Interviewee: Mark Halliday
Interviewer: Kiera Feldman
Date: June 22, 2006
Location: By telephone
Category: Performing Arts/Women's History
Length: 59:28
Word Count: 8058
[00:00:01]
Kiera Feldman: Um well could we begin maybe by you giving me some of your background about where you grew up and what your parents did?
[00:00:09]
Mark Halliday: Oh ok. Well uh my father was an English professor and uh I grew mostly in Raleigh, North Carolina where he taught at North Carolina State College for many years until I was in 8th grade. My mother was Canadian and she...finally got her BA around the time that we moved up to Connecticut which was when I was in 8th grade. My father became an editor at American Heritage Magazine. And...yeah so I went to high school in suburban Connecticut.
KF: And what year were you born?
MH: Born in 1949.
KF: And where did you go to undergrad?
MH: Brown.
KF: And what year did you get to Brown?
MH: Oh I started at Brown in the fall of '67, graduated in '71.
KF: And what kinds of activities were you involved with at Brown?
[00:01:08]
MH: Well, uh let's see. When I started as a freshman I was very interested in politics and the Vietnam War. I took political science courses so I-first I thought I was a political science major but really my interest in literature was growing fast. By sometime in my sophomore year I knew I had to be some sort of English major. Actually I majored in Human Studies, which was a-I don't know if it still exists at Brown but it was a program designed by a Professor George Morgan and you could put together your own major, which was a pretty new thing to do at that time. So I kind of combined some politics and psychology and history but mostly literature. I also did quite a bit of acting. Um, I mean I was not one of the really full-time serious theater people in my years at Brown but I had parts in quite a few shows-both Sock and Buskin and Production Workshop. And so I got to know a few of the theater people who ended up being involved with RIFT [Rhode Island Feminist Theater].
[00:02:21]
KF: And were you involved in the anti-war movement?
[00:02:24]
MH: Yeah I was like a lot of us war. I was not a leader by any means but I was at a lot of demonstrations and uh...I guess I wrote a few--I don't know--editorials and articles about it. But you know there was so much political ferment then that it seemed like every month there was a new political activity you had to decide whether you would participate in or not. Certainly everyone I knew was against the war.
[00:02:56]
KF: Could you maybe go into a little more detail about what Brown's political scene was like when you were there?
[00:03:01]
MH: Um well I could try. I'm not sure how...historically accurate it would be. Uh...a thing that was happening at Brown in particular was the movement to reform the system of education at Brown-the Ira Magazine movement. And I guess the other guy was named Elliot Maxwell. And that was amazingly big news on campus in those years. I mean there were times when it seemed like bigger news than the anti-war movement. I was just on the periphery of that as well but I knew some of the people involved.
[00:03:42]
MH: And uh yhou know at the time there was a sense that in order to [small laugh] change American society and improve the uh the civil rights situation in America and to stop the war it might somehow be necessary to change the educational system. At least the rhetoric that surrounded the Magaziner movement made us believe that was possibly true. So that was kind of exciting.
[00:04:11]
MH: Meanwhile there was a black student movement that I had no connection with but I was certainly aware of it. I remember at one point probably in 1970 there was a black student walk-out from the university. Um--
[00:04:28]
KF: And how was that received by the other students?
[00:04:32]
MH: Uh well everybody I knew was you know in sympathy with it. We-I worried, anyway that Brown itself might be in real trouble and get shut down or become uh uh dangerously damaged the way it seemed was happening to Columbia in 1970 with the student movement. I think it was 1970 wasn't it Columbia? Maybe it was '69.
[00:05:01]
MH: Anyway I was not as radical as some people I knew but um at the same time I think we all, you know enjoyed the sense that young people like us could make a huge difference in American society. That's what we thought.
KF: And were there any non-African American people involved in that walk-out or...?
[00:05:28]
MH: Oh I'm sure there were in some respect. I mean I had no involvement in that except as a spectator. I just remember it as one of the things that was happening on campus.
[00:05:39]
KF: And in your memory when did the women's movement start to emerge?
[00:05:45]
MH: Well I mean I experience that on a personal level with the uh thinking about it that was being done by people I knew well, especially Jessica Murray. I mean I got involved with her uh let's see in the fall/winter of my senior year, so that'd be uh near the end of 1970. And uh she was I think just starting to think about feminism as an explanation of some of the things wrong with society. And her growth in those ideas was very rapid. As I think back through the whole period of time that I was connected with RIFT, it seems as if every month would bring changes in people. Like life was happening very fast. Maybe that's just a typical thing for people around the age of 20 to think, but that is certainly how I remember it. And I've been looking back at my diary from 1974 and [laughing] it certainly seems to confirm that.
