Twelve Angry’s Journey to Bachelorette
Written by BACHELORETTE Director and Twelve Angry Executive Producer: Matilda Dixon-Smith
Our journey to Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette began when I first watched the underseen (and, in my opinion, underappreciated) film adaptation, which was released back in 2012. It was just post-Bridesmaids, when the subject of women’s ability to populate the “gross-out comedy” genre (indeed, to command a comedy audience at all, or even to be considered funny) was once again a(n incredibly boring) topic of debate.
Were women funny? Was Bridesmaids as amusing and outrageous as The Hangover (and: was it allowed to be)? Could women pull off the kind of provocative humour long reserved for male comedians? These were the burning questions the entertainment world grappled with when Headland’s small independent comedy, Bachelorette, was released to VOD with very little fanfare. Nevertheless, my household watched it together, and I was transfixed.
The film became something of a joke among my friends as, within weeks of first discovering it, I had managed to watch it no less than eight times -- each round finding a new friend or family member to “introduce” it to. This was, of course, a pretext: all I wanted to do was watch it over and over again myself. When I discovered it was based on Headland’s play, which premiered in Chicago in 2008 before moving off-Broadway in 2010, a new item moved to the top of my Director’s Bucket List. I had to do this play.
What followed was four years of mishaps with rights, disbanded companies and general life roadblocks before Fiona and I grabbed onto the text as a must-do for the latter half of our 2016 season at Twelve Angry.
Looking back, I’m glad we’re doing this play in 2016 and not in 2013 as was originally planned. For a start, it’s the perfect play to polish off Twelve Angry’s inaugural season, which we began with a little trepidation (and with Fiona’s dark, clever and well-regarded [Lady] Macbeth) and has ended with us marginally more sure of ourselves and our direction. The choice to perform Headland’s Bachelorette is, I am certain, a contributing factor in our rapidly developing identity as a company.
Bachelorette is Twelve Angry’s show. It is written by a woman -- one who has fought tooth and nail to have her particular perspective aired and respected in the creative world (we at Twelve Angry love a scrappy woman). And it is centred on four very different but spectacularly “difficult” female protagonists. We were looking for a show that celebrated women onstage and off. There are desperately few plays that make women their primary focus -- fewer still that interrogate the socialisation and friendship patterns of adult women in the 21st century.
But more than being just a suitable play for a spiky young company whose focus is the voices of women onstage and off, Bachelorette remains blisteringly relevant in 2016. Perhaps even more so now, despite how some of the ideas and references stick resolutely to the post-Girl Power, post-postfeminist mid 2000s (a time when the line “That is so . . . gay!” was considered simply something inappropriate but de rigueur that a twentysomething woman would say).
As a relic of the last decade, some small elements of the show have aged poorly. But other aspects, particularly this central question of what a woman should be, how she should socialise with other women, and what are their acceptable modes of behaviour -- these things are as important as ever to deconstruct in 2016.
It seemed fitting for us to use Bachelorette, a show that unapologetically privileges the female voice (there are just two men in the cast of six, so irrelevant their names are practically interchangeable), to do some unapologetic privileging of our own. Using our newfound power as Company Power Couple, Fiona and I sought a mostly female production team and (for me, at least) a Theatre Unicorn: the all-female design team.
We got our wish: a team dominated by women and complimented by some excellent male allies in the fight to make space for the female creatives’ perspective.
It’s devastating to realise just how much female talent there is in the theatre (particularly in the more traditionally blokey realms of technical design and management) that goes underutilised or underexposed. This is an industry that, like most in the world, remains dominated by men, and those men extend their hands to other men. Men pull men up the ladder of influence, and women are frequently left behind.
So we took a leaf out of the book of other female-focused companies like The Rabble; we built our own ladder and pulled our talented female colleagues up with us. As a result we have compiled an excellent team; they are thoughtful, clever and hard-working. They do their jobs the first time they’re asked, and they don’t mind that it’s a woman who is asking. Together we run like a well-oiled machine (I have been caught exclaiming on more than one occasion that this is the smoothest production process on which I have worked).
It is the ideal team for this production of Bachelorette -- the ideal show to cap off an exciting inaugural season for Fiona and me.
Though Bachelorette has been made into a film (one starring big-name Hollywood actors like Kirsten Dunst and James Marsden), there are still a slew of people who have not experienced Headland’s essential interrogation of young womanhood (and virtually none who have met with the darker, pricklier and superior stage text). I am pleased that, however long it took, Twelve Angry is giving you the opportunity to muck in now.
Matilda Dixon-Smith is a writer, director and cultural critic. She is one half of the two-woman Artistic Director team at Twelve Angry. Her recent directing credits include In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), The History Boys and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.