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Negotiating Genders from the Page to the Stage:
Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks
Siobhán O’Gorman, Ph.D
Supervisor: Dr. Lionel Pilkington
Department of English
School of Humanities
National University of Ireland, Galway
30th September 2011
Table of Contents
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………… 2
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….. 3
Introduction………………………………………………………………………….. 5
Rupturing Petrified Constructs………………………………………………………5
From the Margins to the Mainstream …………………………………………….6
Methodologies and Chapter Outlines……………………………………………11
Scholarly Contribution………………………………………………………………...18
1 Writing from the Margins…………………………………………………….23
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..23
Feminist Aesthetics……………………………………………………………………...28
Writing from the Margins…………………………………………………………….36
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..64
4 Maternal Contradictions……………………………………………………...66
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..66
Maternal Icons in Context…………………………………………………………….68
Maternal Icons in the Early, Experimental Works…………………………74
The Dialectic of Power…………………………………………………………………80
Questioning the Natural Mother…………………………………………………...85
Disciplining the Maternal Subject…………………………………………………91
Good Mother versus Bad Mother………………………………………………….99
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………...104
2 Re-Reading the Canons………………………………………………………106
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………106
The ‘Hester’ Plays………………………………………………………………………111
Gender and the Canon in Carr’s Re-Imaginings of King Lear…………125
Park’s The America Play, Venus and Topdog/Underdog…………………135
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………146
3 Love as a ‘Fabricated […] Epistle’………………………………………...148
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………148
Performativity and Metatheatre in By the Bog of Cats…………………..151
The Bride Icon…………………………………………………………………………....159
The Storied Nature of Love…………………………………………………………164
Repetition, Reflection and Stifling Monogamous Bonds……………….174
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………....182
5 Clothing, Costume and [De]Construction…………………………….184
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………184
Clothing and Costume in Experimental Theatre…………………………..189
Costume in Parks’s Venus…………………………………………………………...204
Clothing and Costume in Traditional Theatre……………………………...209
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………...229
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..232
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..236
1
Abstract
‘Negotiating Genders from the Page to the Stage: Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks’
explores how two female playwrights, from different cultures and backgrounds,
challenge oppressive traditions. It offers the first major comparative study of the
theatre works of Marina Carr (1964- ) and Suzan-Lori Parks (1963- ): two significant,
internationally-successful dramatists. Employing a wide range of theories in feminism
and gender studies, this thesis analyses how Carr and Parks disrupt western literary
traditions, national myths and accepted gender roles in liberating rather than didactic
ways. Both do so not just through the written word but also through other important
signifiers such as costume and gesture. Existing scholarship and criticism have tended
to circumscribe each playwright within certain parameters based on form, language
and national identity. However, comparing the works of Carr and Parks reveals that
they belong to a generation of theatre-makers that seeks to transcend limiting
categorisations. By moving from text to intertext to stage action and image, and
examining the dramatists in relation to their distinct national contexts as well as the
western milieu that they share, I hope to broaden our frameworks for understanding
each playwright’s work.
2
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Lionel Pilkington, who has been
inspiring and has believed, from the beginning, in the integrity of this project. I count
myself lucky to have had the benefit of his vast expertise whilst writing this
dissertation. Dr. Patrick Lonergan and Dr. Julia Carlson also deserve recognition for
spurring my interest in Suzan-Lori Parks. Dr. Lonergan has been particularly helpful
and encouraging throughout the PhD programme, for which I am grateful. I wish to
acknowledge Professor Sean Ryder, who has provided support throughout the
completion of this project, and has given me the opportunity to teach with the English
Department for the last four academic years. I would like to express my thanks to Dr.
Marie-Louise Coolahan for organising the English Department’s annual Graduate
Research Day. Each paper that I presented at this annual event became the starting
point for a chapter. Graduate Research Day is an important forum for graduate
students to present our research and to attain useful feedback from our peers within
NUI, Galway.
My thanks are owed to the staff of the James Hardiman Library, and
particularly those who work in Inter-Library Loans. I wish to acknowledge the staff of
the Abbey Theatre Archives and the New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts for arranging my viewings of the recorded productions of Marina Carr’s and
Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays. My thanks go to the Department of Manuscripts at the
National Library of Ireland and, in particular, Colette O’Daly for organising my
examination of Marina Carr’s papers. I would like to acknowledge Leah Schmitt’s
Office at The Agency, Marina Carr’s literary agents, and Marina Carr herself, for
helping with various queries and for providing the typescript of Meat and Salt. I also
wish to thank the Irish Society for Theatre Research and the Synge Summer School,
whose events I have found to be both academically stimulating and immensely
enjoyable.
I would like to acknowledge the staff members of Irish Theatre Magazine, and
in particular the reviews editor, Fíona Ní Chinnéide, who have been commissioning
my theatre reviews since 2008. It is an honour to contribute to ITM, an important
archival and discussion forum for critics, scholars and Irish theatre-goers. I appreciate
the feedback from the peer-reviewers at Platform, postgraduate eJournal of Theatre &
3
Performing Arts, where a portion of my research is published. I wish to acknowledge
Dr. Tina-Karen Pusse and Dr. Katharina Walter for accepting my essay for
publication in their forthcoming edited collection, Precarious Parenthood. I
appreciate the funding I have received through Galway County Council, the NUI,
Galway PhD Write-Up Bursary, 2011, and the Research Travel Bursaries provided by
the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies.
Friends and colleagues, through their help and consideration, have contributed
to the completion of this thesis. I would like to thank Martina Fanning and Dr. Lisa
Padden for checking and proofing the final draft, and for providing unwavering
support throughout this project. Thanks to Breda, Liselle and Seamus for their support
during the last few years. Old friends such as Geraldine, Kat, Mairéad, Stephen, Liam,
Jo, Evelyn, Alice, Naimh and Peter have also helped me along the way, for which I
am grateful. I wish to thank Dr. Liam Burke, for his advice—especially in using MLA
7, and Dr. Eoin O’Donoghue for his encouragement in the final weeks. I appreciate
the friendship of Maura Stewart, Mark Phelan and Dr. Andy Sargent as well as all that
they have done for the Arts graduate community as core members of the Arts
Postgraduate Room Committee.
I would like to acknowledge my grandmother, ‘Mum,’ who would be proud of
me at this time. I also appreciate heartening wishes from aunts, uncles and other
members of my extended family. Finally I would like to thank my partner, Tony
Mihaylov, for accompanying me on my research trip to New York, and for all his help
and sensitivity throughout the PhD. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Mary and
Martin O’Gorman, as a token of appreciation for all their love and support, as well as
for believing in me and encouraging me for as long as I can remember.
4
Introduction
Rupturing Petrified Constructs: Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks
‘Negotiating Genders from the Page to the Stage: Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks’
explores how two female playwrights, from different cultures and backgrounds,
challenge oppressive traditions. It offers the first major comparative study of the
theatre works of Marina Carr (1964- ) and Suzan-Lori Parks (1963- ): two significant,
internationally-successful dramatists. Employing a wide range of theories in feminism
and gender studies, this thesis analyses how Carr and Parks disrupt western literary
traditions, national myths and accepted gender roles in liberating rather than didactic
ways. Both do so not just through the written word but also through other important
signifiers such as costume and gesture. Existing scholarship and criticism have tended
to circumscribe each playwright within certain parameters based on form, language
and national identity. However, comparing the works of Carr and Parks reveals that
they belong to a generation of theatre-makers that seeks to transcend limiting
categorisations. By moving from text to intertext to stage action and image, and
examining the dramatists in relation to their distinct national contexts as well as the
western milieu that they share, I hope to broaden our frameworks for understanding
each playwright’s work.
The ways in which the careers and writing styles of Carr and Parks have
developed have a great deal in common. Both had their plays first performed in the
1980s, and initially each playwright created surrealist, experimental pieces. More
recently, Carr and Parks have drawn on traditional forms such as tragedy and realism,
and both have also garnered considerable critical recognition. This project focuses on
the earlier, less popular works as well as the later plays that reflect and have
contributed to the national and international acclaim these women have received. This
allows me to consider such questions as: Is anything lost in the transition from
experimental forms to more traditional styles of drama? What has appropriating
realist and tragic dramaturgy allowed the playwrights to accomplish? How can
dramatists deal with issues of marginality from within the mainstream? Yet, rather
than following chronologically the development of each playwright’s repertoire, the
thesis traces its trajectory through text and narrative towards visual signifiers.
Structuring the thesis in this way allows me to explore the intricacies of theatre’s
5
capacity for meaning-making and progressively to consider other important questions:
What strategies can theatre-makers use to subvert oppressive gender roles and
destabalise dominant histories? How do language, corporality and scenography
interact to create interrogative theatre? What roles do directors and designers play in
politicising a play text? Ultimately, the comparative model and thematic structure of
this dissertation aim to suggest that—whatever form they take—the plays of Parks
and Carr can stimulate gender-conscious enquiry. The theatre under investigation
ruptures petrified constructs such as narrative traditions, maternal icons, literary and
historical canons, the heterosexual matrix and the gender binary in ways that promote
alternative possibilities from the page to the stage.
From the Margins to the Mainstream
As dramatists, Carr and Parks have both received significant international acclaim.
Their most famous works, such as Carr’s By the Bog of Cats... (1998) and Parks’s
Topdog/Underdog (2001), are regularly revived and studied on academic syllabi. Carr
became a member of Aosdana in 1996, when she was writer in residence at the Abbey
theatre. She won the E. M. Foster Award from the American Academy for Arts and
Letters in 2001, and the AIF Literary Award in 2004. Parks won Obie Awards for
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom in 1990 and Venus in 1996. She was
awarded a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Grant in 2001. In 2002, Parks became the
first black female playwright to win a Pulitzer Prize—for Topdog/Underdog, which
had just moved to Broadway.
Carr’s early plays such as Low in the Dark (1989), The Deer’s Surrender
(1990), This Love Thing (1991) and Ullaloo (1991) resist realist and tragic models;
these repetitive dramas have little plot or character development. While Ullaloo
reached the Peacock stage (only to be taken off after a few performances), the others
were produced in small, fringe venues: Low in the Dark and The Deer’s Surrender in
Dublin and The Love Thing in Belfast. These surreal works are subversive in content,
and Carr’s satires range from traditional gender roles to Catholicism and the Bible.
The stylistic shift in Carr’s writing appears—ostensibly—to have been quite abrupt,
beginning with the first play in what has become known as her ‘Midlands Trilogy’:
The Mai (1994), commissioned by the Abbey Theatre, appearing on the Peacock stage
and winning the Irish Times Award for Best New Play. Each drama in the trilogy
6
centres on female protagonist who suffers from an inability to reconcile herself with
society, ultimately leading to her demise. While Carr’s early plays such as Low in the
Dark and Ullaloo are, as Tom MacIntyre aptly contends, ‘freewheeling as regards
structure’ (75), in The Mai and her subsequent Midlands’ plays Carr decisively
circumscribes her unwieldy style within the more conventional parameters of
mainstream theatre. Moreover, it appears she garnered significant critical attention as
a result. Tragic outcomes are revealed in the middle of The Mai as well as Carr’s
subsequent work Portia Coughlan (1996), which was commissioned by National
Maternity Hospital, Dublin and also appeared at the Peacock. However, these plays
ultimately lean towards the mimetic strategies of realist tragedy, especially in terms of
their psychological characterisations, recognisable language and domestic settings.
Carr’s final play in the ‘trilogy,’ By the Bog of Cats…, abandons the structural
interventions of The Mai and Portia Coughlan. Based on Euripides’ Medea, its form
adheres even more to an Aristotelian model of tragedy. However, like The Mai and
Portia Coughlan, this play is set in contemporary times and the characters use the
Hiberno-English of Midlands’ Ireland. Since its protagonist is a member of the
travelling community, most of the action takes place outside, on a vast, flat bog that
reflects some of the landscape in this part of Ireland.
Premiering in 1998, By the Bog of Cats… was the first play by a woman to
reach the main Abbey stage since Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose (1936). In 2001,
By the Bog of Cats… was produced by the San Jose Repertory Theatre with Academy
Award winner Holly Hunter in the lead role. That production was revived in London’s
West End in 2004. Carr’s next play, On Raftery’s Hill—a harrowing tale of a highly
dysfunctional, rural family—premiered at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway in 2000
where it was co-produced by Druid and The Royal Court Theatre. The Abbey Theatre
then produced Ariel (2002), which premiered on the Abbey’s main stage. Ariel
concerns a corrupt politician who draws on dark forces to fulfil his hunger for power.
Carr continues to appropriate Greek tragedy, transposed to the Irish Midlands, in these
works. In 2006, Woman and Scarecrow premiered at The Royal Court Theatre,
London. The characters speak recognisable language within a domestic setting and the
action ultimately moves towards the closure of the protagonist’s death. However,
Woman and Scarecrow shares a sense of stasis and surrealism with the early works in
its depiction of a bedridden woman conversing with Scarecrow, her alter ego/angel of
death. Carr’s more recent dramas The Cordelia Dream (2008) and Marble (2009) also
7
incorporate surreal elements, but the linear action takes place in familiar urban
milieus; the characters represent contemporary, middleclass professionals. The Royal
Shakespeare Company commissioned The Cordelia Dream, which draws on
Shakespeare’s King Lear. Marble was produced by the Abbey Theatre. Carr has also
written two children’s plays: the King Lear-inspired Meat and Salt (2003) and The
Giant Blue Hand (2009). The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats… have all
been performed across the United States and Europe, and have been translated into
such languages as French, German and Norwegian. By the Bog of Cats… has recently
been studied in Beijing and translated into Mandarin (Keating, ‘New Meanings’).
Parks’s first plays, The Sinners Place and Fishes, both received rehearsed
readings in 1987: the former at the New Play Festival, Hampshire College, Amherst
and the latter at the International Women Playwrights Festival, New York. Betting on
the Dust Commander (1987) and Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom
(1989) were originally performed at The Gas Station—a garage bar in New York’s
East Village. Parks formed a productive relationship with director Liz Diamond and
the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association when Imperceptible Mutabilities received
its official premiere at BACA downtown in 1989, followed by The Death of the Last
Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990). Parks focuses on the issues and
complexities of black identity in America in these two plays; the politics of race and
pathologies stemming from African diaspora become important subjects throughout
her oeuvre. Her radio play, Pickling, was produced by New American Radio in 1990.
After Diamond directed a rehearsed reading of The America Play in 1991, the play
was commissioned by Theatre for a New Audience and staged at the Public Theatre in
1993. The previous year, Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992) had premiered at the
Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Like Carr’s early works, Parks’s characters at this stage
tend to be symbolic rather than realistic, allowing the playwright to explore and
subvert black icons and stereotypes; many of these plays are also repetitive, as well as
fragmented in structure.
Of all her dramas, Parks’s Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog (2001)
conforms most to realism and domestic tragedy. However, Parks’s move towards
conventional linearity began with her Obie Award winning Venus (1996), which
stages her fictionalized reinterpretation of the story of Saartjee Baartman (also known
as the Venus Hottentot, a nineteenth century African woman who was brought to
England and exhibited because of her ‘unusually large’ posterior). Carol Schafer
8
accurately points out that the play ‘has much in common’ with Parks’s earlier work,
but that ‘it serves as a transition to her tragedies In the Blood and Fucking A’ (181).
Although the character of The Negro Resurrectionist reveals the play’s tragic
conclusion at the beginning, telling the audience that ‘thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead’
(3), and although the scenes are numbered in reverse order from 31 to 1, the story
develops chronologically in comparison to her previous, more disjointed works. Parks
further refines her use of cumulative action with In the Blood (1999), which was also
nominated for a Pulitzer in 2000. Like Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, In the Blood
emulates classical tragedy in its form but is set in the present day. Its main character,
Hester, is a homeless black woman. She and her five children shelter under a bridge
with graffiti on the walls: a recognisable urban slum. Fucking A (2000) is also a
tragedy centring on a black Hester, but this Hester is an abortionist living in a
futuristic dystopia. These Hesters—like the main characters of Carr’s ‘Midlands
Trilogy’—suffer tragic consequences partly because they cannot fulfil the
expectations of their societies.
At an early stage in Parks’s career, Village Voice theatre critic and academic
Alisa Solomon predicted that as the playwright becomes ‘increasingly recognised, she
too—as she well knows—will run the risk of seeing white institutions want to fix that
flattening –d onto her roun writing’ (‘Signifying’ 80). Parks’s subsequent adoption of
tragic and realist techniques could be viewed as fulfilling Solomon’s prophecy. The
verity of her prediction is validated by Parks’s acquisition of a Pulitzer for the play
that is, arguably, her most ‘mainstream’ to date in terms of its tense, plot-driven and
ultimately tragic psychological study of the relationship between two poverty-stricken
brothers: Topdog/Underdog. Lincoln and Booth, the characters of this two-hander,
live in a claustrophobic bedsit. Parks’s dialogue captures the rhythmic turns of phrase
of the urban black vernacular and its symbiotic relationship with popular hip-hop and
rap lyrics. Topdog/Underdog transferred from the Public Theatre to the Ambassador
theatre on Broadway in 2002. In her discussion of the play and its production history,
Deborah R. Geis explores the apprehension with which Topdog/Underdog was
received by reviewers, noting that ‘it became time to worry that the dramatist had sold
out by leaving the avant-garde and entering the Broadway mainstream’ (112).
However, having achieved a Pulitzer for Topdog/Underdog in 2002, Parks moved to a
project that was perhaps even more pioneering than her early experiments: an
extensive collection of short dramas entitled 365 Days/365 Plays (2006). Between
9
2002 and 2003, Parks wrote a play a day for a year. The short plays were performed
throughout the U.S. between 2006 and 2007, in one of the most elaborate, extensive
and innovative theatre premieres in the world. Unfortunately, due to the enormous
scale of its production, 365 Days/365 Plays is beyond the scope of this thesis.
Like Parks, scholars link Carr’s movement towards a more traditional model
of theatre to her increased popularity and critical acclaim. Maria Doyle identifies The
Mai and Portia Coughlan as ‘the plays that solidified her reputation’ (41). Paula
Murphy admits that this dramatist’s ‘change of direction […] has not been adequately
explained, but what is certain is that it moved her firmly into the mainstream, where
she began to attract more critical attention’ (389). Here, Murphy suggests that Carr
began to conform to more conservative dramatic traditions in order to be accepted by
a wider audience and to appeal to the critics. However, she fails to elucidate this idea
any further. By examining reviews and Carr’s own views on the subject, this analysis
aims to offer some explanation. Still, as Claire Wallace notes, ‘[f]rom the perspective
of positive, politically aggressive feminism, Carr’s work might be said to have
developed in a negative sense veering from a playful satirical feminism to grim
patriarchal tragedy’ (87).
Nevertheless, I wish to argue that despite—and in some ways because of—
Carr’s and Parks’s stylistic shift towards traditional dramaturgy, which may have been
instrumental in their respective ‘acceptances’ into national and international theatre
canons, their oeuvres maintain an enduring and maturing political efficacy. Apparent
stylistic shifts can thus be reconsidered as more seamless developments. To illustrate
this point, the dissertation will focus on a wide selection of dramas by each
playwright. I will analyse Carr’s The Deer’s Surrender, This Love Thing, Ullaloo and
Meat and Salt; these plays remain unpublished and, hence, have received little notice.
