A Historian’s Reflection on Caravan Theater

Based on Oral Interviews conducted with Caravan Theater members

By Rachael Davis and Eric Singer

To understand history, it’s critical to understand the culture that made it. Politicians, journalists, and other professionals generally reflect on events unfolding around them. But it is those who make those events in the public sphere who really shape the headlines and the contours of public discourse. Cultural products like sports and theater both directly and indirectly reflect a society’s priorities and motivations. By analyzing cultural forms, we can discern a more textured and three-dimensional view of what was going on in a certain place at a certain time.

The members of Caravan Theater and by extension, the company, reflected multiple aspects of 1960s and 1970s American society. Perhaps most importantly, they reflected the era’s impatient yearning, not just for gender equality, but for equality for all people, and fought for it to be embodied in a more robust and enduring participatory democracy. In that sense, Caravan did not just reflect the society that produced it — it made history.

Along with all of its productions, Caravan’s 1967 original and groundbreaking play HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN was a gathering cultural force that initially premiered at Harvard Square’s Club 47 and eventually helped influence discourse in Cambridge and far beyond. Primarily written by Caravan co-director Stan Edelson and later developed and edited by co-director Bobbi Ausubel, the play became the theater’s most significant contribution to American culture and the emerging Second Wave of the American Feminist movement.

Theater historian Lynne Greely wrote that Caravan’s approach to “conceptualizing, developing, and collaborating on plays expressive of the politics of the period captures a composite of a specific moment that is rare in theatre [sic] history.” She described Bobbi Ausubel’s work as “[having expressed] the heartbeat of the women’s movement as it pulsed with a political consciousness that was growing for women nationwide.” She stated that Bobbi “brought vibrancy to the slogan…’the personal is political’” and she was “first an activist and then an artist.” Greely also noted that Bobbi’s greatest obstacle “in her own development” stemmed from the “feminine conditioning from which she constantly struggled to be freed.”

HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN first premiered at Club 47 a few years before the beginning of the Feminist movement. It took some time for audiences to get used to the production’s unconventional style, but eventually Caravan helped people make the political, social, and personal connections necessary to interpret and reflect upon feminism in the modern context. In fact, Bobbi herself reflected that the company “learn[ed] fast as [we] gradually understood the hugeness of women’s suppression in public and private life.”

After-performance discussions helped to clarify the theater’s aims, purposes, methods, and messages. Once a more concrete Feminist movement began to take shape, Caravan and HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN primed their increasingly receptive audiences to harness, refine, and amplify their calls for awareness and ultimately, change.¹

Looking back, company member Peter Kovner was surprised by how early Caravan embraced Feminist activism. “If Caravan was not the leading edge, they were right there on the leading edge” in Harvard Square. Though, he noted, they were not necessarily “the most radical.” Bobbi, a former scientist, loved the term “radical.” But as Peter explained, for her it meant “going down to the root of things” by analyzing social and gender injustices at their core. Many people, he observed, associate “radical” with destructive methods, whereas Caravan’s approach involved critical inquiry and exposing inequities rather than “tearing everything down.”

Bobbi reflected that HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN was the “right play at the right time.” Its originality and political nature inspired other theater groups to follow in Caravan’s footsteps. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, twenty to thirty new Feminist theaters emerged. Caravan helped inspire several of them, sparking a surge of Feminist art and activism.

Among those influenced was a women’s improvisational theater group in Washington, D.C. called Earth Onion, along with Martha Boesing, founding artistic director of the Minneapolis-based At the Foot of the Mountain — one of the longest-running Feminist theaters in the country. Boesing initially attended HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN with her husband. Going in, she believed that her “relationship to men, children, and marriage was ideal.” Over time, however, she became more questioning of women’s roles in society and came to view Ausubel as the “single most important influence in her development as a Feminist” and theater director.²

Caravan’s impact was not limited to the United States. Inspired by HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN and other Caravan productions, company member Maggie Helmer, later known as Jehane Dyllan, moved to Australia and began teaching Aussie women Caravan’s “consciousness-raising” technique, which encouraged them to use “stories from their own lives to make theatre.” This gave rise to the first Feminist theater on the continent, Carlton Women’s Liberation Group, and their radical 1970 play Betty Can Jump.³

Caravan was groundbreaking in another way, too: the theater welcomed male members into their company instead of eschewing men in favor of an all-female ensemble like other Feminist theaters. Bobbi believed this may have been Caravan’s biggest hurdle to becoming more widely recognized amidst the emerging Feminist movement. However, both she and Stan realized that including men in scripts and productions was crucial. Men needed to know that it was okay for them to be Feminists too. “In my mind, how could men not be important?” Bobbi later reflected. “We were both socialized, both had to grow and change, and the men in our company were certainly exploring themselves and doing that, as did the women.”⁴

Company member Barbara Fleischmann Mackenzie-Wood observed that HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN “changed us, and it changed anybody who saw it.” The show drew audiences ranging from Feminist leaders, such as Mary Daly, to President Richard Nixon’s daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox. For Caravan members, it also expanded their own consciousness on “personal levels” as they better understood “how men and women were squashed into gender roles” that did not fit who they truly were.

Kovner described Caravan as a “free agent” with influence far beyond the theater, shaping members’ and audiences’ family lives, how they raised their children, and their personal belief systems.

Caravan’s commitment to exploring social inequalities through all of their plays, including productions that touched on the ideals of anti-war and anti-fascism, eventually drew government attention. Fervent anti-Communist sentiment prompted the FBI to take notice of Caravan’s leftist leanings and “radical” reputation. Barbara recalled finding out her phone was tapped, and later, Bobbi discovered via a Freedom of Information Act request that Caravan itself had been under an FBI investigation. Today, Bobbi laughs at the notion: “It didn’t matter because we weren’t doing anything that was anti-government… They wasted a lot of money watching us.”

Caravan drew other forward-thinking artists and activists into its orbit. Stan invited civil rights activist Howard Zinn and folk singers like Pete Seeger to share their perspectives and ideas with the company. Aili Paal Singer described Caravan as a “hatchery” where creativity and social consciousness were constantly “incubating.” “It hatched ideas,” she says. “Everything that happened was open to change, open to discovery.”

Fittingly, Harvard Epworth Methodist Church served not only as Caravan’s home base; it became a sanctuary where art and activism collided. Within its walls, Caravan’s bold and challenging narratives left a mark on all who entered the theater. The transformational experiences stayed with them, shaping their lives and actions long after they exited. The culture that Caravan helped create laid the groundwork for a half-century of awareness, activism, and progress.