even productions
p.o.box 18175 cleveland heights, ohio 44118 (216) 371-1697
CLEVELAND WOMEN BREAK THEIR LEGS
VARIETY SHOW RETURNS
Cleveland Women's Third Annual Variety Show lifts its curtain Saturday, February 11. The Variety Show has come to be a tradition of our community and with good cause. Watching the creative outgrowths of our friends and neighbors on the stage is exciting, confirming, and very suspenseful. The unexpected is to be expected in this near fantasy environment of novices and professionals performing comedy, dramatic skits, music, poetry, dance, and other acts which defy description. The show begins at 8:30 pm in the Church of the Redeemer, 2420 S. Taylor Rd. at Scarborough St., Cleveland Heights.
The Variety Show is a benefit concert, proceeds going towards payment of Oven Production's sound equipment. Ticket prices for the event at $3,
$5, $10 in advance; $3.50, $5, $10 at the door. (All seats are non-reserved, contribute what you can afford.) Under 12 over 60, $1. Work exchange is available. Free child care is by reservation only. Call 321-0692 before Feb.9.
Last year's Variety Show succeeded in pulling many exciting guests out of their closets to perform such feats as roller skating/dancing, comedy and dramatic skits, as well as fine performances by Big Mama, The Women's Music Support Group, and a Feminist Dance Workshop. This year's show promises to surpass last year's with an equally creative entourage. Buy your tickets in advance, we expect a sell-out crowd! This production is a women-only event.
Sound by SyrenSound.
INTRODUCING MONA GOLABEK
March 11, Oven Productions will present a piano concert by Mona Golabek at Cleveland State University's main classroom auditorium. Mona is a concert pianist who has been performing internationally for years, but now, for the first time in her life, is examining what it means to be a woman in the arts. "I have concertized extensively for years in many countries, and yet with rare exception, my audiences have always been terribly traditional middle-upper class listeners--such that the sole means of communication was the music." As a woman artist, Mona Golabek will be competing this June in Moscow for the International Tchaikowsky Competition. During the winter and spring, she will be touring women's communities around the country to share her work with other women. "It is important for me as a woman concert pianist to seek the support and dialogue of other women as I enter this very difficult and intense training period for Moscow. It is also most important for me to be able to bring my music to you--with the hope that you will love the music the way I love it." Mona expresses an unusual conciousness about connecting with her audience. "It is enormously important to be able to hold a question and answer period following the concert. I would like to share my thoughts about the music, what it is like being a woman concert pianist,
ABOUT THE COVER
and hear reactions from the audience.'
Mona Golabek first came to international attention when she won the "People's Prize" at the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. She soon after appeared as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, made her debut at the Hollywood Bowl, and appeared as guest artist with orchestras in Mexico and Japan. In 1974, she made a. sensational debut with the New Philharmonic Orchestra of London. Other appearances include the Houston Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, and the Seattle Symphony. A television documentary has been made about her which has been shown nationally several times.
Promoting classical music is not Oven Production's usual fare. Mona Golabek is an extraordinary woman and musician for whom we hope to draw a large and unusual audience. Please come.
The event is co-sponsored with Cleveland State's Women's Law Causus.
Women and organizations wanting to be included in the printed announcements distributed at Oven events must call or write Oven at least one week before the event.
TICKET OUTLETS
center: womenspace, rape crisis center east: coventry books, three of cups, food co-op west: plants plus, ywca southland area geauga co.: geauga women's center
by mail: P.O. box 18175, Cleveland Hts. 44118
My graphic depicts the spirituality of woman's sexuality. As forms changing from leaf to tree symbolize the agelessness of woman's spirit, so the woodland symbols set upon vaginal imagery are meant to depict woman's sexuality as rich and rewarding. The various stages of growth signify that living forms vary in their states of existance and during the change, vary in truth and certainty. I am stating that women need not be humiliated, penalized and persecuted when in the course of exploring her own sexuality, she becomes pregnant.
The issue is not abortion, it is freedom of choice. Woman must be free to control her sexuality,
because it affects her bodily activity and destiny. Certainly in focasing on this issue, What She Wants is expounding on the most important issue of this century.
Arlene Dadley has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally and is co-founder of The Cleveland Chicago Connection, a support group for Cleveland women in the arts. Affliated with Judy Chicago in Los Angeles, the core collective is currently working on the "Dinner Party Project,” a monumental presentation of the herstory of women in Western Civilization.
VANITIES
Vanities, the current production at Center Repertory Theatre, is billed as a comedy; it may be so for men, but for women it is painful and sad look at ourselves and our sisters, as well as an object lesson on the need for the feminist movement.
Written by a man, Jack Heifner, the play is an essentially superficial look at the lives of three women over a period of 10 years. We meet them as high school cheerleaders in 1963, enjoying their "power" as the most popular girls in the school, their chief worry being whether the assassination of President Kennedy will cancel the football rally planned for that night. Kathy is the organized one, head cheerleader since elementary school, who brooks little opposition from her friends to her plans for a prom theme; she has planned it, and therefore it will go as planned. Mary is a rebel, but only against her mother's watchful eye; her idea of rebellion is "doing it" with her current boyfriend. Joanne is the personification of the sweet young thing, smugly asserting her virginity, degrading her own intelligence, and dreaming only of Marriage (sigh) to Ted.
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The second act finds them older but scarcely wiser. They are all members of the best sorority on campus, guarding their positions of superior popularity and scornful of those Vietnam War protesters disturbing the campus. They are about to graduate. Kathy plans to teach physical education she already knows all the games, so it will be easy. Mary, admittedly afraid of the unknown world. before her, plans a postgraduate fling in Europe so that she can put off facing it for a while. Joanne serenely contemplates her forthcoming wedding to Ted, and Total Womanhood. The familiar environment which held them together is about to end.
In the third act, they meet again after several years, having lost touch with one another. The years have not been kind to any of them. Kathy, her plans awry, having discovered that she hated teaching and her students hated her, now leads an elegant but parasitic and withdrawn life as a kept woman. Mary, brittle and wild, runs a gallery of pornographic art, catering to those who like her canot sustain a relationship which is more than sexual; she still has not outgrown her adolescent need to shock. Joanne needs the bottle to avoid facing the hollowness of her fulfilled dreams of marriage and motherhood.
The play has some very funny moments--and yet, how can we laugh when the women on stage are all too clear a reflection of the attitudes we all learned? When we laugh at these three, we laugh at oursselves, but it is a rueful laugh, one of painful recog. nition. Kathy, Mary and Joanne don't think they are funny at all; they take very seriously those dreams, those vanities which male-dominated society has foisted upon women as their only worthwhile goals "popularity'', serving a man, motherhood.
Vanities is too close for comfort to what each of us could have become without the help of the feminist movement to support us in our unorthodox ideas about the roles of women. The three women, excellently acted by Lizette Smith, Karen Joshi and Cindy Snodgrass, are driven nearly crazy trying to live up to the shallow vanities of their existence and make some sense of them. They are, each in her own way, ripe for a CR group.
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In fact, the main criticism of this play is that although it takes place in the turbulent years 1963. 1973, nothing not the Vietnam War, the flower chiidren nor the Women's Movement (which is not even mentioned) -has touched these women. They may recognize their past foibles, but they have learned nothing from them. And yet there but for the grace of the Goddess, go we all.
What She Wants/January, 1978/page 11