why i keep returning to difficult women

I keep writing about difficult women.

Women who drink too much, want too much, lie too easily, speak too loudly. Women who refuse to behave nobly even when history has cast them in noble roles. Women who betray their lovers, disappoint their children, manipulate the faithful, squander their gifts, and make a mess of the lives they were told to be grateful for.

I don’t return to them because I admire everything they do.

I return because they do it.

For centuries, the women we have been allowed to admire onstage have been admirable in very particular ways. They endure. They sacrifice. They forgive. They suffer beautifully. Even when they rebel, their rebellion is often purified by punishment. They die, go mad, repent, or discover that what they wanted was wrong.

The difficult woman refuses purification.

She may suffer, but she does not necessarily become better. She may understand the damage she has done and do it again. She may be brilliant in public and monstrous in private. She may be both victim and perpetrator, sometimes in the same scene.

That is where the play begins.

I am drawn to women like Aimee Semple McPherson and Edna St. Vincent Millay and others because the facts of their lives refuse to settle into a single interpretation.

Aimee was a visionary evangelist, a theatrical genius, a modern media pioneer, and — depending on whom you believe — a calculating fraud who staged her own disappearance. She built a religious empire in an age when women were not supposed to build empires. She fed the hungry, comforted the desperate, exploited spectacle, and understood that salvation, like theatre, requires an audience.

Was she sincere?

Almost certainly.

Was she manipulative?

Almost certainly.

The contradiction is not a problem to solve. It is the reason to write the play.

Millay presents a different difficulty. She was a poet of extraordinary gifts who became trapped by the public image those gifts created: the liberated woman, the bohemian lover, the fearless voice of female desire. But liberation can become another role a woman is required to perform. Behind the legend was a body breaking down, a career in decline, addictions tightening their grip, and an artist still expected to produce something beautiful on demand.

There is a temptation, when writing women like these, to defend them — to explain the drinking, the cruelty, the vanity, the deception. If the audience can be shown the wound beneath the behavior, perhaps the woman will become sympathetic.

But sympathy can be another trap.

A male character is often permitted to remain fascinating without becoming forgivable. His damage is treated as complexity. His appetites are evidence of vitality. His ambition, however ruthless, proves that he is alive.

A woman is more often asked to make her case.

What happened to her? Who hurt her? Why couldn’t she have behaved differently?

These are useful questions, but they can quietly turn a play into a trial. The playwright becomes the defense attorney, arranging the evidence until the audience agrees that the woman was not really difficult after all. She was misunderstood. She was wounded. She had no choice.

But what if she did have a choice?

What if she chose badly?

That possibility interests me far more.

I do not want to rescue difficult women from judgment. I want to rescue them from simplification. Understanding a character does not require acquitting her. It requires allowing her contradictions to remain active — allowing intelligence to coexist with self-deception, generosity with vanity, courage with cowardice, and genuine love with terrible behavior.

Theatre is uniquely suited to this because a play cannot remain an argument for long.

Eventually, somebody has to enter the room. Somebody wants something. Somebody lies. Somebody hears the lie and chooses whether to believe it.

Onstage, reputation becomes action.

The saint has to speak to her mother.

The feminist icon has to face the person she used.

The brilliant artist has to confront the blank page.

The mastermind has to discover that other people have minds of their own.

This is also why I resist the phrase “strong female character.” Strength is not a character. It is an endorsement. It tells us how we are supposed to feel before the woman has done anything.

I would rather write a specific woman.

A woman who can command a crowd of thousands but cannot control a conversation with one person. A woman who demands freedom and resents the freedom of others. A woman capable of transforming the world who remains incapable of changing herself.

She may be strong. She may also be petty, frightened, funny, erotic, selfish, tender, ridiculous, and wrong.

She should be allowed the whole inheritance of human behavior.

Perhaps that is what “difficult” really means. Not unpleasant. Not unsympathetic. Not impossible to love.

Impossible to reduce.

The women I return to will not stay inside the stories told about them. They resist sainthood, victimhood, villainy, and empowerment. Just when I think I understand them, they commit some fresh act of contradiction and force me to begin again.

That resistance is not an obstacle to the work.

It is the work.

I keep returning to difficult women because easy characters confirm what we already believe. Difficult women expose the limits of those beliefs. They make judgment unstable. They turn admiration into suspicion, condemnation into recognition, and history into something dangerous and alive.

Most of all, they ask the question I want theatre to ask:

Can you look at a woman clearly — without worshipping her, excusing her, punishing her, or looking away?

And can you keep looking when she refuses to become the woman you wanted her to be?