In some cases, it can make you doubt your own reality and perception completely and come to completely depend on the abusive person. Over time this can erode self-esteem and self-worth. Many of the people we support tell us that they have experienced being told that something did not happen the way they recall and that this made them doubt themselves. Since the 1960’s the term has been used to refer to people who make covert attempts to manipulate people, particularly in abusive relationships. His aim is to convince her, and psychologists, that she is so unwell she needs to be committed to a mental health institution so that he has ultimate control. In the play, the husband attempts to convince his wife that she is mentally unwell by making small changes to the home environment, such as turning down the gaslight, and then denying all knowledge or telling her that she is imagining it. It just hadn’t been rewritten yet.The term ‘Gaslight’ came from the 1938, British stage play, by Patrick Hamilton. Can I be a woman?’”Īs it happens, one such part was out there. “There was a time in my mid-30s when I said, ‘I would like to stop playing a naïve child now.
(Shaw died in 1950.) But Fox, who spent many years in the Shaw Festival acting ensemble before shifting her focus to directing, remembers feeling hamstrung by many of the roles she was offered here and elsewhere.
The mandate then expanded to newer works set during Shaw’s life, then grew again to include essentially any play that Shaw might have liked.Īs it happens, “Chitra” and “Gaslight” both qualified under the original parameters. Much has been made of the Shaw Festival’s evolving “mandate,” which originally confined its repertory to Shaw and works written during his (usefully long) lifetime. She remembers thinking, “A man wrote this?”) Warren’s Profession,” which takes a sympathetic view toward sex work. (Rampersad said her initial exposure to his works came from reading “Mrs. That battle was central to several works by Shaw, who is considered the first major playwright to depict what became known as the New Woman. “It’s pretty boring to make this just a battle of the sexes,” Wright said. One of the day-to-day stresses that Bella faces is a “new girl,” a housekeeper who is at the very least impertinent and lazy - and possibly a good bit worse. “I picked this not to be disrespectful but to prove a point,” she said.Ĭhitra’s gender fluidity had resonated with Rampersad since she was a young girl: “My parents call me their ‘boy child’ - I know, I know - and my father told me, ‘There is a play about you.’” (In the sort of dizzying cross-casting that is common at the Shaw Festival, Rampersad is also playing the decidedly and eternally feminine Lola in “Damn Yankees,” which also features Jamieson, the “Gaslight” co-writer, in its cast.)Īnother modification involved adding some shadings of good and evil among the play’s female characters. But it is also a reminder that such fits can be found outside the Western canon. All three works will then run through early October.įor Kimberley Rampersad, who both directed and choreographed “Chitra,” the 1892 play (translated into English from the original Sanskrit in 1913) was a natural fit for the festival: “Shaw and Tagore were both polymaths, and you can feel their politics coursing through their words,” she said. And the festival will expand to its full 11-show repertory next month to include one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, “Gem of the Ocean,” which features the matriarch to end all matriarchs: the 285-year-old Aunt Ester Tyler. “Gaslight” is one of a handful of plays at the Shaw Festival, held in this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls in honor of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to grapple with the idea of gender and femininity this year.Īlso at the Royal George Theater is Rabindranath Tagore’s one-act “Chitra,” based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, about a warrior princess who temporarily sheds her “manly” tendencies to attract a world-renowned archer. In her review of the play for The Toronto Star, Karen Fricker called it “a very satisfying piece of theatrical reinvention,” suggesting that theatergoers “bring a smart friend to this show to share the fun afterwards of combing through what happened, picking up cues and evidence in retrospect.”
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