Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 36

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The Popular Culture Review

Once a Catholic is not a failure or a corruption
of feminist theatre, it is just not enough. The positive
aspect of its commercial success is that it makes us
want more of O’Malley. Her next play, Look Out,
Here Comes Trouble, explores the landscape of a
mental institution, and does probe more deeply into
the dilemmas of women, especially in relation to men.
Indicatively, this play never achieved the popular
success of Once a CatholicXS)
The implication is that the populace at large will only accept
superficial plays, profound plays being destined for popular rejection.
This is an assumption for which Keyssar presents very little
evidence. While it may be true to suggest that the hit, commercial
shows by and about women have remained on relatively safe terrain,
Keyssar make no attempt to assess the impact of these shows on their
audience (generally much larger in size than those addressed by their
more ideologically sound counterparts). Just as Mulvey did not
address the ways in which a viewer interacts with the screen to
produce meaning, nor does Keyssar consider the ways in which a
viewer interacts with the stage. Both critics suggest that this whole
area is absolutely quantifiable, rather than in any way ambiguous.
The latter explanation seems much more likely to be the case.
Instead of bemoaning tokenism, it would be more useful to
analyze the abilities of these dramas to undermine the dominant
ideology of the commercial theatre. Keyssar, of course, approaches
this argument from the other direction—suggesting that the
commercial forces undermine the artistic intentions of the
playwrights. While there is value in noting that any production can
subvert the intention of its playscript, that does not justify this
blanket dismissal of the ideological impact of work by Marsha
Norman, Catherine Hayes, Nell Dunn, Wendy Wasserstein and Mary
O’M alley:
The weakness common to these plays is inherent
in their particular strengths: no matter how serious
the topic, they are all comedies of manners,
revelations of the surfaces of sexual identity and