The Women’s and Gender Studies program will restage “We are ... Women!” on Friday, March 20, at 7 p.m. in the Law School Auditorium, exactly 20 years after it was written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the WGST program at USC.
“It was first written and produced in 1995 by instructors or students at USC to discuss women’s empowerment and commemorate where women were at the time, but to also continue advocating for women’s rights into the future,” said Alexis Stratton, co-director of the "We are… Women!" performance.
The original script of the play compiles monologues from women throughout history into a single performance.
The play was written 20 years ago and times have changed, so reading through the original script and monologues made Stratton and her co-director Suzanne Vargas think the script still needed some updating.
“When it was first written, the main focus was on broadening people’s perspectives, and trying to bring social awareness to where women were at and define who they were at that time,” Vargas said. “But now, our perspective isn’t just focused on being accepted and understood. We are fighting for the fact the women are still invisible and are our femininity is manifested into how we are recognizing what ‘woman’ means to us personally and how we are accepting within ourselves.”
Stratton said it’s been nice to see how the original version of the play complements the new, but says the representation of diversity in the original work was lacking in areas of class, race, age and sexual identity.
“The original play had one piece that was about an older lesbian woman,” Stratton said. “In our updated version, there is a wide variety of sexualities represented and various gender identities too, including a monologue that deals with gender non-conformity and addresses what that means, and how much ‘women-ness’ is enough to be a women.”
Fourth-year social work student Megan Monts, whose monologue touches on the issue of stereotypically gendered careers, hopes the audience recognizes the connection between women now and women in the past.
“Feminism has a bite, regardless of the decade,” Monts said. “The attitude is that we are women, in whatever way we wish to express it and experience it, and that feminism has taken many different shapes and colors and voices over time. ["We are… Women!"] is a celebration of that myriad.”
“I hope people will have an open space in their hearts and an open mind to honor where we have come from in our social movement,” Stratton said. “I really think I had forgotten that."
Both Stratton and Vargas hope that after watching the play, the audience will develop a newfound respect for women and challenge all of the ism’s we currently face in our lives.
“We never talk about these things,” Vargas said. “We never stop and think about what our voice was like 20 years ago and compare it to our voice now. We get to capture and catalog the difference and hold it up in an empowering way and say this was what was shocking and amazing 20 years. So what are we gonna do now that’s going to be even more shocking and amazing?”