[00:00:01]

Kiera Feldman: Uh could we start by you saying your full name and today's date and where you are?

[00:00:06]

Deborah Jean Templin: My name is Deborah Jean Templin. Today's date is July 10th, I think. July 10th, 2006. I'm in Whitefield, New Hampshire in the Spruces which is part of the Weathervain Theater in Whitefield, New Hampshire, which is a Summerstock theater in its 41st season.

KF: Great. Well I might correct you on that-I believe it's the 7th.

DT: Hey you know what, it's July 7th. When you're rehearsing as many shows as I'm rehearsing you kind of lose track of time. But it is July 7th.

KF: [laughs]. Good recovery, good recovery. Um could you maybe give me some background about where you grew up, went to school, and what your family was like?

[00:00:49]

DT: I grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota ten miles from the town that I went to high school in. In the wintertime I would have to take a bus to school and that bus would take a half hour to get there. I grew up with three sisters, no brothers, so it was a farm family with four daughters. And my father more than anything else in the world wanted four sons. So we all knew what our name should have been. Like I was supposed to be James, my mother sister was supposed to be Glenn. Because he was a farmer and he wanted someone to farm with him and the whole idea that the farm is inherited through sons and they take over the farming business. Farming is very difficult. Usually it's passed down from father to son.

KF: And what year were you born in?

[00:01:43]

DT: 1951.

KF: Um and where did you go to college?

[00:01:49]

DT: I went to college in Minnesota. I started school in college in 1969. And that was the year that they admitted women to Princeton University. And my sister Beverley-all my sisters went to college. By the way we were all five years apart so we could all go to college, 'cause my parents felt education was very important, especially for girls to give them a chance in the world. So we were all four years apart so the first daughter could-they thought you could make so much money your first year out of college [that] you could pay for the next child's freshman year. My older sister went to Macalester College, paid for my second sister's first year at University of Minnesota. She graduated from the University of Minnesota and the plan worked very well, except for one thing. As the years went on education became more and more expensive. They did not figure inflation into their plan. But they wanted us all to go to college.

[00:02:48]

DT: I went to college at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota called Gustavus-Adolphus College. And I did not apply for Princeton University although my older sister said I should because she said well how many farmer's daughters will ever be going to Princeton-maybe they'll give you a scholarship or something. But I did not know anybody on the east coast and the whole idea kind of scared me about not knowing anyone on the east coast and being so far away from my family. So I went to Gustavus-Adolphus College and the reason I went there is I was in speech contests through high school and we had one act play contests. They're 83 counties in Minnesota and speech contests, humorous/serious interpretation, oral interpretation was still very much taught in the schools. And uh my judge in my high school speech contests was a woman named Mrs. Evelyn Anderson. So she was my judge from the time I was in 8th grade, so 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade-so for five years she was my judge. And then I was offered a scholarship at St. Olaf College for music or Gustavus-Adolphus College for theater and so I continued my training with Mrs. Anderson. So I basically had a through line of the same teacher for almost ten years-Mrs. Anderson. So that's why I decided to go to Gustavus-Adolphus College.

KF: And had your parents gone to college?

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DT: My father went to the sixth grade. His father-my great grandfather came from Germany in 1861 because of the Homestead Act. But also my great grandmother was a single parent and came across with her son who was then six years old. And she did not want her son to um-the first born sons were being taken for the Kaiser's draft and she saw the writing on the wall and she saw what was happening there and as a single parent she realized what was going to happen. So she got on a boat and came to Ellis Island, 1861 I believe, with her son. Then she went from New York to Chicago, had another son, got married. That man adopted both of the boys and I became a Templin-I mean that's why our family's Templin. And then they moved to-then my great grandfather married a woman and homesteaded land, the farmhouse that I grew up in. And there were ten people in the family-six boys and four girls.

[00:05:22]

DT: My grandfather was one of those boys. He married a woman in a farm next door and he had ten children, six boys and four girls. So my father had every reason to believe he would have sons. But he had four daughters.

KF: Um did your mom-what level of education did your mom go through?

[00:05:43]

DT: My mother went to the 8th grade. And the reason she didn't go any further is because people who-think little house on the prairie, think country schoolhouses. There was no rural bus service for country kids. So there was no possibility of people on farms going to high school. There was no electricity on the farm until 1939. And my great-my father's-my mother's father was part of a group of people that said ok we gotta do rural cooperatives. It was sort of-cooperatives were not like New York coops. It was like, cooperatives. Let's all get together, all these farmers get together, and we can have electricity. Lot of people in 1939 went like why should we have electricity-we've got like windmills and we milk the cows by hand and it's a little too futuristic here.

[00:06:36]

DT: But they finally got electricity at about the same time-somewhere in the 30s. And the 30s were really hard on rural poverties like no other. It was really hard but my mother's father made sure there was bus service. But by that time, so my mother was the oldest girl in the family, so by the time she was old enough to go to high school, she was already a year behind. And that was one thing my mother regretted all her life. But my mother was very smart and but she only went to the 8th grade because there was no way for her to get to high school.

[00:07:13]

DT: The other thing is, um in Minnesota and in many areas of-rural areas of the Unites States at that time, we're talking the 30s and the 40s, people would emigrate-let's say all the Germans would emigrate and they'd go to like New Germany, Minnesota. And all the Czechoslovakian people would come to New Prague, Minnesota. So she went to a country school house where most of the kids spoke Czechoslovakian. Sometimes the teacher would just talk Czech, so she had to be bilingual to just understand what was going on. My father um would go to a German Lutheran school in the spring and then his father would transfer him to an English public speaking school in the Fall because he didn't want his son to lose his ability to speak German. So my father spoke low German, high German, and English. But he also had a very strict teacher. And it was a kind of a-well he was a violinist from Germany and he believed in Pavlov's teaching of children with bells. So there was a bell to sit up and a bell to sit down and a bell to recite and a bell to sing-it was kind of like Ms. Hannigan and the orphans like 'We love you Ms. Hannigan.' My father absolutely hated school. So when he was, when he graduated-in the rural areas, once you were confirmed in the Lutheran church or once you had your first communion, that was-they always had lots of pictures in their first communion or whatever-that was the end of their education at sixth grade.