[00:06:56]
MH: Anyway Jessica and Kate Phelps and uh let me see, well lots of other women but I'm trying to think of who I knew well. Jessica had a circle of women friends who were thinking really hard about feminism and radical feminism. And by the time RIFT got started in the beginning of 1973 they had moved a long way into ideas about how drastically uh relations between the sexes needed to be changed.
[00:07:33]
KF: And...how did you um define feminism at the time?
[00:07:40]
MH: Um...I was you know on a learning curve the way everybody was, especially a lot of guys. What I remember was a long, long series of women in which women-particularly Jessica, but others too-would point out ways in which guys took for granted certain privileges, certain privileged behaviors and priority over women and I think a lot of us uh...men at the time would go through a process of initial resistance, maybe kind of laughing about it or not taking it very seriously. And then some of us anyway would learn to take it more seriously. I mean I remember long conversations about language and uh oh like the use of the word chick. I remember huge debates about whether you could legitimately use that word for a young woman. Lots of people thought it was ridiculous to complain about that usage and then some of us came to realize that it was demeaning in the ways it was used. And there were debates about the word girl. I learned to not use the word girl for anyone under the age of 16, I guess-I mean anyone over the age of 16. But you know there were big debates about that kind of thing. And um there's the fundamental question in feminism of whether the problems of society arise from fundamental gender differences or the way society is organized. And everybody in these conversations was constantly struggling with that dilemma. That is, are you going to see the problem in terms of essential differences in women and men or are you going to see it in terms of us all being human with tremendous amount in common but society-patriarchal society-having distorted the rightful relations between people. I think my mind probably changed every few weeks about matters like that.
[00:10:08]
MH: But mostly because of Jessica Murray's really serious quest to understand these issues, I took them more and more seriously to the point where trying to figure out how to be a healthy, happy, male while at the same time not being unfair in my relations to women was really a central concern of mine for quite a few years.
[00:10:41]
KF: And let's see this is a question I should have asked a little earlier, but did you see at the time a relationship between the anti-war movement and feminism?
[00:10:53]
MH: Um...well we wanted to believe, yeah, that was a deep relation as I was saying before between educational reform and feminist reform or resistance to sexism and the peace movement.
KF: How were the three related?
MH: [laughs] Well uh...in practical, political ways I'm not sure how they were related. We were inclined to think in radical terms about society being basically restructured. The notions of justice and equality and uh relations between the genders and the races being understood in fundamentally new ways. And so we told each other that if that could happen--and we seemed on a good day that that was going to happen in the 1970s-we told each other that those changes would lead to a society that would not be imperialistic and militaristic.
[00:12:02]
KF: Um so did you consider yourself a part of the women's movement?
[00:12:08]
MH: Um well I remember conversations about whether there was such a thing as a male feminist. We used the expression male feminist sometimes, although I think I was always cautious and wary about it for fear that there might something absurd just in the term. Um
KF: What did it mean to be a male feminist?
[00:12:30]
MH: [small laugh] Um what it really meant was to be someone who sympathized and tried to help-cooperate-with women involved in the movement. I think that's the practical meaning of it. But there were some men who claimed that their whole understanding of human nature and of the fundamental nature of society was determined by feminism. I don't think I ever went to far as to claim that.
[00:13:08]
KF: And uh let's see...how did you get involved in the Rhode Island Feminist Theater?
[00:13:20]
MH: Um let's see...Jessica was involved in some plays when she was an undergraduate at Brown. I graduated in 71, she graduated in 73. Actually she hadn't graduated yet at the time when RIFT started, 'cause RIFT started in the winter of '73. She was good friends with Kate Phelps and they got this idea that a theater could be organized around feminist issues. And uh I guess there were a series of meetings and uh they must have made the decision from the start that they didn't want it to be only women in the theater group. It'd be interesting to see what Kate or Jessica might remember about the thinking in that, whether it was in a way a practical decision in terms of how you could put together dramas that would interest enough of an audience. Or maybe it was also kind of moral and ideological decision against separatism.
