Calm Down Mother by Megan Terry

First published: 1966

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Feminist

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Various settings, such as a delicatessen, a nursing home, and an apartment

Principal Characters:

• Woman One, Margaret Fuller, a delicatessen clerk, a New York career woman, a nursing-home resident, a call girl, and a member of a mother-daughter trio
• Woman Two, a nineteen-year-old girl, a New York career woman, an elderly woman in a nursing home, a call girl, and a member of a mother-daughter trio
• Woman Three, a delicatessen clerk, a call girl, and a member of a mother-daughter trio

Form and Content

Calm Down Mother is a one-act transformational play that dramatizes the limitations imposed on women both by society and by other women, as well as women’s dawning recognition of the root causes of those limitations. Organized loosely in scenes that transform—at times abruptly, sometimes with the help of bridging commentary or ritual chant—into other scenes in other locales, the play depicts vignettes of women’s daily lives and shows how interactions between women are structured by their familial or societal relationships, economic status, ages, professions or occupations, and above all, gender. Megan Terry has said that she wrote the play because at the time of its creation she could find no good roles for women in current stage offerings.

Structured into eight scenes, the play has only one set, described in the stage directions as “An open stage. Four chairs are in View.” This minimal staging, a characteristic of much of Terry’s work, allows the actors to create various social and cultural milieus through their use of movement, posture, and voice and through their ability to transform themselves from identity to identity. The nearly bare stage also forces the audience to participate actively in the creation of the illusion onstage.

The play opens as the lights come up slowly during the taped recitation of a brief speech about the prehistorical evolution of one-celled creatures into the first plant, and the further splitting of that plant into two parts, one of which “stretches toward the sun.” Three women, clustered together to resemble a plant, are revealed on stage. As the speech ends, Woman One comes forward to introduce herself as Margaret Fuller, a woman who knows that she is strong because “my father addressed me not as a plaything, but as a living mind.” She announces her acceptance of the universe as her home, and Woman Two and Woman Three chant their concurrence with her decision. The scenes that follow outline the boundaries—boundaries of age, class, race, mortality, sexuality, and gender stereotyping—that define a woman’s universe.

A scene in a delicatessen dramatizes a woman’s grief over her diminished attractiveness as a result of hair loss after surgery. The women’s loud lamentation at the end of the scene metamorphoses into rage that drives Woman One to scream “I want to hit!” as she drives her fist into the palm of her other hand. Woman Three’s brief monologue about the “pitiful few facts” of a woman’s life leads to a scene in a New York flat where two young women’s pleasure in the new apartment is destroyed when one of the women gives in to hysteria under the burden of having, yet again, to be the “old bulwark of the family” when trouble strikes. A brief interlude about girlhood as “a green time” introduces Woman One and Woman Two as two elderly women in a nursing home. As the women talk about how “the days go by and the days go by and the days go by,” they are rudely interrupted by a nurse who—treating them like children—insists that they eat their cereal. Abruptly, the old women become a subway door that opens and closes repeatedly as they chant, until finally Woman Three breaks through the “doors” to reveal a completely different world.

The new scene situates the three women, transformed now into call girls, in an apartment that they share uneasily. They are connected only by their profession and by their thrall to a pimp named Ricky, to whom they owe rent, the cost of police bribes, and a hefty proportion of their earnings. The women argue, taking turns siding with each other against the third. A brief connecting chant changes the scene into a tenement kitchen in which a mother and her two daughters discuss menstruation, pregnancy, and contraception until the mother suddenly becomes aware that one daughter is sexually active although unmarried—at which point the mother orders her daughter out of the house. The play ends as the three actresses, now simply unnamed women, enact a ritual that questions whether a woman should be content with an identity solely as childbearer, proud of her unique and gender-specific reproductive capability.

Context

Well received by critics when the Open Theatre premiered it in 1965 at the Sheridan Square Playhouse on a double bill with Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place, Calm Down Mother has become one of Terry’s most popular and most frequently anthologized plays. Like her other transformational plays, including Comings and Goings (1966) and Viet Rock (1966), it constructs a constantly changing series of stage realities, challenging both performers and audience to rethink cultural assumptions about gendered behaviors.

