I write this email to vociferously condemn Rick Levin’s review of the VLT production of At Winter’s Edge (“For the Rest of Us,” 12/12). The entire review mentions only the male actors and makes no attempt to discuss or even mention the contribution of five women who played integral roles in that production.

Granted that the efforts of Paul Rhoden and Dawaul Lawler deserve praise, but the contributions of Bull and Marzyck are minimal and serve only to provide bridges from one scene to the next, or as with Bull, background to the story.

The five women Levin cavalierly ignores, on the other hand, provide essential elements of the play. Rachael Carnes wrote the play based on interviews with the cast and the dialogue is based entirely on those “true” stories. Without their contribution, the stories of Rhoden and Lawler would have consumed at best 30 minutes of the play’s run time. The quality of Carnes’s work depends far more on their stories than those of the two men, even with their skilled and artful presentations.

In this day and age, to ignore the work of women who contributed so much to the power of a narrative is to engage in sexism at its worst. I would have thought that a paper such as yours would have displayed more sensitivity.

Michael B. Charlton

Eugene

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