[00:08:47]

DT: So my father went to work. He was a hired boy, from the age of 12. And he had to give all his money to his father. So he worked as a hired man for people from the time he was 12 until he was 29. They were very poor. And that's when he married my mother. And my father had to work for a year for my mother's-he worked for a year as a hired man on the farm of his future wife, sort of to earn the right to marry my mother. And when they got married my mother's father gave the couple five head of dairy cattle. And they were farmers and they built that heard into 150 head of cattle. But they were farmers. So some of the background I'm telling you, it may seem like old world, almost like old testament, but that's the background that I come from and that's what I wanted to tell you.

KF: That's so interesting. So when you went to college, what kinds of activities were you involved with?

[00:09:53]

DT: In college um I took theater and speech classes. My freshman year there was a mysterious fire in the uh alumni hall and it burned down. We're not exactly sure why it burned down but it burned down. Um the alumni association at the school-this is 1969-alumni associations, universities were just beginning to realize the importance of that. They couldn't exist just on the endowment of someone dying and giving money to the college. They needed to start to milk the alumni for money. And the alumni association decided to do the Fantastics, and it was the first time that a musical had been done at this liberal arts school. And I was, I auditioned for the musical and I was real excited and I got cast as the mime. So my first musical was as a non-speaking part. And uh so activities, I wanted to be in choir. I had always sung. But at this school you kind of had to make a choice. Either you did drama, theater, or music. You couldn't do both. And I chose to do theater, so that meant I couldn't sing anymore. But up until that point I was in choirs from the time I was in fourth grade. I always sang in a choir. And I really missed it going to college, but it was like my teacher would say 'musicals are bastard theater. If you want to do theater you don't do musicals' [affected arrogant accent]. She didn't believe in musical theater.

KF: Were you involved in any kind of political activities?

[00:11:37]

DT: I remember in um, well there was moratorium and all the classes were canceled and no one went to classes. The first play we did at Gustavus was Marat Sade: The Assassination and Persecution of Jean-Paul Marat-well anyway, it's a long title. And um, some of the songs were like [singing] 'what's the use of a revolution without general, general copulation'-it was about the French Revolution and about the Inteligencia and we were in the middle of Vietnam. So it was an appropriate, it was a great show. We did um The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail was the next play. And I remember there were no black students who auditioned for the role of the runaway slave because it really wasn't the time when you wanted to play a runaway slave if you were a black student. And at that time in Minnesota, and perhaps also in um, well definitely in Minnesota at that time and I don't know if it's changed-it was basically 70% Swedish and Norwegian. So I felt I was a minority at Gustavus with brown hair. So there were maybe 15 black students on campus, maybe, and they were all recruited to come-you know they were starting to [de]segregate, starting to bring students into the student body.

[00:13:06]

DT: I know my freshman year the homecoming queen was a black woman, which was really cool.

KF: And were there any kind of women's movement activities on campus?

[00:13:20]

DT: Um I would say uh, there were stickers that would be put on things that say-I remember not so much at Gustavus. There was something called, we have something called Santa Lucia day and it's a Swedish tradition. On the, I think it's like the 5th day of December, you have to be Swedish. You can't be Norwegian for Finnish or anything else. And they pick a Swedish girl to walk with candles on her head with a wreath and you sing carols. Well there was some sort of talk like why do you have to be Swedish, and why do you have to, well ok-well nobody said that a man should do it, but the women were going why do you have to be Swedish. Could it be any woman? No, it was like tradition, those really strong traditions of Gustavus-Adolphus college stayed the way they were.

[00:14:10]

DT: And some of the women were going, look, I'm Norwegian, why can't I do this? So that was more of a nationalistic thing and it's always stayed the way it is. It's like that's the way it is, you gotta be Swedish, you gotta be a woman. Um, there were women, it was the first time we had a co-ed dorm. I was in the first co-ed dorm. Before that time the women were in one dorm and the men were in the other. So in 1969 there was a new dorm built and the women were on one side of the dorm and the men were on the other side of the dorm. You couldn't go to the men's side of the dorm after hours. But it was interested, there was a sauna at the bottom [laughs]-there was a sauna at the bottom of the dorm and we could use it co-educationally. I found that rather interesting.

KF: [laughs]. Um so you graduated in 1973 I'm assuming?

DT: Correct.

KF: And what'd you do after that?

DT: I spent 2 and a half years on campus and it was, I believe my sophomore year was moratorium and I believe waking up one morning and-chapel wasn't compulsory but you could go at 10 o'clock and they'd have thoughts for the day, you know. And uh Reverend Esbornson [sp] was our chaplain and he was very much-he talked about Vietnam and what was happening there. And one morning there were black crosses everywhere, like it's centered around the chapel. It's a beautiful beautiful chapel. And um there were black crosses on the mall representing people that had died in Vietnam. And we you know we had moratorium and classes were canceled. I would say Vietnam took precedence over the Women's Movement but it was sort of at the same time.

[00:15:53]

DT: And um you didn't wear skirts all the time. You could wear jeans. We're talking we're coming out of the 50s and 60s. 50s people-there were pictures where people would have from the late 50s and early 60s, like in a yearbook where people were wearing gloves and the debate team debated Yale. It was kind of like you went for your MRS degree.

KF: What's that?

[00:16:20]

DT: MRS-Mrs. You went to college to get married.

KF: ohhhh.

DT: And so you went to college to get married and you joined a sorority and they'd get together. Then you got married and then your kids went to Gustavus and their kids went to Gustavus-it was just, you could definitely, if you wanted to meet like people, your parents would pay for you to go to a college where you could meet like people and hopefully marry somebody and have a better chance in life because they were both educated. You never heard of MRS degree?

KF: No, I haven't.

[00:17:01]

DT: That was a major reason to go to a college, and certain colleges, yeah.

KF: So I take it that wasn't your reason to go to college though?

DT: No, my reason to go to college was to get an education and to…we all, the reason we went to school was to get an education. To get a good job.

KF: And um when you graduated where did you go?

[00:17:24]

DT: well I graduated in 3 and a half years instead of four. We had a wonderful thing at Gustavus called guaranteed tuition, and I know this sounds crazy in 2006. You paid a little bit-like your freshman year, whatever you paid your freshman year you paid your senior year. But you paid a little bit like a holding fee your freshman year. So for me to go to a year of college, and I think it was with board and room, was $2600 a year. Twenty six hundred. Two thousand six hundred dollars a year.

