Theatre Incognita wraps up its inaugural season with A Room of Their Own: Plays from 3rd Floor (1996-2006). Performances are Fri & Sat at 8 pm and Sun at 4 pm May 14–16 and May 21–23 in the Legacy Foundation Gallery of the Community School of Music and Arts. Image provided
IT FEELS LIKE AGES since culture wars and identity politics dominated conversations about art and art-making. The Millennium might have muted many of these conversations: with so little government funding for the arts, arguments over NEA grants started to seem almost quaint. But after almost a decade of severe economic crises and a president who seemed willfully ignorant about most of the arts, the last few years have seen a resurgence in burgeoning artistic expression and production.
The age that brought “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to be White” to the 1991 Whitney Biennial, as well as Congressional investigations into artists’ intentions, left a legacy of work that remains vibrant to this day. So it seems altogether appropriate to now revisit the ‘90s and early aughts, and thanks to the brilliance of new group Theater Incognita, Ithaca audiences will have a chance to give some wonderful plays a second look this weekend, when the theater group will present A Room of Their Own: Plays from the 3rd Floor (1996-2006), a series of work by a collective of women playwrights.
Operating out of a studio in the Commons, the collective performed both traditional and experimental plays, alternating full-length work with shorter pieces. “One thing the 3rd Floor did was get really good at the short form,” Ross Haarstad said. “The form is like a short story: it doesn’t have the details of a novel. Just a character or two and something turns by the end. So I think each one offers a complete nice experience.”
The 3rd Floor Productions was an Ithaca women’s theater group started in 1996 by a group of eight female playwrights who helped develop each other’s work. “We weren’t interested in the male orgasm model of theater,” Kit Wainer said over drinks at Moosewood last week. “We decided that the female orgasm model is more expressive, not so singular, and not so grand.”
“It seems at least way back when, there was a difference in the way men and women wrote,” Wainer said. “Some of us had been in the Ithaca Group of Playwrights, and we decided we needed a group of women playwrights, doing each other’s work, trying to create a women’s perspective.”
The program this weekend will include seven pieces, including work by all but one member of the collective. They include “Chimera” by Judith Pratt, “Line Qua Line” by Kit Wainer, “Lemmings” by Kit Wainer, “Suicide” and “Time, and Time Again” by Natalie deCombray, “Sleeps Through Storms” by Kathy Kramer, and “Locating Amy Lowell” by Caissa Willmer.
At 20 minutes, “Chimera” is the longest; the rest work with the short form. Some are playful and others are political: there is a post-apocalyptic play, a play about standing in line. In another, a husband worries as his wife keeps disappearing into the attic; another yet depicts three women telling stories and scrabbling for a living while their dreams include a mythical beast.
“We were also involved in a lot of on-site work,” Wainer noted. “Our first major production after “Chimera” [3rd Floor’s first performed work] took place in a restaurant. And we did a series of plays called Overheard, and we took over three of the booths and mic-ed them. And no one would know when one play started and another ended. We also did plays in the park; we did porch plays and attic plays.”
Ultimately, 3rd Floor Productions ended its decade-long existence for two reasons. A principal playwright passed away suddenly and tragically, and the collective lost its space on the Commons due to rising rent.
“10 years is not a bad run in this town,” Haarstad said solemnly. “To be a creative group and a collective! Someone has to run something to keep it going longer. Anyhow, some of the people are still writing from that group: in Wolf’s Mouth, which is much more of both a playwright and actor’s group, or in other groups.”
This is not the first time Theater Incognita has performed the work of 3rd Floor Productions. Last winter, it staged “queermonsterfreaks,” a delightful take on “Frankenstein” that provoked questions about gender identity while poking fun at traditional theater. That work was first staged as a short Halloween play, and it gave a wonderful work a second chance.
“What you hear across the country about plays is that you can get world premieres but it’s very hard to get second productions,” Haarstad said. “It’s very difficult for a play to have a life beyond that one first time. And except for ‘Time and Time Again’ these are all second productions, so they’re all getting a fresh look.”
There are other connections to the past as well. Zia Anger, the director of a short play, first experienced 3rd Floor Productions as a five year old who would attend her mother’s practices. Anger went on to stage a Brecht children’s play last year at DeWitt Middle School, and hopes to continue working with Theater Incognita.
“What I liked about 3rd Floor was that it was a bunch of people who said, We’re going to get together to get our voices out there, and so we can figure out what our voice is,” Haarastad said. “To me, that’s everything I think Theater Incognita is about.”
“I think these plays present possibilities,” he continued. “And I think what I see in this is a lot of fun wordplay, but also the possibility of what could be, a lot of dreamy stuff in it. So much of it has a foot in naturalism but never stays quite there.” And just as the plays flirt with the unordinary, the theater collective itself proved to be an alternative to what’s common in theater, both in form and in organization.
For a time, judging by the group’s ouervre, a small group of female writers found expression, and an audience who were willing to suspend belief for a short play, and ultimately for ten years. In the end, 3rd Floor Productions provided, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “a room of one’s own,” and though not all of their plays were explicitly political, the act of carving out a space for women’s theater was.
Advance tickets are $10 and are available through Ticket Center Ithaca (607.273.4497 or 1-800-28-ITHACA). Online sales are at ithacaevents.org. Admission at the door is $12.50 (seating is limited.)