Playwright Danielle Dresden didn’t know triple threat actor Kiki Moritsugu very well when the two first worked together in 2019. They were staging a show at TNW Ensemble Theater, where Dresden and life partner Donna Peckett have spent their careers making almost as many new plays as one can see in the entire WPW festival.
Playing one of eight women interpreting roles once embodied by actor Ruth Draper, Moritsugu brought pieces of her larger-than-life mother – Canadian actor Jo Hutchings – onto stage.
Literally.
“As part of her costume, Kiki was wearing items of clothing that had belonged to her mother,” Dresden recalled, speaking by phone shortly before leaving home for the WPW’s Wisconsin Dramatists Retreat at Ten Chimneys (more on that at a later date). “Backstage, she was telling us theater stories about her mother. Donna said to me, ‘we should do a solo show featuring Kiki.’”
Like her mother, the Madison-based Moritsugu has her own theater stories to share, beginning as a child and extending to Broadway. You’ll hear plenty about Moritsugu’s career – humorous and harrowing backstage stories very much included – in Dresden’s A Woman Is . . . , an extended monologue that also showcases Moritsugu’s chops as a dancer and singer.
Still, “the show-biz stories aren’t really the point, any more than the setting is the ultimate point of a good mystery,” Dresden said. Playing on Mother’s Day weekend, A Woman Is . . . revolves instead around Moritsugu’s complicated and conflicted relationship with her mother.
(S)mothering
Meeting in coffee shops to interview Moritsugu so she could write a script, Dresden realized from the start “how enmeshed Kiki’s life was with that of her mother.” If she was going to chronicle Moritsugu’s journey, she’d need to map that part of the road, hairpin turns and all, during which her mother had been a particularly vocal backseat driver.
“Early on, the play began to focus on how the discoveries Kiki made about herself and her life were entangled in her understanding of her relationship with her mother,” Dresden said.
“I don’t know if I consciously copied her or not,” Moritsugu tells us, early in A Woman Is . . . . “But my gestures are like hers, my hands are like hers, the point of my chin. I look like her. I’m sure I wanted to be her . . . at least a little bit. The thing is, she wanted me to be her, too, and that got to be a problem.”
A problem, Dresden’s play reveals, for both mother and daughter.
As Moritsugu began to spread her wings as a person and as an actor, mother love could curdle into jealous competition – even as Moritsugu was struggling to discover who she was as a person, distinct from both her controlling mother and the demanding profession that dominated both women’s lives.
When separate from her mother and not on stage, who was Kiki Moritsugu?
It didn’t help that both her mother and the stage could be so intoxicating, as aptly captured in the show’s opening song: In Stephen Sondheim’s “The Glamorous Life,” a girl sings her adoration of her stage-biz mother, even as she unwittingly reveals how lonely she is. Appropriately enough, it’s a difficult song to play and sing.
Difficult as Moritsugu’s relationship with her mother could be, one of the great strengths of Dresden’s script is that it resolutely refuses to demonize Moritsugu’s mother – any more than it hides Moritsugu’s unabashed love for the theater.
But even as A Woman Is . . . celebrates the side of Moritsugu’s mother that could be loving and generous, it simultaneously exposes her mother’s dark side, while making clear that Moritsugu would need to break free to fully find herself.
“Kiki came to understand that she herself is not an extension or reaction to her mother, but her own person,” Dresden said. “Telling and embodying that story is not an easy thing to do.”
Dresden went still further when I asked her what her show is trying to say about motherhood.
“Ultimately, I don’t see this as a show about being a mother,” she replied. “It’s more about the process of becoming. That’s difficult for any person, and especially for women, because of the often constricting roles they’re assigned.”
Expanding the Frame
Hence the ellipsis in the title to Dresden’s play.
As we learn in the introduction to the show, the first part of Dresden’s title – “A Woman Is” – comes from an Anne Sexton poem; the concluding two lines of Sexton’s “Housewife” are “A woman is her mother./That’s the main thing.”
Sexton’s poem condemns women to endless repetition – much as the teenaged Moritsugu in Dresden’s play feels caught in the bathroom mirror, through which her mother stares at Moritsugu’s face as well as her own while the two of them argue.
“Me, I wanted out of that frame,” Moritsugu says.
That assertion of selfhood – “me,” followed by “I” – is akin to the one Dresden suggests through the ellipsis in her title.
Rather than repeating Sexton’s confining conclusion, with its end-stop periods in each line, Dresden’s title opens up and out, suggesting through her ellipsis that defining what women are is a fool’s errand. They can be anything; their potential is unlimited.
As Dresden noted, what any woman is extends beyond gender; A Woman Is . . . also explores the intersectionality between women and age as well as color, with some particularly pointed things to say about the racism Moritsugu has experienced as a global majority woman (Moritsugu’s father is Japanese-Canadian).
Ultimately, Dresden’s show suggests, Moritsugu’s increasing ability to love herself freed her to more fully appreciate the many, sometimes conflicting multitudes that comprise her mother – while still retaining sufficient critical distance to remain independent.
“Kiki’s story is one that’s universal, involving the roles we assume,” Dresden said. “Regardless of one’s relationship with one’s parents, we undergo a process of coming to terms with them and who we are. And no matter how good that relationship is, our parents shouldn’t want us to become copies of them.”
TNW Ensemble Theater’s production of A Woman Is . . . runs May 13-14 at the Diane Ballweg Theatre, 1000 Edgewood College Dr., Madison. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/a-woman-is-2/.
