Beauty and Culture: A Beast Declawed by Female Writers : Commentary: Topical stage productions and a TV show carry on the task of demystification.

Does anyone remember the 1986 Newsweek story that said a 40-year-old single woman has as much chance of getting married as of being killed by a terrorist? Most people do remember it because Susan Faludi exposed the study on which it was based as insidious tripe in “Backlash,” her 1991 bestseller. Have we traveled far from the time when our culture gleefully reinforced the myth that the worst and most useless thing a woman can be is single? Most women over 30 know that we have not.

But, if we have made any progress at all in this respect, it’s at least partly because female writers have enlightened the entire population as to another side of the story, another set of possibilities for understanding the world and its values.

In Lisa Loomer’s dark comedy “The Waiting Room,” at the Mark Taper Forum, a woman named Wanda (Jacalyn O’Shaughnessy) relates that her mother had sent her the infamous Newsweek article. Wanda did not go into a deep depression, nor did she throw it out and forget about it. Being a woman of action, she bet her mother a hundred bucks she’d beat the odds and, abetted by money from her father and various boyfriends, she “got to work.” Several cosmetic surgeries later, still unmarried, riddled with cancer quite possibly caused by her breast implants, Wanda finds herself re-examining her priorities, her culture, her life.

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Loomer and O’Shaughnessy make us care deeply about this foolish, sharp-tongued party girl with the spirit of a heroine in a screwball comedy--except that we’d like to think that our screwball comedy heroines would have the confidence to avoid massive plastic surgery. But what if Carole Lombard, say, didn’t have that confidence until she was restructured? What if our culture makes it near impossible for some people to have natural confidence?

The answer is that we all need to examine our complicity in reinforcing dangerous standards of beauty, and this Loomer does with great humor and much intelligence. In a doctor’s waiting room, Wanda befriends two women from other eras, one Chinese, whose description of the putrefying flesh that occurs in foot-binding shortens the minimal oxygen available to the other, a corseted Victorian, who nearly faints. No one could miss the connection between civilized butchery from the last century and today. This is not a subtle play, but this is not a subject that demands subtlety.

Interestingly, a remarkably similar (and also remarkably unsubtle) musical comedy on this very subject played earlier this year at the Actors Gang in Hollywood. In “Hysteria,” playwright Tracy Young asks us to consider two sisters who thumb through Vogue, asking themselves, “How do I differ/From Claudia Schiffer?” One of them decides to go for plastic surgery, another gets pregnant because the pill made her sick and her diaphragm gave her an infection and her husband, who has now left her, refused to use a condom. Young sets these painfully familiar dilemmas side by side with those of the sisters’ grandmother, Miss Lilymoist Teagarden, whose lascivious doctors prescribe enforced bed rest for Lily’s “hysteria,” which of course makes this already nervous young woman a complete basket case.

Since bed rest did nothing for Loomer’s high-strung Victorian in “The Waiting Room,” the character’s doctor husband is advocating ovariotomy. It’s no coincidence that these two plays address identical ideas in a similar bright, comic voice, perhaps in the hope that if we can laugh at the ridiculousness of our own cultural habits, we can change them. The time has obviously come for women to confront the “beauty myth,” as Naomi Wolf named it, that eats up so much of our confidence, money and valuable time. Perhaps it constitutes one of feminism’s last frontiers.

One local group that’s joined the fight is the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, who regularly perform naked, and are at Highways through Sunday. How enlightening it is to see women strip themselves with no intention of catering to a man’s eye. These women say in their bios they believe their bodies are their texts. Their texts. Watching them, we realize how unusual it is to see female nudity in a context that is controlled entirely by women. It feels different and, even though sex is a part of the Nature Girls’ subject, it feels less erotic. As Michel Foucault pointed out, eroticism is apparently as learned and changeable as notions of beauty. Certainly Loomer suggests as much in a scene involving the fetishism of bound feet in “The Waiting Room.”

Wanda comes to understand that notions of beauty and eroticism are dangerously erratic. She begins as the kind of good-time girl whose troubles some women have trouble feeling empathy for. Who would have three breast surgeries (not to mention the nose, cheek and jaw jobs) in order to look better for men, or, like the dancer in “A Chorus Line,” to get more work? Fewer and fewer of us, one hopes. Who would spend, as Wanda has calculated, 6,750 hours of her life on her hair and makeup? Most of us would prefer not to tally up that one. If, in the search for beauty and self-image, there is a line between what is healthy and pleasurable and what is insane, it may lie in whether or not we do violence to ourselves.

Of course the line is different for every person, every culture, every generation. “She TV,” a witty new ABC-TV comedy show about the travails of women, recently featured three wealthy ladies at lunch, discussing their latest operations. The world of cosmetic surgery is so familiar to them that when one mentions she is off for her acid peel, another estimates that her recovery time will have her back at lunch in 10 weeks, at Thanksgiving. “Thanksgiving?” offers the third woman. “No, please, with an acid peel she’ll still be scarring and crusting at Thanksgiving.” The women discuss this pleasantly then almost gag when one finds a hair in her endive salad.

Every culture has its disgusting, accepted customs. When critic Thorstein Veblen wrote “The Theory of the Leisure Class” in 1899, he noted that in many cultures, when a woman “is useless and expensive, she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength.” This explains both the constricted waist of the Victorian era and the deformed foot of the Chinese, and, arguably, plastic surgery as well. “The connection,” writes Veblen, “between the aesthetic value and the invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in the consciousness of the valuer.” Until, of course, the real, economic issues behind that aesthetic value are made absolutely clear, which robs the ideal of beauty of its objective truth.

That’s what Wanda finally dreams of in the end--instead of perfect, surgically enhanced breasts, a kind of beauty that comes from within. Wanda imagines a time when women who want to know how they look will not go to the mirror held by the magician, that is, the plastic surgeon, or by anyone who profits in one way or another from a woman’s insecurity. Instead, they will go to a friend who would say, “Oh, gimme a break, you look fine!”