In addition, I will examine the published works Low in the Dark, The Mai, Portia
Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats…, Woman and Scarecrow, The Cordelia Dream and
Marble. For Parks, the research will focus on Betting on the Dust Commander,
Imperceptible Mutabilities, The Death of the Last Black Man, The America Play,
Venus, In the Blood, Fucking A and Topdog/Underdog. Stylistically and spatially,
Parks and Carr have moved from the avant-garde to the mainstream; yet, exploring
each playwright’s early and later work reveals that ideas and meanings are developed
organically across each oeuvre. Moreover, by maintaining various distancing
strategies in the mainstream plays—such as narrative interruption, self-reflexivity and
10
metatheatre—these dramatists pursue an on-going consideration of gender
restrictions, marginality, performance and writing. Appropriating traditional dramatic
forms has allowed the playwrights to stimulate wider audiences with theatre that is
produced regularly and internationally. Whatever form they take, the dramas of Parks
and Carr tend not to prescribe ‘better’ ways of being; instead, they raise questions,
leaving the act of imagining new possibilities in the hands of the audience.
Methodologies and Chapter Outlines
A range of theories in feminism and gender studies provide the frameworks for this
thesis. I draw variously on the writings of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia
Kristeva, Catherine Belsey, Elaine Aston, Janelle Reinelt, Jill Dolan, Sue-Ellen Case
and Judith Butler. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, issues concerning form
dominated certain branches of feminist literary theory. The proponents of what has
now become known as l’écriture féminine—Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva—sought to
deviate from traditional, ‘masculine’ modes of expression and embrace a new,
feminine literary aesthetic that, by virtue of its circularity, cyclicality and plurality,
would more accurately represent women’s biological and cognitive experiences.1
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, academics such as Dolan, Reinelt, Belsey and
Case also lauded the interrogative potential of experimental forms and criticised what
they saw as ‘patriarchal’ theatre traditions, namely realism and tragedy.2
1
While many feminist academics in theatre studies examine the theatrical and theoretical writing of
Cixous—including Case in Feminism and Theatre (124-132) and Dolan in The Feminist Spectator as
Critic (8; 87; 101-3)—Aston provides a useful summary of all three ‘French Feminists’ in An
Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (45-56). Her approach is specific to theatre, and she also offers a
practical application of these theories to various experimental plays. For a more wide-ranging
exploration of the theories of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva see Part Two of Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual
Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985).
2
Catherine Besley, a cultural materialist, uses the term ‘classic realist’ to describe texts that move
towards closure, seek to fix meaning and repress the split subject (Critical Practice 85). On the other
hand, texts that unfix the subject and destabilise meaning, she labels as ‘interrogative’ (Critical
Practice 91). In her volume entitled Feminism and Theatre (1988), Sue-Ellen Case argues that
realism’s focus on the patriarchal family and the domestic sphere reinforces the idea of man as subject
and woman as object or Other, making the form a ‘“prisonhouse of art” for women’ (124). Here, Case
is referring both to how women are represented in the genre and the limited roles that it offers to
actresses. Case also develops a convincing treatise regarding the sexist and classist features of
Athenian, Roman and Elizabethan classics (1-27). Meanwhile, in ‘The Politics of Form: Realism,
Melodrama and Pam Gems’ Camille’ (1989), Janelle Reinelt voices her scepticism about traditional
realism’s political potential (96). In her 1985 essay ‘Gender Impersonation Onstage,’ Jill Dolan argues
that traditional theatre, by leaning towards a reflection of the world as it is, functions to maintain the
dominant ideological order. She suggests that ‘perhaps sexual difference is too deeply embedded in the
mimetic structure of [traditional] theatrical representation’ (10).
11
Many of these critics have since softened their earlier views.3 Dolan, who once
dismissed certain commercially successful works as much for their links to capitalism
as their style and content, now admits that these plays may have ‘helped, rather than
hindered, feminist progress’ (‘The Popular’ 434). Following Wendy Wasserstein’s
death in 2006, Dolan wrote an essay that reconsiders her earlier treatise. While she
laments the post-feminist stance that feminism is no longer relevant, she also
acknowledges the advantages of this so-called ‘third-wave.’4 Post-feminists see the
view that theatre can remain outside the grasp of the dominant ideology as idealist and
so, like the liberal feminists who preceded Reinelt and Dolan, often support work
within the mainstream. Dolan concedes:
I now find tedious the somewhat facile pose of scholars always looking for the
next new outlaw or the most outré performance examples to boast as
aesthetically radical and politically subversive. While the work they uncover is
often effective and important, in the rush to innovation, already-noted artists
are too often dismissed. (‘The Popular’ 435.)
This thesis places the ‘already-noted artists’ Carr and Parks in the context of an
evolving, progressive feminist theatre discourse. It embraces the wider, more
inclusive materialist approach that Dolan seems to call for in her more recent work. 5
Moving from the page to the stage reveals the diverse factors involved in the creation
of political theatre; the complex dynamics of performance can enable theatrical
representation to transcend the boundaries of form.
Like Aston and Case in their introduction to the collection Staging
International Feminisms (2007), this project embraces the term ‘“performativity,” as a
way to look beyond the traditional parameters of performance’ (3). While I draw on a
range of theories concerning theatre and gender, Dolan and Butler appropriate the
word ‘performativity,’ and related terms, in ways that help to illuminate the analysis
throughout. In comparable ways, Butler and Dolan see the ‘performative’ as having
3
Reinelt reconsiders her anti-realist views in her 1994 essay on the Brecht/Lukács debates. Here, she
advocates ‘a hybrid feminist style which combines features of both traditions, epic and realist’ (123).
4
For a discussion of theories that consider feminism to be out-dated and irrelevant, see Tanya
Modleski’s Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Post-Feminist’ Age (88).
5
While Dolan remains interested in Marxist analysis, she recognises that ‘the assumptions of feminist
performance criticism might profitably be revised as we approach the end of the century’s first decade’
(434). In her recent volume Utopia in Performance (2005), she explores the transformative power of a
range of diverse theatrical experiences, from regional, feminist solo performances to Broadway shows
such as Deborah Warner’s production of Medea (2002).
12
transformative power; both are concerned with evoking hopeful possibilities that
exceed the limitations of history and the moment.
In Butler’s seminal 1988 essay, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution:
An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ she launches her concept of
gender as performative—a repetitious ritual that disguises its own genesis and so
appears natural. Butler sees male and female roles as constructed by and active in the
maintenance of cultural oppositions that govern human behaviour. She expands such
ideas through her ground-breaking volume Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (1990). In a subsequent book of the punning title Bodies that
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), she counters those who problematise
her thesis on the basis of biological difference. Here, Butler argues that the ‘matter’
of the body itself can also be seen as performative; she refigures matter as a process of
materialisation achieved through on-going cultural signification (5-11). Seeing gender
(and sex) as processual rather than fixed exposes ‘gaps and fissures’ in naturalised
roles and thus facilitates resistance (Bodies 10). This ‘unsettling of “matter” can be
understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter’ (Bodies 30).
Ultimately, Butler argues that revealing gender performativity and exposing the
process of materialisation can open possibilities for constituting identities in more
liberating ways (‘Performative Acts’ 154-55). Dolan asks in her essay ‘Geographies
of Learning’ (1993): ‘How can the liveness of theatre performance reveal
performativity?’ (431). As the research shall illustrate, Parks’s and Carr’s works
expose the construction of gendered traditions both textually and visually; hence, their
plays encourage us to imagine restrictive conventions anew.
The thesis regularly employs Dolan’s feminist theatre discourse, circulated in
articles from ‘Gender Impersonation Onstage: Destroying or Maintaining the Mirror
of Gender Roles’ (1985) to ‘Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular:
Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein’ (2008). Her recent work on utopia, published in such
essays as ‘Utopia in Performance’ (2006) and collated in her book Utopia in
Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005), is particularly useful. Dolan
evokes the etymology of the word utopia (meaning ‘no place’) to rethink the concept
in terms that are productively elusive. She defines utopian performatives as moments
during theatre performances that, effectively and affectively, point towards a better
future that is beyond our grasp (Utopia 7-8). Dolan’s utopia is not an idyllic place but
a process that illuminates the restrictions of the present, while non-coercively
13
suggesting more inclusive, communal and radically democratic ways of living and
organising society (Utopia 13). Performance, in Dolan’s view, has the potential to
move us into a limitless, fantasy space in which we can critically assess the present
and imagine an improved future. She cites Butler’s 2003 essay ‘Global Violence,
Sexual Politics’ (‘Utopia in Performance’ 164). In a key quote used by Dolan, Butler
contends that ‘[f]antasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise;
it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is
embodied, it brings that elsewhere home’ (‘Global’ 208). Materialist frameworks such
as these allow us to understand how Carr and Parks use performance to make visible
the oppressive hierarchies of past and present within and beyond their distinct national
contexts. Each does so in ways that open possibilities for accepting alternative modes
of being. This is achieved through complex interactions between form, content,
context, action and image. So, it is necessary to examine Carr’s and Parks’s works
from the play texts to their embodiments on stage in order to fully appreciate the
transformative potential of their theatre.
Chapter 1, ‘Writing from the Margins’ focuses on the form, content and
national production contexts of Parks’s and Carr’s early works to reveal how these
dramatists use theatre to establish themselves as feminist thinkers. For Carr, this has
involved uncovering unpublished, archival material at the National Library of Ireland
that has remained un-catalogued and unexplored: the manuscripts of The Deer’s
Surrender and This Love Thing. Reviewers writing for national, mainstream
newspapers struggled with the meanings of plays from Carr’s Low in the Dark to
Ullaloo, and Parks’s Betting on the Dust Commander to The America Play, claiming
that such works are deliberately and unnecessarily complex. However, drawing on a
concurrent feminist discourse, which lauded the political potential of marginal,
experimental theatre, I aim to show that the perceived difficulty of these plays is
actually the source of their power. Feminist theory from the mid-1970s to the mid1990s, such as the work of Irigaray, Cixous, Belsey, Dolan and Reinelt, informs my
analysis. Many of Parks’s and Carr’s plays at this stage incorporate ritualised
performances and repetitions, in content and structure respectively. Butler’s work on
gender performativity elucidates the political potential of these features. Parks’s and
Carr’s early works, which remain overshadowed by their subsequent, more
traditionally-styled plays, merit further critical and scholarly attention to explicate
their subversiveness and depth. ‘Writing from the Margins’ addresses this issue,
14
historicises Carr’s and Parks’s theatre and compares the connections between the
mainstream media and conservatism in Irish and North American institutional theatre.
The second chapter, ‘Maternal Contradictions,’ focuses on representations of
motherhood from the dramatists’ bourgeoning theatre careers to their later plays. This
facilitates fruitful comparisons between Carr’s and Parks’s evolving engagement with
the myths and stereotypes of Irish and black American motherhood, respectively. It
compares and contextualises Carr’s initial satires of maternity to Parks’s celebration
of feminine fecundity, as well as explicating each dramatist’s move towards graver
maternal images. In their more recent works, both playwrights debunk national and
western maternal icons by exposing the performativity of motherhood, revealing
maternal ambivalence, deconstructing the conventional model of the ‘good mother’
and questioning the ideal of the natural mother. In doing so, the dramatists suggest
that women’s bodies have the potential to ‘matter’ in ways other than traditional
visions of motherhood. As well as the work of Dolan and Butler, this chapter draws
on relevant psychoanalytical and cultural philosophies, from Nancy Chodorow’s
object-relations theories, published in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), to the
sociological work of Rozsika Parker in her essay ‘The Production and Purposes of
Maternal Ambivalence’ (1997), to more recent considerations in cultural studies, such
as those published in Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer’s edited collection
Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home, and
the Body (2006).
Chapter 3, ‘Rereading the Canons,’ takes us from text to intertext in order to
examine the subversive ways in which Carr and Parks employ theatrical
appropriation. While Carr tends towards reimagining literature and Parks appropriates
both literary and historical narratives, both are involved in a comparable process of
demythologising what can be seen as a white, western, patriarchal knowledge base.
The dramatists reimagine simultaneously Euripides’ Medea (431BC) and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Parks’s In
the Blood and Fucking A. I compare how the playwrights infuse these classics with
contemporary relevance in ways that challenge societal attitudes towards
economically and socially marginalised women. The chapter then explores how Carr,
in her two re-imaginings of King Lear (1606), Meat and Salt (2003) and The Cordelia
Dream (2008), redresses reductive images of women in Shakespearen theatre. Here, I
employ the theories of Case, who argues that Greek and Elizabethan theatre supressed
15
real women, replacing them on stage with ‘masks of patriarchal production’
(Feminism and Theatre 7). Drawing on Belsey’s Why Shakespeare (2007), my
analysis of The Cordelia Dream and Meat and Salt also demonstrates how
appropriation can disrupt ideals of originality and the individual, inspired author.
Finally, the chapter examines Parks’s The America Play (1993), Venus (1996) and
Topdog/Underdog (2001). This part of the research seeks to expand upon the work of
Harry Elam Jr. and Alice Rayner by exploring how Parks adapts recorded history in
order to imaginatively recover black perspectives and to interrogate perceived
historical truth. ‘Re-reading the Canons’ demonstrates the ways in which theatrical
appropriation can challenge the revered conceptions of origins and authenticity that
have helped to construct and maintain exclusionary canons. Dolan’s work on utopia
and performance informs the overall argument that Carr and Parks insert peripheral
perspectives into well-known narratives for the purpose of creating new mythologies.
‘Love as a “fabricated […] epistle”’ is the third chapter of this thesis. Here, I
move the analysis towards stage action and image by focusing on storytelling,
metatheatre, scenography and heterosexual rituals such as courtship, weddings and
marital routines in Carr’s and Parks’s plays. By examining productions, I assess how
directors and designers can help to politicise a play text. The chapter examines how
performance and visual imagery enable the dramatist’s works to interrogate the
cultural model of long-term heterosexual union. Paradigms of romantic love help to
craft and uphold stifling gender constructs. Carr and Parks regularly reveal such
relationships and roles to be performative—which, in Butler’s view, has
transformative power. As well as Butler’s poststructuralism, the research draws on
theories of narratology, such as the work of Mary Gergen. This illuminates the ways
in which Parks and Carr expose the role of dominant representation in constructing
and maintaining gender identity and heterosexual union. This chapter seeks to reveal
how theatrical performance can disrupt what Butler refers to as ‘the heterosexual
matrix’ and its oppressive gender binary (Gender Trouble 151).
Chapter 5, ‘Clothing, Costume and [De]Construction,’ focuses on the
significance of clothing in Parks’s and Carr’s play texts, as well as the opportunities
that these works provide for the stage. In doing so, I aim to show how clothing and
costume can expose gender as culturally constituted—and, therefore, capable of being
constituted differently. Here, I employ Butler’s theories regarding the body, published
in her influential volume Bodies that Matter (1993). Butler’s ideas enlighten my
16
analysis of how Parks and Carr use clothes and other gendered props to stage visuallyconspicuous layers of gendered significations. The resultant stage images rupture
seamless, naturalised conceptions of traditional femininity and masculinity. Drawing
on such feminists as Butler, Dolan and Case, as well as recent psychoanalytic theory,
this chapter also examines how Carr and Parks probe the ontological distinctions
between performance and reality by staging gendered self-creation. By comparing the
ways in which directors and designers have interpreted works such as Parks’s Venus
and Topdog/Underdog and Carr’s Portia Coughlan and The Cordelia Dream, this part
of the dissertation reveals the important role of theatre practitioners in enhancing a
play’s political potential.
Applying Dolan’s research on ‘utopia’ to Carr’s and Parks’s later tragedies
might seem at odds with the content of those plays. However, as Dolan asserts:
Utopian performatives exceed the content of a play or performance; spectators
might draw a utopian performative from even the most dystopian theatrical
universe. Utopian performatives spring from a complex alchemy of form and
content, context and location, which take shape in moments of utopia as
doings, as process, as never finished gestures towards a potentially better
future.’ (Utopia 8.)
‘Negotiating Genders from the Page to the Stage’ explores the interconnections in
theatre’s capacity for meaning-making, revealing that we must also consider elements
beyond form and content when assessing the transformative power of theatre.
Representations of people who are unwilling or unable to conform to their culturallyprescribed roles are prominent Carr’s and Parks’s plays—particularly in their
tragedies. Analysis of the function of these characters, many of whom violently resist
gendered cultural expectations, adds to our understanding of how theatre can
intervene in our perceptions of gender. According to Butler, refusing to perform one’s
gender correctly can lead to the social exclusion that many of Carr’s and Parks’s
protagonists face. Drawing on the work of Dolan and Butler, the thesis compares the
ways in which Parks and Carr use ‘dysfunctional’ characters to illuminate unjust
socio-cultural hierarchies. Through costume and gesture as well as the written word,
these plays have the potential to rupture static conceptions of gender, to reveal
performativity and, ultimately, to open the possibility that oppressive gender roles
could be imagined in less restrictive ways. In this context, many of the plays in
17
question can be said to offer ‘never finished gestures towards a potentially better
future.’
Scholarly Contribution
As well as building on the seminal research of theorists such as Dolan, and applying
the work of Butler to two acclaimed contemporary playwrights, this thesis seeks to
widen our frameworks for understanding Carr’s and Parks’s theatre. The research
focuses on plays that were instrumental in the dramatists’ success in addition to
earlier, less popular works. Since each has achieved international acclaim, it seems
logical to broaden the context in which each is explored. Looking at each through the
lens of the other offers a variety of new and different perspectives on both dramatists,
for example the forces affecting how their early careers developed, their engagement
with western (as well as Irish and African American) culture, their use of ‘canonical’
material, how their plays can give rise disruptive stage imagery, how they challenge
oppressive traditions and reveal gender performativity.
Both Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks have attracted considerable scholarly
attention. Volumes and edited collections of essays have been published on each for
example, Rhona Trench’s Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina
Carr (2010) and Deborah R. Geis’s Suzan-Lori Parks (2008), as well as the
compilations The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rules was made’ (2003), edited by
Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan and Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and
Other Works (2010), edited by Philip C. Kolin. However, existing scholarship and
criticism tends to locate and discuss these dramatists within their national contexts,
focusing mainly on language, form and textual analysis.
Essays focusing on the later plays in the context of form have been published
on each playwright. Wallace examines Carr’s use of the tragedy and points out how
this might be problematic for certain strands of feminism.6 Carol Schafer looks at
Parks’s adoption of traditional forms to stage an alternative literary history. 7 While
these scholars acknowledge formal change, they neglect to explore in detail its
significance across each dramatist’s career. As we have seen, Doyle and Murphy link
See for example Wallace’s essays ‘“A Crossroads Between Worlds”: Marina Carr and the Use of
Tragedy’(2000) and ‘Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats..., The Mai
and Portia Coughlan’ (2001).
7
See Schafer’s 2008 essay, ‘Staging a New Literary History: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, In the Blood
and Fucking A.’
6
18
Carr’s movement towards a more traditional model of theatre to her increased
success. As Geis points out, critics worried that Parks had sold out to the mainstream
when the realist tragedy Topdog/Underdog moved to Broadway (Suzan-Lori Parks
112).
Explorations
of
Carr’s
‘Midlands
Trilogy’
and
Parks’s
Venus,
Topdog/Underdog and ‘The Red Letter Plays’ dominate academic criticism; much of
Carr’s unpublished work remains unexplored. However, analysing Carr’s and Parks’s
later plays in conjunction with their early works establishes continuities in each
dramatist’s political agenda. These continuities, as well as attention to staging, reveal
that Parks’s and Carr’s plays offer potential gender-conscious meanings that transcend
the limitations of form.
Trench’s Bloody Living focuses on the ‘form and content’ of Carr’s theatre, to
show how the dramatist ‘both perpetuates and challenges stable conventional notions
of identity in Irish society, revealing subjectivity as ambivalent and harmful’ (287).
Applying the theories of Kristeva, Trench analyses the nature of self-destruction in
Carr’s theatre. While she concludes by conceding that Carr’s destructive identities
‘might serve to negotiate productive renewal’ (287), her textual analysis misses the
immense, transformative power of Carr’s plays in performance—as well as how they
engage with a broader western culture. Moreover, by limiting her framework to one
key theorist, Kristeva, and to material published in the 1980s, Trench overlooks a
range of other, more recent and, perhaps, more relevant frameworks for understanding
how Carr negotiates identity—such as the work of Dolan and Butler.