[00:17:56]

DT: But at that time that was a lot of money and I went ok, I studied abroad my junior year. I studied abroad and it was less expensive for me to go to school in the English system because the dollar was worth so much money. It was worth a lot of money. Just like right now in 2006 in New York City-that's where I live now-there are many many students that are coming from England and Spain and Germany 'cause their money is worth a lot more. So I did the opposite thing in 1971. I studied in England. And in England I know one of the reasons I went to where I studied was Germaine Greer was teaching in the next town and she had just written the Female Eunuch and I thought that was so cool.

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DT: I studied in England and I think the um-although English society in many ways is more stratified and there's more layers of you know, there's more class distinction. I think in terms of the women's movement, the women's movement started more in England and then it came over to America. Like the Redstockings. There was still more evidence. So my junior year when I went to England I really became aware of the things I could do. I didn't even realize that I wasn't being shown some of those things.

KF: [interrupting] what do you mean?

DT: But when I was in England I was just with a different, I think I had more intellectual stimulation. I wrote plays at Coventry Cathedral. There were people-I started to mix with people from Germany. Um they had something called the um Cross of Nails Center. Coventry Cathedral was one of the cathedrals during world war II that was bombed and Dresden Cathedral in Germany was bombed by the allies. So they had a reciprocal agreement, any place in the world that had really been um decimated by war, they would uh sort of get together and figure out-they would study peace. And during Vietnam that was an interesting thing to study. And um peace also meant peace between men and women and what was the, what was causing strife between men and women.

[00:20:12]

DT: And what was causing strife between men and women were very um tightly defined roles. And um although I'd never thought about it, I guess I'd never thought about it in the same way some people had. Because some people had come from families where the husband worked and the wife stayed at home and was a homemaker. In my family my father worked from the time he was 12 milking a cow and my mother was put under a cow at the age of 12. She was a milkmaid. So the two of them worked together equally. So I always had that sense of equality in my family. And I just listened to other people. You know I thought Donna Reid was kind of a funny show. It wasn't that funny how people lived. That's not how my family lived.

[00:21:03]

DT: Because you couldn't do it without everybody working. And my mother worked I would say equally as hard as my father did. The only thing there was, I remember she said the farm is-why is the farm in your name? Why can't it be in both of our names? And they tried to put it in both of their names and then they found out tax-wise it didn't make any sense, do you know what I mean. So I think early on I learned-my examples of feminism came from my mother and father working together, equally, sharing in this together.

[00:21:37]

DT: Then when I went to college, just like when anybody goes to college, you start to realize that not everybody was raised the same. Or, so my examples of my own feminism in a way came from my mom and dad.

KF: And then what did you come to see about gender roles when you were away at college?

[00:21:59]

DT: Well, um, let's see. I found that…I remember being, going to a sorority rush and finding the-like I didn't know how to set a good table. The things that I knew and thought were important just weren't as important to some of the other people. Like I certainly, I wouldn't say I necessarily had the latest fashion or I dressed-I didn't dress to…I didn't feel like I quite dressed to attract the opposite sex in the same way that other people did. And I sort of, then I'd learn and sort of emulate and…I guess I didn't really date a whole lot. I spent my time concentrating on being in plays and if you were in a play then you didn't have time to date because you were at rehearsal.

[00:23:00]

DT: And I certainly, I was never into going to a beer bust or anything because my grandfather was an alcoholic and my father definitely told us never to drink. Just don't even, don't even think about it. So in a way I was pretty straight laced. Um I spent my time working-I got a lot of joy out of being in plays and creating characters. So my friends in college were people that I did plays with. And we'd rehearse a lot and looking back and actually having taught at the college level, plays keep people busy and keep young people away from the opposite sex in some senses. It's a safe activity to get involved in [laughs]. But for whatever reason I was really excited about the plays I was in. I was at the theater rehearsing and then we'd talk afterwards and we'd have deep, philosophical discussions about things.

[00:23:56]

DT: And then when I was in college in, well the same sort of things would happen when I was in plays my junior year in England. And then I came back and I graduated from college a half a year early because I had taken so many extra classes. And uh I went to San Francisco to live with my sisters. I had one other class to finish up and that was in comparative religions. And I went to a different house of worship every day for almost 30 days. Because in San Francisco-and I'm sure you can still do that today-for a small area of the world it's got more different religions than anywhere else.

[00:24:44]

DT: And I really wanted to-I felt that the way people view the world has to do with, and the way they view each other, women and men, has to do with how they're raised in their family and their community and then also how they were raised religiously. I mean how, their religious education. If you're catholic and you really think it's important to have lots of kids, like if you're going to have ten kids and be you know achieve sainthood or whatever, you want to get married and start having kids because that's what you should do as a woman.

[00:25:20]

DT: Um if you're uh, a Muslim and you're going to school for the first time with other people, how you were raised as a child is going to be different. And I really wanted to experience how different people um understood the world. And so I, my last class was a class in comparative religions and I did an independent study and I actually did attend Jim Jones' church. Do you know who he is?

KF: I do not.

DT: Ok. Jim Jones took a group of people to Guyana and he said the end of the world is coming, everybody have some kool-aid. And they all died.

KF: Right, right.

DT: That's Jim Jones and his church. So I mean there was some-I mean everybody has to learn. That charismatic feeling of someone. Being a charismatic speaker in, whether it's religion or politics or feminism or whatever, you can't-just because everybody, just 'cause someone can rouse you or 'yeah this is the right thing,' I knew enough about speech and how speech is constructed to raise people, to get people involved, that I'd always listen with a little bit extra when a preacher or a teacher would try to convince me of something. I was always a little bit um skeptical. And that skepticism, like just because a man was saying it I didn't believe it any more than if a woman was saying it.

[00:26:58]

DT: So I would say that from the time when I was little, I was a pretty questioning little girl. And I think my mother taught me to um, you know, we were never told that a question wasn't a good thing to ask. Where I thought people might think well just smile and if you're pretty, you'll [laugh]…but if you really don't get it you should ask a question. I always felt I was raised that way.

KF: And how long did you spend in San Francisco?

