The Nance

[deliasherman]

I started this last week, but it's still pretty much accurate--including not quite being unpacked.  The piano's gone, however, and I now have 25 square feet of living room space I didn't have before, which is a good thing.  Anyway, finishing it now, and hoping to Be More Timely in the Future.  (Ha

Comments

[sartorias]

Oh, that does sound like fun. Off-Broadway comedies, written by (and or starring) interesting women. Now that is something I need to explore.

[wild_irises]

We talked about whether or not the ending was inevitable, and how set in his ways Chauncey was or had to be. EK raved about the second male lead.

For myself, the more I think about the show, the more I liked the first act better than the second, because the first (as you said at intermission) was open-ended and could go either way, but the second was more stereotypical and predictable.

I would give the women characters a little more credit than you do; I think the communist woman could have been more developed politically, but she was still more than just pasties and performing. On the other hand, this article is relevant to the whole question of women characters, and McDougall's points can be applied to The Nance for sure.

[deliasherman]

You are so right about that article, which I read yesterday and loved. There will always be people who write complicated, nuanced, thorny, active, ambiguous female characters (my own dear wife among them), but they are not necessarily going to be the people who make the cover of The New York Times Sunday Book Review or the best seller lists. Because popular culture tends to self-perpetuate, as all powerful systems do, and change course v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, if at all