In Suzan-Lori Parks, Geis compares Parks to Kennedy and Ntozake Shange in
terms of the dramatist’s quest for ‘an American-feminist way of speaking’ (SuzanLori Parks 9).8 The volume offers a relatively chronological overview of Parks’s use
of theatre and other media, and seeks to historicise the playwright within her national
context. While Geis mentions various productions, she does so descriptively and the
analysis emphasises language and textual images. She frames her exploration with
criticism focusing on Parks, as well as comparative American literature. Similarly,
scholars such as Robert Baker-White, Amy S. Green and Robert Vorlicky lean
towards textual analysis and compare Parks’s theatre to the work of other American
8
Geis offers a more extensive analysis of American-feminist language in Chapter 6 of her volume
Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (1993).
19
writers.9 By utilising a different comparative model, employing a range of cultural
theories in feminism and gender studies, and tracing the political potential of Parks’s
theatre from the page to the stage, my thesis offers a more expansive study of this
writer’s work in contemporary theatre.
Much of the academic work published on Carr reveals a prevailing critical
anxiety to locate the dramatist within her national context and a tendency to focus on
the language of her plays. Anthony Roche, Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan
explore feminist meanings in Irish theatre by relating Carr’s plays to the work of
dramatists such as Teresa Deevy and Emma Donoghue.10 While such work is useful,
it is limited to an Irish comparative frame. Victor Merriman compares Carr to her
contemporary Martin McDonagh, complaining that these playwrights envision gross,
rural Irish stereotypes, which assure contemporary middleclass audiences of their
relative sophistication and, hence, foster mainstream success.11 In ‘“Close to Home
but Distant”: Irish Drama in the 1990s’ (1998), Roche discusses Carr’s use of
Hiberno-English, which, when phonetically delivered, leads to ‘a true oral literature
and an utterly distinct idiom’ (280). While Roche argues that Carr uses a flexible
linguistic medium to create characters living and dead, realistic and mythical, Richard
Russell holds that Carr—in her use of Hiberno-English and her syncretism of pagan
and Catholic representations—is also drawing on Synge.12 Russell focuses on By the
Bog of Cats… and identifies Carr’s scenario of awaiting a fated death as homage to
Synge, eliding Carr’s much more obvious and deliberate use of broader western
influences in her creation of a fallen woman story: Euripides Medea and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Contrary to critics such as Russell, I examine Carr’s literary linkages and
conversations also beyond the national canon. I argue that Carr productively locates
herself within a wider western tradition that helps to foster international success, and
Vorlicky’s ‘An American Echo: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The American Play
and James Scruggs’s
Disposable Men’ (2007), Green’s ‘Whose Voices Are These? The Arts of Language in the Plays of
Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, and Diana Son’ (2006) and Baker-White’s ‘Questioning the Ground of
American Identity: George Pierce Baker’s The Pilgrim Spirit and Suzan Lori-Parks’s The America
Play’ (2000) offer comparative studies of the dramatist work, but within her national context.
10
See, for example, Roche’s ‘Women on the Threshold: J.M. Synge’s The Shadow Of The Glen, Teresa
Deevy’s Katie Roche and Marina Carr’s The Mai’ (2005), Leeney’s ‘Ireland’s Exiled Female
Playwrights: Teresa Deevey and Marina Carr’ (2004) and McMullan’s ‘Gender, Authorship and
Performance in Selected Plays by Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights: Mary Elizabeth BurkeKennedy, Marie Jones, Marina Carr, Emma Donoghue’ (2000).
11
See Merriman’s ‘Decolonisation Postboned: The Theatre of Tiger Trash’ (1999).
12
See Russell’s ‘Talking with the Ghosts of Irish Playwrights Past: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of
Cats….’ (2006).
9
20
that can prove useful in understanding more fully the cultural work in which her
theatre participates. Moreover, such criticism is so preoccupied with locating Carr
within an Irish tradition of verbal theatre that it fails to address in depth the visual
potency of her work. Merriman, by lamenting what he sees as outdated images of an
Irish peasantry in Carr’s Midlands plays, misses the ways which she uses liminal
figures to raise pertinent questions regarding contemporary issues of gender and
marginality. Exploring Carr’s work through the lens of her western contemporary
Parks—and the academic work concerning that playwright—can help us to identify
and endeavour to fill these gaps in Carr scholarship.
Scholarship on Parks has been more wide-ranging in that several critics have
explored performativity in her theatre, for example Kimberly D. Dixon and W.B.
Worthen. These academics emphasise language and text respectively. I expand on
their work by using the theories of Dolan and Butler to show the transformative power
of the performative in Parks’s plays. My analysis of how visual signifiers such as
costume and gesture can reveal performativity also adds to existing scholarship. In
comparison to Carr, the staging of Parks’s work has achieved much more academic
attention. Elam and Rayner have been at the forefront of such research, focusing on
productions as well as play texts to examine history, gender and the black body in
Parks’s work.13 In their essay ‘Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by
Suzan-Lori Parks’ (1998), Elam and Rayner devote parts of the analysis to the
costume design for the Public Theatre’s premiere of Venus. My thesis further
develops such research by examining costume design in other plays by Parks, and
comparing the visual potency of her work on stage to productions of Carr’s theatre.
Some academics have sought to move research on Carr in directions
comparable to my own. Drawing on Butler’s ‘Performative Acts,’ and focusing on a
play that despite being published has received little attention, Anna McMullan
provides a brief analysis of Low in the Dark in ‘Gender, Authorship and Performance
in Selected Plays by Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights’ (2000). Melissa Sihra
explores the ways in which Carr’s representations of gender usurp Irish political and
religious ideals of femininity; she illuminates the organic development of such
In essays such as ‘Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks’ (1998)
and ‘Echoes from the Black (W)hole: An Examination of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks’
(1999), Elam and Rayner explore the subversive ways in which Parks stages history, race and gender.
13
21
meanings by referring briefly to early plays such as This Love Thing.14 However,
Sihra also looks beyond Ireland to explore international productions of Carr’s works
in ‘Reflections across the Water: New Stages Performing Carr’ (2003). She argues
that the San Jose Repertory Theatre’s 2001 production of By the Bog of Cats…, which
took place in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, ‘offered
a sense of comfort and catharsis to audiences’ (108). Here, Sihra identifies what could
be seen in the context of Dolan’s recent theories as the ‘utopian’ quality of Carr’s
theatre. Enrica Cerquoni also explores By the Bog of Cats… in performance, with
special emphasis on space and scenography.15 ‘Negotiating Genders from the Page to
the Stage’ seeks to build on the important work of these academics by looking beyond
the national context, using relevant feminist theory to illuminate the textual and visual
power of Carr’s theatre and examining in more detail early plays that have received
little notice.
Exploring the materialist feminist and gender-conscious meanings of Parks’s
and Carr’s plays from the page to the stage provides a range of original, intellectual
viewpoints from which to consider each playwright. This thesis reveals the
philosophical, feminist approaches underpinning each playwright’s theatre and how
these strategies relate to Ireland and America, as well as the wider western culture.
Discussions of Carr’s and Parks’s work have tended to be limited to national contexts.
Adopting a broader comparative framework locates the playwrights within an
international context, showing their relationships with key authors such as Euripides
and Shakespeare. It also establishes continuities between the plays that were limited
to national productions and those that have achieved international success. Finally,
examining productions of Carr’s and Parks’s plays—with an emphasis on such
features as set and costume design—offers new perspectives on each writer’s work.
Analysing Parks’s and Carr’s shape-shifting dramaturgy from such a variety of angles
reveals the diverse, political potencies of their theatre works.
Sihra’s ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’ (2007), for example, explores how
Carr, throughout her career, has interrogated Irish ideals of femininity and the limited spaces that
women continue to occupy.
15
See Cerquoni’s ‘“One bog, many bogs”: Theatrical space, Visual Image and Meaning in Some
Productions of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…’ (2003).
14
22
Chapter 1: Writing from the Margins
Introduction
Gerry Colgan’s Irish Times review of the 1989 Crooked Sixpence production of
Marina Carr’s Low in the Dark is laced with sarcasm and condescension. Colgan
commends the cast as confidently embodying their ‘cartoon characters’ as if ‘they, at
least, knew what was going on’ (‘Low in the Dark’). He maintains that the play’s
novel stage imagery sustained audience interest at first but, by the second act, the
piece had ‘disintegrated into a forced farce, with bits of dance thrown in, up to the
meaningless ending’ (ibid). Three years later, another Irish Times critic—David
Nowlan—categorises Ullaloo as a ‘satire of the Beckett genre’ which lacks Beckett’s
‘profound levels of meaning.’ In his final dismissal of the piece, Nowlan suggests that
people ‘who like this kind of pretentious vacuity should storm the Peacock’s seats.’
Similarly, reviewers from the main New York daily newspapers charged Suzan-Lori
Parks’s early productions with affectation and deliberate impenetrability. In a 1996
New York Times article on Parks, Monte Williams sums up disparaging reactions to
the first phase of this dramatist’s career as follows: ‘Critics have called her
productions elliptical and, in places, purposefully unclear.’ One such critic is David
Richards. Reviewing The America Play in 1994 he warns his readers to stay away ‘if
you expect plays to deliver tidy meanings’, since ‘what’s going on in the bleak and
boxy landscape the author describes as “an exact replica of the Great Hole of History”
seems purposefully unclear.’ That same year, critic Vincent Canby accuses Parks of
overwriting, leading to ‘muddled’ ideas.
Certainly, rather than prescribing ‘tidy meanings,’ Carr’s plays from Low in
the Dark (1989) to Ullaloo (1991) and Parks’s from Betting on the Dust Commander
(1987) to The America Play (1994) promote complex enquiry. Many of these highly
experimental pieces were performed on low budgets in small or fringe venues. During
these periods, both dramatists were working at the periphery of the theatre institution
and those prominent critics just cited could just as easily have missed or ignored their
dramas. On the contrary, however, these critics’ responses to the works were vigorous
and passionate—albeit in their reproach. But why did these now well-known
dramatists initially elicit such harsh criticism and, in some cases, disdain? Evidently,
some reviewers considered the meaning of such work to be elusive. What frameworks
23
might help to illuminate the significance of these dramas? What do commentaries
such as the above really tell us about the plays of Parks and Carr? Do they reveal a
connection between the mainstream media and conservatism in institutionalised
western theatre? Finally, what are the repercussions of such adverse reactions to the
bourgeoning work of young, innovative dramatists?
Influential reviewers take issue with Parks’s and Carr’s early dramas
on the basis of contrived convolution and deliberate elusiveness. However, such
criticism overlooks the political agendas behind these dramatists’ early methods, as
well as how the complexity of the writing might be significant. This chapter shows
how Parks and Carr seek to eschew the mimetic conventions of what can be seen as a
dominant, patriarchal theatre institution, marking (and possibly maintaining) their
marginal positions as theatre-makers at the time. In plays such as Carr’s Low in the
Dark (1989), The Deer’s Surrender (1990), Ullaloo (1991) and This Love Thing
(1991) and Parks’s Betting on the Dust Commander (1987), Imperceptible
Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), The Death of the Last Black Man in the
Whole Entire World (1989), Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992) and The America
Play (1994), the dramatists opt for self-referential elements, shifting personae and
fragmentary, repetitive, surrealist scenarios. These stylistic features block sustained,
emotional involvement with any one character. The fluidity and multiplicity of these
works offer an alternative to the static, ‘universal’ values that canonical and
commercially successful theatre tends to endorse. Moreover, Parks’s and Carr’s
metathearical and self-reflexive strategies expose the representational apparatus and
refuse to naturalise events on stage, reminding viewers that they are watching a play.
In doing so, the playwrights inhibit the easy, spectatorial immersion typically incited
by dominant styles such as realist tragedy. These works’ non-sequential structures
resist closure. The dramatists avoid regulating the onstage disarray, and the resultant
open-endedness of these plays precipitates, instead, a sense of disorder. I wish to
argue that these methods are productive from a feminist perspective as they promote
opportunities for change instead of installing definitive, petrified truths. Hence, the
ambiguity of these plays can be viewed as the key source of their subversive power.16
Alice Rayner and Harry J. Elam Jr. make a similar argument in relation to Parks’s The Death of the
Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World in their 1994 essay ‘Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring
History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.’
16
24
Parks’s and Carr’s works were first produced during the late 1980s and early
1990s. Discourse problematising traditional ‘male’ writing styles was at its most
prolific preceding and during this period. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, theorists
such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous had advocated a new, feminine form of
expression which is now referred to as l’écriture feminine. Finding traditional
narrative authority and logical progression to be masculine, exclusionary and
oppressive to women, they sought a more cyclical, multifarious aesthetic that would
harmonise with what they saw as female cognitive and biological experiences. In
works such as Critical Practice (1980), British cultural materialist Catherine Belsey
also analysed the politics of form by categorising literary texts on a spectrum between
classic realist and interrogative; like l’écriture feminine, Belsey’s notion of the
interrogative text deviated from traditional forms. Finally, in America, there was an
explosive feminist backlash against realist and classical drama in favour of theatrical
experimentation, spearheaded by materialist academics such as Sue-Ellen Case,17 Jill
Dolan and Janelle Reinelt. During late 1980s and early 1990s, this school of thought
elided Parks’s and Carr’s contemporaneous productions, while the similar works of
established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill and Adrienne Kennedy were the
focus of much discussion.18
Considering Carr’s and Parks’s respective academic backgrounds, both would
have been exposed to the feminist literary theory discussed above. Carr graduated
from University College Dublin with a BA in Philosophy and English in 1987 (Mike
Murphy 53). Parks studied at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley,
Massachusetts (Geis 4). She changed her majors from Chemistry to English and
German when Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ‘pulled [her] from the science lab
to the literature lab’ (Parks in Jiggetts 310). She continued her literary studies and
17
In her introduction to Feminism and Theatre, Case identifies herself as something of a recovering
radical feminist: ‘Though my historical roots are in radical feminism, I consider myself to be a
materialist feminist. Certainly, a close reading of this book would reveal both its radical and materialist
biases’ (3-4).
18
The journal, Modern Drama, provided a special issue on ‘Women in Theatre,’ in 1989 (vol. 32, no.
1). This entire issue provides a useful introduction to this ‘school of thought,’ which concerned a
feminist quest for subversive, political theatre. Jeanie Forte’s essay, ‘Realism, Narrative and the
Feminist Playwright,’ is published here. Forte discusses Kennedy’s The Owl Answers (1965), arguing
that while the unique form of this play satisfies the quest for a feminist aesthetic, the fact that it is
rarely produced impedes its political potential. This issue of Modern Drama also includes Reinelt’s
essay ‘Feminist theory and the Problem of Performance’ (48-57). Here, Reinelt lauds Churchill’s Cloud
Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982) as ‘tours de force of the deconstructive phase’ (52). Churchill began
by writing more realist works and moved towards the kinds of fluid meanings and shifting
temporalities that Parks and Carr adventurously began with. To this extent her career development is
the inversion of Parks’s and Carr’s.
25
graduated in 1985. Whether Parks and Carr were directly influenced by this feminist
academic mood or not, this interpretation suggests that each playwright’s early works
can also satisfy the feminist pursuit of radical ways to articulate subjugated voices in
literature and the performing arts. Moreover, examining these plays in the context of
concurrent feminist debates reveals the rich meanings and political efficacy of this
theatre.
Analysing Parks’s and Carr’s emerging preoccupations institutes a
fundamental background to the more recent dramas, which subsequent chapters
discuss in detail. Parks, since her career began, has been concerned with racialised
gendered identities, cultural assimilation and the amnesia of public consciousness.
She seeks to demythologise American and other histories. Carr, too, seeks to shatter
what could be seen in Ireland as national myths; her plays continually resist and usurp
images of femininity informed figures such as the Blessed Virgin and Cathleen ní
Houlihan. She also plays with broader gender stereotypes, most overtly in her early
work. Despite their differing political agendas, Carr’s and Parks’s early plays are
comparable in that they raise questions regarding identity categorisations and
constructions, as well as issues concerning marginality, privilege and writing. In
Carr’s Low in the Dark and This Love Thing, and Parks’s Imperceptible Mutabilities
and The Death of the Last Black Man the playwrights stage gendered (and in Parks’s
case, also racial) stereotypes to different ends. Parks’s Betting on the Dust
Commander and Carr’s Ullaloo both reveal the repetitious performativity of gender
and heterosexual relationships. In This Love Thing and The Deer’s Surrender, Carr
absurdly explores how the privileged position of men as ‘inspired creators’ in (and of)
western culture has helped to suppress female perspectives and replace real women
with fictitious, male-authored constructs. Parks, by exposing recorded history’s
limited, Eurocentric perspective in The America Play and The Death of the Last Black
Man, promotes questions regarding the value and validity of historical ‘facts.’
Comparing the first phases of these dramatists’ works reveals each dramatist’s selfconscious awareness of problems concerning marginality and the established
authority of the written word. Both playwrights further such thematic concerns in
their later, more naturalist plays.
There are fascinating similarities between the developments of Parks’s and
Carr’s respective careers. Tracing and comparing each playwright’s progress
illuminates important issues regarding the expression of minority identities in theatre,
26
the politics of form and the forces that affect mainstream success and literary
canonisation. Unfortunately Parks’s and Carr’s early works are likely to remain vastly
overshadowed by their later, more commercially successful plays. Produced mostly in
intimate fringe venues, these dramatists’ initial productions reached relatively small
audiences. Plays such as Parks’s Devotees in the Garden of Love and Betting on the
Dust Commander are rarely performed or examined critically in comparison to this
Parks’s more recent theatre.19 Carr’s early dramas hardly ever appear on university
syllabi. The only of her first few works to be published is Low in the Dark. The
others, Ullaloo, This Love Thing and The Deer’s Surrender remain unpublished in the
National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Carr sold This Love Thing and The Deer’s
Surrender to the library along with her notes for £4000 in 1995, but as of yet they
remain un-catalogued and can be viewed only by prior appointment. Apart from Low
in the Dark, which was also performed by Corcadorca at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork
in September 1991, Carr’s early plays have never appeared on stage since the original
productions.20 Audiences and students have little exposure to each playwright’s early
theatre; this situation steers academic study towards later plays such as Parks’s
Topdog/Underdog (2001) and Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998).
Carr’s and Parks’s early dramas merit future productions, as well as further
critical and scholarly attention to explicate their subversiveness and depth. Yet, while
the more recent plays thrive, these works are pushed further into the margins.
Although the views of journalists such as Canby and Nowlan may well have
contributed to the prominent position of Parks’s and Carr’s tragic or relatively realist
works, the intense reproach that these critics directed towards their early experiments
perhaps indicates the provocative power of the writing (as well as the poor quality of
criticism). Feminist literary theory from the later 1970s to the early 1990s offers a
useful interpretative tool for clarifying the challenging and profound nature of these
plays. I will, therefore, provide an overview of the feminist quest for alternative or
19
Occasionally, Devotees in the Garden of Love is examined as part of university courses on absurd
theatre. The drama department of Berkeley, California recently staged it in a programme of absurdist
one-acts entitled ‘Silences and Salutations’ (November, 2009). For details of the programme, see UC
Berkeley Events Calendar for November 6, 2009.
20
After its initial 1989 production, Low in the Dark was subsequently performed by Corcadorca at the
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork in September 1991. Corcadorca was then a newly established company and
Low in the Dark was their second production. For further details on Corcadorca’s production history,
see the ‘Shows Past and Present’ section of the company’s website.
