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Women 40 and over challenge the norm of invisibility

The current presidential campaign has given us all a nasty dose of a particular, toxic worldview that depends on silencing, caricaturing, or making invisible the other. It sounds like diversion tactics, gaslighting, mansplaining, and often straight-up lying. 

The other often ends up being a woman. But every woman has a story to tell. Not just the pretty ones or the wealthy ones. And not just as wife, daughter, mother, sister, or aunt. Each has her own dismantling to do, often involving letting go of (or blowing to smithereens, depending) the notion that she look and act a certain way, or else she will be unheard and invisible. 

These stories drive “The Invisibility Project,” an evening of monologues and songs based on the personal stories of the women who will perform them: Lisa Cole, Michelle Cullom, Machele Miller Dill, Christina Elizabeth, Kelley Childers Friedburg, Liz Masters, Leta Rector, Rebecca Ungerman, and Shelly Watson. (Full disclosure: I turned 40 in the spring and have the pleasure of choreographing and performing a movement solo for the show.) The project is the latest from Echo Theatre Company, a relatively new organization in town that recently presented its original work “The Low Down Dusty Blues” at the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 

Some of the stories are raw—even harrowing, some are funny and bittersweet, and all are examples of the kind of honesty that comes easily to women when they realize nobody’s looking at them anyway, so they might as well say what they want. 

Dill, who's a director of the musical theater program at the University of Tulsa and directs Echo, said inspiration for the project came when she was walking with a much younger female student. 

“A gentleman, not too far off my age, held the door and spoke to her and I was completely ignored,” said Dill. “And then I realized: ‘Oh lord, I’m fat and over 40. Invisibility has hit!’ But then I realized that what once bugged me, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anymore. But I wanted to talk about it.”

Why do women over 40 feel invisible? In part because, in the media, they pretty much are. You don’t see many women with gray hair in fashion magazines or in prime Hollywood roles. If women aren’t what the male gaze wants to see, then they aren’t made perceptible.

There’s another invisibility, too, that comes from surviving painful or traumatizing life events while having to keep up appearances. Without a framework that supports being seen in their truth, these women can become invisible to themselves. Cole’s monologue describes her abuse as a teenager, her descent into alcoholism, and, finally, her willingness to commit to a new reality: “I am not nothing.” 

The show deals with many experiences of invisibility: a woman who’s a Jew and a lesbian, a Native father dying of neglect in a nursing home, a teenage mother. Dill wrote many of the monologues based on interviews she conducted with other women, a process she described as “humbling.”

“They trusted me with their stories and the ones who wrote their own are trusting me to showcase their stories. So much trust, so much passion and pathos ... so much wisdom in one room.”

Many of the women in “The Invisibility Project” are veteran Tulsa performers. Like Billie Sue Thompson and Melanie Fry, whom Dill describes as “people who built our theater community,” they have helped shape and strengthen the arts in Tulsa over the decades, making it a city in which creative women and men are equally vocal and visible. 

Half the ticket sales on opening night will go to Dress for Success, the mission of which is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools. One performance will feature an interpreter for the deaf.

“This [kind of show] is what Echo is meant to do,” Dill said. “We focus on work that is global in scope, socially conscious in substance, and educational in outlook … this show lives that.”

The Invisibility Project 
Fri., Oct. 28 through Sun., Oct. 30
Nightingale Theater
1416 E. 4^th St | Tickets $15 
nightingaletheater.com

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this column misidentified Machele Miller Dill as head of TU's theater department, and mistakenly omitted performer Leta Rector. We apologize for the error. 

For more from Alicia, read her article on the Tulsa Awards for Theater Excellence.