Leading drama scholar Helene Keyssar has referred to Megan Terry as the mother of American feminist theater, an identification whose truth is demonstrably evident in the body of dramatic work that she produced from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Repeatedly, she has dramatized women’s issues: gender stereotyping, reproduction, patriarchal language, woman as victim, woman as hero, competition and sisterhood, the bonds and separations between mothers and daughters, and the perils of male-female relationships. Her treatment of these themes is part of her continuing focus on the societal forces that define women, the cultural icons that provide women with negative self-images, and the political barriers that prevent someone from discovering who they are and what they can be.

More important to the development of feminist drama, however, is Terry’s considerable contribution (widely acknowledged by theater historians) to the creation of transformation drama. It is this genre—a product both of the theatrical ferment of the 1960’s and of Terry’s own creative experimentation—that has done the most toward breaking down the gender stereotyping so prevalent on the American stage until the middle of the twentieth century. Transformational drama frees performers from the baggage of acceptable images and cultural models, allowing them to explore different characters, different theatrical styles, and new forms of interaction—all within the same play. The implications of such freedom have proved significant for women writers who struggled for a time to create a form of theater that would lend itself to the portrayal of women whose very lives were a multiplicity of roles, a panoply of selves. With transformational drama, women playwrights can simultaneously dramatize women’s split identities and suggest new and integrated ways of living female.

Calm Down Mother displays many of the characteristics that would later become commonplace in feminist drama. The play explores and dramatizes women’s internal states of being, showing women to themselves by valuing women’s experience through its depiction of commonplace activities and images—furnishing an apartment, washing dishes, applying makeup. Terry uses negative images in positive ways, creating accurate characterizations to shatter female stereotypes and dismantle female myths. Seemingly meek elderly ladies harbor regret for the end of their fertility; one of the call girls defiantly conceals some of the tips from her pimp because she dares to dream about taking a vacation out of New Jersey. These personal rebellions are minor, but they signal the strength of inner identities all but obliterated by culturally constructed images. When feminist theaters flowered in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, many of the plays that they produced were (like Calm Down Mother and Terry’s other transformational dramas) collagelike, multilayered constructions that used poetry, ritual, and lyrical language to portray the reality of women’s lives.

Terry, meanwhile, although not abandoning the early forms of transformational drama, has forged ahead to create two other distinct bodies of work: role-model plays, which showcase admirable women such as Simone Weil and Mother Jones as appropriate strong female icons; and political and public service drama, focusing on such issues as teenage alcoholism, dysfunctional families, and domestic violence. These new issues can still be identified as women’s concerns, but where Terry’s earlier work focused on the personal, her later work addresses public and community affairs from the woman’s point of view.

Bibliography

Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, eds. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. This valuable book includes an interview in which Megan Terry comments on the influences on her work, the sources of her themes and ideas, and her working habits. She also discusses her work in the context of the development of American theater since the 1960’s, focusing on her association with the Open Theatre and later the Omaha Magic Theatre.

Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Women in American Theatre. New York: Crown, 1981. A collection of essays, interviews, reflections, and reminiscences about and by notable American dramatists, actresses, directors, and other theater professionals. Of special interest is Dinah Leavitt’s interview with Megan Terry—an interview in which Terry speaks of her desire to explore in her work what it means to be a woman in American society.

Hart, Lynda, ed. Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Included in this collection of essays is Jan Breslauer and Helene Keyssar’s “Making Magic Public: Megan Terry’s Traveling Family Circus.” Although the essay does not focus specifically on Calm Down Mother, it is valuable reading for its discussion of Terry’s work as feminist drama. The rest of the collection is significant because it provides a theatrical context for Terry’s work and for her contribution to American drama.

Keyssar, Helene. Feminist Theatre. New York: Grove Press, 1985. An extremely important study of the beginnings and development of feminist theater. Especially significant to the student of Megan Terry’s plays is Keyssar’s description of Terry as the mother of American feminist theater, and the subsequent discussion of Terry’s contributions to the dramatization of women’s issues and concerns on the American stage.

Savran, David, ed. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. Savran’s collection of interviews includes a conversation with Megan Terry in which the playwright names the plays and playwrights that have influenced her style and describes the emotions in which she finds ideas for her work. She discusses her own plays and her work with the Omaha Magic Theatre, and she speculates about the future of American drama.

Schlueter, June. “Megan Terry’s Transformational Drama: Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place and the Possibilities of Self.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Although this essay focuses on a play other than Calm Down Mother, Schlueter’s discussion of transformational drama as a genre is important for its illumination of Terry’s technique in Calm Down Mother.