De GROEN, Alma (Margaret) 1941-

PERSONAL: Born September 5, 1941, in Foxton, New Zealand; daughter of Archibald Mathers and Eileeen Vertongen; immigrated to Australia, 1964; married Geoffrey de Groen, 1965 (divorced); children: one daughter.

ADDRESSES: Agent—RGM Associates, P.O. Box 128, Surry Hills, New South Wales 2010, Australia.

CAREER: Playwright. National Library Service, Wellington and Hamilton, New Zealand, library assistant, 1958-64; West Australia Institute of Technology, Perth, Australia, writer, 1986; Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney, Australia, dramaturg, 1987.

AWARDS, HONORS: Canadian Playwriting Competition winner, 1970, for The Joss Adams Show; Canada Council grant, 1970; Australian Writers Guild Award, 1985, 1993; New South Wales Premier's Award, 1988; Victoria Premier's Award, 1988; Patrick White Literary Award, 1998.

WRITINGS:

plays

The Joss Adams Show (one-act; produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1970), included in Going Home and Other Plays, 1977.

The Sweatproof Boy (three-act), produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1972, revised as Perfectly All Right (one-act; produced in Sydney, 1972), included in Going Home and Other Plays, 1977.

The After-Life of Arthur Cravan (two-act), produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1973.

Going Home (three-act; produced in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1976), included in In Going Home and Other Plays, 1977.

Going Home and Other Plays (includes The Joss Adams Show and Perfectly All Right), Currency Press (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1977.

Chidley (two-act), produced in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1977.

Vocations (two-act), produced in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1981.

The Rivers of China (two-act; produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1987), Dramatic Publishing Co. (Woodstock, IL), 1988.

The Girl Who Saw Everything (two-act; produced in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1991), Currency Press (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1991.

Available Light (radio play), 1992.

(With Ian McKenzie) Stories in the Dark (radio play), 1992.

The Woman in the Window, Currency Press (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1999.

Wicked Sisters (two-act; produced in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2001), Currency Press (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 2003.

Author of episodes for television series and of television plays, including Going Home, 1980, and Man of Letters, 1985.

SIDELIGHTS: Feminist themes are threaded through the work of Alma de Groen, a New Zealand-born playwright who now makes her home in Australia. De Groen's first play, The Joss Adams Show, has at its core the often-unrecognized condition of postpartum depression. A young mother who kills her baby carries it with her to appear on a talk show where, perhaps, she will find some sympathy. The black comedy lays the blame for Joss's actions, as de Groen sees it, squarely where it belongs, on a patriarchal society that provides women with few real economic and social choices to cope with violence and neglect.

The Sweatproof Boy, which was shortened and retitled Perfectly All Right, is about homemaker Viv, who tries to find meaning in life by constantly rearranging the furniture in her home. The handsome nephew of Oscar Wilde is the subject of The After-Life of Arthur Cravan. Cravan, a performer, boxer, and favorite of the day, disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight. Going Home finds Australians in Canada feeling homesick as they deal with a blizzard. Chidley is a biographical play about William James Chidley, the Australian eccentric who was imprisoned for publishing and speaking out about sexual practices and other health-related subjects.

Vocations is a comedy about Joy, a writer, and Vicki, an actress, and their relationships with their respective husbands. Joy's husband writes about the feelings of women in his feminist novel without ever understanding them. Vicki's partner, Ross, is trying to take over her life and pregnancy, which itself may put her career in jeopardy.

De Groen's The Rivers of China, is her most acclaimed play to date, and she worked on it for more than ten years before it was produced. It is a tribute to New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a strong and independent woman who was fully aware of society's limitations on her gender, and who expressed her observations in her work. Before her death at age thirty-four, Mansfield sought help from a Russian guru; in the metaphorical journey upon which dramatist de Groen takes her, Mansfield joins the Gurdjieff Institute, where the writer hopes to find peace and accomplish a longer life through diet, exercise, and meditation. In uncovering her real self, however, she also learns from Gurdjieff, who believes in male dominance, that her self is still considered less significant that the self of any man.

In the years following her untimely death, Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, had published censored versions of his late wife's writings, diaries, and letters that portrayed her as an innocent romantic. Mansfield's work has since been reassessed, an outgrowth of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Influenced by such revisionist study, de Groen portrays Mansfield as a passionate, reckless, and tough woman who at the same time was often unhappy and depressed. Still, as Brian Hoad noted in the Sydney Bulletin, "a strong streak of good humor runs through this play."

The second narrative that threads through The Rivers of China begins in the first scene: it is set in the near future, with male characters exhibiting the same frustrations in their female-dominated world that Mansfield felt in hers. In one of the hospitals where all men are orderlies and women are doctors, a male patient who attempted suicide by jumping from a building has his face and body reconstructed by plastic surgery. He is also hypnotized to help with his recovery, and when he wakes, he believes himself to be Mansfield. In a Variety review, Debby Kruger noted that this unnamed man "is a symbol, in the same way that the character of Mansfield is a symbol; de Groen has perhaps chosen the writer for convenience, but it is an appropriate choice." The scenes shift back and forth between this place and Gurdjieff's France-based Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, while the year shifts to 1922.

Other works by de Groen include The Girl Who Saw Everything, the story of marital breakdown and midlife crisis, and The Woman in the Window, which focuses on the repressions of women's artistic expression. Her two-act play Wicked Sisters, first produced in 2003, mixes drama with comedy as it follows four friends who meet after the death of one of the women's husband; the meeting inspires them to discuss the divergent paths they have taken in life.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Dramatists, sixth edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

periodicals

Australasian Drama Studies, October, 1989-April, 1990, Helen Gilbert, interview with de Groen.

Bulletin (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), September 22, 1987, Brian Hoad, review of The Rivers of China.

Variety, September 30, 1987, Debby Kruger, review of The Rivers of China.

online

Currency Press Web site, http://www.currency.com.au/ (October 5, 2004), Elizabeth Perkins, "Studies in Australian Drama: Alma de Groen: The Rivers of China."

OzLit Web site, http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/ (December 7, 1997), Martina Hall, "Alma de Groen."*