[00:27:30]

DT: I was in San Francisco from January of '73 till about august of '73. and then I got a call-I had auditioned for something through the Ford foundation. The Ford foundation helped a lot of regional theaters get their start like Trinity Repertory in Providence, and um Hartford Stage, and Actors Theater-Louisville. It was the regional theater system. Guthrie. Um and companies were making money and it was a good time. And the Ford foundation helped regional theaters get their apprentices. Now apprentices would be the people who would make the costumes, make the sets, wash the laundry, doing everything else, and have small parts like the young, the smaller leading parts. Ensenues [sp], young leading men. And you'd be paid like a hundred dollars a week and you could apprentice in the actors' union and gradually you could earn a living wage. So the Ford foundation had this audition in Chicago and I auditioned in 1973. And then I went away and went home to San Francisco. Then I got a call in the fall of '73 that I had been accepted-that I'd been asked to be an apprentice at Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. And I was really excited.

[00:28:51]

DT: And I um, at the time I was working for 25 dollars a week in food stamps. I was working with the New Shakespeare Company in San Francisco. My director had worked with Bertold Brecht in the 50s when he was blacklisted. And we were doing Threepenny Opera, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, and Midsummer's Night's Dream in rotating rep. Which means Midsummer's Night's Dream on Monday, As You Like It on Tuesday, Threepenny Opera on Wednesday, whatever-they rotate. And because we were only paid 25 dollars a week and we traveled in two station wagons and a little rider rental truck, we performed at Indian Reservations.

[00:29:37]

DT: We did Midsummer's Night's Dream at a Navajo Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or near there. I remember one night the Indians came-they were having a pow wow but some of them came to see Midsummer's Night's Dream and it was the first Shakespeare they'd ever seen. And we performed at remote college campuses and Indian reservations and places outdoors. And it was a very, she was-her name was Margrite Roma [sp] and she had been part of the Canadia Francaise [sp] company. I may have been mispronouncing it but it's the oldest theater company in the world. It's been around for about for hundred years. And she was Swiss, so she was definitely a pacifist and she had worked with Bertold Brecht and she was a very interesting, well-read woman. She could read the original text of Ionesco's Macbet and she opened the world of theater to me in many ways. Theater and politics.

[00:30:42]

DT: I had never known that-I learned about blacklisting from someone who had actually experienced it working with Bertold Brecht. And I learned that Governor Reagan-the governor of California was Ronald Reagan-and he would never give our theater company any money because she had worked with Bertold Brecht in the 50s. And so then I went wow, you know, the um, sort of being blackballed with somebody can go on and on. And I learned about the John Birch society. Uh a very conservative-I mean growing up on a farm what you learn about is your family. You learn your family and your neighbors are somebody, your neighbors are people who may have been your neighbors for 130 years.

[00:31:33]

DT: So then as your world expands it went from my family to my neighbors to my town to the state to England. And then San Francisco and then California politics is a very special thing. Learning about um, I saw the movie Citizen Kane and then I actually went to, uh the Hurst mansion. And I had never realized that people in the United States could be that wealthy. I'd never been-I never even knew about the mansions in Newport or Rockefellers or anything like that. But when I saw the Hurst mansion I went oh my goodness. I mean I'd seen castles in Germany but not castles in America. I just thought everyone was a hard-working, you know work their way up from the bottom-we were all kind of in it together. And I didn't realize…I didn't realize…about the vast amounts of wealth concentrated in a small-small family wealth. I learned a lot.

[00:32:42]

DT: And then I came to Providence and worked at Trinity Rep. And I had to-I didn't have enough money working at 25 dollars a week to get to Providence so I had to work at a canning factory back home in Minnesota to get the money to go to Providence, Rhode Island. And um I had worked at this canning factory in the summers when I was in high school. And the women made minimum wage husking corn 12 hour shifts with 5 minute breaks every hour. And the men who worked there, like the boys that I used to go to school with on those 30 minute rides into town, they could make 5 cents an hour more than the women because for 5 minutes every hour they would take large industrial brooms and wipe away the debris. Because they would use these tools and maybe they were stronger, maybe not, but I remember thinking hey, give me a broom. Give me a yellow hat. I'll do it. If I can make 5 cents an hour more, I can do it. My mom can lift milk pails, I can do this.

[00:33:45]

DT: But that's not the way it was. So that's, working at Green Giant, working at a canning factory, I said women and men should be paid the same. That just doesn't make sense to me. Mom and dad, it's not like they're getting a paycheck but they're working the same and we're eating the same food, that just doesn't make sense. So that was my basis for feeling um--the feminist movement it was like for me it was always you should be paid the same as men were paid. That's it.

KF: And you said when we talked before you said that you were ready for the Rhode Island Feminist Theater. Could you explain what you meant by that?

[00:34:26]

DT: Well my first season at Trinity Rep, we-I had roles to do and all the apprentices would work hard and then like let's say we did the laundry and we'd sweep the floors and we'd do shows. Then we, then all the floors were swept and they were building their new theater and all that was done. Then the women apprentices would do the laundry. And I remember one afternoon I was doing laundry and I said where are the guys and they were playing baseball.

[00:34:56]

DT: And I went huh?? And I just didn't think that was fair because I thought men can wash clothes too. And so I was washing clothes and doing sewing. Now I did know how to sew, but you know, I do know how to sew and I was a good sewer because my grandmother knew how to sew. But at the same time I went like I'm inside of a building with no windows doing laundry and the guys are like playing ball. And they thought it was kind of funny and I didn't think it was funny particularly. But I went like, then people knew about my sewing skills. And now that I've been in the theater for 30 years it's like you kind of have to make a decision. Just don't tell people you can sew [laughs]. 'cause then either you're an actress or you're a seamstress. And as an apprentice you could end up being in the sewing room all the time.

[00:35:45]

DT: So I went ok, I was going to go into my second year as an apprentice and I kind of looked what the season was and there really wasn't-the next show of the season, there wasn't anything for an ensenue[sp]. There wasn't anything for a woman my age. So I remember the company manager said to me, well you can work in the sceneshop, you can sew costumes. And I said I didn't come all the way from San Francisco to sew costumes, I came to act. So in a way if I hadn't ever-maybe if I said I didn't know how to do laundry or didn't know how to sew, but anyway.