27
subversive literary aesthetics before moving to an in depth analysis of Parks’s and
Carr’s early plays.
Feminist Aesthetics
The ‘French Feminists,’ Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, deem
conventional language and literature to be allied in the process of maintaining
oppressive (patriarchal) hierarchies. In works that emerged in the late 1970s and early
1980s, these theorists launched their criticisms of the linear, logical, one-dimensional
and phallocentric aspects of orthodox language usage and form, arguing that these are
at odds with the ways in which women experience the world. This is widely known as
l’écriture feminine. Its proponents seek to deviate from oppressive, masculine modes
of expression by exploding existing literary aesthetics to achieve the cyclicality and
plurality which, they believe, will more accurately represent women’s experiences.21
Cixous, being a playwright herself, has perhaps been the most influential in theatre
studies.
Cixous draws heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis. She objects to the
phallocentric nature of the Symbolic Order, in which woman is constructed as the
‘Other’ in relation to man. In ‘The Laugh of Medusa,’ she explains her aspirations for
a new form, one that would emerge from the margins and, hence, be unmitigated by
dominant and dominating patriarchal ideologies.22 She points out in this essay the
objectified position of women in traditional theatre, describing the female body on
stage as ‘the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure’ (250). In another
essay ‘Aller á la Mer,’ she questions how female audience members can avoid
‘lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women’ (546). Here, she argues
that imagining a return to the pre-oedipal mother—a time before the regulatory
21
While many feminist academics in theatre studies examine the theatrical and theoretical writing of
Cixous—including Case in Feminism and Theatre (124-132) and Dolan in The Feminist Spectator as
Critic (8; 87; 101-3)—Aston provides a useful summary of all three ‘French Feminists’ in An
Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (45-56). Her approach is specific to theatre, and she also offers a
practical application of these theories to various experimental plays. For a more wide-ranging
exploration of the theories of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva see Part Two of Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual
Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985).
22
Jill Dolan also takes issue with the mainstream context itself, preferring dramas that are beyond the
reach of capitalism. This is evident in her 1993 book, Presence and Desire: Gender, Sexuality and
Performance. Here, she problematises both the style and the Broadway success of Wendy
Wasserstein’s 1989 play, The Heidi Chronicles, charging the play with undermining the feminist
movement. Dolan later reconsiders these views and reassesses the value of the mainstream following
Wasserstein’s death in 2006 in her article ‘Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular.’
28
Symbolic phase imposed its phallocentric order—could positively influence women’s
creative expression. Both essays support the formation of a new poetic that embraces
the creative power of the female body and the marginal status of women because they
are outside and beyond orthodox hierarchies. These aspects of femininity enable us to
write ‘ourselves’ in a non-linear, pluralistic form that evades closure, and in language
that ‘does not hold back [but] makes possible, signifying “the erotogeneity of the
hereogeneous”’ (‘Medusa’ 252). As we shall see, Cixous’ theories can illuminate the
significance of such plays as Carr’s The Deer’s Surrender and Parks’s The Death of
the Last Black Man. These works explore issues of female marginality and celebrate
maternity.
Irigaray can be compared to Cixous in that they are both proponents of
‘contiguity,’ which Case describes as ‘an organisational device that feminists have
discovered in both early and modern works by women’ (Feminism 129). Contiguity
evades the homogeneity, chronology and closure of common narratives in favour of a
more immediate, syncopated, over-lapping and elliptical structures. While Cixous
envisions that fluid, pluralistic state during the Imaginary phase when the child cannot
differentiate herself from the mother, Irigaray celebrates the pluralism or doubleness
of the female body itself and its sexual pleasures. Because the female sex organ is
composed of two lips that touch, Irigaray sees women as being composed of two
inextricable parts and as having the capacity to continually stimulate themselves (‘The
Sex which is Not One’100). Irigaray draws on Derrida to offer a deconstructive
approach. Like Cixous, she is concerned with undoing and reversing the ways in
which western culture has silenced women by creating a new fragmented,
interruptive, multifarious poetic that diverges from the regulatory status quo. Her
ideal form is non-conclusive and continually in-the-making. For her, meaning should
not be definitive but ‘constantly in the process of weaving itself’ (103). The next
section will explore how Irigaray’s concepts of overlapping voices and meaning
which is constantly in-the-making are particularly relevant to Carr’s Low in the Dark.
A long, unwieldy story is threaded through the action of this play, and the characters
collaborate and interrupt each other in the telling.
Kristeva focuses on different concepts of temporality in her 1979 essay
‘Women’s Time.’ For her, there are two symbiotically connected kinds of time which
are beyond the linear logic of language, narrative and history. These are ‘cyclical’
time, which she links to the female body and the menstrual cycle, and ‘monumental’
29
time which is best described as self-perpetuating and eternal (34-35). Aston links
Kristeva’s concept of chronological time to realism and explores the feminist drive
towards the cyclical, explaining that ‘finding a form to represent the “broken-backed”
experience of women which has been repressed, necessitated the explosion of the
linear, the masculine’ (An Introduction 55). She applies these Kristevan theories to
the way in which Caryl Churchill’s theatre rejects the constraints of linear history and
injects it with female subjectivity (ibid). However, as we shall see, Kristeva’s
conceptions of temporality are also applicable to the early plays of Parks and Carr.
The Kristevan concept of cyclical time is particularly relevant to Parks’s use of
‘repetition and revision.’ Kristeva can also be compared to Cixous in her use of
psychoanalysis. Her concepts of semiotic and symbolic correlate to Lacan’s
Imaginary and Symbolic Order respectively. Aston shows how an application of
Kristeva’s theories to literature would associate realist texts with the symbolic and
experimental works with the semiotic. She explains that the drive toward the semiotic
is ‘severely (though not wholly) repressed’ in a symbolic text (An Introduction 53).
Like these theorists, Catherine Besley’s proposition in Britain draws on
Lacanian psychoanalysis. In Belsey’s view, entering into the Symbolic requires a
splitting of the subject between ‘the “I” who speaks and the “I” who is represented in
discourse’ (Critical Practice 85). She uses the term ‘classic realist’ to describe texts
that repress this split subject, offer stable meanings and ultimately move towards a
conclusive finale (ibid). On the other hand, texts that unfix the subject and destabilise
meaning, she labels as ‘interrogative’ (ibid 91). Belsey associates the categories of
classic realist and interrogative with the Symbolic and the Imaginary, respectively.
Hence, her method resembles Aston’s literary application of Kristeva’s concepts. In
Belsey’s view, classic realism seeks to curb the feminine desire for the Imaginary in
the interest of upholding the existing pecking order and quelling social unrest. She
sees the typical classic realist pattern as one which instates a temporary crisis, leading
to a cathartic climax, followed by revelation and, ultimately, a return to the
(patriarchal) status quo. Her conception of classic realism harks back to Aristotle’s
ideals for classical tragedy as expressed in his Poetics. Belsey’s classic realism seeks
to establish the truth of the story. It is ‘characterised by “illusionism”’ and its plot
involves ‘the precipitation of disorder’ (‘Constructing the Subject’ 53). For her, a
classic realist story ‘moves inevitably towards closure which is also disclosure, the
dissolution of enigma through the re-establishment of order’ (ibid). The interrogative
30
text, however, refuses to dissolve enigma, thereby precipitating mutable and
multifarious ‘truths’ and subjects. In doing so, it expresses and promotes social
change (Critical Practice 85-6).
Generally, these theorists aspire towards literature that is concerned with
unfixing the existing social or Symbolic order by exploding the unified subject, as
well as traditional linearity and narrative closure. Applied to the early drama of Parks
and Carr, such ideals reveal the political potential of the ambiguity that some critics
disparage. For example, Carr’s The Deer’s Surrender and Parks’s Imperceptible
Mutabilities offer porous and changeable figures in lieu of fixed, coherent subjects.
These two plays also employ episodic structures. Both playwrights make use of
repetitious cycles: Carr in Ullaloo, for instance, and Parks in Betting on the Dust
Commander, for example. Stylistically, these approaches frustrate audience
expectations of closure, leaving us with elusive rather than definitive meanings. In all
of these plays, as well as in Carr’s The Love Thing and Parks’s The Death of the Last
Black Man and Devotees in the Garden of Love, spectral personas inhabit surreal
scenarios. In the context of feminist appropriations of Lacanian psychoanalysis, these
early methods of Parks and Carr can be seen to express a desire for the Imaginary and
to destabilise oppressive, authoritative fixities.
From the mid-1980s on, American scholars in the field of theatre studies such
as Case, Reinelt and Dolan problematised the revered dramatic techniques of the
male-centred, western theatre institution that has historically commodified women.
For critics such as these, the practices of tragedy and realism—frequently combined
in theatre of the western canon from the late 19th century on—were the focus of much
reproach. Broadly, from this perspective, traditional theatre objectifies and silences
women. Moreover, mimetic strategies that attempt to capture the world as it is cannot
challenge but can only reinforce an oppressive status quo. These academics embrace a
materialist feminist approach, influenced by the social constructionism of Foucault
and Butler which aims to demystify dominant power. Broadly, materialist feminists
argue that the universalising conventions of tragedy and realism tend to pass off as
truths what are, in fact, ideological constructs. Evidently, the politics of form have
been central to these debates. In comparable ways, Case, Reinelt and Dolan exposed
how styles typical of commercially successful and canonical theatre could be
pernicious. These academics led an in-depth, theoretical investigation into what kinds
of theatre practices might be helpful for feminism.
31
Materialist feminists reveal how the style and substance of classical and realist
drama can work to stifle radicalism and maintain the dominant ideology. For liberal
feminists, on the other hand, these familiar forms are useful in increasing the visibility
of women playwrights and practitioners, as well as creating more central roles for
actresses (Dolan, Spectator 4). However, for theorists such as Dolan, this leads to a
situation in which feminine forms of representation simply mirror oppressive male
models, occupy the same forums and target an ideal (white, middleclass) viewer.
Drawing on films studies, Dolan takes issue with the objectified position of women
characters geared towards a male spectator’s gaze.23 From this perspective, traditional
theatre (typically experienced in a darkened auditorium from which we see clearly
only the illuminated action taking place on a proscenium stage) invites us to become
utterly absorbed in the story. Usually, we identify with and imaginatively enter into
the subjectivity of a male protagonist, gaze—through his eyes—upon objectified
female bodies, experience his cumulative trials, feel his pain and disillusionment at
the climax, are relieved when this chaos is over and acceptant when order is restored.
Like Cixous, Dolan contends that such prominent narrative structures make female
spectators allies in the on-stage commodification of the female body (Spectator 13).
Case argues that the focus of realism on the patriarchal family and the domestic
sphere reinforces the idea of man as subject and woman as object or Other: ‘The
portrayal of female characters within the family unit—with their confinement to the
domestic setting, their dependence on the husband, their often defeatist, determinist
view of the opportunities for change—makes realism a “prisonhouse of art” for
women’ (Feminism and Theatre 124). Here, Case is referring both to how women are
represented in the genre and the limited roles that it offers to actresses. Case also
develops a convincing treatise regarding the sexist and classist elements of Athenian,
Roman and Elizabethan classics (Feminism and Theatre 1-27). Janelle Reinelt,
another outspoken critic of typically masculine theatre forms, asks whether material
could be ‘presented in traditional realistic terms and make any kind of feminist
statement;’ she goes on to voice her scepticism about realism’s political potential
(‘The Politics of Form’ 96). Like Belsey, Reinelt challenges realism’s ideological
23
Laura Mulvey explores these ideas and the notion of the male gaze in the discipline of film studies in
her seminal 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In The Feminist Spectator as Critic,
Dolan draws on Mulvey and other film scholars including Teresa de Lauretis (Alice Doesn’t 103-149)
and E. Ann Kaplan (Women & Film: Both Sides of the Camera 23-35). For more on how traditional
theatre is aimed at and helps to maintain an ideal spectator (who is white, middleclass and male) and
alienate the female audience member, see Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1-18).
32
frame, which after temporary upheaval, reinstates the order of the Father. Meanwhile,
in works such as ‘Mimesis, Mimicry and the “True-Real,”’ Elin Diamond objects to
theatre that perpetuates a limiting and static illusion of singular, coherent identities.24
The quest for a feminist theatre practice has been characterised by an effort to
usurp commercial, hierarchical paradigms. Dolan has, until recently, been resistant to
traditionally-styled, woman-authored plays that take the liberal humanist stance which
allows them to be co-opted into the capitalist, exclusionary, male-biased institution.25
‘Universal’ artistic ideals have been historically considered in awarding prizes such as
the Pulitzer. The same principles have been used ‘to render women invisible in
traditional theatre, its history and the formation of the canon’ (Case, ‘Personal’ 4).
Hence Dolan, at this stage, lauded the value of the margins as a dynamic space for the
making of socially-conscious, politically-aware theatre. In a review for Theatre
Journal (1990) and later in Presence and Desire: Gender, Sexuality and Performance
(1993), she praises an unpublished, fringe work called Winnetou’s Snake-Oil Show
from Wigwam City (49-64). Dolan uses her analysis of the play to exemplify how
‘those marginalised by the dominant culture are still filled with rage that might
productively be channelled into reinvigorated activism’ (50). The members of
Spiderwoman Theatre collaborated to write Winnetou and performed it together in
October 1989 at At the Foot of the Mountain, Minneapolis (Presence and Desire 68).
Women’s theatre troupes that emerged in Britain and America during the 1970s had
countered the tiered, commercial model of mainstream theatre companies by
collectively devising work and adopting a leaderless, democratic organisational
structure.26 This method was later revised to enable members to hone their individual
24
Diamond collates and expands upon her various essays about feminism and representation in theatre
in Unmaking Mimesis (1997).
25
Scholars such as Dolan have sought out the political faults of realist, woman-authored plays that
have achieved mainstream success and inclusion in the dominant canon such as Marsha Norman’s
’night Mother (1983) and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989). In The Feminist
Spectator as Critic (1988), Dolan convincingly argues that Norman’s aims for neutrality in terms of
class, region, intellect and political affiliations are part of an assimilationist strategy that panders to the
universalism of the dominant canon (25). Building on Dolan’s ideas, Jeanie Forte notes that ’night
Mother depicts Jessie’s suicide as personal failure or perhaps even heroism; she claims that, by
instating a temporary crisis then restoring order ‘the play ultimately re-inscribes the dominant ideology
in its realist form’ (117). In 1993, Dolan interrogated Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles in Presence
and Desire: Gender, Sexuality, Performance (13-54). She was one of a number of critics to take issue
with its passive heroine, its humanist approach and the mainstream (Broadway) context of its
production, concluding that the work undermined rather than supported the feminist movement. Both
plays have also won Pulitzer prizes.
26
For more on the structure and management of women’s theatre groups, as well as various academic
endeavours to theorise their practices, see Aston’s An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (58-62).
33
strengths and to allow for the commissioning of writers, but feminist theatre practice
continued to be characterised by ‘the spirit of co-operation and collaboration’ (Aston,
An Introduction 62). For these feminist groups, this attitude was preferable to the
stratified management which prevailed in commercial theatre.27 We will later explore
how the 1989 production of Carr’s Low in the Dark exemplifies the use of
collaboration on the fringes of the Irish commercial theatre institution.
American academics such as Reinelt and Dolan conceived traditional,
mainstream theatre forms as instrumental in the service of dominant, oppressive
ideologies. Since such styles tend to naturalise events on stage, these feminists sought
out unconventional approaches which revealed or exploded the representational
apparatus. For example, Dolan approves of Winnetou’s alternative form which makes
use of expressionism, narration and miming and in which the ‘seams’ are showing
(Presence 60). She applauds the play’s ‘moments of energetic, erratic slapstick
parody […] interspersed with more expressionistic or ritualised moments of American
Indian storytelling’ (Presence 62). Moreover, she identifies a use of Brechtian
techniques which, she believes, stimulate political enquiry (64). Dolan, Reinelt and
Diamond all suggest ways in which the appropriation of Brechtian methods such as
alienation effects, self-conscious devices and episodic structures might be useful for
feminism.28 Dolan and Diamond have also commended aspects of l’écriture feminine.
Diamond embraces the concept of sexual difference in ‘Mimesis, Mimicry and the
“True Real,”’ drawing heavily on Irigaray and Kristeva. Dolan explores how the
theory and dramaturgy of Cixous might be useful from a materialist perspective
(Spectator 101-106). As Aston aptly points out, the voice Cixous speaks of emerges
from a pre-Oedipal space before gender roles—or any kind of symbolic labels—were
imposed (An Introduction 47). This can be linked productively to the materialist
For a discussion of women’s collaborative approaches in Irish theatre, see Anna McMullan’s
‘Gender, Authorship and Performance.’ Resurrecting plays by women that have involved collaboration,
including Carr’s Low in the Dark, McMullan sees the Irish canon’s focus on individual (male) authors
as a contributing factor in women’s exclusion.
28
See, for example, Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic (106-114) and Diamond’s 1988 essay
‘Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism.’ Reinelt has engaged in
significant research on the influence of Brecht in British theatre, collated in her 1996 monograph After
Brecht: British Epic Theater. For an earlier example, see her 1986 essay ‘Beyond Brecht: Britain’s
New Feminist Drama.’ In 1994, she argued in favour of ‘a hybrid feminist style which combines
features of both traditions, epic and realist’ in ‘A Feminist Reconsideration of Brecht/Lukács Debates’
(123).
27
34
evasion of identity categorisations and the associated poststructuralist ‘undoing’ of
gender.29
Finding the conventions of realism and tragedy too limiting and conservative,
these feminist theorists looked towards the avant-garde, as well as the experimental
dramas of critically acclaimed playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy and Caryl
Churchill, for socially conscious, political theatre.30 However, their propositions
regarding the adoption of Brechtian methods and some aspects of l’écriture feminine,
as well as the politicised revelation of representational strategies and gender
constructions, are equally applicable to the theatrical works of Parks and Carr. The
early works of these playwrights in particular demonstrate aspirations towards a
ground-breaking dramaturgy that departs from prominent theatre traditions. As the
ensuing analysis reveals, the plays resist easy assimilation into mainstream forums.
These works were created and performed on the margins; feminists such as Cixous
and Dolan have placed value on this position as it marks an artist’s resistance to the
oppressive, mainstream institution and allows her work to be unmitigated by its
influence.31 Parks and Carr created provocative theatre of immense political potential
working on the margins of commercial theatre, which testifies to the fecundity of that
space. Yet, critical responses, combined with the dramatists’ ensuing appropriations
of mainstream styles and subsequent assimilations into the commercial institution,
have helped to maintain the peripheral status of their earlier dramas. This contributes
to depriving these works of the re-stagings, as well as increased critical and academic
attention, that they surely deserve.
Here, I am evoking to the title of Judith Butler’s recent monograph Undoing Gender (2004).
See, for example, Diamond’s ‘Refusing the Romanticism of Identity: Narrative Interventions in
Churchill, Benmussa, Duras’ (1985) and her ‘Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht’
(1993). Also see Jeanie Forte’s ‘Kennedy’s Body Politic: The Mulatta, Menses, and the Medusa’
(1992). In ‘Realism, Narrative and the Feminist Playwright—A Problem of Reception’ (1989), Forte
explores how Kennedy’s The Owl Answers satisfies the quest for a feminist aesthetic. However, she
suggests that the play’s unique form makes it seem difficult to engage with, which may offer some
explanation for the fact that the play is very rarely produced. Reinelt examines Churchill’s work in the
context of Brecht’s influence in Chapter 3 of After Brecht, ‘Caryl Churchill: Socialist Feminism and
Brechtian Dramaturgy’ (81-108).
31
Dolan has revised some of these views. Although she once dismissed commercially successful,
realist works as much for their links to capitalism as their style and content, she now admits that these
plays may have ‘helped, rather than hindered, feminist progress’ (‘The Popular’ 434).
