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SPIKE HEELS. Pygmalion goes awry in this contemporary comedy of manners, which explores sexual harassment, misplaced amour, and the possibility of a four-sided love triangle. The combatants are a sexy, volatile young woman and three Back Bay types: a writer, a lawyer, and a fiancée in sensible shoes. The setting is Boston, the ending is happy ...
Overview. Theresa Rebeck’s provocative feminist two-act drama Spike Heels, first produced in 1990, is a problem play, that is a drama that looks at cultural, social, and economic issues. Problem plays intended to participate in the cultural conversation have a long and significant history in the theater. Playwrights like the Ancient Greek ...
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Theresa Rebeck has had success writing for television, film, and the theater. Originally from the Cincinnati, Ohio, area, Rebeck moved to Boston to attend college and graduated from Brandeis University. While writing plays, Rebeck began also to write for television for such shows as Brooklyn Bridge and Dream On and later for the critically acclaime...
Act I, Scene 1
Spike Heelsopens in Andrew’s apartment. Georgie, his neighbor, arrives home from work in a foul mood. She is wearing her work clothes, including a pair of spike-heeled shoes. She changes her clothes in front of Andrew, which makes him uncomfortable. As she complains to Andrew, she lets him know that her boss, Edward, has made unwanted sexual advances to her and threatened to rape her. Andrew gets very angry, and Georgie tries to seduce him, unsuccessfully. When Andrew lets Georgie know that h...
Act I, Scene 2
The second scene also takes place in Andrew’s apartment, one day later. Edward arrives unexpectedly, dropping by to see his friend before picking up Georgie for their date, and Andrew lets him know that he is not welcome. Andrew and Edward argue about Edward’s conduct toward Georgie. Georgie arrives, dressed provocatively, and Andrew gets Edward to leave for a minute so that he can talk to Georgie. As he tries to remove her spike heels, they kiss passionately. He pulls away. Georgie and Andre...
Act II, Scene 1
The second act takes place in Georgie’s apartment. Scene 1 opens later the same night. Georgie and Edward have returned to her apartment and are making out on the couch. She is attempting to seduce him but he resists, and wants to talk with her about her relationship with Andrew. When she refuses, he becomes insulting and she gets upset. They are interrupted by a pounding on the door: it is Lydia, who is very angry, thinking that Georgie is having an affair with Andrew. Edward leaves, and Lyd...
Andrew
Andrew is a professor of political philosophy at a small college in Boston. He lives alone in an apartment and has befriended his neighbor Georgie, appointing himself her “teacher.” He is engaged to be married to Lydia. As the play opens, Andrew is fastidious, cautious, and tends not to take risks. However, during the course of the play he becomes less restrained because of Georgie’s influence on him.
Edward
Edward is an old friend of Andrew’s. Their personalities are very different, though; Edward is aggressive, extroverted, demanding, and at times a little sleazy. He is a criminal defense lawyer and, as a favor to Andrew, has hired Georgie to be his secretary even though she has not attended college. He dated Andrew’s fiancee, Lydia, before Andrew began dating her.
Georgie
Georgie is Andrew’s neighbor and Edward’s secretary. She comes from a working-class background and has not attended college. She is lusty, earthy, sarcastic, and fatalistic, especially in her relationships with men. Six months before the play begins, Andrew has decided to become her friend and to try to diminish her self-destructive tendencies. In befriending her, Andrew has also tried to “improve” her by giving her books to read and encouraging her to speak more properly. She has responded t...
Power
One of the most important themes of Spike Heelsis power. Each of the characters has a form of power and attempts to wield it, with results that are not what the character was hoping for. Andrew’s power is as a teacher—he is a college professor, and taking the role of the teacher in his relationships is natural to him—and he uses this power to “mold” Georgie into a different person. Although he wants to feel that he is simply helping her, at one point in the play his true feelings come out: “I...
Male and Female Roles
At the heart of the play’s plot are the differing roles that men and women play in society. In this play, as is often true in society at large, the men have the power and the women are acted upon by that power. Andrew takes the role of the father or teacher figure, directing Georgie’s life—telling her what to read, how to talk, even where to work. Edward plays the role of boss and of sexual predator. He is aggressive, insulting, and demanding. By contrast, the women are acted upon. Georgie re...