[00:36:21]

DT: I said, I want to act, I don't want to sew costumes. And on that particular week I saw a notice on the bulletin board, the call board, and it said there were auditions for the Rhode Island Feminist Theater. And it was for Persephone's Return. Now I knew the story of Persephone and Demeter and they were looking for Demeter. Well Demeter is the earth mother goddess. So my choice was, stay in a windowless backstage area sewing, or play god. The earth mother goddess. And I said well I think being the earth mother sounds excellent.

[00:36:58]

DT: So I auditioned for the part, and being that I grew up in Minnesota I knew what from where in an alfalfa field and feeling kind of strong. 'cause when you're at the beginning of the great plains, if you stand in an alfalfa field you're the biggest thing for miles. You can really think you are somebody. Whereas I kind of have a theory about this. Like if you were raised in a valley, you kind of like can't see over the hill and you might think you're not really worth very much. But if you're on a plain you're the biggest thing around. So I had this sense of really being big. Maybe I'm not, I'm really not that tall, but I always felt like I'm big. And so when I auditioned for the role of Demeter, I got the job.

[00:37:40]

DT: Then I said what's the job, you know. Well we have to write the play. And I went cool, writing the play, that's good. It's kind of like homesteading a whole theater. So we all worked together and there were women and men in the company and we all worked together and we all-I worked with Fred Radway and uh um Mark I'm trying to think of his name right now, but Mark is a, he's a writer and he's written for New York magazine and he teaches English I believe in Philadelphia area. And uh Fred played Mercury and a man by the name-the late Eric Benson. Eric died of AIDS in the early 90s. But he played Hades. There was Eric, Fred, and Mark, and then there were-anywhere there was a group of women and men and we would rehearse and we put together this play. We worked all summer to create the play and then we did it.

[00:38:45]

DT: And I noticed that, I think I said that, well I learned a lot about marketing the theater from Trinity Rep. And I became a good friend of a woman by the name of Sonny Warner. She was a uh, she did the graphics for Trinity Rep. And I remember one day we were doing some improve and Sonny came up and they said 'oh come on.' If somebody came to, if someone stopped by the rehearsals they were put into the improvs. And my friend Sonny Warner was put into this improve and it was kind of juxtaposing modern day instances of separation and betrayal with some, with the Persephone-Demeter myth. And we were doing a scene where a mother was washing dishes and her daughter was wiping the dishes and the uncle was kind of like snapping the little niece with a towel. Kind of like, kind of…slightly molesting, not quite, but it was a shady area. Like how much touch is appropriate?

[00:39:54]

DT: And this was when those issues were starting to be addressed. So Sonny came down just to see-she was a friend of mine when I worked at Trinity Rep, so she came down and instead of her watching the improve we just put her in the improve. And she to this day she still remembers that night. It was just really exciting for her because as an artist-and she's a wonderful artists, she's had several books published, children's books-she had never experienced that as an actor. So we were very inclusive. You didn't just watch, you participated.

KF: So in your mind what were RIFT's goals?

[00:40:31]

DT: RIFT's goals were to create better roles for women in theater. More, new roles. Uh I always felt that we were creating new roles for uh dramatic literature. That these plays would last. And certainly when we took a play like, when we took a myth that has lasted as long as Persephone and Demeter, which is basically the creation of the seasons, should have some legs. And so, I mean we could have done I don't know, Joe-I don't know, we could have done less lofty. We took from the myths.

[00:41:24]

DT: I talk about Persephone and Persephone's Return because that was the one show I was involved with in working with from the very beginning. But we felt ok, what's something that's going to last? Now at that point they had done Taking It Off. Taking It Off was about a weight loss camp, and the weight loss camp was one run by men, but it was all women at a weight loss camp. And then there was the Johnnie Show, which was like Johnnie Carson, except Johnnie Carson-everything was reversed. So instead of Johnnie Carson flirting with you know Charo, um Johnnie was played by a woman. And he'd be-Johnnie would be flirting with some tennis pro and saying oh those are nice buns or something like that.

[00:42:04]

DT: So it was sort of reverse sexism. The Johnnie Show was about reverse sexism and Taking It Off was about a weight loss camp and power issues. And Persephone and Demeter took the um-I think when they went to Persephone's Return I think they were trying to make classic literature that people would do again. And actually Persephone's Return was done down in Miami. And I guess Persephone's Return was the first one where they said maybe the Schubert Society would publish our play. And someone looked into that and Persephone's Return was published and then the Johnnie Show and I think all of-I know the Johnnie Show and Taking It Off and Persephone's Return all got published. And that was a really exciting thing, being published. We wanted it to last.

[00:42:58]

DT: I mean I think all of us believed in the written word. If we had just thought oh let's do feminist theater, we would have just kept doing improve. But we believed in the power of the written word and we all believed in the power of-I mean words, published, will all last longer than all of us will lived. We wanted to be remem-we wanted this play to go on.

[00:43:22]

DT: And I remember when we applied for the copyright they said, what? No, one person wrote the play, no no no. It was published as a collective theater piece, which was-I remember when we applied for the copyright, whoever applied, it was like they want one person and they said but it isn't one person, it's a collective. And in those ways I thought oh collective. And for me I thought back to my great grandfather thinking of how, you know bringing electricity to the Midwest, that was a collective. Like all the farmers got together and then they got electricity. Here all the theater workers got together and we created a play. And yes it was a collective process.

[00:44:04]

DT: Now I would say some people did more writing than others, and those people who went on to do, and actually make their living as writers would probably say well listen I really wrote the play. But I always thought we always made an effort to be a collective effort. But writing down the words, working collectively, it took a lot longer than it would have taken if just one person would have written it.

KF: How do you think your idea of feminism compared to the other members in the group?

[00:44:37]

DT: …I think there are some things that happened, either I…feminism. How did it differ from other members in the group. I sometimes felt that other members of the group were angrier about things than I was. But then when I heard what had happened to them in their life, I think they were justified in their anger.

KF: [interrupting] angrier, how so?

