Houppert, Karen 1956-

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HOUPPERT, Karen 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born 1956.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Sightlines Theater Company, 125 Eastern Parkway #5D, New York, NY 11238.

CAREER:

Journalist, playwright, and author. Village Voice, New York, NY, reporter; Sightlines Theater Company, New York, NY, playwright. Mabou Mines/Suite, New York, NY, artist, 1993, 2002, 2003; HERE Arts Center, New York, NY, resident artist, 2003-04.

WRITINGS:

The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo, Menstruation, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1999.

Contributor to numerous journals, including Nation, Newsday, and Salon.

PLAYS

(With Stephen Nunns) The Packwood Papers, produced in New York, NY, 1996.

Tragedy in Nine Lives, produced in New York, NY, 2003.

Waiting Wives (nonfiction), Random House Canada (Toronto, Canada), 2005.

Also author, with Stephen Nunns, of play The Boys in the Basement, 1995.

SIDELIGHTS:

A playwright, journalist, and author, Karen Houppert has produced plays and books on Bob Packwood's sexual harassment scandal, the radical feminist who shot Andy Warhol, and the odd secrecy that continues to surround the subject of menstruation. She has also written a book about military wives, Waiting Wives, particularly those who oppose the war in Iraq but find themselves intimately connected to it through their husbands' service in the war zone.

In the play The Packwood Papers, which she wrote with Stephen Nunns, Houppert fictionalizes the very real story of Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, whose strong public record on women's issues contrasted so sharply with his private history of sexual harassment. Relying on the thousands of pages compiled in the Senate Ethics Committee's investigation of Packwood, as well as his own diary, the play paints a picture of a deeply flawed man, but not a monster. As Off-off Broadway Review Online contributor John Michael Koroly explained, "an image emerges: Packwood as a jerk, but hardly a malignant one. Indeed, he appears an exemplar of what can be called 'the banality of machismo,' his lewd advances less an attempt to assert patriarchal privilege than a pathetic effort to bolster his attenuated virility and sexual worth." Though disappointed that Houppert and Nunns did not make more of the dramatic irony of Packwood's actual legislative achievements on behalf of women, New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder felt the play builds "a cumulatively powerful portrait of a man who, right to the end, seemed never to understand his misuse of power and the offensiveness of his behavior."

Houppert next turned to a subject that is less scandalous on the surface, but in fact is surrounded by a great deal of controversy. In The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo, Menstruation she chronicles the history of secrecy, horror, and hostility that surrounds this perfectly normal physiological function. From biblical times to the present, menstruation has been a subject of great concern to many commentators, and for Houppert the attitudes enshrined by those commentators continue to have a great and often unhealthy impact on the lives of women. "Writing with a bravura that occasionally crosses the line into crudeness," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Houppert "convincingly investigates the role of advertisers and manufacturers of 'feminine' products" in perpetuating the unhealthy attitudes surrounding menstruation. Those attitudes can actually cost lives, as Houppert reveals in discussing the 1980 case of thirty-eight women who died from toxic shock system related to the tampons they were using. The Food and Drug Administration did not bother to impose new regulations for ten years, by which time 60,000 women had been affected. She also argues that the men who control the health-care industry have effectively invented premenstrual syndrome (PMS), a disease without any scientific proof, that causes many young women in particular to question their own assertiveness. For Library Journal reviewer Barbara Bibel, Houppert "offers an interesting feminist perspective" on a surprisingly difficult and contentious subject. And while disappointed that Houppert does not explore some of the larger questions about gender roles that her book raises, Women's Review of Books contributor Kathleen O'Grady concluded, "Nevertheless, The Curse is a powerful examination of 'the last unmentionable taboo,' fired with an anger that gives it a clarity and force that academic studies of menstruation often lack."

Houppert returned to the stage with another subject shrouded in controversy: Valerie Solanas, the one and only member of the Society for Cutting up Men, or SCUM. Tragedy in Nine Lives, a musical set in Andy Warhol's famous Factory, tells the bizarre story of Solanas's life as a particularly nutty member of Warhol's eccentric circle, her growing obsession with the idea that Warhol is stealing her ideas, and her attempt to avenge herself by shooting him, an attempt that gave her the fame she had so long craved. Houppert "presents the Solanas-Warhol encounter as a kind of Greek tragedy," wrote Village Voice contributor C. Carr. "Of course, what lives on after all these years is Solanas's Medea-like fury and poisonous resentment. The author of the SCUM Manifesto is probably destined to be an icon of female rage for as long as sexism lasts."