En Garde Arts Presents Uncommon Voices

SOLDIERGIRLS
Hear conversations with writer and director Em Weinstein on their new work “SOLIDERGIRLS” about queer women in the army during WWII.
TRANSCRIPT
Part of why I am really passionate
about telling queer histories
is because these conversations have been happening
since the beginning of time
and I want to place old stories in new contexts
so that people understand
that that these aren't a blip on the radar,
these conversations around gender
and identity and sexuality,
that they have always been in the discourse.
They just not have not been on the surface of it.
So that's really important to me as an artist and as a mission.
[ Up-tempo music plays ]
Part of why I am really passionate
I'm Em Weinstein, and I'm the playwright and director
of a new play called "Soldier Girls,"
which I like to say is a lesbian musical sex comedy.
Woman: She's the redhead with the...
Big glasses? ...big boobs. Yeah. Um...
Anyway...
I've been directing and writing plays
since I was 10 years old.
My mom is an experimental theater artist/teacher.
And started directing after I had brain surgery, actually,
when I was 10 years old,
I was in a wheelchair for a few months,
recovering from having a brain tumor.
And I started writing plays
and have sort of been creating theater ever since.
I went to Smith College,
where I got to direct on a really large scale very young,
and then started directing professionally
right after college.
And I finally ended up doing my MFA at Yale School of Drama.
I graduated last year with a degree in directing.
And while I was there, I started making films,
and I started writing
and I started getting really interested in original musicals
and how we can take the American musical,
which is, frankly, one of the greatest things
this country has ever come up with, in my opinion,
and bring it into the 21st century
to be something that's really fun and sexy
and queer and young.
So that's sort of where "Soldier Girls" came out of.
[ Mid-tempo music playing ]
♪ Touch her thighs and kiss her neck ♪
♪ And be sure to double-check ♪
♪ She's not an actress or a Gemini ♪
♪ An alcoholic private eye ♪
♪ On recon for the Germans ♪
♪ Or an heiress dressed in ermine ♪
♪ Or a lying sack of vermin ♪
♪ Like my ex, Augusta Herrmann ♪
♪ Yes, I'll make sure to determine ♪
♪ Baby, I could write a sermon ♪
What if I don't like it?
Then make it stop.
What if you don't like it?
I like it. [ Laughter ]
But what if you don't?
It's an experiment.
I failed chemistry in the 10th grade.
I was good at chemistry.
Will I need gloves?
Weinstein: Women's Army Corps,
which was founded in World War II
for the purpose of women getting involved in the war effort,
ended up being a pivotal moment for queer liberation
and for women's liberation
and in lesbian history just generally.
Gentlemen of the Senate, manhood is under attack.
What has become of us men
when we have to call on our women to protect us?
Gentlemen of the Senate,
my name is Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby.
I'm a wife. I'm a mother.
I'm a mother and a wife.
I'm a colonel in the United States Army --
the only female colonel, in fact.
"Colonel" is spelled C-O-L-O-N-E-L.
It doesn't have an "R" in it. I'm aware of that.
Is it advisable,
long before the supply of manpower is running short,
to put a lot of young, vigorous girls
into a vaguely defined noncombatant branch of the Army?
Wouldn't it be wiser to encourage them to marry,
produce children?
Why not put these girls to use?
Many even have college degrees.
Some even speak a foreign language.
Why not, I say! What of the masculine environment of the Army?
Do we not fear that the disease of tomboyishness
will spread amongst them?
It is well known that enlisted men despise office work.
They long to march into battle, to drive tanks,
fly airplanes, to drop bombs,
built trenches, shoot machine guns,
pull out the throbbing viscera of the enemy
with their virile young fingers.
How many of our boys could be free from the drudgery
of paperwork and transcription
if we put girls into our war offices
to operate our radios and answer our telephones?
Women aren't made for war.
Girls love telephones, gentlemen.
Gentlemen, everybody knows that. Everybody knows that.
I'm a huge nerd for 1930s and 1940s musicals.
I always have been.
I sort of was raised on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
I should say the '50s, too.
I love Gene Kelly and Gershwin and Cole Porter.
And I think that, you know, for so long
we have described those musicals in relation to queer history
in terms of gay men especially.
I mean, they've sort of gotten to own the whole genre
in terms of queer musical.
But for me, as an assigned- female-at-birth queer person,
these musicals meant a lot.
And in some way, I always saw gender
as being played with in these musicals.
And so I always have wanted to add to that canon,
even though it's, you know, decades and decades later.
And when I started working on a show
that took place in the 1940s, I was like, "Oh, my God.
It needs to involve that music."
I started working with Emily Johnson-Erday,
who's the composer on "Soldier Girls,"
and she has a super-unique background.