[00:45:09]

DT: One woman was very petite, and she was blessed with larger blessed. So she was pretty in a doll-like kind of way. And she would talk about guys, you know, whistling at her on the street and really feeling unsafe sometimes. And I would walk down the street and because-I'm five foot six but kind of big boned, and I don't have big breasts or anything. So I walk down the street and I didn't even hear it, or if I did I didn't even-I'd walk down the street and if somebody whistled I wouldn't think they were talking to me. She knew they were talking about her and, I guess my thing was don't justify um, the behavior of moronic men was so stupid I didn't want to-oh what's the word. When you give a response to something that's so stupid you give it worth. I didn't give it any worth. I didn't dignify it with any response.

[00:46:28]

DT: I walked by. There's that picture. It's an old photograph of a girl in Italy during wartime and all these men are kind of whistling at her and she looks scared and she's running. I guess I'd never been quite in that situation. I do remember a time I was hitchhiking by myself in Greece. And I always felt pretty safe. But I think that sort of situation I-oh I know, we started to take classes. At the feminist theater we all took classes in self defense. We learned how to punch someone if someone attacked us. We got that from the feminist theater.

KF: Were the-did the men take the classes too?

DT: Yeah, yeah. I learned-to this day I know how to punch somebody because maybe it was Fred [Radway] or-Fred was always much more into sports than I was, he was a tennis player or whatever. Just like if you take the third position and bend your knees you can be much stronger. It was something I learned and I learned from the feminist theater, not from anyplace else.

KF: So do you think the men thought of themselves as feminists?

[00:47:43]

DT: Yes. They did.

KF: How so?

DT: And then I was with the feminist theater until the time when they decided that men shouldn't be part of the group and I went well they're part of our world. And I just, I think it was about the same time that-I'd worked at Trinity for a year and lived in Providence. My second year I still lived in Providence and worked at the Rhode Island Feminist Theater. And then I needed to move to a bigger town. Like I needed to move somewhere that I could make a little more money. And then I went from the feminist theater to um…the Pocket Mime Theater of Boston [sp]. And I was moving to a bigger city and they offered like a contract for a hundred dollars a week, like a steady salary. And the feminist theater wasn't offering any pay and I didn't do anything but the theater. Like I never had any-once I decided to go into theater, it was 25 dollars a week doing Shakespeare on the road. Then it was Trinity Rep for 100 dollars a week. Then I worked with the feminist theater and there wasn't any money there, there wasn't very much money. We sometimes got paid. We got paid when we did our show at colleges and universities.

[00:49:05]

DT: And I became the business manager for the feminist theater and I went like I gotta make a living here. So um, what can we do to make money? And then we did-I was working at the Rhode Island State Prison doing workshops and I asked them to come with me and we got some, like we got paid to do workshops through the Rhode Island Council on the Arts. They like I would sort of share it so we would all like get some money to do stuff. Um, we did get paid sometimes, but it was like really working on booking ourselves to colleges and universities.

[00:49:43]

DT: And um, I made sure that we got to the um Lincoln Center Street Festival in 1975. '75 or '74, I can't remember, it was either '74 or '75, you can look that up. But it was the year that Fallabulus [sp] came out of Dartmouth, the dance company that's still going. Fallabulus came to perform at the street theater festival in New York City, and we also went to the street theater festival in New York City, the Lincoln Center Street Festival. And it was when we came out of Rhode Island to perform in New York City at the Lincoln Center Street Festival that the Providence Journal did a feature story on us. And that was the first time that they'd ever recognized our existence.

KF: Backing up just a little bit, could you tell me a little bit more about the debate about including men in the theater and who was on each side?

[00:50:36]

DT: Well when I joined the theater there were men in the theater. Um, when I joined the theater company the artistic director was Ada McAlester and if you haven't talked to her you need to talk to her. She was hired to be the director. At that, when it first started out it was Brown University students and one of those students became the director, and then as the theater company grew that person went away or left Providence and they needed to have a director and they hired Ada McAlester and I believe Ada was the person that put the notice up. So when I joined there were men in the company. I was thinking about leaving the company about the same time that they decided that the next-they worked on O Women's Piece and I think that was the next piece after Persephone's Return. And it was about creating a language that wasn't sexist. Kind of like our father who art-o creator who art in heaven hallowed be your name. Instead of, it's not exactly like that, but to create a language that wasn't so he-oriented.

[00:51:50]

DT: And so it became O Women's Piece. And they decided that the piece that they were creating next would only have women in it. I, well they were still doing Persephone's Return when I decided to leave the company so I was not part of that conversation. But I know there was rumblings of it. And my personal opinion was the world is women and men. I think they made contributions and we tried-going back to the model of my mom and dad. I guess I thought, they made contributions to it. I thought we were all pretty strong and we certainly expressed our opinions and we never just sort of just…I always felt like I could say something and my ideas would be heard. I felt I had to have an intelligent contribution to make, I couldn't just whine. I mean it was based on some kind of intellectual ability. And I guess I felt I was up to the task.

[00:52:59]

DT: The thing that I felt I could contribute to the feminist theater was certain business acumen in running a theater. And I believe we applied for a grant. We went nonprofit, we got, you know, we got nonprofit status. I uh got the theater to apply for a grant-I introduced Ada McAllester to Tom Roberts who um was the head of the Endowment for the Humanities. And then I believe the next show got some money from the Endowment for the Humanities. So Tom Roberts would be somebody to talk to as well.

KF: Ok. How many gay members of RIFT were there during your time there?

[00:53:43]

DT: Well there was uh, in terms of numbers, I know at least three-one man and two women.

KF: Ok. And did their politics or artistic ideas differ from the straight members in the group?

[00:54:00]

DT: I think they were more articulate at times. I remember one woman, she's no longer with us, we would-after a show there would be three groups. Male-female audience, you know we would break down for discussion. There would be men and women, a women's group, and a men's group. And I would usually go to the men and women's group. Sometimes I would go to the women's group. Do you know what I mean? And we'd sort of trade off and on. But one of the women was very-her day job was a teacher. Her day job was a teacher, and she could go-there'd be all this discussion and she'd go, she'd sort of like catch this ball of thought. She'd go 'that's not the dominant issue' and then imagine your hand being up like catching a ball. She'd catch the ball. And then she'd like smoosh the ball into a tighter ball. And then she'd go like 'that's not the dominant issue' and then she'd squish the ball and rev up. 'This is.' And then she'd throw it back.

