Around the turn of the 20th century, realism in theatre was all the rage. The idea was that theatre should be as much like real life as possible. Putting life onstage would allow the audience to observe how it all worked. Makes sense, right?

But what if the act of putting lifelike scenes onstage actually had the opposite effect? What if this attempt at verisimilitude made it more difficult to understand how real life worked? 

Take the example of a car. I know very little about cars. If I saw one driving around onstage, I would simply see a car, moving around as cars do. I would have no deeper understanding of how cars worked than I did before I entered the theatre. However, if I were shown the inner workings of the car as it drove, if the “mechan-actor” demonstrated how the combustion of gasoline makes the wheels turn, then maybe I could be led to understand something new about cars. Otherwise, it all just stays hidden under the hood.

This is precisely what theatre makers such as Bertolt Brecht argue. For Brecht, the best way to see how the world functions is to reveal its underlying structures, systems and mechanics.

Brecht argues that, in theatre, we need to see the machinery. We need always to be reminded that, as an audience, we are involved in an act of social observation and critique. The Realists’ aims, according to Brecht, cannot be achieved by realistic acting and staging techniques—whereby we lose ourselves in the world of the story and forget that we are watching a fabricated scenario—but by letting us see under the hood of the play, as it were.

Since the work of the early Realists, and since Brecht, many theatrical forms have come and gone. Some rely upon realistic staging techniques, and some are more obviously stylized. When we think of “American Realism,” our minds turn to the great American men of the theatre—Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet. Ironically, though, each of these playwrights experimented heavily with form and style, and the claim that they are Realists is difficult to uphold.

The claim that they are white men, on the other hand, isn’t so hard to maintain. So, while these great writers were shaking things up onstage, complicating our understanding of life based on the artfully crafted scenarios they presented, there was always going to be only so much agitating they’d be able to pull off.

When I found out that NYC-based playwright Julia May Jonas had taken it upon herself to write a cycle of five full-length plays responding from a female perspective to these great white male giants of the theatre, my attention was piqued.

This Saturday at NACL, her company, Nellie Tinder, will present “A Woman Among Women,” written in response to Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” The intention, as I understand it, is to crack open the world of assumptions that undergirds Miller’s original play and serve them to us in a new form.

We can imagine Arthur Miller’s play as the car of male society, driving around onstage, propelled by the hidden forces that fuel it and enable it to keep rolling along. We can then imagine Jonas’s play as the car taken apart, allowing us to see the internal machinery normally hidden from view. The hope is that, by seeing this play staged, the audience might learn how the car works, and even stand a chance of making a better, safer, more efficient vehicle for the coming generations.

[Brad Krumholz is co-founder and artistic director, North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL Theatre). See page x for more information on “A Woman Among Women.”]