[00:14:36]
MH: In any case, my involvement came through Jessica's involvement. I was interested in acting, I knew I was not a very good actor but I had enjoyed it quite a bit in my productions at Brown. And uh so we found ourselves I think around February of '73 with ten people who wanted to proceed with this-five women and five men.
[00:15:04]
KF: And um let's see-so what was it like being a man in a feminist theater?
[00:15:12]
MH: Uh there was a lot of tension and a lot of comedy. I felt...I think I felt I had a special, lucky position because of my relationship with Jessica. I mean we were boyfriend-girlfriend and that felt quite secure at that point in time. And so I think I may have felt less threatened and less troubled than some of the other guys did. Though I don't know, it may be that Fred Radway-who was my closest friend among the men in the group-did not feel very troubled either. Fred always seemed very relaxed and secure about it a lot of things.
[00:16:03]
MH: However there was tension because as we rehearsed and as we planned scripts and imagined the plays that we would produce, inevitably there was a tendency for the male roles in the plays to be two dimensional and ugly. We tended naturally to imagine situations in which the males were behaving badly and oppressively and manipulatively. And so the question would just naturally keep coming up-to what extent are we mirroring the way we really are in our relationships. And when rehearsals over and we go out the door, how worried should I be about whether I'm actually behaving in some ways similar to the character that I was playing as a male role in our play. Uh
[00:17:04]
KF: Why do you think uh some of the men in the group might have felt threatened and troubled, as you said?
[00:17:11]
MH: Um well as I say, in our first big production Taking It Off, all the male roles in the play are villainous, really. Maybe sort of comically villainous, but still negative portrayals for sure. I was the psychiatrists, Dennis Sykes was the athletic director, Fred Radway was the camp director I think, and uh I'm fuzzy on the other male role but there was a fourth one, I'm pretty sure. And uh yeah we were the bad guys of the play. The real three dimensional characters in the play were the women at this uh what would we call it, a beauty farm or beauty camp-who were discovering their sisterhood, as we always spoke of it, and realizing their shared fears and needs and really growing as people. So that by the end of the play the women could bond together and symbolically overthrow their oppressors.
[00:18:30]
MH: I was proud of that play. I think we were all really proud of it because it was a complicated work, it told a story, it had some drama, and it also had political meaning. And for our first production to achieve all that as a full length play I think was a real achievement. But still when I played this manipulative, sarcastic, egotistical psychiatrist in the play, on the one hand I saw that I knew how to do it and that sort of talking down to the women and um controlling them with language was something that sort of came naturally to me. I could find it in myself. And that was disturbing. But at the same time I could tell myself that that guy wasn't really me and that I was a much better person than that. And so I guess that would lead to the thought that to go on for years and years hypothetically portraying a character as limited as that would be a very limiting way to be an actor.
[00:19:43]
KF: And um let's see on what points do you think that your political or artistic ideas different from the other members in the group?
[00:20:01]
MH: Uh well I was in RIFT for about two years only. To me it seemed like a very very long time but it was really just two years. From the founding in 1973 to the winter/spring of 1975. And of course RIFT went on for years after that so I'm not really speaking of those later phases. But in just the two years that I was involved, as I've said, it seems that we went through so many changes um-
KF:--could you go into some of those changes actually?
[00:20:35]
MH: Well in the first year I guess as I've already said, I felt I was playing catching kind of intellectually. I followed the lead of Jessica and Kate and no doubt several other women that I should be naming but I'm not because my memory is a little fuzzy. And I learned from their arguments. Now my attitude in many discussions probably tended to take the line that you know things weren't really so bad and patriarchy wasn't so monolithic perhaps as they claimed and that there were many more exceptions to the patterns of oppressive behavior by men than they saw...and like that. But it never got to the point where I felt like I was against their basic views. I certainly wanted to keep participating.
[00:21:39]
MH: Um you know this played out on a more personal level in a way uh or sort of a [sigh] private level because since Jessica and I were a couple she often came home with me to my family's house in Connecticut. And uh there was a lot of tension that developed over a period of a couple years between her and my father because you know my father considered himself a very good liberal [small laugh] person with slightly left of center political views. And you know a humanist. And he was very dismayed and troubled to find his own behaviors and attitudes judged by Jessica as she became more radical-judged by her to be sexist or male chauvinist. And that led to you know a series of crises in which I would try to defend Jessica's views and my father would be very angry with me. Anyway so on that front I was living out the tensions. On the one hand I certainly loved my father and I wanted to be like him in a lot of ways. But on the other way I could see how he had benefited from male privileges in society all his life.
