copyright © Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, 2017
first edition
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Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Nostbakken, Amy, author
Mouthpiece / Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava.
A play.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55245-368-1 (softcover).
I. Sadava, Norah, author II. Title.
PS8627.O844M68 2018 C812′.6 C2017-906129-1
Mouthpiece is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 557 9 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 558 6 (PDF),
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For Janis and Anne
An Introduction
by Michele Landsberg
There’s nothing more challenging for a vintage feminist today than to convey the kind of constraints we endured before the so-called Second Wave of feminism came along. The passively accepted tyranny of girldom and boydom that regulated every minute detail of life: only girls had flowers on their birthday cake (flowers were feminine); only boys played sports in any organized way; only boys took second helpings and only boys were comfortable in their own skins. As teenagers, we went along with the choking conformity of clothing; we completely accepted rape jokes and the necessity for girls to laugh merrily at them. We girls inhaled division and restriction with every breath and had no more thought of rejecting sexism than of rejecting breathing itself. Our main task was to be pretty and to attract boys; if that same prettiness and attraction led to our deflowering and hence pregnancy, we might as well kill ourselves, so profound was the social humiliation. Of course, we were also despised as ‘cockteasers’ and accused of leaving boys with the dreaded ‘blue balls’ if we protected our sacred virginity. Double bind? It was our daily life.
With syncopated movement, song, and spoken (and howled) words, two women – writers and performers Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava – summon up this painful past and our present moment.
With astonishing fluidity, they evoke an earlier version of femininity and, simultaneously, their own complicated rejection of it. The lead character(s) in the play – two females, both merged into one and also divided – portray a thirty-something contemporary woman who has just awakened, metaphorically voiceless, to the knowledge of her mother’s death and her appalling duty of writing her mother’s eulogy for the imminent funeral.
The two voices unite and divide in a riveting duet. The women first appear onstage in a bathtub, comically elided – the legs emerging at one end of the tub do not belong to the woman whose head appears at the other. It’s the scene-setting visual joke that prepares us for the complex interplay to come. Both are dressed in plain, white, one-piece bathing suits, making them appear almost more exposed and vulnerable than if they’d been naked.
The bathtub is a useful prop. Twice the women ask men in the audience – in elaborately high-pitched, cooing, cajoling voices and with mincing steps – to move the bathtub for them. A few seconds later, they’re hefting it lightly and absent-mindedly by themselves.
As the woman struggles to sum up her mother’s life for the compulsory eulogy – a doormat! So perfectly groomed! Always smiling! She never ate a french fry! All those copies of Vogue magazine! – she is torn between her filial love and her rejection of her mother’s feminine role. It’s the perfect way to embody the distance we’ve come and the distance we still have to go, because, of course, she has soaked up, willy-nilly, so many of her mother’s values. It’s a universal condition, as we can easily recognize from the groans of recognition and shouts of rueful laughter from the audience.
The fast-paced performance is a perfect blend of singing (eerie fluting, bursts of opera, Bulgarian chants), wisecracks, and wrenching monologue/duologue, along with a precisely choreographed athletic performance that veers from ballet to Wrestle-Mania. Among the sharpest and most painful passages are when the women rapidly exchange the most filthily misogynist bar jokes and the humiliatingly sexist taunts of men on the street.
There’s hardly a facet of a modern woman’s life left unremarked upon in this deft and searching work. Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava have found a wonderfully apt form to express the dilemma of contemporary feminism, without once dipping into academic jargon or movement rhetoric. The whole of our predicament is expressed in the constricted throats of these two women, tightened with grief, fury, and frustration. The audience carries the unanswered questions with them as they leave with the last line in their ears: ‘Huh, huh, huh, we’ve come so far now and we’ll never go back to …’
A Note from the Creators
by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava
In 2013, we set out to collaborate on a theatre piece about female relationships. Inspired by the writing of Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Amy Gerstler, and Sylvia Plath, we wanted to create a work that would investigate the particular nature of the way women relate to one another. We hoped to explore the special closeness that we share: the intimacy of bathing together, crying together, nursing each other, all the while sensing this dark sister of competition and menace living right beside that love. The poets deftly capture the conflicts tangled up in a complicated mess of motherhood, friendship, cycles, birth, death, rebirth, releasing, menstruation, suffocation, cocks, fucking, eating, blood, food, vomit, venom, jealousy – all the forces that are extremely complex and disturbingly familiar. Inspired by these women, we wanted to examine why the darkness exists, and we wanted to make a play about it using the strengths of the female voice.
We began improvising around the subject of female relationships – physically, vocally, using the work of these poets. But day after day we kept gravitating toward stories from our own lives, our friends’ lives, our mothers’ lives, our own experiences from that very day, headlines about a ‘woman’s place in society,’ the memes, the articles, the enraging ads, the blog posts, the Beyoncé. Everyday realities had us all fired up.
Then the penny dropped. Or rather, after years and years of pressure building behind it, the penny blasted into our faces, knocking off the rose-coloured glasses. Up until that point, if asked what the play was about, we would reply: ‘It’s about
