt bullied in gym class, get to use that same space to strut their stuff, to show that they, too, can be champions.

But where the gym allows for an empowering reversal in Spelling Bee, it reads quite differently as the meeting place for Lizzie’s consciousness-raising group in small-town Ohio in 1971. These women are gathering in order to establish themselves as autonomous adults, not as afterthoughts in a male-dominated world. That they gather in a gym, largely coded as male and adolescent, only emphasizes how little room there is for them to be themselves.

The play (its full, witty title is Liberation: A Memory Play about Things I Don’t Remember) follows an unnamed woman, a stand-in for the playwright, as she tries to understand her mother’s life as a second-wave feminist. Time moves fluidly, with the same actress—the remarkable Susannah Flood—playing both Lizzie in the early 1970s and her adult daughter in the present. Most of the action unfolds within Lizzie’s consciousness-raising group, but her daughter regularly steps in, narrating, revising, and questioning as she struggles to understand her mother’s life.

In Act I, the women’s interactions are marked by a telling awkwardness as they begin to share their lives. The gym doesn’t create this awkwardness, but it magnifies the sense of constraint they feel. As they try to connect, they do so in this ambivalent space, one that suggests the limitations in their lives.

The tension of this constrained space becomes even more apparent at the end of Act I. Lizzie stays late to clean up after the meeting, long enough to encounter a cute guy—adorable ‘70s mustache and all—arriving for a basketball game. It’s an ordinary interruption, but it came as a bit of a shock to me, immersed as I was in this female world for the past hour.

It’s a shock to the narrator, too, who recognizes him as her father.

Poor Lizzie, we think. It’s all over. And once she leaves and the intermission begins, the guy remains on stage, effortlessly sinking baskets. “Damn,” I found myself thinking. “He seems perfectly nice, but how nonchalantly he’s taken over the space as his own. A master of the universe.”

The play, and Lizzie’s consciousness-raising group, continue after intermission, but something has changed. Time passes and Lizzie is unable to tell her group about the man she’s met, even after she’s decided to marry him. And we carry with us a new feeling about the setting: where the gym initially served as a space being claimed by a small group of women, we’ve now seen a man effortlessly take it over, revealing what the space most readily accommodates.

The gym in Spelling Bee briefly reverses its usual hierarchy: the children who are most uncomfortable there get to dominate the space on their own terms. The transformation may be temporary, but it’s complete within the logic and the confines of the show.

Much as they try, the women in Liberation can never quite make that transformation happen. Spelling Bee is a fun show, one that gives us a joyful repurposing of a familiar space. Liberation, by contrast, dramatizes the ambivalences and difficulties of real women’s lives. These women may temporarily inhabit a male space, may try their utmost to transform it, but they will never be that nonchalant basketball player who doesn’t stop to wonder if he belongs there.