[00:23:05]
KF: What kinds of things did she point out?
[00:23:08]
MH: Uh well some of it was about language because Jessica was always very smart about language. She would point out assumptions that were sort of built into my father's--and you know any middle class adult males probably-vision of how life should go. The sort of assumed power that he had in his marriage with my mother. Although I mean my mother was actually a proud and smart and assertive person with an independent will in lots of ways. But still, you know she had been formed in her ideas in womanhood and wifehood by the 1950s in ways that were hard to avoid.
[00:23:59]
MH: So let's see I'm not remembering anything too specific at the moment but uh there were you know hundreds of times at the dinner table, say, when my father would make a remark and Jessica would make out what she understood to be the sexist implications in the remark-in the language. And then my father, who considered himself [laughs] and was I mean he was an editor after all. He considered himself an expert at the use of the English language. And he would argue back and he would expect that by the sheer logical force of his argument that he could dominate and end the discussion. But Jessica had a very strong will herself and she wouldn't allow that to happen and so it would move toward a flash point pretty often.
[00:24:45]
KF: So how did that tension get resolved?
[00:24:47]
MH: Oh.....I guess that never really got resolved. There was, there was one point where things had gotten so bad that I just realized I had to pull back-I sort of backed off and just avoided the subject as much as possible. And Jessica stopped coming to my family's house. I mean we were still together for a while after that but we stopped doing the family thing together.
[00:25:18]
KF: So to back up a little bit. You said that you learned from some of their arguments-their being the women in RIFT-what kinds of things did you learn?
[00:25:31]
MH: Uh well I guess I've already talked about that some. I learned to think twice about the way I used any language that related to gender. There was a lot of you know thinking twice and rethinking and reconsidering how we said something. Um...uh...well I don't know I'm afraid I'll just say more vague things like I've already said about that. Uh but um you know an issue that came toward the center in RIFT in my second year and then was definitely involved I think after I left was the issue of heterosexuality. You know when we started the group uh I guess maybe somewhat naively I thought that there could be a kind of wonderful, happy combination of this interest in radical feminism with uh my heterosexual relationship with Jessica. And uh I was pretty happy for quite a while there. But um there was a current in radical feminism that was moving toward a kind of separatism-or toward the idea that women could only reach full humanity and full independence and self-determination if they got out of heterosexual relationships, either through celibacy or lesbianism.
[00:27:11]
KF: Was that talked about in RIFT or are you talking about inside of-
[00:27:15]
MH: No that was talked about in RIFT yeah. Both outside and inside in various discussion groups. But I remember that Kate Phelps, although she was heterosexual as far as I ever knew, she at least did express a kind of theoretical interest in radical feminism that would be apart from men and would include lesbianism as a possibility. And um the basic idea that you could not have a heterosexual relationship without oppression by the man. That idea I could not [laughing] could not accept. It went against my nature and I knew that would be the path to misery for me so I wasn't going to go there. Uh so I think when that-let me see, my sense is that in roughly my second year in RIFT when that idea would come up I would just sort of fade back from the discussion. Maybe uh...in that connection I tended to shift my focus more toward the artistic aspect of things-toward the writing of the plays, and trying to perform them well as an actor. Because I was interested in that stuff even though I knew I was not fundamentally a theater person.
[00:28:46]
MH: Uh let's see so the productions that I was involved with were Taking It Off and the Johnny Show and then a shorter play that we performed I think maybe only once at Wellesley College called Clown U. Maybe we also performed it at University of Rhode Island but not many times. And then the next show after that was Persephone's Return. And uh it was in the whole period of preparing Persephone's Return that this issue of heterosexuality versus homosexuality became more a topic of discussion.
[00:29:31]
KF: So do you think-were you um in agreement, were your thoughts in accordance with the other people in the group, or who felt uncomfortable by these discussions and who um who agreed with them?
[00:29:48]
MH: Um, let me see. By the time I left we had uh at least a couple of gay members of the group. One of them was Eric Benson who was a very important member of the group by that time. He was a crucial player in designing and writing and performing Persephone's Return, partly because of his musical ability and his choreography ability. And there was a women named April-I've forgotten her last name-also gay. And uh I had a sense there was probably someone else, well. Uh our director at that point was Ada McAllister and I think Ada-I think she saw herself as bisexual. I think that's how she presented herself. Um so uh in that context the issue of uh of whether in some sense homosexuality offered a fundamentally moral answer to and alternative to the sick, perverted injustices of heterosexuality. That was very much in our discussions in the Persephone's Return phase.
