Caravan Theater’s most successful work — and, in the words of feminist theater critic Rosemary Curb, the first play of the modern women’s movement. Developed through months of improvisation and performed on and off for four years, it turned a small experimental company into a center of feminist energy in Boston.

Caravan Theater started in 1963 as a two-summer project led by married co-founders, playwrights, and theater directors Stan Edelson, 34, and Bobbi Ausubel, 28. In a big, crowded yellow school bus, the couple, their young children, and a group of actors “caravanned” across New England to perform their plays. Eventually they found a permanent home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard Epworth Methodist Church.

There, in Harvard Square, they spent over a decade performing plays by known playwrights, by Edelson, and later by Ausubel — and, importantly, found success with their own company-created works. The common theme for all of their productions was what they called “socially relevant” theater. More on the beginning of Caravan Theater →

In January 1967 — a few years before the start of the Second Wave of the women’s movement in the U.S. — the cast, crew, and staff of this small, low-budget experimental theater gathered in the living room of co-founders Stan Edelson and Bobbi Ausubel. At that meeting, Bobbi proposed a unique idea: a play that would explore what it’s like to be a woman, and how that differs from being a man.

Stan immediately understood the importance of a play focused on women’s oppression. Growing up, he had watched his mother struggle with domestic solitude and constraints, which helped fuel his political activism. From that first meeting, he was committed to the project. The group’s discussion was complicated and intense, and one participant, Joe Volpe, emerged as one of its biggest supporters. By meeting’s end, the company agreed to an innovative plan: a theater project focused on women.

A note on the name. In the 1960s, the phrase “make a woman” meant having sex with a woman. The play was really about how society constructed limited roles for women, but the title played on the double entendre — and perhaps helped pique the public’s attention.

The play was shaped through months of improvisation with key members of the troupe. Bobbi Ausubel guided the exercises and urged her cast to draw on their personal and collective experience to surface cultural assumptions about femininity; Joe Volpe encouraged a physical movement style that was unusual for the time. Stan Edelson attended every improvisation — never missing one — then transformed the group explorations into what Bobbi later called “a surprisingly-new, creative, ever-evolving script.” From the start the play aimed “to ridicule rather than reinforce social beliefs” and to reject biological essentialism, posing a central question: how does society construct and position women throughout their lives?

By June 1967, the play was ready for its public premiere. Stan approached Club 47 (now Passim) in Harvard Square and persuaded them to host the first performances. As Bobbi recalled, “Early audiences enjoyed the show and clapped, but then returned home and forgot about it.” Behind the scenes, though, American politics and public consciousness were about to change.

One day in 1968, while the cast rehearsed an updated version, Joe Volpe rushed in with news: at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a group of women had left Students for a Democratic Society to form a new organization, “Female Liberation,” tired of being discounted at SDS meetings. Bobbi was stunned — “What does ‘liberation’ even mean? Are there other women who feel like I do?” The troupe realized their onstage work was paralleling a larger emerging movement.

Over the next few years (1968–1972), Bobbi kept refining the script — updating dialogue, rearranging scenes, adjusting characters based on insights from post-show women’s groups, male allies, and audience feedback. She even hid in the ladies’ bathroom after performances to eavesdrop on candid reactions, revising anything that fell flat. Word spread. Audiences packed the church auditorium — up to 200 people perched for 90 minutes on hard, homemade wooden bleachers. Critics who had once dismissed the play as “ridiculously bad” began giving it rave reviews. Performed on and off for four years, How to Make a Woman became Caravan’s most successful show and turned the company into a center of feminist energy in Boston.

Peter Kovner, who saw many early productions before joining the cast, noticed reactions often split along gender lines. Women “were just so raucous and pleased and belly laughing,” while men, though they laughed, seemed to wonder, “Am I now going to be attacked, and can I leave the theatre alive?” Despite the show’s controversial reputation, it built its following through word of mouth. As Aili put it, “It grew, and it grew, and it grew… and it wasn’t because of the critics and reviews, it was the people that came to see what was happening.”

Students and professors recommended it, and performances sold out. In Cambridge the play was “unusual,” prodding people’s curiosity: “What is Caravan Theater doing now? What are they saying in this play?” Barbara reflected that it held a mirror to both men and women — “a place where men and women could see themselves and see their lives being played out… very physical… very vocal.”

As its popularity grew, so did critical praise. Writing in the Boston Phoenix in 1970, Laura Shapiro described the play’s power and how it “never [fell] into polemics… The stuff of it is fantasy and symbol, but the truths that [came] tumbling out [were] piercingly immediate.” The boldness generated some alarm, too: Aili recalled an evening when rumors spread that a policeman was at the side door after a complaint of nudity and obscenity. “We thought, well, let him watch.”

Peter described it as “the hot show for a few years.” Many women returned multiple times, finding “courage or some kind of strength,” and David confirmed they “sold that thing out forever.” See a sample of newspaper articles and reviews on the Productions & Media page →

Caravan became known internationally and was invited to several festivals, but went to only one — for lack of travel funds. In 1971 the troupe took How to Make a Woman to communist Poland for the International Polish Experimental Theatre Festival, performing in a number of cities at the invitation and expense of the Polish government. They traveled by bus and train and slept in student dorms.