She's done folk and bluegrass music and jazz.
And so what you'll hear in this musical
is a whole bunch of different music samples
from across many genres.
There's an Ani DiFranco-inspired number.
There's a riot grrrl-inspired number.
♪ Lost in the limbo [ Mid-tempo rock music playing ]
♪ In the first flesh of you ♪
♪ But an echo remains
♪ Of trust untold
♪ Yeah
Part of why I am really passionate
♪ God's in His heaven
♪ And I'm in my hell
♪ I shall only hope
♪ That you are well
[ Groans ] [ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Something that I found really, really satisfying
was the chance to take someone's journals
and put them to music.
The two lesbian breakup songs toward the middle of the show
are both directly from Marvyl's diary
after Esther and Marvyl's breakup.
And there is something so sacred about taking a text
that someone never intended to share --
it's in her private journal,
and it's her, like, most terrible moments --
and just taking that intimate, vulnerable piece of text
and giving it everything that I possibly can.
♪ So pack up your troubles in your old kit bag ♪
♪ And smile, smile, smile
Part of why I am really passionate
My dramaturge, Rebecca, and I
found this amazing archive housed at USC
called the ONE Archive,
which is this incredible treasure trove of queer history.
And through that archive and a trip to L.A.,
we discovered the incredible letters of female soldiers
during World War II, these very erotic love letters
between a number of soldiers in the Women's Army Corps.
And from those letters, a story emerged
of this beautiful, sexy, and sort of forbidden love story
between these two female soldiers.
Rebecca and I and two actors
went to Adelphi University with New York Theatre Workshop
and spent five days just, like, playing with things.
We laid out all of the letters,
and we had a table full of books.
And by the end of that five days,
I realized a few things --
one, that I wanted it to be a musical,
two, that I wanted it to just be two people,
and three, that I wanted it to really traverse genres.
Eleanor Roosevelt and others fought
for the Women's Army Corps to exist.
And unlike the male army, homosexuality wasn't something
that was talked about from the start.
So whereas in the Army proper,
there were all these ways that homosexual men
were screened out and persecuted,
they were so oblivious to the idea
that women could desire each other
that for a very long time, there was no screening process.
By the time women started to meet and fall in love
and the Army started to wake up to the fact that they had
what they called a "lesbian menace" at their hands,
they had to strike out.
And they ended up doing so by targeting especially butch women
and by using pretty harmful tactics
to dishonorably discharge those soldiers.
In my entrance interview, they ask if I'm a homosexual.
I've never heard that word before -- not out loud.
Anyway, there's a tingling sensation
on the third syllable -- sex...ual.
I say no.
I'm not lying.
I've never done anything that would categorize me as...
But of course, there were those times long ago at night,
laying on top of my pillow,
rubbing back and forth, thinking about...
But I haven't done that in a while,
and there's no way she could know, this serious officer
who asks me, so matter-of-fact, about...that.
It's really fascinating, because for a moment,
these communities were fostered in the barracks
of the Women's Army Corps
that then led to movements after the war.
So it led to bars being created in these communities,
sort of sprouting up and finding each other again,
because for the first time,
queer women could find each other in these single-sex spaces
and organize and plan
and fall in love and meet each other.
♪ I like the Army
♪ 'Cause it's full of pretty girls ♪
♪ And my mother isn't here, and I'm not in West Virginia ♪
♪ And the world is larger than it's ever been before ♪
♪ Now with pants instead of pantyhose ♪
♪ I'll fix a million radios ♪
♪ From Tokyo to Amsterdam, Paula Jean to Marianne ♪
♪ Now in neckties 'stead of pearls ♪
♪ Some in pigtails, some in curls ♪
♪ Oh, yes, I like the Army ♪
♪ 'Cause it's full of pretty ♪
♪ Full of pretty girls ♪ I like the Army
♪ 'Cause it's clear and it's determined ♪
♪ And my father isn't here ♪
♪ and I'm not in Flatbush, Brooklyn ♪
♪ And the world is larger than it's ever been before ♪
Weinstein: You know, when I started working on the piece,
I struggled with this question of relevance.
World War II is a very well-worn subject matter
onstage and on-screen.
And so I was really wondering, you know, why add to that canon?
And I realized, you know, so much about the Army
and who makes up the Army today
and who made up the Army back then
is not in our public discourse.
But so much has changed
and so little has changed in our military.
And I wanted to dive deep into understanding
how women first were welcomed into the Army
and then what the history of their participation
in the U.S. military has been till now,
because it's a story that bears telling
and that needs to be told and retold.
[ Up-tempo music plays ]
Part of why I am really passionate