[00:31:17]
KF: So do you think um-was that the reason why you left RIFT?
[00:31:23]
MH: Uh I left for so many reasons. I think I was the last of the original members to leave. Uh in other words Kate left, Jessica left, the two younger women who were such good actresses in the first show-Mary K. Fox and Liz I've forgotten her last name-they had all departed. And uh Fred had opted out at some point in that second year and Dennis Sykes was gone. So anyway it was partly that I just felt myself to be a holdover from something that was already history. And also I knew I was not really a good actor. There were people with more theatrical talent involved at each stage of RIFT. Also this whole time you see I thought of myself as a writer, essentially. I mean I look back at my diary and my notes and I see that you know on the very day that we would have a RIFT performance, the stuff on my diary page I just barely mention that and the stuff that I'm really focused on in my diary is my writing-my kind of literary connections. So I was never pouring enough energy into RIFT to do a really good job. I think, I think it was more a central commitment for some of the women. Lucy Winner, Jessica Murray, Kate Phelps and others. So um I guess you know that together with this emerging focus on homosexuality uh early 1975 made me feel that there just wasn't enough reason for me to stick with it.
[00:33:19]
KF: Aside from the homosexuality-heterosexuality debate, what were some of the other kind of hot topics that changed over the course of your involvement with RIFT?
[00:33:35]
MH: Uh....let's see...topics that changed...uh I'm not sure about change exactly. I-Taking It Off we conceived as a realistic drama, with some satirical touches. But we tried to present the world in that play as a real life space with real life characters. Then the second show, the Johnny Show was a kind of a parodic reversed world presentation of the Johnny Carson show in a world of gender reversal. So that Jessica played the Johnny character who was sort of suavely totally in control of all the relationships connected with this TV show and my part in that was a young man who was supposed to be kind of handsome and beautiful and you know I-my part corresponded to that of a young Hollywood starlet who would appear on the Johnny Carson show who would be-I mean in real life would be appreciated only for her appearance and not for any of her you know thoughts or personality. And so in this reverse world I played the young guy who was treated that way.
[00:34:52]
MH: So anyway in that show we were experimenting with a very elaborate kind of satire that would present our ideas forcefully. So there's some difference in those two productions. And then, well Clown U was a strange thing that was meant to focus on uh issues of sexism in the university scene. Uh so that was kind of a made to order production in certain ways. Then the thing about Persephone's return is that there in the discussions leading up to that, we--our thinking was utopian, or partly utopian. It was like can we imagine, how can we imagine a different world in which gender relations would be healthy and good. So we...we tried to go in that direction. Well let's see, we used music a lot more. And we um we used mythology, you know references to the myth of Demeter and Persephone with scenes that were symbolically parallel to that in the play. But that-I'm not sure that answers your question but that's about some different ambitions we had for the plays.
[00:36:12]
MH: I see here in my notebook a note on a day in June of 1974. [reading] Brainstorming session about Persephone's Return, a central question in our play: what else is possible in human nature besides patriarchy as we know it. Whatever sort of matriarchy we create for the lost golden age for the play, it should illustrate potentiality's in human nature which had been prevented from developing. [stops reading] and so on-I mean my notes go on and on, but we were trying to think on that very large, broad level on the issues.
[00:36:48]
KF: And um, let's see-so did you go through a lot of your diaries to-in going through your diaries, what were some of the memories that stood out for you looking back?
[00:37:02]
MH: Uh well I was-I was uh...as I say kind of noticing the uh the way in which RIFT competed in my life with other interests like my literary interest. And I see the sheer amount of effort that we put into it. I mean given-keeping in mind that we had no money and uh different members of the group were making money in lots of odd job kind of ways and just barely getting by but we put in a lot of effort.