29
30
35
Writing from the Margins
In her early plays, Carr distorts narrative conventions and the apparently illogical
prevails. Performed only in smaller venues such as Dublin’s Project Arts Centre and
Belfast’s Old Museum Arts Centre (OMAC), works such as Low in the Dark (1989),
The Deer’s Surrender (1990) and This Love Thing (1991) can be seen to epitomise the
marginal dramaturgy sought out by materialist feminists and proponents of l’écriture
feminine. Carr wrote the four plays that showcase her early style during the period in
which she finished her degree in English and Philosophy at University College
Dublin, taught and wrote for a year in New York, and commenced postgraduate
studies on Samuel Beckett at Trinity College Dublin.
The first of the four to be staged was Low in the Dark at the Project Arts
Centre, Dublin in 1989. A new theatre company seeking to break with traditional
dramatic structures, Crooked Sixpence, produced the piece. Sarahjane Scaife, who
played Binder in that production, tells us of the collaboration that imbued this work’s
inception; Carr wrote sections at a time, and the actors were also free to improvise (56). Rehearsals took place in a cold, damp ‘glorified warehouse’ that was littered with
rubbish and had little room to move (Scaife 1). During the eighties, funding for
theatre in Ireland was scarce. Like many others of its kind, this project was not very
profitable: in total, each member of the team received only about £30 (Scaife 3). The
fact that the work was created and performed on the margins of commerce, as well as
the non-conformist, liberal and collaborative approach of the Project Arts Centre, Carr
and Crooked Sixpence, makes it significant in terms of the concurrent materialist
feminist discourse. Compared to more popular and profitable plays, this work was
resistant to organisational hierarchies and capitalism’s grasp. Moreover, the context of
its production, its innovative form and its unique use of language satisfy Cixous’s
conception of a feminine aesthetic that emerges from the margins.
Low in the Dark can also be viewed as significant in the context of Cixous’
work and materialist feminist thought of the late 1980s and early 1990s in that it
simultaneously espouses and confuses gender difference. It stages the actions of two
women, Bender and Binder, and two men Baxter and Bone. Another character,
Curtains, is referred to as a ‘she,’ but we never see the actress. She is entirely covered
by a pair of curtains throughout the play, metatheatrically evoking the appearance of a
36
stage before a show begins.32 The characters enact stereotypically male and female
desires and concerns: Binder and Bender obsess about love and child-bearing, while
Baxter and Bone try in vain to understand women and to find girlfriends. Yet, while
this play even demands a set that is divided into a male space and a female space,
characters regularly role-play as the opposite sex and all, except Curtains, become
pregnant. With its immature and competitive characters, the drama imbues the
mundane with a sense of the ridiculous. Much of the action and dialogue centres on
the female ‘roles’ reproducing and knitting a seemingly endless scarf, and the male
‘roles’ building a wall that should be ‘higher than everyone else’s’ (16). Role-playing
fractures gender difference and stable characterisation, with performers rapidly
switching between various personas.
Introducing Carr’s interest in storytelling, the characters relay long disjointed
tales throughout, which overlap and interrupt each other. So, in addition to shattering
the coherent character, Low in the Dark can be elucidated by Irigaray’s view of
woman-speech, which Josette Féral tells us ‘interrupts itself for no reason, only to
continue further on, different and always the same’ (558). The main raconteur is
Curtains. Fragments of her narrative about a woman from the south and a man from
the north punctuate the piece. Scaife tells us that the Beckettian restriction of the
costume, which prevented the actress using her body, allowed Bríd Mhic Fhearraí
(playing Curtains in the original production) to find ‘a new freedom for her voice,
which was probably the idea’ (15).
Low in the Dark is stylistically and structurally innovative. The play usurps
petrified conceptions of gender and dominant narrative conventions. Low in the Dark
is composed of the absurd role-plays discussed above; these are punctuated by
Curtain’s long, unwieldy and—at times—collaborative tale.33 Hence, Carr evades
features such as chronological plots and closure which have for centuries dominated
the western theatre institution. As we have seen, the roles that the characters in Low in
the Dark play could be described as male and female stereotypes. Striking stage
images are promoted through a use of gendered signifiers, such as a hat and tails or
lipstick. Yet, Carr evokes reductive conceptions of gender, only to undermine them
Incidentally, this image of the stage within a stage resembles Beckett’s Endgame (1957), particularly
when Clov looks through both of the set’s (curtained) windows. Carr’s interest in Beckett is manifest in
her early theatre.
33
McMullan compares Low in the Dark to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). She aptly links Carr’s
role-plays to Estragon and Vladimir’s ‘canters,’ as well the vaudeville comedy and music hall
traditions which inspired these moments of Beckett’s play (‘Gender’ 42).
32
37
through her subversive use of metatheatre. As Anna McMullan argues in her essay
‘Gender, Authorship and Performance,’ these ‘self-conscious performances of gender
identity question any kind of gender essentialism, and comically frame our
expectations of gender roles and differences’ (42). While McMullan is referring here
on the play’s cross-gender performances, her statement could equally be applied to
the moments in which characters enact their own genders; these performances, too,
are strikingly self-conscious.34 Ultimately, Low in the Dark exposes gender as ‘a
disguise, a set of effects’ (Solomon, Re-Dressing 7). With its arresting visual imagery,
absurd situations and non-sequential script, this avant-garde piece eschewed
mainstream conventions and promoted gender-conscious enquiry at a time when the
Irish theatre institution was conservative and mostly run by men. Writing for Theatre
Ireland in 1989, Victoria White complains that, despite the prevalence of female
representation in Irish drama, ‘women are still seriously under-represented in the
theatre decision-making process’ (‘Towards Post-Feminism’ 33).35
Although it is replete with feminist meanings, Carr’s next play The Deer’s
Surrender has received even less critical and scholarly attention than the rest of the
dramatist’s early theatre, so I will discuss it in some detail. In 1990, it was produced
by and for the Gaiety School of Acting at Andrew’s Lane, Dublin. Andrew’s Lane
was a colourful, graffiti-covered venue, tucked away just off Dame Street. Its theatre
studio seated less than eighty viewers and was geared towards experimental shows.
The Deer’s Surrender is a suitably innovative piece. The manuscript (held at the
National Library of Ireland) is composed of a series of absurd, loosely related
vignettes, many of which feminise or satirise biblical stories and religious rituals. The
action opens with the entrance of six chorus members who disperse themselves
randomly around the stage. These figures are simply named ‘1 chor’, ‘2 chor’ etc. The
speakers communicate as one, each taking turns to contribute various fragments of an
initially confusing ‘once upon a time’ tale:
34
Chapter 5 expands on the ideas discussed here by focusing in much more detail on the political
potential of metatheatre, striking stage imagery and the use of gendered cultural significations such as
clothing in Carr’s Low in the Dark. Chapter 5 offers an extensive analysis of the disruptive potential of
clothing and costume in Carr’s and Park’s respective oeuvres.
35
White also edited the Winter edition of Theatre Ireland in 1993, a special issue focusing on the
difficulties faced by women involved in Irish theatre from creative as well as organisational
perspectives. Riana O’Dwyer summarises critical responses to the under-representation of women in
Irish theatre in her essay, ‘The Imagination of Women’s Reality: Christina Reid and Marina Carr’
(237-8). Margaret Llewellyn-Jones also addresses such issues in her monograph Contemporary Irish
Drama & Cultural Identity, as well as discussing the exceptional achievements of directors such as
Garry Hynes and Lynn Parker (70-72).
38
1 chor: Once upon a time there was a time
2 chor: And before that time there was a time before that
3 chor: Called one time which was nearly the time we want to talk about.
4 chor: But after that time called one time, there was a time beyond that
5 chor: which was before once upon a time and after one time,
Immediately, this dialogue evokes Kristeva’s notion of ‘Women’s Time,’ as
expressed in the essay of the same name. In the treatise, Kristeva maintains that,
‘female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains
repetition and eternity from the multiple modalities of time known through the history
of civilisations’ (34). It is difficult to locate The Deer’s Surrender’s first tale within
any specific time. However, the opening line, ‘once upon a time there was a time,’
suggests a kind of concentric, cyclical temporality in which one time exists within
another. While this is then disordered by words that suggest linearity such as ‘before,’
‘after’ and ‘nearly,’ the phrase ‘a time beyond’ conjures Kristeva’s notion of
monumental time.
The tale that the chorus tells us turns out to be a bizarre version of the story of
creation which, like the work of Cixous, links female creativity to the body and
maternity. According to Moi, Cixous’ ultimate aim is ‘to proclaim woman as the
source of life, power and energy and to hail the advent of a new feminine language’
(105). While Carr’s celebration of femininity is satirical in its hyperbole, she reveals
the role of the Bible in women’s marginalisation. In the account, God orders the
specimen (Adam, presumably) to cook him something. His obedient subject puts
some ribs in the oven, which then explodes and ‘the most despicable creature ever
seen’ emerges from the ashes, introducing herself as ‘woman.’ The specimen accuses
her of ruining everything as it was supposed to be just him and God. Woman shrugs
this off, applying her lipstick and asking what they can do about it now that she exists.
Before either man or God have a chance to reply, she has a ‘girl baby’ on top of the
oven:
4 Chor: How did you learn to do that, god asked.
5 chor: He was jealous.
6 chor: I don’t know the woman replied and had twins.
3 chor: You’re out of control God yelled. I won’t stand for this. I’m the one
who creates around here.
39
2 chor: And after God, I’m the next creator the man sulked. You’ve no
business doing this in front of our very eyes.
Here, creation and procreation become metaphors for the creative endeavour that is
writing. God created man, whose job it was to design and create art, among other
things. Carr is satirising the idea of ‘God as father’ and obliquely deriding the notion
of the author as the ‘father’ of a literary text. She exposes the bible’s complicity in the
construction of male privilege and subverts female suppression by amplifying
women’s creative power. That the woman is reproducing alone, without the man’s
‘contribution,’ relates to the quest for a new, feminine creativity beyond male
influence and interference. To this extent, Cixous’ concept of writing the body is also
applicable.
Both in terms of style and subject, The Deer’s Surrender evokes women’s
marginality and the quest for a female literary form. Like Low in the Dark, narratives
are picked up and dropped throughout this work, interrupted by somewhat
incongruous scenes. These inconsistencies and interruptions frustrate the viewer’s
urge to place scenarios and story fragments in a coherent order. The disjointed form
of The Deer’s Surrender circumvents the logical progression of dominant narrative
structures such as classic realism. Hence it is, in Belsey’s terms, an interrogative text;
the strange, dreamlike content also expresses the associated desire for the Imaginary.
Moreover, the dialogue explores ideas about female difference and marginality. After
her apparently asexual reproductions, Woman (the figure representing Eve)
announces that she has postnatal depression, falls asleep on the oven and has triplets
as she sleeps. 4 Chor tells us: ‘God was in an awful state. Suddenly the world had
gone mad. He couldn’t fit the woman into his logical, rational principles. He couldn’t
classify her as human.’ This seems to echo the urge to categorise and regulate, to
repress fluidity and plurality, which is associated with Lacan’s Symbolic Order. As
God and Man discuss what to do with woman, God suggests that, for the moment,
they will have to ‘keep her down.’ This implies that men’s fear and incomprehension
of women contributed to women’s historical oppression. The notion that women’s
experiences are beyond phallocentric logic is part of what motivated theorists such as
Cixous, Dolan and Diamond to find and celebrate a feminist aesthetic, emerging from
the margins.
40
Cixous’ Portrait of Dora (1976) has merited much feminist discussion. This is
partly because it reveals and reverses male-bias and female objectification in
psychoanalysis by reconstructing and distorting Freud’s 1901 case study of a female
patient named Ida Bauer, whom he diagnosed with hysteria. In a similar vein, Carr’s
The Deer’s Surrender exposes and ridicules the patriarchal biases in Catholicism. The
work is loaded with satires and feminisations of masculine religious images. Three
female figures, Alpha, Omega and Gamma, appear on bright pink crosses: one is
upside down, another is at an angle. Jesus and the Blessed Virgin are also
characterised in this work and they bicker comically throughout. A priest appears in a
wedding dress, effeminately seeking admiration from Jesus. The figure of Jesus is
another source of humour, becoming progressively more petulant and childlike. As
the priest prepares to give a sermon ‘for the women’ who are ‘getting out of hand,’
Jesus claims: ‘It’s all Mammy’s fault. She’s sending out bad vibes to them, vibes
against you and me and Daddy.’ Later in the play, the adult Jesus asks his mother for
money for ice-cream and she warns him to mind himself crossing the street. The
religious aspect of the play culminates in the establishment of a new, matriarchal faith
in which female figures worship the Blessed Virgin, or the Great Mother, as she
wishes to be called. There is even a ceremony in which a priestess (FP) leads the
prayers to the Great Mother:
FP: Great mother open everything
All: Everything is open
FP: Bless the womb.
All: The womb is blessed.
FP: Bless the womb within the womb
All: And the womb within that womb.
Kristeva’s notion of cyclical time is again applicable here. The womb within the
womb makes life itself concentric rather than linear. The scene is also reminiscent of
radical approaches about women’s counter-culture in some cultural feminist
discourse.36 By reimagining the ritual of mass, Carr is ‘deliberately and productively
36
Case provides a useful discussion of radical/cultural feminism in her Feminism and Theatre (64-69).
Dolan argues that cultural feminist performance artists use nudity to accomplish l’écriture feminine’s
goal of writing the body (Feminist Spectator 83). Case establishes important links between Cixous’
writing and what she calls radical feminism (Feminism and Theatre 128). But she considers Cixous and
Irigaray as part of her chapter entitled ‘Towards a New Poetic’ rather than in her chapter on radical
feminism. As we have seen, Dolan and Aston point out the materialist value of Cixous’ theories.
41
parasitic on patriarchal mimesis’—an approach that Diamond detects in Irigaray’s
work (‘Mimesis/Mimicry’ 67).
Many of the vignettes in The Deer’s Surrender have the effect of exploding
the unified subject, which is valuable from the feminist perspectives that dominated
academic critical thinking in the 1980s and 1990s. This is exemplified in the opening,
in which the chorus members each add different portions to a bizarre, unwieldy tale.
Immediately, this has the effect of fragmenting unified subjectivity in ways that are
illuminated by Irigaray’s feminist discourse: the multifarious voices lead to a
narrative that is plural and unfixed. The contributions sometimes seem incongruent
and random, as if the story is being collectively created on the spot. Like others in The
Deer’s Surrender and in Low in the Dark, this narrative seems to be ‘constantly in the
process of weaving itself’ (Irigarary, Not One 103). Another example of The Deer’s
Surrender’s fluid identities is evident in the scene in which the crucified characters,
Alpha, Omega and Gamma discuss dreams. Alpha tells the others about her wonderful
dream, but Gamma—having listened to the dream—claims that it was boring. As the
figures continue to discuss each other’s dreams, it becomes clear that they can ‘tune
in’ on each other. They berate Alpha for her dirty dreams. They laugh at Gamma’s,
and she comically defends herself by stating: ‘Laugh away, but let me tell you there
are many dimensions to me. I exist on many levels, all of them above the likes of
you.’ As well as offering ample humour, these characters are porous and penetrable.
Carr shatters the illusion of the coherent character that Diamond (who draws on
Irigaray) sees as perpetuated by realism. Moreover, celebrating rather than repressing
the split subject also qualifies this work as, to draw again on Belsey, an ‘interrogative
text.’ From this perspective, the play liberates the repressed desire for the Imaginary.
This Love Thing was co-produced by Tinderbox and Pigsback at Belfast’s
OMAC in 1991. At the time, OMAC—an intimate, fringe venue—had only been
established a year. Both Tinderbox and Pigsback were set up in 1988 and both were
dedicated to new and innovative writing. Tinderbox has since been quite successful in
organising outreach programmes, supporting new dramatists and touring shows to
London, Edinburgh and Washington D.C. One of its key aims is to attract a wider
audience for new theatre. Ironically, however, Carr’s This Love Thing remains
relatively unknown, and—since it is not even in print—it is unlikely to attract much
scholarship or to reach any viewers beyond those who attended during its initial run.
The manuscript itself is difficult to find. A copy was once housed at the Linen Hall
42
Library in Belfast, but this script is no longer available. An un-catalogued,
handwritten version is kept in storage by the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. The
following discussion is based on that version.
This Love Thing delves more complexly into the themes of art, marginality
and ritual that Carr explores in The Deer’s Surrender. It begins with the entrance of
Jesus, followed by three wise fools and Leonardo, Michelangelo and Love Doctor.
Jesus begins a sermon which seems to function almost as a retort to the ceremony
scene in The Deer’s Surrender. He laments women’s wisdom and power, and longs
for the days when ‘men were men and women were nothing.’ The three wise fools
reply: ‘Halleluiah. Praise the lord!’ Jesus elaborates: ‘Women are rapists—they want
to desecrate and defile all that we have struggled for, they want to beat us into the
ground.’ The idea of women ‘defiling’ men’s property seems pertinent to the position
of women writers such as Carr, who, in this work and other early plays, seeks to
shatter patriarchal narrative structures; the dramatist has continued to plunder and
revision revered male-authored representations.37 Jesus’ chauvinistic tirade continues,
culminating in a dismissal of women as vile, subhuman forms of life. Again, Carr
uses bizarre scenarios and overblown dialogue to elucidate the male-bias of
Christianity, along with religious and historical misogyny. The Irish Playography
database describes This Love Thing as ‘a lighthearted analysis of love.’ Yet, placing
such provocative words in the mouth of Jesus in a work staged in Belfast of the early
1990s was a radical act. Ireland, at the time, was less secular than it is today and
religion was ingrained in Northern Ireland’s political conflict. With divorce still
illegal in the Republic, love itself was partially governed by religion.
This Love Thing can be analysed from a materialist perspective due to its
Brechtian elements and its exposure of the construction of ‘woman.’ The play brings
to life figures from well-known artefacts, including Mary and Jesus from
Michelangelo’s Pietà, Mona (of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa) and Eve from the Bible. Since
the Renaissance artists themselves also appear on stage, the play becomes selfreferential. Personifying the works of art and resurrecting the artists self-reflexively
points to the play itself (as another piece of art) and obliquely evokes its author. Apart
from Jesus, the ‘creations’ are all women: Mary, Mona and Eve. So, This Love Thing
characterises male authors (fathers, Gods, creators) and representations of women
37
Chapter 3 focuses in more detail on Carr’s later re-imagining of male-authored, canonical literature.
43
created by and for men or, as Case would have it, ‘masks of patriarchal production’
(Feminism and Theatre 7).38 These elements of This Love Thing function to expose
the artifice of artistic and religious representations of women and to reveal the
historical construction of woman as a product of patriarchy. Bringing these women to
life might be viewed as a corrective strategy, imbuing female ‘objects’ with the
subjectivity that women have been denied in history and art. However, Carr’s
approach is more complex. This Love Thing’s dialogue reveals Carr’s continued
interest in Beckettian restriction (which she also expresses through her use of the
curtain-rail costume in Low in the Dark) as it appears that Mary’s movements are
limited by her stand and Mona’s, by her frame. The characters converse about these
impediments and show an absurd awareness of their status as art. By allowing them to
speak for themselves, Carr loosens the shackles of female objectification, but she does
not entirely free these women from representation’s frame. This makes a political
point about the on-going struggle for female liberation, and can be read as a reflection
of how patriarchal woman-constructs, such as the biblical Eve and Mary, continue to
restrict real women.39
Mary, Mona and Eve are not psychological characters but figures. The
frivolity and egotism of their dialogue inhibits the audience’s emotional involvement.
