Mildred’s Umbrella Celebrates 25 Years

Mildred’s Umbrella is celebrating 25 years as a Houston theater company, and its anniversary season puts queer women and their stories center stage. The company is led by founding Artistic Director Jennifer Decker and Associate Artistic Director Rhett Martinez.

When I asked Jennifer how the company got its unusual name, she explained, “The name is from a Gertrude Stein poem. We needed a name when we did our first show, which we thought would be our only show, and the playwright I started the company with, John Harvey (who now lives in Europe), was teaching a literature class. We grabbed it from his textbook because we liked the poem. Our first show was a play called Kama Sutra, [written by the aforementioned John Harvey]. It was about an affair gone wrong.”

Mildred’s has established a reputation as a company that produces shows concentrating on women and the feminine experience. Decker clarified, “We didn’t switch our mission to specifically [doing] plays by women until about 2012, but it was because, other than the plays he wrote, I was choosing plays by women mostly. Nobody was doing them, and I was able to premiere some A-list playwrights that had only been done in London before we did them. So when we were part of the HAA incubator project in 2012–2015, they asked us to hone our mission to what makes us unique, and that seemed to be what did.”

That women-centered mission was a natural fit, and this year the company is producing two works with queer feminist roots: Collective Rage: A Tale in Five Betties by Jen Silverman and Anthropology by Lauren Gunderson.

Elaborating on his choices for these 25th anniversary offerings, Martinez says, “This season might be the first ever that Mildred’s has had women actors on the stage exclusively. There will be no male actors on the stage at Mildred’s this season. Exclusively women playwrights. There are only two women … and in both plays, Anthropology and Collective Rage center queer characters. And that wasn’t necessarily what we set out to do; it just sort of happened, and yet it’s somehow perfect.”

For a company that has long centered women’s voices, the season brings queer women even further into focus.

Five Betties, One Journey

Their first offering, Collective Rage by queer playwright Jen Silverman, opened September 3 and runs through September 19 in an upstairs black box theater inside Spring Street Studios. Actress Cindy Wang is one of the cast members, and she explains the show this way: “I see it as this show is about five very, very different people, but also, they’re the same person. And they are all coming to this journey, both separately and together, to accept themselves.”

There are five “Betties,” and several identify as lesbian or bisexual. Wang, who identifies as bisexual or pansexual, also connects personally with the material and says that men have strange reactions when she shares that part of her identity.

“As a bisexual woman, it is also a world that we live in, where sometimes when you talk about that with males, it’s really sexy. It’s really cool. I get asked, ‘So, do you make out with girls?’ Yeah, so, speaking upon the idea of collective rage, there is so much rage in just being a woman, like, our bodies literally attack us every month.”

What’s Changed, and What Hasn’t

Asked what has changed over the past 25 years, Martinez reflects, “The Houston theater scene was quite different, as I recall. Back in 2001, there just weren’t that many companies around, and now there are a lot more. I love the scene now. The scene is great now. But even now, 25 years later, there’s a lot of great women out there working on the stage, a lot of great women directors and writers, but I still think we are the only one that centers women. That sounds kind of funny, coming from a man. But Jen and I work very well together, but it is definitely a women’s company, and I’m just there to support the mission.”

What hasn’t changed is Mildred’s Umbrella’s passion for finding unique female voices to uplift and inspire. But a company centered on women’s experiences can still tell stories that resonate well beyond them.

“Like all great works of art,” Martinez clarifies, “it is universal, and you don’t need to be the things [it is about] to get something from this, to actually glean something from the story. And that’s what gay women have been forced to do forever by looking at stories like Death of a Salesman, which doesn’t represent them. But yet, they’re expected to find the universal in that. However, when it comes time for a play that’s all women cast and a woman playwright, suddenly, somehow, it’s not for everyone. And this play really challenges that idea, and I think it does it brilliantly. It breaks my heart and makes me laugh every single day, and I don’t feel excluded at all. I feel very much included.”

After 25 years, Mildred’s Umbrella remains a company centered on women while making room for everyone in the audience.

For more info, visit mildredsumbrella.com.