[00:37:45]
MH: I'm looking at August 16 of 1974 and I see my note here after a long rehearsal in the evening. [reading] Once again RIFT has sweated through a tense final week push and gotten a show ready for its tense debut. Persephone's Return has some powerful moments and some shallow spots. Sad premonition: this will be RIFT's last play. [stops reading]. Now of course I turned out to be wrong about that [laughs]-I mean I knew that the original membership was dropping out or planning to drop out and I guess I had the idea that the group would end when we were all gone. That didn't turn out to be true but I had a strong sense that we were nearing the end as we got toward the end of 1974 [pages turning in background]
[00:38:35]
MH: We had a performance of Persephone's Return outside at Lincoln Center in New York which we all thought of as a big deal. I mean it seemed like we were kind of making a more national scene there. Uh but uh...we probably had an exaggerated sense of the significance of that event. Uh I'm looking at my diary for August 28 of 1974 and I wrote this after a rehearsal: [reading] The collective scriptwriting for Persephone's Return threatens my ego. I'm the only person in the group who claims to be a writer, yet I find that the dialogue I write is often no better-and sometimes worse-than what the others write. [stops reading] Uh that doesn't necessarily relate to your question but it shows the kind of thing that was on my mind.
[00:39:34]
MH: Uh we went to New York a couple days after that and the Lincoln center performance was September 1st, 1974. The day before that we performed Persephone's Return at a park in Flushing, New York. On August 30th I wrote [reading] RIFT sets out to make it or break it at the big Lincoln center performance. Most of us seem to think that this show is an opportunity to win fame and fortune for RIFT and help insure RIFT's future. But as I see it, by the time November comes, disintegration will be unavoidable.
KF: Why do you think the group was disintegrating then-or why did you think it was?
[00:40:13]
MH: Well I guess I've already said that some of the original members had left, and I really felt there was nowhere to go with this tension about heterosexuality versus homosexuality. I mean, the people involved were not going to change their basic attitudes on that. And uh I certainly-even if I hadn't been tryuing to define myself as a writer and even if I didn't have other things to do, I was not going to be in a theater group where the basic message of the plays would be that heterosexuality was fundamentally sick. That just wasn't going to work for me.
KF: Why do you think the group changed its thinking towards thinking that heterosexuality was fundamentally sick?
[00:41:00]
MH: Well when you say the group, it's always a shifting membership. Uh as I said before, this idea that the injustices in patriarchal society might be so deep that heterosexuality itself was fundamentally implicated-that idea was there in the thinking and discussions that involved people like Jessica [Murray] and Kate [Phelps] and Ada McAllister. Uh but when some very talented gay people got involved in the group and really in the case of Eric Benson in a leadership role, that issue was more inescapable. But you know by that point in turns of membership it was very much a different group from what it had been when we started in '73.
KF: How was membership different? Like were there less men and more gay people or....?
[00:42:01]
MH: Uh well I mean I've said there was Eric among the men and April among the women but from performance to performance in 1974 our membership changed because somebody would have to work or travel and couldn't be in the show so there was a lot of coming and going. Uh... I don't know. That's uh...that's probably as specific as I can be about that. I mean, I see we get back from the Lincoln Center performance and on September 5th I'm writing about a long rehearsal in the evening with a fierce and painful confrontation over Ada's [McAllister] directorship. I kind of remember this. Some of us thought that we needed a new director and Eric [Benson] thought we were being disloyal to Ada in suggesting that, uh but I don't know if that can be defined in terms of the issue about sexual preference. It had more to do with aesthetic and artistic issues.
KF: Um towards the end of your time there, how many of the members would say approximately were Brown students and how many were community members?
[00:43:22]
MH: Hm...hm. I think by that point maybe the majority were not Brown students. Uh let's see, Susan Juvelier was and Eric was a Brown student and I was...uh and I think Jessica was still in the group, ok, so that's four of us. Might have been half and half we can say at that point.
KF: Ok. And were there any black members of RIFT or non-white?
MH: No I don't believe-not in my time there certainly were not.
KF: So I know that at least in the very beginning that RIFT shared a rehearsal space with a black theater group called Rites and Reasons, and I was wondering what kinds of interactions the two groups had?
MH: I don't remember any at all-
KF: [interrupting] Why do you think-
MH: There may have been some but I just don't remember those discussions or anything about that. We rehearsed in many different spaces around Providence and I was not involved in negotiating where we rehearsed usually.
[00:44:37]
KF: Ok. Let's see so this is a somewhat unrelated question, but I found an old Brown Daily Herald article from 1973 and Kate Phelps is quoted as saying "One half of me is still ready to talk radical rhetoric, but the other half wants to pause a second and see the movement as one for everybody." And I was wondering if you could explain what you think she meant by that.
