#something something misogyny rooted extremely deeply in theater as an art form and as a field of study

[spocksgotemotions]

I saw a modernized version of a lesser known Shakespeare play in Russian and it was so interesting and weird that it’s still stuck in my brain (i saw it for a class and my professor was very annoyed with me when I said it was my favorite of the semester because it was different and weird). Most of my senior year of college I was learning about absurdist/surrealist theater and experimenting with it and the weird subgenres that came out of it. I wrote a very short collage play about Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg in a tumultuous romance (Strindberg hated Ibsen’s guts so much, but he kept a lifelike bust of Ibsen in his study), where all the lines were taken from the various women in their plays. Different professor once introduced a play as the most feminist thing at the time (in the 1830s). The play was written by a man and had a cast of 20, with 6 female characters. The female characters were split into two groups, “whore” and “wife.” One of the wives did not have a name. All of the wives died for their husbands and the whores were only in one scene. One of the whores has a beautiful monologue about longing. But it is longing for sex and sex alone. She was based off of 18th century porn novels. My professor got very annoyed when I informed him of this. Right now I’m working as a scare actor and after being told the story of the haunted house I put a lot of thought into the sort of things I would say and do to fit the vibe but still make it my own. I heard one of my coworkers say, “people keep laughing cause they think I’m saying yeet, but I’m doing the minecraft zombie noise.”