When Mary asks how her stand looks, Mona ignores her and asks about how the
landscape behind her looks, turning to examine it herself. Mary, not looking,
examining behind her own shoulder, replies: ‘It’s beautiful. I wish I had a landscape
to lean on. It’s tough sitting up all the time with a grown son draped across your lap.’
These characters seem unable to engage with each other, making it equally difficult
for viewers to relate. Moreover, the figures’ obsession with their appearances shows
how they have internalised a female stereotype; they are now complicit in their own
objectification. The disengagement, superficiality and self-interest of these roles
prevents audience members from empathising, forcing them instead to stand at a
In Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Teresa de Lauretis develops a theory concerning
how patriarchal culture invents and represents fictional conceptions of women. This, she believes, is
allied in the process of supressing real women. Her ‘Introduction’ to the book succinctly expresses
some of these ideas (1-11). Case productively applies some of de Lauretis’s concepts to theatre,
arguing that the texts and practices of Greek, Roman and Elizabethan theatre both literally and
metaphorically replace real women with ‘masks of patriarchal production’ (Feminism and Theatre 7).
39
Chapter 2 analyses Carr’s and Parks’s revelations of how stagnant conceptions of femininity—and in
particular maternity—circumscribe real women’s lives and identities. In their introduction to
Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home, and the Body (2006),
Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer examine the stifling influence of idealistic maternal images such as
artists’ renderings of the Madonna and Child (1-11).
38
44
critical distance. Such distancing strategies, and the work’s self-reflexivity, intensify
This Love Thing’s political efficacy. Hence, the play exemplifies the feminist
potential of Brechtian techniques which scholars such as Diamond, Reinelt and Dolan
have lauded.
Ullaloo was also staged in 1991, although Carr wrote it four years earlier. At
this point, Carr appeared to be creeping out of the margins as this play was performed
at the Peacock—a studio theatre which is part of the Abbey and located beneath its
main foyer. The two-hander depicts the stale relationship between a man called
Tomred and a woman called Tilly. The pair exists in a purgatorial space in which
meaningless phrases echo and what little activity there is appears futile and selfdefeating. From a feminist perspective, the pair’s repetitious routine reveals the
construction of their roles and eschews conventional narrative progression. Moreover,
their environment’s liminality and the obscureness of their expression help to locate
the content within the Lacanian Imaginary. Images of restriction and stagnancy
surface again here, as Tilly refuses to get out of bed and arguments about mundane,
elusive subjects continually resurface. Early in the play, Tilly taunts Tomred with an
accusation which she repeats, almost singing so that it becomes a refrain: ‘If you said
what you should have said, it might have made all the difference’ (2-3). We never
find out what was said, and Tomred goes on to mimic Tilly:
‘If you said what you should have said it would have made all the difference.’
If you didn’t say what you said it mightn’t have made any difference. But
since you didn’t say what you should have said and what you said was what
you shouldn’t say there was no difference! (To Her) Lunatic! (5.)
While it sounds ridiculous, this is recognisable as a typical couple’s quarrel.
Resonating like a riddle, it reveals the often inane tautology of such arguments.
Although the dialogue alludes to a once vibrant love affair, these characters now find
it difficult to engage with each other, and both regularly resort to conversing with
Tomred’s toes.
Through an absurd depiction of Tilly and Tomred’s existence, Ullaloo
explores survival anxiety. Mostly, when these characters are not bickering, they are
disconnected and self-absorbed. However, they do have in common an urge to
transcend death—albeit in different ways. Tilly attempts to achieve this through
physical self-preservation, while Tomred wishes to be recorded in history for the
45
length of his toenails. He archives their progression and even photographs them. For
him, this is a route to immortality (12). Excited about some growth, he announces,
‘Tilly, our names’ll go down in history, you and me together’. Tilly responds, ‘That’s
what you said the last time and they broke’ (11). As in Low in the Dark, mundane
activities are exaggerated to the point of bizarreness. Throughout the production
Tomred watches his toenails grow, cheering on his big toe: the Champ. Tilly is
engaged with ‘sparing’ her bodily resources—saving her voice by using shortened
words and refusing to finish sentences, her eyes by closing them, her lungs by not
breathing—presumably in an endeavour to prolong her life. One wonders why she
would want to continue such a painstaking, tedious existence. Yet, Tilly’s action, or
more accurately, her inaction, functions in a similar way to the self-objectification of
Mona, Mary and Eve in This Love Thing. Tilly’s attempts to sustain herself by closing
her eyes and refusing to speak paradoxically point to women as allies in the historical
stifling of female subjectivity and voice.
Carr’s interest in ritual is also evident in Ullaloo. However, instead of religion,
she focuses here on gendered routines. The opening stage directions set the scene for
this:
Tomred is busy with his ritual: Measuring, recording, rubbing cream into his
toenails, checking time. He stops, looks at Tilly, begins again the same
fastidious process of measuring, recording, rubbing cream and checking time
[…] Tilly is surrounded by her possessions, folding and unfolding her red ball
gown […] (1.)
While the scenario is absurd, it points to the ritualised nature of human behaviour.
The emphasis on repetition calls to mind Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. For
her, gender is constituted through repeated actions; it is ‘not a singular act, but a
repetition and a ritual’ (‘Preface’ xv). In this context, Tilly’s red dress and her
repetitive action of folding evoke the construction of her gender. Later in the play, a
connection between Tomred’s toenails and his manhood becomes apparent when he
childishly complains that he wants the nails to be longer than ‘his’ (26). While we
never learn who ‘he’ is, we can infer from the tone that ‘he’ must have been a threat
to Tomred’s relationship with Tilly: a former lover or alternative suitor. Tomred is in
competition with this other man and the toenails take on the function of an unusual
phallic symbol.
46
There is humour in this work’s treatment of ritual, but also pathos. Unlike Low
in the Dark, This Love Thing and The Deer’s Surrender, in this play there are
moments in which we can truly sympathise with these characters—even as love itself
is revealed to be little more than a habit or custom. One such moment concerns Tilly
and Tomred grasping at the elusive memory of some transient yet significant
experience that they shared in the past. At first, they argue over whether they did ‘it’
or not. Then, appearing to acquiesce that, whatever it was, it definitely happened, their
voices become softer:
Tilly: That was the last time.
Tomred: That was the first time.
Tilly: Tomred.
Tomred: Yeah.
Tilly: That was a time. (14.)
Another quarrel ensues, after which Tomred puts on a black and white home movie
depicting various romantic scenes between a man and a woman. The woman’s
appearance is described as attractive ‘40s/50s style’ and we can assume that the tape
is composed of recordings of Tilly and Tomred’s younger, happier years. Eventually
another man intrudes on the tape. Perhaps this is Tomred’s competitor. Yet, the ways
in which these scenes evoke happier times are significant. As well as offering some
explanation for why Tilly wishes to live on, these scenes show that a ritualised return
to a reserve of happy memories contributes to the construction and maintenance of
romantic unions—in this case, long after the pair have grown apart. It offers a bleak
dramatization of a couple trying in vain to regain their ‘spark’ when both partners
have been lost to introspection, compulsion, self-preservation and anxiety about
death.
Carr’s Ullaloo bears striking resemblance to one of Parks’s early plays:
Betting on the Dust Commander (1987). Parks’s play is also a two-hander that centres
on a heterosexual relationship and it contains even more powerful senses of the
cyclical and the stagnant. Like Ulalloo, it utilises repetition, routine and
representations (such as photographs and plastic flowers) to expose the performativity
of gender and of romantic partnerships.40 Its characters, Lucius and Mare, are also
concerned with endurance and anxiety about death. Parks conjures these allied themes
40
This aspect of the play is discussed at length in Chapter 4.
47
by juxtaposing images of permanence and transience throughout the play. Like Tilly,
Mare’s desire for survival is linked to the body. Rather than preserving her own body,
though, Mare wishes to have children who will allow at least part of herself to live on.
Carr uses Tilly point to women’s contribution to the suppression of female, but
Parks’s Mare poignantly conveys an unfulfilled feminine urge to procreate. This
sentimentalised broodiness might seem reductive but it is denaturalised by the play’s
focus on habit and custom, and its revelation of gender performativity.
Betting on the Dust Commander also uses mixed-media: the play opens with a
slide-show of the couple’s wedding day, accompanied by the disembodied voices of
Lucius and Mare. This helps to promote a purgatorial feeling similar to Ullaloo but
even more intense. The slide-show scene is repeated at the end, along with the same
conversation coming from somewhere off-stage. This adds to an impression that these
characters are ghosts, trapped in a kind of limbo. Framed by identical slide-shows, the
dialogue that the actors deliver on stage is also repeated twice, verbatim. This
constructs the onstage action as the couple’s infinitely repeatable memories, which
they are forced to continually relive on whatever plane of existence they now occupy.
Repetition penetrates this work’s structure as well as its substance.
Betting on the Dust Commander exemplifies Parks’s distinctive dramaturgy as
discussed in her 1994 essay ‘From Elements of Style.’ The techniques she espouses at
this point in her career diverge from the tragic and realist conventions she would later
adopt and, hence, satisfy the feminist quest for a more politicised form. Two of the
essay’s subheadings, ‘Repetition and Revision’ and ‘Time’, conjure Kristeva’s notion
of repetitious time which entails ‘cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a
biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature’ (34). In ‘Time’, Parks proposes
that, while it might look linear and horizontal from our limited perspective, ‘time has
a circular shape’ (10). In ‘Repetition and Revision’, she discusses her appropriation of
the jazz aesthetic to give her dramaturgy a more cyclical, repetitious structure.
Through its use, she hopes to ‘create a dramatic text that departs from the traditional
linear narrative style to look more like a musical score’ (9). The practice, which she
refers to as ‘Rep and Rev,’ encompasses both repetition and revision, so that when a
scenario is reused, it is slightly altered. The structure of Betting on the Dust
Commander epitomises these concepts in that it ends where it begins: with a slideshow depicting images of Lucius and Mare on their wedding day, accompanied by
identical dialogue. Temporally, the play’s shape is round: it comes full circle,
48
bringing its audience back to the beginning. The play consists of three scenes, two of
which are the slide-show scenes. In the middle scene, the same set of dialogue is
repeated twice, one leading directly into the other. Here, we have obvious repetition,
but the revision comes into play in performance. Parks believes that stage directions
should be minimal. Much of the time, she sees these as implicit in the play’s content
and she is averse to constraining theatre practitioners within the parameters of
‘parenthetical’ instructions (Parks in Jiggetts 312). When the play was produced by
Working Theatre, as part of its ‘Working One-Acts ’91’ programme, the repeated set
of dialogue was revised in that it was delivered in a wearier, more somnolent fashion
(Holden).
Through a use of repetition and revision in the structure and dialogue of
Betting on the Dust Commander, Parks constructs Lucius and Mare as ghosts or
shadows. Like many of the figures that appear in Parks’s early works, Lucius and
Mare deviate considerably from traditional psychological characters. For Parks, the
figments that inhabit her dramas are paramount; she builds her innovative dramaturgy
around these non-psychologised figures. In ‘From Elements of Style,’ Parks contends
that form and content are interdependent, and that traditional, linear narratives ‘never
could accommodate [her] figures’ (8). She explains her sense of ‘characterisation’ as
follows:
They are not characters. To call them so could be an injustice. They are
figures, figments, ghosts, roles, lovers maybe, speakers maybe, shadows, slips,
players maybe, maybe someone else’s pulse. (12.)
Figments, ghosts and roles evoke the fluidity of character evident in much of Carr’s
early drama, and in Kennedy’s surrealist works such as The Owl Answers: ‘hoo’ or
what these figures are is often obscure. This sense of shadowy, changeable and
permeable roles also releases repressed desires for the Imaginary, which is viewed as
progressive by Cixous, Belsey and other feminists who appropriate Lacan’s work on
sexual formation. Lucius and Mare, ensnared in a recurring situation framed by their
own disembodied voices, are ghostly shadows continually enacting the same parts.
Like this couple, the figures of much of Parks’s early theatre are liminal spectres.
While she lists her ‘characters’ for Betting on the Dust Commander, Pickling and
Imperceptible Mutabilities as ‘Players,’ and the parts for The Death of the Last Black
Man as figures, her cast list for Devotees in the Garden of Love is entitled ‘The
49
Lovers’. This is ironic, as ‘love’ in Devotees (1992) is devoid of emotion and
achieved through bloody male combat, with a female figure, George, as the winner’s
prize. Lily, a thin, elderly lady in an old-fashioned wheelchair, wears her wedding
dress. Hence, she appears ghostly and uncanny, recalling Miss Havisham from
Dickens’s Great Expectations.41 George, also in bridal attire, later becomes Patty: she
decides she would like a prettier name, and so it is changed in the text. Here, identities
are not fixed, but shady or mutable.
Devotees in the Garden of Love is a work of immense political power.
Language makes time indeterminate: archaic social niceties are used in conjunction
with contemporary media jargon and references to the kind of technology that can
keep a bodiless head alive. Blending elements of science fiction, gothic horror and
absurd humour, Parks constructs yet another liminal space to accommodate her
‘figments.’ The play regularly conflates the language of love and the language of war,
exposing the inherent contradictions of both. This is evident, for example, when
Madame Odelia Pandahr (also in a wedding gown) reports from the front line:
There is one word, I guess you could say, sums up the brilliant display this
passionate parade of severed arms and legs, genitals and fingertips, buttocks
and heads, the splatterment the dismemberment, the quest for an embrace for
the bride-who’ll-be which has, for many, ended in an embrace of eternity, and
that one word is “Devotion” (144).
The poeticised excitement in the delivery of such grotesque imagery exposes how
patriotic battle is romanticised despite its harsh reality. This was relevant at the time
of its premiere, a year after the first Gulf War ended. Love and war are conflated in
terms of ‘devotion,’ yet the play itself is blatantly unsentimental and the dialogue
inhibits audience empathy. When George/Patty is presented with the head of the
winning suitor, she points out that they were ‘supposed tuh fall into eachothers arms’
(154). Here and elsewhere, the play reveals the enduring ritualistic, formulaic
elements of love—as well as raising important, timely questions about war. Moreover,
Devotees’ distancing strategies intensifies its political efficacy. The figures often refer
to themselves in the third person. George/Patty’s final speech is a ‘love’ story about
herself and her husband delivered in the third person (155-156). There is also a
41
In her book on Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Geis mistakenly points out that Lily recalls Estella, Miss
Havisham’s adopted daughter, but she rightly notices the link between this character and the
protagonist of Rockaby as among the Beckettian aspects of Parks’s early work (37).
50
striking use of metatheatre. Parks continually evokes ideas about watching and being
watched, for example when the figures take on news reporter personas (shown in the
above quote), or when they watch television (150). The piece opens on Lilly and
George perched on a hilltop garden, using binoculars to watch the armies of George’s
suitors, ThisOne and ThatOne, at war. Hence, they look from the stage into the
audience, refracting the audience’s gaze. Together, these techniques make viewers
conscious of their own spectatorship and impose a productive critical distance. Parks
presents her audience with stark and grotesque images of devotion that serve to
undermine mythologised visions of love and war; cyclical time, episodic structure and
non-psychologised characters impede passive viewing and force the audience to
confront and digest the play’s subversive moments.
Betting on the Dust Commander and Devotees have not had much exposure
beyond their initial production runs. Betting on the Dust Commander was first
performed in 1987, on a very low budget at The Gas Station—a makeshift bar in a
garage in New York’s East Village. Three years later, after Parks had formed a
professional connection with director Liz Diamond, the play was performed by
Company One, Connecticut (1990) and by Working Theatre, New York (1991).42
More recently, it was performed as part of Cutting Ball Theatre’s 2008
‘AvantGARDARAMA’ programme at the Exit in San Francisco. Writing for the San
Francisco Examiner, Chad Jones admits that while the play is ‘strange,’ its humour
boosted his enjoyment of the piece. Yet, his assessment demonstrates a rather
superficial comprehension of the play and his comment that the couple are caught in
‘an endless loop of silliness’ undermines the work’s complexity. Devotees was staged
at the Actors Theatre, Louisville during the Humana Festival in 1992 and has received
little notice since. Occasionally, it is examined as part of university courses on absurd
theatre and the drama department of Berkley, California recently staged it in a
programme of absurdist one-acts (November, 2009). However, in response to the
production, student newspaper The Daily Californian pointed out that ‘the dialogue
isn’t totally comprehensible’ (Cowan). Reviewing 1992’s Humana festival in which it
premiered, New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow complained that, unlike the
year when Beth Henley’s realist comedy Crimes of the Heart premiered in Louisville,
‘[t]his year there was no feeling of discovery’ (‘Critics Notebook’). He named three
42
In her 2008 book, Suzan-Lori Parks, Geis provides a useful list of premiers of Parks’s plays (167-8).
51
plays from the festival that showed promise; Devotees was not one of them. The fact
that there is little media information available that relates directly to Devotees reveals
its obscurity. The above responses to Betting on the Dust Commander and Devotees
overlook the political agenda behind Parks’s deviance from traditional and familiar
theatre techniques. The patriarchal structures of criticism have contributed to a
misconception of these works as meaningless, silly or incomprehensible. This offers
some explanation for why this powerful theatre is eclipsed by Parks’s more realist
plays such as In the Blood (1999) and Topdog/Underdog (2001).
While it typifies and, in a way, amplifies Parks’s challenging and radical
dramaturgy, she eventually garnered some important notice with Imperceptible
Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Originally, this work was also performed on a
shoe-string at The Gas Station in 1987. Between 1986 and 1989, Parks worked
various day jobs in New York and spent her evenings writing one-act plays, including
this one. These were performed in make-shift bars, cafes and off-off-Broadway
venues. Then, championed by academic and Village Voice theatre critic Alisa
Solomon, she became involved with the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association
(BACA). Under the skilled directorship of Liz Diamond, a workshop production of
Imperceptible Mutabilities was produced at BACA Downtown in 1988. An extended
version of the play had its official world premiere during BACA’s Fringe Festival in
1989, also directed by Diamond. On the merit of this production, the New York Times
named her ‘the year’s most promising new playwright’ in 1989 (Geis 5).
Imperceptible Mutabilities also won the Off-Broadway Obie award for Best New Play
in 1990. In terms of her career development, Parks’s connections with BACA and
Diamond were fruitful.43
Compared with Betting on the Dust Commander and Devotees,
Imperceptible Mutabilities is more overtly political, both in terms of its episodic
structure and its content. In this play, Parks’s inventive use of language and form, and
her appropriation of Brechtain techniques, satisfy some of the politico-aesthetic
criteria of l’écriture feminine, as well as materialist feminist thought at this time.
Imperceptible Mutabilities, which also makes sporadic use of slide shows, is
composed of a collection of juxtaposed fragments which are connected by an
overarching, explicit focus on issues regarding the constructs of race and assimilation.
For further information on Parks’s biography and the development of her career as a dramatist, see
the introductory section of Geis’s 2008 volume, Suzan-Lori Parks (1-22).
43
52
The first of these involves the ‘mutable’ personas of three black women Molly/Mona,
Charlene/Chona and Veronica/Verona. Molly/Mona contemplates ending her life as
she has been expelled from school. In order to be accepted, she practices ‘correct’
pronunciation and struggles with the word ‘ask.’ Meanwhile, the girls are spied on by
a naturalist, disguised as a giant cockroach, who evokes a wild-life documentary
voice-over as he narrates their actions. He has renamed the ‘subjects’ Charlene,
Veronica and Molly for the purpose of his ‘observation’ (27). The following section
depicts a group of ‘Seers’ in a boat. Like Lucius and Mare, these ethereal figures
occupy a liminal space: they sail a sea called the ‘third kingdom’ somewhere between
America and Africa. Combining Parks’s phonetic language and onomatopoeic sounds,
their absurd discussions evoke elusive conceptions of place and identity. The ‘Seers’
reappear in a ‘Reprise’ before the final vignette, repeating and revising some of their
earlier dialogue and delivering different speeches simultaneously. Here, Parks is even
more adventurous in her theme, structure and use of ‘Rep and Rev.’