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Andrew accuses Edward of “sexual harassment” in his treatment of Georgie. What is sexual harassment? Why is it such an important and controversial issue? Research sexual harassment, concentrating on the difficulties of constructing a legal definition and of enforcement. 2. Why does Georgie decide to be with Edward instead of Andrew? Think about this question in terms of the development of each character: where does each character begin and what does each character learn in the course of th...
Setting
Spike Heels is set in two apartments in contemporary Boston. The play does not make much use of the city; however, Rebeck cleverly structures the play in two parts, and the division is also indicated by the locations of the two acts. The first act is set in Andrew’s apartment, the second in Georgie’s. As the play examines very carefully some important differences between men and women, setting the two acts in apartments belonging to the two sexes allows the setting to mirror the theme. Rebeck...
Character Development
The play is in large part about self-discovery and the way that we grow to understand and learn new things about other people, and Rebeck uses the development of her characters to reinforce that theme. With the exception of Georgie, all of the characters in the play are both presented to us and described to us by other characters while they are offstage. We get a very negative impression of Lydia before she ever arrives on the stage—Edward describes her as a vampire—but when she does show up...
Symbolism
As indicated by the play’s title, the most important symbol in the play is Georgie’s spike-heeled shoes. The spike heels represent a number of aspects of women’s roles in contemporary society—as sex object, sexual predator, working woman, and homebody. As the play opens, Georgie arrives at Andrew’s apartment, complaining about how badly her spike heels hurt her. Women on the job, Rebeck indicates, are expected to dress attractively or even in a way that accentuates their sexuality. Men’s work...
The 1970s were a time of great change for American women. Through the turbulence of the 1960s, women’s roles in American society went largely unquestioned. Even the revolutionaries of the period dismissed questions of women’s liberation and feminism. But, led by such theorists, writers, and political figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gl...
Theresa Rebeck’s play Spike Heels, exploring issues of love, gender roles, sex, and sexual harassment, did not receive great reviews when it was initially produced but has since been produced to acclaim all over the country. When the play was first staged in New York in 1992, Rebeck was already known in the New York theatre world for her one-act pl...
Greg Barnhisel
Barnhisel holds a Ph.D. in American literature. In the following essay, he discusses the structure of the play and how that structure relates to and helps construct its themes of gender relations. Theresa Rebeck’s play Spike Heels is a humorous meditation on contemporary gender roles and romantic relationships. It explores feminism, sexual harassment in the workplace, the teacher-student relationship, and even social class. Some of its critics have taken the play to task for undermining its o...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Theresa Rebeck: Collected Plays(1999) collects all of Rebeck’s full-length and one-act plays. 2. Pygmalion is George Bernard Shaw’s classic 1913 retelling of the Greek myth. In Shaw’s play, a sophisticated London professor bets a friend that he can remake an uneducated, working-class city girl into the very model of upper-class gentility. In accomplishing his goal, he falls in love with her. 3. Oleanna(1992), a play by David Mamet, explores sexual harassment, as well. But where Rebeck’s pl...
Carole Hamilton
Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In the following essay, she discusses “power feminism” and Rebeck’sSpike Heels. In his essay “Power and Knowledge,” Michel Foucault wrote, “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.” Foucault means that powe...
Kennedy, Louise, Review of Spike Heels, in Boston Globe,May 8, 1993, p. 27. Klein, Alvin, Review of Spike Heels, in New York Times,Connecticut Edition, November 14, 1993, p. 18. Pressley, Nelson, Review of Spike Heels, in Washington Times,September 21, 1994, p. C16. Rich, Frank, Review of Spike Heels, in New York Times,June 5, 1992, p. C3. Shaner, ...
MacKinnon, Catharine, Only Words, Harvard UniversityPress, 1993. _____, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, Yale UniversityPress, 1979. Phelps, Timothy M., and Helen Winternitz, Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination,Hyperion, 1992.
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Complete summary of Theresa Rebeck's Spike Heels. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of Spike Heels.
Jun 30, 1991 · Theresa Rebeck. Comedy / 2 male, 2 female Interior Pygmalion goes awry in this contemporary comedy of manners which explores sexual harassment, misplaced amour, and the possibility of a four sided love triangle. The combatants are a sexy, volatile young woman and three Back Bay types a writer, a lawyer and a fiancee in sensible shoes.
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Spike Heels. Full-Length Play, Comedy / 2w, 2m Theresa Rebeck. ... Theresa Rebeck is a widely produced playwright throughout the United States and abroad.
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