[00:55:02]

DT: And I loved what she did and I would, I learned a lot about listening in a group to hear what was really being said. And after being in the discussion with her, I became a better discussion leader because of her.

KF: Could you maybe explain why there were three different groups-the men and the women's group, the women's group, and the men's group?

[00:55:29]

DT: Because after the show, the audience--some audience members did not feel comfortable being in a mixed group. They didn't want to discuss-some of the audience members only wanted to talk to the men in the group. There were men that came to the show that wanted to talk to the men. Like maybe, I don't know what happened in those discussions, you'd have to ask Fred. But maybe they-I'm only guessing-maybe they'd go like 'why are you there? Buddy, buddy, what's happened to ya?' I don't know what they were talking about.

[00:56:02]

DT: And then in the women's group, they might go you know, things would come out like 'my husband beats me' or you know they didn't wanna, like they really want to sit with the person they came with, do you know what I mean? Then the people that kind of maybe there was a truce or they were like ok with their male-female feelings, they sat in the mixed group. So, it's wherever the audience member felt comfortable.

KF: What kinds of things did you talk about in the mixed group?

[00:56:35]

DT: In the mixed group we talked about well you know, did you feel in that one scene that the uncle was really behaving, was that questionable behavior that happened there or was that just teasing? And people would go well, yeah I could see you know, that was just teasing. And then somebody would say, 'really? He touched her in an inappropriate area, that's a little, and you know, she was at the cusp of being a young woman and how do you feel?' 'Is that how you felt, Shirley?' 'Yeah, Tom, I did. 'really, you know' 'oh' 'hahaha.' And then we'd laugh or whatever, but we'd talk about certain things. Or what, we would talk about the things that people talk about now in diversity training-sexism, racism, agism. But we were talking about it in 1974. Now corporations pay big money to have diversity issues discussed.

[00:57:34]

DT: And you know ever since Anita Hill and other court cases have happened, people are much less um-companies can be sued for what might have been construed as they were just teasing, somebody can't take a joke. People in that mixed group began to realize why verbal abuse can be just as hurtful and harming to a person as the physical touch.

[00:58:05]

DT: And may I also say that at this time there were-I had a boyfriend at the time who was studying to be a lawyer. And I remember at Brown University, um we went to a moot court case where-'cause the show, Persephone's Return, basically deals with rape. The rape of-some stories, some interpretations of the Persephone-Demeter myth say Persephone went down with her uncle Hades to the underworld and she was offered the pomegranate seed. Well, some people say, I don't know if Edith Hamilton's retelling of the story says this, or if it's Robert Graves, but some interpretations of this myth say Persephone was raped by Hades.

[00:58:52]

DT: So there was a moot court held in a courtroom I believe in Providence. And my boyfriend was studying to be a boyfriend and I went to it. I took some people from the feminist people so we could learn what actually happened in a rape case. Nowadays you have lifetime television every other week doing something, do you know what I mean? Television programming for women. You've got those sort of cases are on television if you choose to turn the channel and listen to them. So there are some things, we're talking 197-like 30 years later it's now on cable. It's on television these stories that we were putting together on our own. So going back to your initial question, why are there these three groups of people, there just wasn't that kind of programming. We're talking about [makes tv show noise] Bewitched, where a woman with ideas was a witch. She was cute and everything, and the reason she could sort of one up her husband was she was a witch.

[00:59:56]

DT: We studied about what had happened during-we studied a lot of history sometimes. In the making of Persephone's Return, I remember Sonny brought-my friend Sonny Warner was showing me-I didn't realize how many witches-we went to Salem, the Salem Witch Trials, and why women were uh burned at the stake or whatever.

[01:00:18]

DT: Oh oh oh. The piece after Persephone's Return was not O Women's Piece. I think it was the story of-there's a woman who came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne Hutchinson. And they still Anne Hutchinson, the piece that the Rhode Island Feminist Theater wrote, is still aired I think every year in Rhode Island 'cause they filmed it. WGBH-they filmed it. The Rhode Island Feminist Theater wrote a play about Anne Hutchinson and there were definitely men and women in the company then, so they again, Persephone's Return was some kind of archetypal myth, historically based somehow you know in the deep deep roots of theater, or religion, actually, in the creation of the seasons. And then they did the Anne Hutchinson play and that was about going way back to Puritan times and how Anne Hutchinson came to Rhode Island. And then they wrote that piece and I believe that was filmed. And they do have it on television in Rhode Island every year.

KF: mmhm. What kinds of connections did RIFT have to other theater groups?

[01:01:33]

DT: Well there was, I know there was Rhode Island Feminist Theater-RIFT. We heard about Los Angeles Area Feminist Theater-LAFT. There was Washington Area Feminist Theater-WAFT. There was At the Foot of the Mountain in Minneapolis and I believed we talked to them, I know I did. And what was interesting is somebody that I went to school with at Gustavus-Adolphus college was the company manager for Foot of the Mountain Company in Minneapolis. Her name is Teresa Zigler[sp]. I know that at the time we were writing Persephone's Return or right after, when we were still looking for grants and stuff, um Teresa, I talked with Terry-Terry Zigler.

KF: And uh did you compare notes, get any ideas?

DT: Well we compared notes in terms of how to get grant money, yeah.

KF: Any other kind of sharing of ideas between theater groups?

[01:02:34]

DT: Um, uh, the Bread and Puppet Theater was-we worked on a clown piece when I was there. We worked on Stars and Moon Circus and that particular piece was um developed because Ada McAllester had worked at-I'm trying to think of the college-well anyway she had done a workshop with members of the Bread and Puppet Theater. Ada McAllester and April Feld-F E L D. April lives in the Philadelphia area now and we're still good friends and I'm still good friends with Ada and I still talk with Lucy Winner all these years. And I'm in touch with most of the people who were with the feminist theater, or have been. But Lucy I talk to a lot, April a lot, Ada McAllester-but anyway, April, Lucy, Ada, and I-we all created these clown characters. And that came from working with their work with the Bread and Puppet Theater.

[01:03:45]

DT: And um, it was based on Jacques Leqoc clown technique. And we did a whole clown workshop and that was a lot of fun. And the men were part of it too. Men were part of the clown workshop.

KF: So what do you think were your main personal successes during your time during RIFT?