Throughout the play, Parks evokes complex questions about authenticity,
acculturation and the erosion of ethnic identity. Referring to her former self—
apparently prior to ‘civilising’ white influences—Molly tells us: ‘Once there was uh
me named Mona who wondered what she’d talk like if no one was listening’ (28).
Like Tilly of Carr’s Ullaloo, Molly is complicit in the suppression of her own voice
and subjectivity—in this case by striving to accommodate towards the speech patterns
of the privileged class. Part three appears to take place not long after emancipation
and focuses mainly on a black woman, Mrs Aretha Saxon. Issues of legitimacy arise
again with Aretha’s ‘white’ surname, her disillusionment regarding where she belongs
now that she is free and the fact that another character, Miss Faith, extracts her teeth
to verify her identity. Miss Faith answers Aretha’s questions with condescension and
professional distance. Parks employs Brechtian distancing by also having Miss Faith
sporadically communicate footnotes about the slave trade, validated by book titles and
page numbers. Yet, what is most significant about this section is Parks’s unique use of
language. Aretha’s speech is punctuated by a ‘thup’ sound, which conveys her
struggle to communicate. This is one of many words or non-words that Parks has
invented.44 She defines ‘thup’ as ‘(Air intake with sound placed in mouth; liberal use
of tongue.) Slurping’ (‘From Elements of Style’ 17). In BACA’s 1989 production,
44
For a list of these neologisms with definitions, see Parks’s ‘From Elements of Style’ (17-18).
53
available to watch on videotape at The New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film
and Tape Archive, the ‘thup’ sounds visceral and quite disconcerting. It expresses
Aretha’s emotional pain as much as her oral discomfort. It also gives an impression of
words being choked back. Hence, it evokes the stifling of the black female voice.
Characters such as Aretha and Mona reveal the suppression of ethnicity and the
slippery nature of identity.
Both Parks and Carr use language to provide early explorations of otherness
and oppression, but in different ways. The dialogue in Carr’s first four plays is
relatively neutral in accent (unlike the distinctive, Hiberno-English conveyed
phonetically in the dramatist’s Midlands’ plays). In works such as The Deer’s
Surrender and This Love Thing, Carr riffs on Catholic iconography and, in doing so,
subverts the traditional ideals of Irish femininity. However, she also exposes and
challenges female subjugation in the broader, western context. As we have seen, she
combines punning and parodic language with strikingly surreal stage imagery; in
doing so, she offers an expansive feminist critique, spanning from the biblical story of
creation to the Renaissance to the contemporary era. Parks’s work, at this stage,
appears more localised in that she engages with issues closely linked to slavery and its
aftermath in America. Moreover, her experiments with spelling and grammar, and her
neologisms, hone the plays’ sound so that it becomes an important political tool.
Where Carr uses dialogue playfully to promote satire, Parks reinvents language to
communicate ethnic identity, as well as Black oppression.
In 1990, BACA produced Parks’s next work, The Death of the Last Black Man
in the Whole Entire World, under the direction of Beth A. Schachter. Writing for the
New York Times, Gussow claims this play ‘lacks the precision of Mutabilities’ and ‘is
as recondite as it is elliptical’ (‘Dangers’). As we have seen, David Richards responds
similarly to The America Play, which was commissioned by the off-Broadway
organisation, Theater for a New Audience, and staged in 1994 at New York’s Public
Theatre (where Topdog/Underdog began its journey to fame). Richards considers this
work to be designedly obscure. Yet these two plays have attracted much scholarly
focus since they raise important issues in relation to the Eurocentric, mythologised
and exclusionary nature of written history.45 In both plays, Parks revises the
See, for example, Louise Bernard’s ‘The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori
Parks’s The Death of the Last Black man in the Whole Entire World’(1997). Rayner and Elam Jr. argue
that the play’s perceived difficulty is actually its source of power in ‘Unfinished Business:
45
54
chronological timeline through the use of non-linear structures and repetition. In The
America Play (and later in Topdog/Underdog) the figure of President Abraham
Lincoln is juxtaposed to a ‘Lesser Known’ black man, The Foundling Father, who
works as a Lincoln impersonator in a theme park called The Great Hole of History.
The action jumps non-sequentially between scenes of The Foundling Father speaking
alone or enacting Lincoln’s assassination with strangers who shoot him using plastic
bullets, and scenes of his wife Lucy and son Brazil excavating the remains of the park
after his death. This work is laden with clever symbols and puns. References to
Lincoln as ‘The Great Man’ and, comparatively, to his impersonator as ‘The Lesser
Known’ symbolise the dialectic of historical preservations and omissions. The figure
of Abraham Lincoln represents the White bias of the historical record, while The
Foundling Father stands for those who are forgotten—although, like Tomred from
Carr’s Ullaloo, he yearns for a place in History (The America Play 162). Adding
another layer of sophistication, Parks also points out the fictive nature of recorded
history by evoking the gap between the ephemeral man, Abraham Lincoln, and the
static mythical Lincoln composed only of ‘the staying power of words and image’
(162). The Death of the Last Black Man stages a black man’s repeated deaths (and
apparent resurrections) and appears to be concerned more with survival than death.46
Here, Parks’s figures announce their presence by identifying themselves as the play
begins. Names such as Blackman with Watermelon and Old Man River Jordan
conjure stereotypes and myths: the fictions of blackness. Meanwhile, the title of the
figure Before Columbus refers to African expeditions to the new world that actually
took place prior to the European ‘discovery’ (Geis 66). Hence, this name evokes the
way in which much of black history has, according to Parks, been ‘unrecorded,
dismembered, washed out’ (‘Possession 4).47
Reconfiguring History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire
World’ (1994). Elam and Rayner also explore history in The America Play in ‘Echoes from the Black
(W)hole: An Examination of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks’ (1999). Verna Foster compares
The America Play to Topdog/Underdog in ‘Suzan-Lori Parks’s Staging of the Lincoln Myth’ (2005).
46
Yvette Louis makes this argument in her article ‘Body Language: The Black Female Body and the
Word’ (2001). She also develops a treatise in relation to the role of Black Man’s female companion,
Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, in his continued survival. This will be problemtised in the next
chapter.
47
The way in which The America Play engages with history is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3,
and compared to later plays such as Venus (1996) and Topdog/Underdog (2001). Costume becomes
particularly important in the construction of stereotypes and historical figures in The Death of the Last
Black Man. This is discussed in Chapter 5 and compared to Carr’s use of stereotypes in Low in the
Dark.
55
The male-centred title of The Death of the Last Black Man masks a multitude
of feminist meanings. The play is composed of numbered sections, titled to evoke the
Stations of the Cross and depicting similar situations. These elements, along with its
repetitive dialogue, showcase an interest in ritual that is also manifest in Carr’s The
Deer’s Surrender. Staging ritual (or performance, as in the assassination re-enactment
in The America Play) is metatheatrical and reveals the workings of representation
(which forms such as realism tend to conceal). Hence, Dolan applauds ritualised
elements in Winnetou’s Snake-Oil Show from Wigwam City (1989). Like Carr in The
Deer’s Surrender, Parks employs ritual to celebrate matriarchal power—albeit
without Carr’s satirical approach. Each time Black Man with Watermelon returns, his
female counterpart Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, seeks to feed, nurture and
heal him. When he comes back to her still wearing a noose attached to a tree branch,
she responds: ‘Let me loosen the tie let me loosen the neck-lace let me loosen the
noose that stringed him up let me leave the tree branch be. Let me rub your wrists’
(118).
She is the maternal energy-source that sustains Black Man’s continued
survival beyond his violent deaths.48 These restorative activities, along with Black
Woman’s spoken references to food, harvests and the changing seasons, link her to
natural rejuvenation and construct her as a Mother Nature figure. Hence, the play
satisfies Cixous’ aim ‘to proclaim woman as the source of life, power and energy’
(Moi 105). However, the figure’s characterisation as a domestic caregiver can, in
other contexts, be seen as reductive. This will be explored in Chapter 2.
To return to Parks’s historical-revisionist strategies, The Death of the Last
Black Man resurrects the female Egyptian pharaoh, Hatshepsut. While Hatshepsut
was initially recorded as a queen, subsequent research suggested that this woman
ruled as a pharaoh. Her name in the play, Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut, points to
the mutable nature of historical ‘facts.’ Her inclusion in the drama points to the way in
which history’s white male bias omitted the significant achievements of a black
woman. This, combined with the staging of black stereotypes, signifies a need to
recuperate lost histories and gain control over (mis)representation. This is intensified
by the repetition and revision of the phrase ‘you should write that down’ throughout
the play. Like Carr in The Deer’s Surrender and This Love Thing, Parks uses The
48
Chapter 2 discusses this play in the context of maternal representations throughout Parks’s theatre.
56
Death of the Last Black Man to interrogate the established authority of history, art and
the Bible and to give voice to marginalised perspectives.
Looking at the themes of Parks’s early work through the lens of Carr’s and
vice versa is revelatory in terms of the cultural work in which each dramatist
participates. The political agendas of Carr and Parks differ in that Carr is primarily
concerned with myth, while Parks engages mostly with history. However, analysing
the early plays shows that both writers are preoccupied with the idea of representation
as a regulatory, exclusionary force. Through the figures of Mary, Mona and Eve in
This Love Thing, Carr shows how female perspectives have historically been reduced
to representation’s frame. In The America Play, Parks not only points to historical
omissions but shows how figures included in the historical record, such Abraham
Lincoln, become mythic and far-removed from reality. Paralleling these dramatists
exposes the overlaps between myth and history: in the light of such comparisons, both
history and myth can be seen as reductive representations that seek to maintain an
oppressive status quo, and suppress more inclusive scenarios. Parks and Carr
interrogate male and female stereotypes, for example in Parks’s Betting on the Dust
Commander and The Death of the Last Black Man and Carr’s Ulalloo and Low in the
Dark. Both open possibilities for rethinking mythologised identities and stories in
alternative ways. This is evidenced by the way in which Parks reimagines the violence
directed against black people throughout history as a story of survival and
regeneration in The Death of the Last Black Man and by Carr’s feminising of religious
rituals in The Deer’s Surrender. Through such activities, the playwrights demystify
oppressive, culturally-petrified constructs.
Comparing the responses to each playwright’s theatre in the late eighties and
early nineties reveals much about the issues that affected the success and subsequent
visibility of works for the stage. Despite mainstream media conceptions of Parks’s
drama of the time as abstruse, the recognition that she received for works such as
Imperceptible Mutabilities testifies to certain levels of liberalism and a propensity to
nurture innovation in New York; this starkly contrasts to the conservative Irish theatre
scene in which Carr began to work. As we have seen, some of Parks’s early plays
have much in common with Carr’s, both stylistically and thematically. Carr spent at
least a year in New York, which means both playwrights were writing and working
day jobs there during the late eighties. Having worked in New York around the same
57
time as Carr, Scaife asserts that the dramatist’s stay there, during the period in which
she wrote her early experiments, must have influenced her approach:
The streets and bars were full of material for writing and characters. Every
hobo had a story. You could be listening to what you thought was a basket
case ranting at the corner of 42nd street and Eight Avenue (it was a spot!), and
after five minutes realize that what he was saying made enormous sense. The
hookers, cross dressers and coke dealers who took their break at night where I
worked were full of loud and colourful theatricality. A situation would flare
up, everyone would be involved and then it would be over as quickly as in
Low in the Dark. (8.)
Much of Parks’s early theatre was performed in New York, but Carr’s early works
were limited to Irish productions. The Irish theatre institution has been strongly
influenced by the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1903. Although this establishment
was a political act, regularly linked to nationalism and a reaction against cultural
assimilation stemming from centuries of British colonial rule, the resulting ‘canon’
has been as conservative as all others: exclusive, patriarchal and universalising.49
Historically, the prominence of the Abbey and its associated canon contributed to a
marginalisation of unconventional or innovative approaches and women’s voices in
theatre.50 Along with her fragmented, repetitive style, Carr’s early work possesses
unique imagistic qualities. As we have seen, her early work is dominated by inventive
stage imagery and Ullaloo makes use of mixed media. Ideas for plays take the form of
visual descriptions in her notes (written some time before 1995), which are held at the
National Library of Ireland. There is even an outline for a short film entitled
‘Foreplay/Afterplay’ which she describes as ‘imagistic’ in style. According to
Eamonn Jordan, by 2000, ‘there [was in Ireland] a small but significant move away
from text-based theatre to improvised scripts, a shift from verbally-driven productions
to a greater emphasis on the visual dimension’ (‘Introduction’ xii). In this context,
49
In The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988), Dolan argues that the established theatre canon excludes
‘not only worthy plays, but also worthy spectators on the basis of their ideological perspectives’ (40).
For more on the omissions and suppressions of the Irish canon, see Catherine Lynette Innes’ Women
and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880-1935 (4).
50
Lionel Pilkington argues for a revisionist approach to Irish theatre that would challenge the
assumption that Irish theatre history began with the establishment of the Irish National Theatre Society.
He contends that the Irish canon as it stands excludes rural theatrical traditions such as mumming and
folk drama. See ‘The Beginnings of the Irish National Theatre Project.’ There has been much
discussion regarding the marginalisation or absence of female playwrights in Ireland. See for example
Anna McMullan’s ‘Gender, Authorship and Performance’ or Riana O’Dwyer’s ‘The Imagination of
Women’s Reality.’ Both McMullan and Pilkington refer to the Irish canon’s universalising approach,
directed towards an ideal spectator and promoting an ideal, homogenous response.
58
Carr appears ahead of her time by writing works that collated shocking and disjointed
images in Ireland of the late eighties and early nineties. At this stage, it appears, the
Irish theatre institution was a space in which ‘a play was a play, […] strictly wordbased’ (Scaife 8).
In comparison to Carr, the more progressive milieu in which Parks’s early
plays were performed afforded her some recognition. Yet, she remained in the avantgarde and the directors associated with her early work, Marcus Stern, Liz Diamond,
and Richard Foreman, are considered ‘experimental artists’ (‘Remarks on Parks I’).
Due to the presence of Broadway, the so-called margins and mainstream are more
clearly defined in New York—which is probably why the writings of academics such
as Dolan have been so concerned with that division. Parks was not considered for a
Pulitzer until she wrote In the Blood and her work was not produced on Broadway
until Topdog/Underdog transferred from the Public Theatre to the Ambassador in
2002. The following day, the play’s Pulitzer-winning status was announced (Wada
151). Despite some recognition and attention for early works such as Imperceptible
Mutibilites and The Death of the Last Black Man (mainly in avant-garde and scholarly
circles), at this stage Parks’s work remained outside New York’s mainstream,
commercial institution, along with the vast audiences and lengthy production runs that
forum entails.
As we have seen, some critics struggled with the complexity and disregarded
the rich meanings of Parks’s and Carr’s works. Both playwrights also suffered
rejection during their early careers. The implications of such negative responses and
their possible influence on Parks’s and Carr’s approaches must be considered. Parks’s
first play, The Sinner’s Place (written in 1984), was part of her course work at Mount
Holyoak, where she studied English and German. It concerns a homecoming, digging
and the discovery of a baby’s dead body. While the play won honours, Mount
Holyoak’s theatre department declined to produce it because of its unique style and,
according to Parks, the supposed difficulty of staging the act of digging (Wada 151).
However, Parks persevered and it was subsequently given a reading at The New Play
Festival, Hampshire College in Amherst in 1987. She then continued to develop her
unique style for about a decade.51 This dramatist maintains that she refuses to let
51
Parks, having achieved a Pulitzer in 2002 for the domestic tragedy Topdog/Underdog (2001), moved
to perhaps an even more ground-breaking experimentalism with 365 Days/365 Plays (2006). Between
2002 and 2003, Parks wrote a play a day for a year. The short plays were performed throughout the
59
reviews—good or bad—influence her writing. In relation to the critics, she states:
‘I’m sick of people trying to pin me down […] I won’t let myself get screwed up by
Fs or As’ (qtd. in Wada 64, 151). She decidedly shakes off the labels in her essay
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ claiming that ‘[t]here isn’t any such thing as a
Suzan-Lori Parks play’ (29). While she evades implication about critics influencing
her change in style, mainstream journalism has helped to maintain the marginal status
of her early works. Speaking at a symposium dedicated to Parks’s work in 2006,
Solomon blamed daily reviewers for denouncing her early plays or ‘valuing them
primarily as immature sketches that prepared her for the more complex and controlled
canvases that she’s created in the last couple of years’ (‘Remarks on Parks I).
Powerful critics can sway audiences’ responses to theatre and can thereby
influence a dramatist’s progress. Dolan testifies to the influence of mainstream
journalism, which ‘both shapes and reflects the ideological workings of the dominant
culture whose concerns it represents’ (Spectator 19). Carr confirms that she reads
critical responses to her work (Mike Murphy 56). Indeed, considering Ireland’s small
population, its theatre institution’s conservatism and the influence of critics from
national broadsheets such as the Irish Times (which demonstrates a historical
commitment to the arts and has organised, since 1997, the Irish Theatre Awards), it
would have been difficult for an emerging dramatist such as Carr to ignore scathing
commentaries. Despite Colgan’s sardonic assessment of Low in the Dark, he concedes
that the dramatist has ‘true ear for dialogue’ and that she writes with confidence; he
suggests that she sharpen these skills to realise her ‘potential to write a successful
play.’ This is indicative of prevailing attitudes to theatre in Ireland at the time, which
privileged language and psychology over action and image. Here, Colgan appears to
link ‘success’ in the theatre to ‘truth’ and to language (dialogue) which reveals a bias
towards naturalistic approaches, characters that appear authentic and theatre in which
words are paramount.52 Compared with Parks, Carr seems far more affected by
U.S. between 2006 and 2007, in one of the most elaborate, extensive and innovative theatre premieres
in the world.
52
In fact, in an article published in the Irish Times in 2001, Fintan O’Toole saw Irish theatre as still
‘besotted by words and stories’ and complained that it needs to get beyond this. See ‘Getting Back to
the Story.’ Since then, O’Toole is still lamenting the state of the art, evident in his 2011 documentary
Power Plays, in which he suggests that Irish theatre of the Celtic Tiger era is disappointing in that it
does not tackle current issues and promote activism the way that earlier plays had. His approach
implies a divide between plays that stimulate political enquiry in the indigenous population and theatre
with less depth that achieves international success. At times, his narrow scope and nostalgia tend
60
critical responses to her work. In an interview with Mike Murphy, she admits that she
is upset for a while after bad reviews, but eventually, ‘You dust yourself off and move
on to the next one’ (56). When Ullaloo (having been denounced in an Irish Times
review) was taken off the Peacock stage after only a few performances, Carr persisted
by asking the Abbey’s then artistic director Garry Hynes for a commission (Mike
Murphy 56). Her request was honoured and she returned with the ‘next one’ in 1994:
the decidedly more conventional The Mai, which seems to fulfil the suggestions of
reviewers such as Colgan with its recognisable setting and language, its logical
progression and its sympathetic characters. This play achieved a positive critical
response, with the Observer linking it to the work of Eugene O’Neill (White, ‘Straight
from the Arts’).
While Parks was inspired by the comparable work of black female playwrights
such as Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange, who emerged in the sixties and
seventies respectively, Carr lacked similar role models in Ireland. Parks read
Kennedy’s work after The Sinner’s Place was rejected for production. This made her
understand that she ‘could do anything’ in theatre (qtd. in Jiggetts 314). Carr, on the
other hand, was without such figurative ‘sisters.’53 Until recently, there was a scarcity
of professional female playwrights in Ireland. While Christina Reid and Anne Devlin
worked in Northern Ireland, in Ireland Lady Augusta Gregory was recorded in history
more as a co-founder of the Abbey than as a dramatist (McMullan, ‘Gender’ 35).
