Gender Roomours I

CW and AR: When discussing your play in class, we were wondering whether Ella can be considered a more "real" character than the "might-have-beens" Beth and Liz, or, in the terminology of psychology, whether she is the "host personality" for the "alters" Beth and Liz. Did you have any hierarchy of the characters in mind? Or do you see the three figures as equally "real" figures which stand for three different ways of coping with the experience of incest?

HC: I think Ella is the one who brings on the others, she is more real. In Chichester, where the original version was played, some people I heard in the interval had already realised that they are one person, others did not get it at all, which is fine. It's like life, there is a mystery. When we read the reviews, we realised that even some reviewers had not understood it. When we wanted to transfer the play to London, an outside producer, Peter Woolfe, put money into it. He saw it in Chichester and absolutely loved it. But then, when he considered putting money into it, he read all the reviews and it turned out that he had not realised that they are the same person. He wanted me to rewrite it, and when I said that I would never rewrite it, we had exactly the situation of the play, where Ella refuses to cut the stork-passage in her composition. But finally, I changed tiny things because I did want people to get as much out of it as possible. And then the reviews came out, saying, well, it was subtle in Chichester but now they're hammering it over our heads - it's weird.

CW and AR: Was your idea of multiplying the central character related to psychological studies on trauma, sexual child abuse, and dissociation? Did you read such studies when working on Three Women?

HC: I didn't set out to write about trauma, so I did talk to a lot of people only after I had written the play. Most of the people found it hard to accept Ella's unconditional love for her father. I am interested in this Elektra Complex, because I think the Oedipus Complex is so often talked about but you rarely hear about the Elektra Complex. I also think that the power system that I wrote about is different from sexual child abuse because Ella was already an adult when their incestuous affair began. However, as Liz says, "after ten years of foreplay, what do you expect?" I think it is also important that memories constantly change, and a new experience can shift everything that was in the past. So for those three women, having made their choices - aborting the baby, having it adopted, and raising it - changes their whole relationships with their past, which is the same past.

CW and AR: You just mentioned that Trauma Studies didn't play a particular role when you wrote the play, and that you only realized later on that there are parallels. Did you have other plays in mind which feature multiple protagonists such as Sarah Daniels's Beside Herself?

HC: I know of it, but I haven't read it. I would like to read that, actually. It has been done before - everything has been done before, but I don't think that there was a particular model. It really came of thinking how different our ways of looking at the world are; our choices are so different, and yet, I felt, essentially we are all absolutely connected.

CW and AR: The three main characters all have to cope with a trauma and do this in very different ways: Liz is very emotional about everything, very furious and unimpressed by social conventions (obvious also in her "striptease"). Beth absolutely avoids any memory and therefore any feeling that could arise, besides she is rational and in control of herself at all times. Ella, we would argue, is somewhere in the middle between the two, influenced by both Liz and Beth. When you developed their characters, were you also thinking about the Freudian concept of "ICH", "ÜBER-ICH," and "ES," or did the separation of different coping mechanisms automatically lead to characters that would kind of match the Freudian concepts?

HC: I didn't consciously think of these concepts, but I'm glad that the characters have this echo. But, you see, I would like to think that there are many more of them. I would love a German production with an orchestra of women coming on at the end saying, "We have concentrated only on three women, three different choices, but there are so many more possibilities." In the Chichester production we had Harold say at the end: "Mom, look, there they are. Nuns with violins, prostitutes with double-bass, and so on," and that was lovely. But then Sam suggested we should have shadows instead of the speech. This has gone on and off, and on and off, and I lost. I think it's a huge shame. I want to say that we have so many more possibilities, not just these three. Every choice we make takes us on a different journey leaving behind many parallel might-have-beens...