[01:04:12]

DT: Well I created these clowns named Uda and Ulva. Ulva was one short for vulva, but anyway. Uda was sort of this-she didn't speak English very well, she was an immigrant. She was kind of like my great grandmother. Like clowns are based on something that you're-my biggest thing was creating my clown character Nudelmach that I still do today. Um writing a play with a group of other theater artists, because I've always had a great-writing a play with these theater artists helped me write more plays. And I've written seven plays since then.

[01:04:50]

DT: Um, the one, and if I hadn't ever written a play collaboratively, I don't think I would have been able to do it on my own. I had written one play on my own called the Ragbox when I was in college. And it was a play about women, just an all women's piece. And then I wrote Persephone's Return with those people collectively. And then we wrote our own monologues for our clowns-we started to write monologues. And then I wrote-the skills I learned working, I think number one the skills I learned really working as an ensemble. The skills I learned um, interacting with the audience. I don't think-I mean sometimes I have talkbacks when I've been on national tours. Like we'll have a talkback session that's led by the stage manager, an equity stage manager, which is great but that equity stage manager did not have the skills for really leading a discussion. Discussion skills are something that you learn as a teacher, and I think one of our company members, I learned a lot more from her. From the skills she learned in the classroom that she could bring to us. And that has helped me a lot through my career.

KF: What did you learn from talkback sessions?

[01:06:18]

DT: Well, that…you have to get a talk, a talk just like a monologue or a show has an arc. And you want to get things going and stimulated and then you don't want to just leave people up in the air. You need to like, it has a climax and then you need to sort of tie up the lose ends or leave them with something to think about. So it's kind of scratching people and scratching people's sores off and a little bit of blood's gotta be let and then oh ok and then we breath. And that way you grow.

[01:06:58]

DT: And so I think you need to ask some pointed questions in the beginning, make sure everyone gets to participate and feel like they're part of it. Especially today in a computer society where you can have wonderful chats but you're never really talking to anybody. When people volunteer to be part of a discussion group after a play, especially when a play is meant to bring up topics. We made plays that were sort of-it was political theater, it was meant to maybe rub people, meant to make people a little uncomfortable, to ask questions. And sort of go on to another level. I think Brecht did the same thing. I think Tony Cushner in the normal heart did the same thing. Um it went from feminist theater to I think some of the, you know, a lot of gay theater asks really really important questions that we started to ask in the beginning of the feminist theater in the early 70s. And political theater, I mean like there's black theater and feminist theater and now I think some of the issues that were asked by the feminist theater, some of the writers are doing that more with theater that addresses uh issues of the gay community.

KF: And with RIFT, what kind of questions do you think you um left the audience with?

[01:08:34]

DT: Um, I think with Persephone's Return, with questions about roles. What are your roles and how are they defined. Questions about how you treat another person. I'd like to think that we still teach the golden rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. And when you do uh role reversal, when you're playing a man, or a man is playing a woman, like you walk a mile in someone else's shoes you learn a lot. And in a way, when there were men in the company it was kind of like walking into the locker room and finding out what they were really thinking. And for them at the time it was like them walking into the ladies' bathroom and finding out what they were really thinking. And it was interesting. Some people decided not to go into that room anymore but at least they knew what was going on behind those doors in terms of our basic conditioning and how we feel about each other.

KF: What do you mean by what was going on behind those doors?

[01:09:48]

DT: Sometimes when women are talking with each other they say things about men that they wouldn't ordinarily say things if a man was in the room. But if you say ok now we're lifting the wall and nobody's going to get hurt feelings, we're just going to say some things that have always bothered us. And with the feminist theater, I think the men in the company heard things that they hadn't heard before. And I as a woman heard things from men that I had never heard before. Why? I had no brothers! I didn't date a lot! I learned a lot with the Rhode Island Feminist Theater. For that summer, Mark [Halliday] and Fred [Radway] and um those three men were like brothers to me and I learned from them. Maybe my experience would have been different if I had had brothers but I didn't so I learned a lot.

KF: What kinds of things did you hear that you hadn't heard before?

[01:10:47]

DT: Oh, let's see, [laughs] well that men think about men every thirty seconds perhaps, but they don't necessarily have to act on it. That there are just things guys do that they need to do because they like to…they physically like to be active, they like to be more, whatever. Just different things I don't know. Sometimes I learned things about how people were raised. I think not just male-female things but how people were raised. And um, I learned from the gay men that you know their love-the gay and lesbian people in the show, in the company, I learned that…relationships can be difficult whether you're gay. Like, if I said to myself, if I were a lesbian it would be a lot easier. Then I'd watch the lesbian couple and I went like, that relationship isn't any easier than being heterosexual. The gay relationship isn't any easier for being gay. It's not a question of being better or worse. They're all people, they're all people that have made choices. And those choices were made, it didn't happen because of the movement. It happened when they were like four years old. They'd always felt an attraction to men, or they'd always felt an attraction to women.

[01:12:24]

DT: So I went, you know it's the way people were born. That's what I felt. That's what I learned from being with the feminist theater. And um, you know, I was happy for their joy in their partners. That they found love and joy with those partners. And I tried as much as I could to keep my family up on the-like my mom and dad. What could I-you can't take them with you, you know. You can't take them into this experience with you but I tried to take them and let them understand where people were going.

[01:13:06]

DT: And I remember when my mom and dad came to visit me in San Francisco, it was the first time they saw two men kissing full front. Mouth to mouth on the street. In Minnesota, well not always Minnesota but sometimes the Midwest it's kind of like you don't talk about it. You see it but we're not going to discuss it. That's interesting, I don't understand it, I'm not going to discuss it. The thing about the feminist theater, it's interesting, I'm going to discuss it, was great. It's interesting and I'm going to discuss it was a wonderful thing about the feminist theater.

KF: Uh anything else that you would like to add?

DT: Well I think that this history project is an excellent, excellent idea and I'm glad you're doing it. I hope you will be able to meet other people that were with the feminist theater. Um one of the members of our group was one of the writers of the original Our Bodies, Ourselves. And when I did move to New York City I chose a gynecologist from that book. She was my gynecologist till her death and she improved my quality of life. So I always look back on the feminist theater for that as well.

KF: Well great, thank you so much for talking with me.