” Women and the Sea,” at the Portland Stage Company until recently, should add a word to its title. It should be called “Working Women and the Sea.” The script is based on oral histories compiled from interviews with over 40 Maine women. From these, 17 adult characters are represented on stage. Fifteen are directly involved in the fishing industry: fishermen’s wives (fishermen’s wives are equal partners with their husbands,” observes one character); women who actually go fishing (or diving or clamming) for a living; women involved in ancillary businesses like auctioneering, processing, farming. One white-collar woman is a liaison between government and industry.
Three additional characters, a 101-year old lighthouse keeper and a feisty ferry captain, are the leitmotif for this dramatic examination of Maine’s fishing community. A child (fisherman’s daughter) provides visual pleasantries but little content.
The format of the play is as unconventional as its characters. There is virtually no dialog between characters; each speaker addresses the audience singly. Vignettes unroll, slowly, with interruptions from other characters chiming in with their own experiences. Audience attention shifts and shifts again. The uphill battle for both playwright and director is overall cohesiveness. “Without dialog, it will be even more important to create the sense of a group among the characters,” says writer-director Anita Stewart. Therein lies the challenge of this brave fledgling play.
The playwrights come close to getting it right. The characters, though tightly edited and filtered through the minds and motives of city-folk immersed in the world of theater, are sympathetic; the voices authentic. The overarching theme of community does bind the work together. As Pat Percy, lobsterman and former president of the Fishermen’s Wives Association says, “fishing in Maine is not just a job. It’s a way of life that spans generations…it’s the fiber that holds the coast together.”
The tension in the play is created by the inherent dangers of “the life.” Risk and its shadow, fear; vulnerability and its human defense, community, are the focus of these stories.
“To be the wife of a fisherman is to have a home where all the time is something new. Could be good news could be bad news … you can never predict your life.” Another character says, “I don’t worry about the sea taking him, that would be like God taking him.”
Loss of life is perhaps the hugest risk but there are plenty of other disasters always just around the corner. Boat sinkings, corporate and regulatory irresponsibility, bankruptcy, deceit, betrayal and lawsuits are components of one wife’s story, but the ultimate tragedy was the loss of her husband’s fishing license (fishing licenses are now sold with the boat).
Independence, skill, physical endurance and the pride they foster are the up-side themes of the play. To be a successful fisherman requires a mountain of specific skills, from reading the water to repairing a diesel engine. Clammers know how to walk on the mud. “As you’re walking, you’re kinda twisting your ankle.”
Universal respect for such “life and death” skills dissolves the female stereotype. “Things came up and if you didn’t do them, you were lost.” The urchin diver explains, “at the age of 16 I started spear fishing in Florida. For the first time in my life…I wasn’t made to feel that by being competent and confident, I somehow diminished others.”
Woven throughout the stories of women holding their own in the fishery are stories of birthing and childrearing and care giving. That aspect of femininity is undiminished by the hard work. Conversely, the stereotype of the rough, tough insensitive fisherman is diminished by intimate glimpses of the men at sea. “One day Bill and his crew were out on the boat…there were all these dolphins around and he just stopped the motor and the watched the dolphins and then they went back to work. I wonder how many corporate lawyers would do that?”
What’s missing in the play is the universally practiced self-deprecating, fatalistic, often black humor and the running gags full of blistering irony that gets every working man and woman through his or her day. A smattering of teasing lines, like the Linda Greenlaw character’s account of a discussion with her mother about wanting to have a child. “‘You don’t have to be married to have children’,” says Mom. “‘Yeah, Mom, I know that.’ But I don’t need my mother telling me, right?'” The white collar character (a Greenwich, Connecticut native) tells her husband “Whither thou goest doesn’t go any further down east than Brunswick.” Cute, but not the humor of the docks.
Overall, the play presents the besieged Maine fishing community in a sympathetic and often moving way. Its summary line, buried somewhere in the middle of the second act, “It’s a leap of faith to leave the land,” has been well demonstrated.
“Women and the Sea” was performed at Portland Stage through May 23.