[00:45:02]
MH: That's a good quote because it immediately makes me remember Kate. You know, Kate was a very strong personality, very good actress, and she had a lot of talent for imagining and designing productions. And um I mean she was very intense. It was her will I think more than any other single force that brought the group into existence. At the same time with all her intensity, she was deeply ambivalent. I mean among other things I think she was very ambivalent about how she wanted to be as a sexual person and whether she wanted to withdraw from relationships with men or not. I mean I think that the ambivalence she felt was painful for a long time there. And uh yeah the basic question of how radical this feminist theater was going to be was there in so many connections. And yeah her remark there is certainly about that.
KF: What did it mean to be radical?
[00:46:09]
MH: Well apart from the issue of whether you're going to reject heterosexuality itself, um there's the issue of whether you're going to say that society has got to be changed from the bottom to the top and there is no place for healthy relationships between men and women or just lives for women at all in American capitalist society. You know if you're going to take that view that's a radical view and then what are you going to do in your dramas? You're just going to have kind of furious, furious satire or you're going to have to have utopian otherworldly mythic visions. So yeah we wondered which way to go.
KF: And what did it mean as she said, "to see the movement as one for everybody"?
[00:47:03]
MH: Well that would be uh a movement and by extension a theater group that would uh try to create plays and uh expressions of views that would bring large audiences, including lots of people that were let's say not at all radical maybe even conservative in their ideas of marriage and the family and gender roles. Bring them in and try to influence their thoughts. I suppose to addressing ourselves really to just a select audience of people who already more or less agreed. That was a temptation but I think we in those first 2 years avoided that temptation mostly.
KF: After that where do you think the group went?
MH: I could not say with justice. I moved out of Providence in the summer of '75 so there were only a few months that I was still in providence after I'd left the group. I remember a woman named Barbara Conley who was sort of emerging as a leader of the group right at the time I left. I liked her a lot. She was talented and really smart but she was lesbian and it seemed as if her understanding of the meanings that would have to come out of theater productions were I don't know sort of centrally shaped by her lesbianism. And uh so you know I liked her a lot but I just wasn't I guess I wasn't deeply interested at that point. So I can't really comment on how they did or what they did uh say in the year 1975 or 76 but she'd be a person to talk to if you can find her. Barbara Conley.
KF: C-o-n-l-e-y?
MH: Yeah that's how it appears in my diary anyway.
49:17
KF: Um...and so what were you reading at the time that influenced your politics?
[00:49:23]
MH: Huh. You know I read stuff that Jessica handed to me [laughing]. I remember reading about half of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which I thought was really, really good. I mean that was probably more influential and educational for me than a lot of other things. Uh let's see, there was Kate Millet with Sexual Politics came out somewhere around there. And since that was largely about literature I was interested in that. Earlier of course there was Betty Friedan. And I remember that Jessica gave Betty Friedan a lot of credit for having anticipated the second wave of radical feminism with ideas in the Feminine Mystique, which I guess was published back in the early 60s I think. Uh oh gosh there was a raft of books that came out and they were all around the house. There was a book by Mary Elman I remember reading some of, and Shulamith Firestone. There was a radical lesbian feminist whose name I think was Judith Johnson or Johnston...hmm I might have that slightly wrong. She was a very sort of colorful, lively writer. And her books seemed to have some influence on Jessica and others, but that is an example of writing that did tend toward rejection of heterosexuality itself.
[00:50:55]
KF: And uh let's see, do you remember any relationships RIFT had with other feminist theater groups or political groups?
[00:51:09]
MH: Uh I guess not. Um...hm. I remember when we would perform at universities we would inevitably meet some people who were interested in the issues, particularly women. Uh and I think I remember a couple of visits to the University of Rhode Island where some really talented actors there who were interested in the issues talked to us and I remember we saw some skits that they performed one evening. It had some relation to our concern. But beyond that I don't remember sort of group interactions.
[00:51:50]
KF: Um let's see....trying to think am I, are there any questions that I'm leaving out here? Any topics that I've forgotten?
