Playwright, author and political activist Sarah Schulman says she’s determined to be the woman to break the glass ceiling in American theatre. As founder of Lesbian Avengers, co-founder of the first Dyke March and a seven-year member of ACT UP, Schulman’s work has always had an activist edge. An accomplished writer, Schulman has seven novels and two non-fiction books to her credit. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in playwriting, Schulman is currently working on a new play, Burning Deck, as part of La Jolla Playhouse’s Page to Stage program.

Recently, the Gay and Lesbian Times sat down with Schulman to discuss the state of American theatre and its relationship with the GLBT community.

Sarah Schulman: There’s not one play in the American repertoire that has primary lesbian content. It’s still a story that can’t be told, and I am trying to change that. I was able to make some headway in fiction some years ago, although the ground that was won then has since been lost.… There was a time, probably 1989 or ’90, when there was lesbian content coming out in mainstream publishing. Now no American author with lesbian content can get their books published in the mainstream, they’re all British imports — Sarah Waters, that type of thing…. The theatre has also been profoundly resistant.

What’s interesting is that we have a public discourse that says everything’s getting better, but I can see that it’s going backwards.

Gay and Lesbian Times: Why do you think that is?

SS: I think that there are a lot of things going on, one is that the industry has created their own version of gay people, which are not authentic representations…. It used to be that there was no representation at all, and gay and lesbian culture would produce our own — and that was underground. Now, they produce their own version, which is untrue, and our work can no longer surface; it’s been replaced.

For example, look at AIDS representation. The culture loves stories of lonely, self-oppressed gay people with AIDS, and benevolent straight people who overcome their prejudices to help them. We see this constantly and this is always rewarded.

For those of us in the community, we know that’s not what happens. In fact, it’s the opposite, but the true story can’t be told.

We see, increasingly, “pseudo-gay” and “pseudo-lesbian” characters in mainstream movies or TV or whatever, but they never experience homophobia. The straight people are always so clean in the way that they behave towards them, and they’re never the main story — or if they are, it’s something like The Hours, [which], even though it’s gay, gay, gay, is about a relationship between a man and a woman.

So basically, despite all the rhetoric about how much better things are, we’re far, far behind where we were 15 years ago in that we have no authentic voice about what we’re truly experiencing.

I did plays from ’79 to’94 in the East Village in the Downtown Arts Movement. I didn’t even try to work in the mainstream; it was just impossible. Then I decided to try to make the shift to mainstream theatre and what I found is that there’s profound hostility to lesbian protagonists — so profound that there’s not a play in the American repertoire that has one. Unless they’re written by men.

SS: I think a lot of people are too prejudiced to be able to universalize to a lesbian protagonist. And what’s interesting is that we’re being told every day how tolerant everyone is, but there’s the evidence. The other thing is that men run the theatre. All women, straight or gay, can’t get their plays done. I think last year eight percent of all plays were by women.

Gay men, when they see two women onstage, they get bored. They’re not interested in women. Straight men are very interested in women, but they’re interested in women in relationship to men.

So lesbians in the theatre have no power network whatsoever. Gay men have an amazing power network. You can just watch the next young, gay man to come up and he’s just treated like a prince. The women really don’t have it together at all.

I’m almost single-handedly trying to change that, because there are some very fine lesbian writers in the theatre, but most of them are not writing multi-character, serious plays with lesbian protagonists.

SS: They’re either writing plays that are coded — for example, one of my favorite American plays is How I Learned to Drive, by Paula Vogel. That play is coded in a really interesting way. If you’re a lesbian you know that she is, but if you’re not you never have to face that she is; you can watch it on either level. And that’s how people are getting by. Or they’re working in solo and performance art or vaudeville style stuff that’s not serious. So I’m trying to change that.

I’ve been writing a lot of plays in the last few years, and what I’ve found is that a play like this one [Burning Deck], which has a gay, male protagonist and a relationship between a man and a woman — even though it’s not a romantic relationship — can go much farther than a play that’s about two women. I have an equal number of plays about two women and about a male/female dichotomy, and the ones about a male/female dichotomy are the ones that get produced.

SS: My strategy is that I submit my plays to every theatre, I sit down to horrifying, humiliating meetings with the guys who run these theatres, and I try, individually, to help them understand, over and over, until somebody will break down…. Often I’m the first person they’ve had a conversation with who has a lesbian play. Because I’ve been through this before in fiction, I’m seasoned to it, so even though I find it personally crushing and humiliating, it doesn’t stop me.

This play, while I’m very proud of it and it has a proto-lesbian character, if it was about two women I probably wouldn’t be sitting here.

SS: Stop Kiss is about heterosexuality. It’s about two heterosexual women who have a negative fantasy about what would happen to them if they crossed that line. And as soon as they cross that line their entire futures are destroyed. It’s like a tragic homosexual narrative. If you study Hollywood cinema, you see “the tragic Mulatto,” and it’s the same thing. In the tradition of the lesbian has to die at the end or be beaten — The Killing of Sister George, The Fox — there’s always a punishment, so it very much fits into that.

SS: It’s easy. That’s not the issue. The issue is not how well the plays are written or constructed; it’s the inability of the people with power to identify with those protagonists. For example, I wrote a play about Carson McCullers. It was done in New York in a very good theatre and was directed by Marion McClinton, who is like the number one black director in the country. He and I have a very strong collaboration. He’s straight, and we’re both very interested in justice and both very interested in women.

Every moment in that play was either from a black or a lesbian perspective. We got 25 bad reviews. And as Marion said to me, “I’m black and you’re a lesbian — ain’t none of these people black or lesbian. So no one with evaluative power is like us.” They were all white men, except for one straight woman.

SS: I wouldn’t say anyone, but I think that dominance makes people very stupid, because they end up only knowing about their experience. People who are marginalized know their experience plus the dominant cultural experience. That’s why I try to write interracial casts as much as possible, because if I’m asking other people to try to facilitate accurate representation of lesbians and gays, I too have some responsibility to try to see people as full human beings who don’t have the same access and rights that I have….

SS: The inspiration came from a novel by Balzac, called Cousin Bette. I studied it in college and it always stuck with me because she was a spinster, which is an interesting icon in Western literature — often, I think, misunderstood. She has been wronged by her family, who has marginalized and humiliated her, and she decides to do everything she can to make it right, no matter what. That always intrigued me, and I was looking for a good role for a woman in her 50s. Our greatest actresses get wasted in this country — once they’ve crossed 40, that’s the end, they play people’s mothers — so we have all these great actresses all over the country with nothing to do.

[Burning Deck] is really about these people who are refugees from America to New York, people who leave their families and live on the margin, and the consequences of oppression on people’s emotional lives. And that gets back to the gay representation issue, because I think one of the things people don’t want to know is how homophobia functions, how dominant people benefit from it and how it diminishes people who receive it.

Burning Deck will play at La Jolla Playhouse, July 15-Aug. 3. For more information, call (858) 550-1010.