At every venue, only university students and faculty were admitted; performances weren’t open to the public. The company’s American presence and feminist ideals stirred immediate interest. “They nearly broke down the theater doors to get in,” Bobbi recalled. “Mostly because we were Americans, and they were thirsty to know about anything from outside of Poland. But in the end, the play’s themes resonated with them.” Aili remembered a knock on the dressing-room window — students piled on each other’s shoulders, asking to be let in. “We put them over on the wings, so they sat not in the audience, but to the sides.”

The official Polish press stayed silent, but the play’s commentary on gender roles set off heated debate. Many men argued that Polish women already worked outside the home — more than American women did at the time — but Caravan members pointed out that those women still carried the full load of domestic work and childcare. David saw it confirmed on a bus of Russian tourists: a couple insisted there was no discrimination against the wife, an engineer, but when he asked who cooked and minded the children, they both laughed. A nearby Russian professor overheard and said, “They are laughing, but it is not funny.”

From its inception, How to Make a Woman was more than a good production — some considered it the first play of the emerging Second Wave of the women’s movement in the U.S. It ignited a conversation, inviting audiences and performers to question ingrained beliefs about gender, identity, and relationships.

Aili described the experience as a “challenge to challenge” one’s self-worth and societal standing. For David, the strongest proof of the play’s power was how people either embraced or resisted its message — “both [in Cambridge] and in Poland and wherever we toured” — revealing how it struck a “deep cultural, social nerve.” Peter believes its significance only grew with time: “The older I get, the more profound it gets.” Decades on, he was confident the piece could still be staged with only minor updates.

Bobbi Ausubel explained that the play exhibited how “the socialization of girls and women” placed them into predetermined gender roles — roles symbolized by dresses and by the women’s choices (or lack of choices) among them. The second half explored the challenges women faced when they refused those roles.

Stan Edelson wrote the original sparse script from the improvisations Bobbi had led; the staging was then developed collaboratively with the actors, emphasizing physicality over words. That let Bobbi “fill the space between the limited language” with movement, posture, and sound. Much of the show’s success, she said, came from the ensemble’s highly skilled actors, most of whom stayed for the full four-year run. The visuals and lighting were designed by John Furlong, set and costumes by Philip and Johanne Geraci; in some scenes “slides of abstract color patterns” were the only light, heightening a surreal quality. The cast produced the sound effects live. Though the themes were serious and at times dark, humor and physical comedy “leavened the play’s tone.”

The play followed two women, Aili and Mary, who walk into a dress shop run by two men — a thinly veiled metaphor for the culture at large. The pushy salesmen pressured them to try on dresses, each representing a gender stereotype society forces on women. Whenever the women tried to leave, the men became revolving exit doors, refusing to let them out until they chose a dress. Aili and Mary searched in vain for anyone who cared about their needs.

At the start, the men brought out an actor called “Mannequin” in a metallic, skimpy outfit — manipulating her limbs, forcing her to smile, declaring “This will sell.” The Mannequin represented the narrow roles society allowed women, especially older women: a “bikini-like dress made of squares of leather dyed silver to look like armor,” a matching helmet, false hair — a “mechanized woman… basically exposed and ready to do anything that men wanted.”

Aili and Mary entered in white tights and sleeveless leotards, their bodies a near-nude blank. Overly apologetic, they dismissed their own needs to cater to the men. When the men tried to put Mary in a dress, Aili intervened and “forces [Mary] to make a dreamlike descent” through her life — birth, girlhood, sexuality, marriage, old age. Mary’s childhood needs were represented by blueberries: she grabbed at them, they got all over her, and her mother slapped her hands and told her to be a good girl and “keep it clean.” Mary learned to ignore her own needs, hitting her own hands whenever they reached for what she wanted.

As she grew, Mary learned “feminine wiles,” then married the “Hunter” — hip boots, flowing shirt, artillery belt — who raped her, telling her “You’ll learn to like it, like I do.” Confined to a small home, she became a housewife obsessed with cleaning, repeating the old mantra: “Keep it clean.” She ran off with the “Wolf,” a man in a funky fur vest, who represented her wants but soon dehumanized her — calling women “lovely creatures” — then mistreated and abandoned her.

Aili then went into her own descent, confronting the unsatisfying options of married life: an independent woman trapped in a bad marriage, frustrated by a husband who wouldn’t share the household, becoming a controlling “Big Mama” in a costume of giant breasts; or a “pseudo-liberated marriage” where the husband’s career always superseded hers. Theater scholar Lynne Greeley observed that the play offered “an unromantic treatment” of motherhood — mothers tended to be repressive; pregnancy and childbirth were played as comedic pantomime — and Mary constantly sought her father’s approval, asking “Do you like me?”, a plea that carried into her adult relationships.

As the 90-minute play closed, both women returned to the shop. Mary, having accepted the roles pushed on her, wore “plastic breasts” as her new dress and became the new Mannequin, while the old one was shoved aside as “useless.” Aili demanded a different dress — one not on offer. Told none existed, she “runs screaming from the shop into the audience, reaching for someone to leave with her.” The moment was often called breathtaking. (In later versions, both women run out together.)

“[Aili] runs out of the shop, so [she rejects] the offerings that male establishment has put them in — being childlike, being the wife, being the sex object.”

— Aili Paal Singer