[00:52:04]
MH: Well uh I don't know if there's topics, it depends on [laughs] how much anybody would want to know. But there's certainly other people that have important memories. I just came across a name in my diary that I should have mentioned before. I just came across a name in my diary that I should have mentioned before. I was mis-remembering the name of one of the first members. I think I said Liz but it was Nancy Buell-B-u-e-l-l. She and Mary K. Fox were the two younguest members of the group when we got started. I think they were both still in high school. And they were terrifically talented young women as actors. And uh Nancy Buell had a good kind of intellectual connection with Jessica [Murray] as I recall. Anyway so if you could track down other people who were involved you could get some interesting perspectives.
[00:53:00]
KF: Yeah, yeah. Actually one thing I'm just remembering I forgot to ask you about was the discussions after the plays. And so maybe if you could tell me about why they happened and whose idea they were.
[00:53:16]
MH: Like a kind of interaction with the audience?
KF: Yeah
MH: Well you know they happened, I remember Kate really being interested in that because of this desire for the plays to you know not just be entertainment but to have an impact on society and on the local culture at least. And uh yeah I think that people felt that that was important. I know that I felt, gosh I felt self conscious and odd in those situations and I probably didn't say much because going back to the issue I was talking about before, I did not feel that I was fundamentally a bad, oppressive, chauvinistic, domineering, patriarchal villain. I knew that some truths about me were related to those ideas, but uh I didn't want to-I guess I didn't want to betray myself after the play in a sort of context where I'm just being myself implying or going along with the idea that there was something that fundamentally wrong with my very social being.
[00:54:41]
MH: But anyway I think those discussion sections were good. I think there were probably a lot of young people who really got something out of those. And so you know we were breaking down the barrier between performers and audience in a good way.
[00:55:00]
KF: So do you think all the other men in RIFT felt that way and kind of kept quiet in the discussions or was there any particularly reason why...or yeah.
[00:55:09]
MH: Uh I don't remember very well. I would bet that Fred Radway stayed pretty quiet as I did. I think I remember that Dennis Sykes had a lot to say in some of those sessions in a kind of heartfelt and very sensitive, thoughtful way. But my guess is the main speakers in those occasions were the women.
KF: Hm. Did you feel threatened during those sessions or just uncomfortable or...?
MH: I just didn't want to be false to myself. Somehow you do cross the line when you step out of the drama, you step out of the character that you've been portraying, and now I'm just Mark, you know I'm just this guy. And uh...I just think I probably didn't want to exaggerate my commitment to feminism as a central thing in my life. And I didn't want-as I said before-I didn't want to exaggerate my own evil [laughing] my personal evil as a man.
[00:56:20]
KF: [laughing] What do you mean-like that just by speaking you would like condemn yourself? I'm not quite sure I would understand.
[00:56:29]
MH: Well you know these plays would stir up emotions in some part of the audience. And there would be women in the audience-not just young women, sometimes older women too, women who had been married for many years-who would feel a kind of cathartic connection with the female characters in the plays. And they would feel that these plays were bringing out ways in which-making them see ways in which they had been controlled and defined and manipulated by men. And so they'd want to talk about that and there would be a back and forth about that in these discussion sessions. And uh what am I going to do as a guy who's been-at least in Taking It Off, I mean that's the role I'm mostly remembering, but also in some of the scenes, the kind of real world scenes in Persephone's Return-a guy who's portraying this manipulative, chauvinist jerk. Am I going to sit there and say, actually I'm not like that at all-I'm a really nice guy? That would sort of ring hollow. But on the other hand as I said before I'm not going to sit there and say yes I've always been this kind of bad person and I'm totally ashamed. I didn't want to take that position either.
[00:57:52]
KF: That's funny you say that because there's a scene in Taking It Off where-I can't remember exactly which characters they are but it's kind of a dialogue between the male and the women characters where they talk about the things they have in common, like house plants and the singles scene and that kind of thing. And then there's that scene of dialogue is possible in the play, but then afterwards it seems like there wasn't much dialogue between the men and the women.
MH: Uh huh.
KF: Hm. I mean, I don't know but why--well I guess you already answered that question but um....hm we're at about 60 minutes right now. Um is there is anything else you'd like to talk about?
[00:58:45]
MH: Uh I don't think so. I hope you can talk to as many of the others as possible. You know my basic feeling as I look back is that I'm very proud to have been in it. I think we made a lot of mistakes and of course we were not professional really [laughs] but I think it took courage really on the part of all of us. And given that we all had to make our money in some other way, we worked really hard in the couple years I was involved. So it was a damn good experience for me and I certainly don't regret it.
[00:59:27]
KF: Well thank you so much for your time.