Looking Back Or Moving Forward? The Feminist Conundrum Of 'The Town Hall Affair'

In 1971 in a Town Hall in New York, four women discussed women's liberation with Norman Mailer - author, journalist and co-founder of The Village Voice, New York's alternative arts and politics paper. The speakers included now-iconic feminists Jill Johnston and Australia's own Germaine Greer. The long debate, which was recorded, got nasty, as the panellists sparred with the often-domineering Mailer. This subsequent film, Town Bloody Hall, is considered an important record of the women’s liberation movement – what we now call second-wave feminism. It's also the inspiration for a theatre production by New York's The Wooster Group.

The Town Hall Affair, first performed in 2017, incorporates the film, re-enacts parts of the original discussions, introduces new material and questions how these ideas still resonate today.

It's a production that also offers resonances with other works playing the Sydney Festival, including Wild Bore, where comedians and performance artists Zoe Coombs Marr, Adrienne Truscott and Ursula Martinez unpack gendered arts criticism and a failure to understand the intent of feminist performance; Pandemonium, where Meow Meow subverts sexuality, attraction and power; Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag that confronts the anger and sexual desire of a 20-something who calls herself a "bad feminist" because she'd give up five years of her life for a "perfect" body; and Pussy Riot Theatre's Riot Days that asks if we should act or stay silent.

Wooster Group actor Kate Valk plays Village Voice writer and dance critic Jill Johnston, who is now known for her 1973 book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. Valk describes Johnston as an "ecstatic" and says she's "one of my favourite roles; if not my favourite role".

Valk was 13 in 1971 and joined The Wooster Group not long after they formed in 1975. She says she wasn't familiar with all the speakers and was initially surprised by their relevance, especially as, "Ten years ago, it could ruin your career to call yourself a feminist".

"When I graduated from high school, abortion was legal and birth control was easily accessible. Nobody that I went to school with ever considered getting married," Valk shares. "That's like a big deal: the difference between my mother's generation and mine. These women paved the way for me."

Johnston was 42 in 1971 and discussed the political, and for her the natural, choice to be a lesbian - a word she refused to accept as the insult it was frequently used as. Valk says it was "an exciting click in my own consciousness to get familiar with her (Johnston's) writing ... especially her 'We will never be equal women until we love one another'".

Johnston didn't finish her Town Hall speech because Mailer stopped her for going over time. Two of her supporters responded by making out on the stage. However, Johnston, who died in 2010, finishes her speech in The Town Hall Affair.

Greer, who was 32 in 1971, will also get a final word during the festival at An Evening With Germaine Greer. Maura Tierney, who was 6 in 1971, plays Greer and brought the idea of the work to The Wooster Group. Tierney is best known in Australia for her TV roles in ER and The Good Wife.

Greer's influential book The Female Eunuch was released in 1970. Here she argued for a women's revolution because first-wave feminism (the right to vote) had failed because women were still a minority in government and female employment was still underpaid, menial or supportive. At the Town Hall, she argued that female artists don't have the freedom to create as long as society treats women like "improper goddesses or unwilling menials". She also argued that no art should be "worth the income of a thousand families for a year" and hoped that the revolution will lead to art that isn't judged by its rarity, expense or "extraordinary marketing".

The other speakers were Jacqueline Caballos, from the National Organization of Women, talking about advertising's unachievable images of "deodserised" and "doll-like" women, and literary critic Diana Trilling discussing women's sexual liberation and the freedom to have the orgasms they want - even the recently-dismissed vaginal ones.

Even by today's standards, so much of the thinking enshrined in Town Bloody Hall feels radical. Valk believes that while young women today have more information and appear to have increased freedom and "self-agency", she isn’t certain that it necessarily follows that women in the 21st-century are enjoying this agency.

"Oh my god, with all the plastic surgery and having to market yourself as an object. Have we really come forward? It's like crazy. We have to market ourselves. I don't because I'm old, but I see friend's daughters ... Some of the poses these young girls adopt for their social media pictures - oh my goodness."

In a twist for a work of feminist theatre, Trilling is played by a man in The Town Hall Affair. Valk promises that it "makes perfect sense" on stage, especially as it reflects something that has changed since 1971: "You can change your sex. You can become a man; you can become a woman."

But progress is slow and although looking back can offer extra momentum or let us see that we are moving in a positive direction, there is an inevitable undercurrent of frustration at the heart of The Town Hall Affair, as it innately questions how much progress has been made in the last four decades. 

Ironically, the most re-quoted line from the debate is from Mailer: "There is an element in Women's Liberation that terrifies me. It terrifies me because it's humourless ... because there's been almost no recognition that the life of a man is also difficult." It's a broken logic that remains all too familiar.

Mailer, who died in 2007, went on to say how he knew women's liberation was vital. And yet, he didn't seem to understand the irony of his contradictory positions as immortalised in Town Bloody Hall. The Wooster Group have two men playing Mailer so he can literally fight with himself on stage; maybe providing the comic relief he felt was missing 46 years earlier.

Even though many of us have never stopped calling ourselves feminists, 2017 feels like a year when feminism has been reclaimed as a positive and exciting word. We're talking about gender and inequality, whether it's wearing a #pussyhat, saying "of course" to #marriageequality, sharing a #MeToo story, declaring "nasty women", reading a book written published before the internet, or going to theatre made by women.

As I write this piece, I see another story about hidden sexual abuse in our arts industry break, followed by the slew of inexplicably surprised reactions. Women, however, don't seem surprised; it's never been hidden to us. So, we will keep talking, listening and creating until we don't have to ask "What's changed?"