Waterford playwright Teresa Deevy had a number of plays produced at the Abbey,
but turned to Radio after the theatre declined to stage her 1937 play, Wife to James
Whelan. Despite a few posthumous productions of her drama, Deevy’s work slipped
into relative obscurity. It was in this context that Carr began to work; she had little
female inspiration in her field and her ‘sex and youth removed her from the traditional
male hierarchy that had been predominant in Irish theatre’ (Scaife 6). Female
playwrights were so underrepresented that, when The Mai was staged as part of the
Dublin Theatre Festival in 1994, an Irish Times columnist declared:
For Irish theatre-lovers, there was the additional thrill of seeing an Irish
woman winkle her way on to the stage of the National Theatre at last, and
towards imposing canonising value judgements and overlooking the powerful theatre that was, and still
is, taking place in both fringe and mainstream venues throughout Ireland.
53
Geis maintains that comparing Parks’s work to Kennedy’s and Shange’s reveals that she is ‘their
figurative daughter and sister’ (7).
61
represent, at last, the world of women. For this writer, in fact, The Mai would
have been enough sustenance to ask from the Dublin Theatre Festival. (White,
‘Straight from the Arts’.)
Christopher Fitz-Simon, Literary Manager of the Abbey Theatre at the time, wrote a
letter of complaint (published two days later) in response to these comments. As well
as pointing out the journalist’s error in omitting Ullaloo’s previous appearance on the
Peacock’s stage, he claimed that ‘winkle’ is a term that ‘rather snidely implies
unmannerly subterfuges on the playwright’s part.’ The debate testifies to the
trepidation surrounding the advent of a woman dramatist. Superficially, it might
appear that Carr, as a white woman, occupies a more privileged position than Parks, a
Black woman. However, compared with Parks, Carr was in a situation of isolation and
weighty expectation as a female playwright working in Ireland of the late eighties and
early nineties.
Having suffered reproachful reviews up to the advent of The Mai, but also
working in this sensitive context, it is perhaps understandable that Carr demonstrates
less confidence in her talent than does Parks. In 1998, despite her relative success at
this stage, she still considered herself ‘an apprentice who is trying to learn the craft
and become worthy of that high and often misused title—writer’ (‘Dealing with the
Dead’ 190). Lacking the conviction to defend her early style, she has come to regard
The Deer’s Surrender and This Love Thing as ‘apprentice pieces, unworthy of
significant attention’ (Lonergan 228). This is unfortunate as these works promote
gender-conscious enquiry and are replete with potentially striking and effective stage
imagery. Since these works were produced, Irish theatre has become more varied,
vibrant and inclusive. 2011 saw the successful productions of Nancy Harris’s No
Romance, a collection of three, thematically similar vignettes dealing with aspects of
sexuality that Irish culture has historically repressed, and Stacy Gregg’s highly
imagistic Perve, which explores the moral ambiguity surrounding certain sexual
practices, both at the Peacock. In 2009, the Abbey introduced its ‘New Playwrights
Programme’, to nurture, support and develop new talent in Irish theatre. Considering
this, one wonders if Carr’s early, experimental style might have been welcomed and
encouraged if it had emerged in today’s context, and whether her techniques would
have developed along different lines.
Despite the loosening of strictures in Ireland’s institutional theatre, most of
Carr’s early work is unlikely to be produced again—on one level, because it is so
62
difficult to obtain. The only of her first few works to be published is Low in the Dark.
Its inclusion in Marina Carr: Plays 1 along with ‘The Midlands Trilogy’ reduces an
early style evident in three other plays to just one example. The others, Ullaloo, This
Love Thing and The Deer’s Surrender remain unpublished in the National Library of
Ireland. That these works are not easily available to the public, and that This Love
Thing and The Deer’s Surrender are not even listed on the National Library of
Ireland’s online catalogue, inhibits scholarly explorations of Carr’s oeuvre and
prevents contemporary and future audiences from engaging with her early dramas.
Parks’s early plays (with the exception of The Sinners Place) are published
collectively in The America Play and Other Works, which at least allows for future
productions and more extensive theorising of her body of work. Yet, due to
assumptions propagated by mainstream journalism that misconstrue some of these
works as weak, immature and/or pretentious, some are still likely to remain underproduced and, hence, underexplored. Solomon describes the media narrative that has
become widespread since Parks won the Pulitzer:
This narrative describes her starting out with promising but largely obscure
early plays championed by a few white intellectuals until she was
triumphantly rescued by those who knew better, George C. Wolfe and The
Disney Corporation, who guided her toward the writing of characters you can
sympathize with and plots you can follow and sometimes even predict. Of
course, I'm exaggerating but only slightly. (Remarks on Parks I.)
This popular narrative functions to maintain the marginal status of Parks’s early plays;
however, as Deborah Geis contends, these works ‘deserve restagings that might lead
to better understandings of their innovative dramatic riches’ (157). Indeed, Geis’s
comment could equally be applied to Carr’s early theatre. The negative responses that
these playwrights initially elicited may be seen to testify to the immense power of the
plays. Yet, they have also helped to push these works further into obscurity—
especially in the context of Parks’s and Carr’s respective shifts towards more
conventionally-styled works. The media, the conservatism of the Western theatre
institution and the playwrights themselves have, directly or indirectly, all played their
parts in constructing limited and limiting perceptions of these dynamic and political
dramas.
63
Conclusion
The early dramas of Parks and Carr are politically-charged, as well as formally and
thematically subversive. For this reason, it can be argued that these works deserve to
be more regularly revived. Yet, these plays are rarely produced and are hugely
overshadowed by the dramatists’ later works. Plays such as Carr’s ‘Midlands Trilogy’
and Parks’s In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog have afforded these playwrights wide
appeal. In these more recent works, the playwrights appropriate aspects of realism and
tragedy such as coherent, empathetic characters, recognisable language and settings,
and relatively linear structures. It is significant that Carr’s and Parks’s most
‘patriarchal’ plays, the tragedies By the Bog of Cats… and Topdog/Underdog, are the
most commercially successful and are the plays most often studied on University
syllabi. This raises questions regarding reception and the persistent allure of the
coherent, unified play. If Parks and Carr had continued to write in the style of their
early plays, would they still be whispering at the margins of our culture?54
The forms, contents and production contexts of Carr’s Low in the Dark, The
Deer’s Surrender and This Love Thing and Parks’s Betting on the Dust Commander
and Devotees in the Garden of Love satisfy the concurrent materialist feminist quest
for work that deviates from the commercial, institutional theatre and its conventions.
Dolan, Belsey, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva offer feminist theories which can be
used to illuminate the subversive power of these works, as well as Carr’s Ullaloo and
Parks’s Imperceptible Mutabilities, The Death of the Last Black Man and The
America Play. In general, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva—now seen as proponents of
l’écriture feminine—celebrate women’s reproductive bodies and cyclical experiences
of time, seeking to translate these features into women’s writing. This provides a
useful framework for understanding Parks’s and Carr’s early works—many of which
have been construed by mainstream journalism as incomprehensible. The cycles and
repetitions evident in each dramatist’s early theatre can be seen to evoke Kristeva’s
idea of ‘Women’s Time.’ Moreover, Irigaray’s ideals concerning formal features that
unfix meaning and Cixous’ exploration of the ways in which literature can express a
Here, I am paraphrasing Schroeder who suggests in her 1989 essay ‘Locked Behind the Proscenium’
that feminists embrace diverse theatre styles. According to Schroeder, ‘an undeviating separatism of
dramatic forms can only mean that fewer feminist concerns will be dramatized, fewer audiences will be
reached, and feminist playwrights, like the women they often depict, may be left unheard, speaking
softly to themselves at the margins of our culture’ (112).
54
64
desire for union with the pre-oedipal mother are relevant to each playwright’s use of
mutable personae and surreal, often placeless scenarios.
Maternity and reproduction underpin many of the ideals of l’écriture feminine.
Chapter 2 hones in on Parks’s and Carr’s explorations of motherhood by examining in
more detail plays such as The Death of the Last Black Man and Low in the Dark as
well as some of the dramatist’s later works, for example Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays’
and Carr’s ‘Midlands Trilogy.’ As we shall see, the dramatists move towards
demystifying maternal icons and revealing the contradictions of contemporary
motherhood. Moreover, focusing on motherhood allows me to further explore each
playwright within her national context in order to compare how they respond to
maternal ideals within their distinct cultural milieus as well as the western context
which they share.
The shift to a more realist style, which seems to have contributed to the
increased critical acclaim that these women have received both nationally and
internationally, and to their canonization, would be seen as problematic from the
feminist perspectives discussed in this chapter. Yet, academics such as Dolan have
since revised earlier theories to explore the feminist potential of a variety of theatre
forms and production contexts. This is evident for example in Dolan’s Utopia in
Performance (2005) in which she finds utopian performatives within diverse
theatrical experiences, from regional, feminist solo performances to Broadway shows
such as Deborah Warner’s production of Medea (2003). Subsequent chapters support
this more varied and inclusive feminist perspective by showing that—like the early
works—Parks and Carr’s later plays continue to deal with the issue of marginality and
are replete with subversive, materialist meanings. Since they adopted more
conventional styles, Parks and Carr are no longer positioned on the periphery of the
commercial theatre institution. Yet, their more stylistically ‘mainstream’ dramas often
stage characters at the margins of dominant culture—who, as we shall see, contest
accepted, but restrictive, cultural constructions of gender and identity in general.
Whatever form they take, the dramas of Parks and Carr tend not to prescribe ‘better’
ways of being; instead, they raise questions, leaving the act of imagining new
possibilities in the hands of the audience. In doing so, they offer ‘never finished
gestures towards a potentially better future’ (Dolan, Utopia in Performance 8).
65
Chapter 2:
Maternal Contradictions
Introduction
In 5th century Athens, Euripides staged a mother’s shocking and transgressive deeds,
culminating in the most unmotherly of acts: infanticide.55 In Medea, feelings of
powerlessness and abandonment motivate the eponymous protagonist’s pathological
act. Medea, already considered within her community to be a barbaric outsider,
becomes consumed by her calculated quest for vengeance, leading her to sacrifice her
innocent children’s lives. The character appears to be far more liberated than her
Athenian counterparts, whose autonomy was curtailed by prevailing social
prescriptions that determined the place, space and acts of Attic women. Women at the
time were both inside and outside the social system—contained by it yet marginalised
from it. Medea straddles the wall separating inside and out, private and public (oikos
and polis), female and male.56
The striking duality of Medea has led to a wealth of sophisticated academic
readings of the work.57 Moreover, the prominent text-book notion of the play as a
cautionary tale on how women ought not to behave seems redundant since the part
was written by a man, for a male actor and was aimed at a predominantly male
audience. Perhaps Medea, who differed from Athenian viewers of the drama in terms
of both her gender and her status as a foreigner, provided an opportunity for Athenian
men obliquely to consider sensitive issues.58 Hence, the play may have worked
indirectly to question longstanding traditions. Since Medea uses the heroic logic of
55
Although Athenian audiences might have been aware of the myth upon which Euripides based his
Medea, they may still have been shocked at the play’s outcome. In certain versions of the myth,
Medea’s children were actually killed by the Corinthians. See Sarah Iles Johnston’s ‘Corinthian Medea
and the Cult of Hera Akraia’ (61).
56
See Margaret Williamson’s ‘A Woman’ s Place in Euripides’ Medea.’ Combining a discussion of the
stage layout for a production of Euripdes Medea in 5th century Athens with an examination of the
various language registers this female protagonist uses (and, significantly, in what space she uses
them), Williamson demonstrates Medea’s transition from the private to the public sphere, in which her
mastery of public, male dominated acts is revealed. Williamson demonstrates how Medea becomes an
object rather than a subject in the marriage transaction and how the style of her language takes on the
qualities of a Sophoclean hero.
57
For a detailed discussion of these arguments see Helen P. Foley’s section entitled ‘Tragic Wives:
Medea’s Divided Self’ in Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (243-271).
58
In her Introduction to Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, Foley makes this argument in relation to Greek
tragedy in general. According to Foley: ‘Masculine identity and conflicts remain central to the
enterprise [tragedy], but texts often explore or query these issues through female characters and the
culturally more marginal positions they occupy. Such indirection is basic to the genre as a whole’ (3).
66
epic poetry to validate her actions—doing good to her friends and bad to her enemies,
as well as saving her reputation by avenging her mistreatment—the character’s
dichotomies probe notions of masculine heroism (Foley 260). In addition, her
deliberating between such masculine, heroic achievements and private, maternal
concerns for her children (which she eventually rejects as weak) promotes for
consideration the ancient Greek idea that—for men—private, familial issues should
be subordinate to public concerns and the state (Foley 262-6). In this context,
Medea’s murder of her children might be viewed as a symbolic rejection of feminine
weaknesses and an aspiration toward heroic masculinity as it was construed in Greek
epics. Moreover, her apparently dreadful deeds seem to have the Gods’ approval when
the drama ends with her escape in a celestial chariot. As its enduring legacy, Medea
imagines a female character who deliberately and successfully bursts out of the
private, domestic prison to which women of the time were relegated—and with which
mothers to this day are still firmly associated. The character’s bipartite nature,
evidenced most vividly in her famous monologue in which she effectively argues with
herself (1021-80), conveys a maternal ambivalence which is still pertinent—though
rarely acknowledged—today.
In recent years, Suzan-Lori Parks and Marina Carr have appropriated the
patriarchal form of tragedy and the character of Medea to stage more modern acts of
maternal infanticide. In Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays,’ In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A
(2000) and Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998), each dramatist draws simultaneously
on Medea and Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, placing centre stage single
mothers named Hester who go on to kill their children.59 The murderous acts of the
mothers of In the Blood and By the Bog of Cats… are set in contexts representing
contemporary American and Irish spaces respectively which are socially and
geographically marginalised. Fucking A appears to be set in a futuristic dystopia; this
setting makes its probing of subjects such as motherhood, abortion and infanticide all
the more pressing. Hence, these works infuse Medea’s deeds with further
contemporary relevance. How might staging such immense maternal ambivalence
resonate with present-day audiences? In a western cultural space in which the press
has exhibited a resurgence of fundamentalist judgements of good and evil, how might
59
Chapter 3 offers a detailed analysis of Parks’s and Carr’s appropriations of these and other texts.
67
viewers understand the staging of mothers killing their children?60 Could the way in
which these dramatists represent maternal infanticide jolt audiences into an awareness
of the vast gap between ideal maternal icons and real mothers’/women’s diverse lives
and subjectivities? Considering that, in western culture, mothers continue to be
idealised or denigrated, exonerated or excoriated, what can we learn from staging
motherly ambivalence? What kind of theatrical representations of motherhood are
helpful for feminism?
From early in her career, each playwright has engaged with the subject of
motherhood. This interpretation traces and compares the ways in which these
playwrights have engaged with mothering and the mother icon from their early
experimental works to their later dramas that are more ‘mainstream’ in style.
Ultimately, in their more recent works, Parks and Carr probe the confined and limited
spaces to which mothers are still relegated and highlight the perils of the mother
icon—produced and endorsed in the broader, cultural space. Therefore, it is important
first to consider how motherhood is imagined in the western space that these two
playwrights share, and more specifically, to compare how the role is further idealised
in both Irish and African-American cultures.
Maternal Icons in Context
Parks and Carr share the context of the west: a culture that is saturated with images of
the ideal mother. For the model mother, the desire to reproduce and the act of
mothering are natural urges. Love for her child is unconditional. She is pure, devoted,
stoical—and too faultless to be real and human. Christianity possesses the most
famous and enduring mother icon: the image of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus.
Since this institution has for two millennia helped to mould western culture and
society, the image of the Madonna and Child precludes contemporary visions of ‘the
good mother’. In their introduction to Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the
Maternal through Politics, Home and the Body (2005), Sarah Hardy and Caroline
Wiedmer aptly evoke the Madonna and Child icon. Although mothers’ choices and
In ‘The Heaven and Hell of Mothering,’ Ros Coward discusses ubiquitous use of the word ‘evil’ in
newspaper coverage of child murders in the US and the UK, particularly when those murders are
committed by a parent. Dichotomous conceptions of good and evil were popularly rejected in the 1960s
and 1970s in favour of giving an equal hearing and trying to understand how the lives of perpetrators
may have contributed to such drastic crimes. However, Coward identifies a backlash towards these
fundamentalist binaries which she attributes partly to an increase in such crimes. However, she
considers this return to such basic ideals to have been stimulated by the Right in America (113-115).
60
68
experiences vary according to specific contexts, Hardy and Wiedmer remark that ‘the
constructions that frame our understanding of what it means to be a mother can seem
remarkably alike and can be slow to change across historical times and cultural
arenas’ (2). The model of the ideal mother is produced and maintained at the level of
culture and can inform the self-image and behaviour of real mothers. Culture
circumscribes mothers’ experiences to the extent that they contribute to their own
limitations. The result: the contemporary spaces that many mothers inhabit are as
limited as the private domesticity with which they were traditionally (and still are)
firmly associated. Ironically, however, while the spaces mothers that occupy are
private or at least constrained, their bodies become public property, their actions a
public concern.61
Within the western world, Parks and Carr occupy distinct national contexts,
which—though geographically distant—are culturally analogous. Both Irish and
African-American cultures are formerly subjugated spaces in which the impact of
imperialism has, in different ways, helped to consolidate an idealisation of the mother
figure.62 Throughout the eras, colonialism and slavery have both hinged on the racist
61
Such activities as drinking coffee or alcohol, smoking and taking drugs while pregnant are social
taboos in the West. In Using Women (2000), Nancy Campbell probes important issues about women
and addiction. Concerning the habits of pregnant women, she suggests that ‘the emphasis on personal
responsibility creates an atmosphere of public surveillance’ (222). In some cases, however, the state
can also dictate how pregnant women behave. In Mississippi, for example, Rennie Gibbs, a cocaine
addict who miscarried at 36 weeks when she was 15, now faces life imprisonment for ‘depraved-heart
murder.’ However, there is no evidence to suggest that her drug-use contributed to the miscarriage. For
more on this case and similar examples, see Ed Pilkington’s Guardian article, ‘Outcry in America’ (24
June, 2011). Pilkington also reveals that at least 38 of the 50 states in the U.S.A. have introduced
‘foetal homicide laws’ which ‘are are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the
women.’ Abortion legislation also affects a woman’s control over her body. The influence of
Catholicism, which views abortion as evil, endures in Ireland: here, the law still prohibits abortion
(unless pregnancy threatens the life of the mother). Hence, as soon as a woman living in Ireland
becomes pregnant, her body becomes a state concern. The Abortion Papers, Ireland (1992), edited by
Ailbhe Smyth, offers a useful collection of feminist commentaries on the implications of Irish abortion
laws. In both Europe and North America, abortion is restricted after a certain number of weeks, varying
between 12 and 24. Among other issues, these limitations depend on when a foetus is likely to survive
outside the womb. This is based on the argument that, when the foetus becomes ‘viable’, it has the right
to life. While it is a convincing argument, the unborn child’s right to life does circumvent the mother’s
choices about her body. For an overview of the laws and ethics associated with abortion in the West,
see Bertrand Mathieu’s The Right to Life in European Constitutional and International Case-law (esp.
23-44). While abortion has been legal in the United States since 1973, legislation, funding and
availability still vary from state to state. See Melody Rose’s Abortion: a Documentary and Reference
Guide (2008) for details of laws in particular states. Moreover, resistance from pro-life groups and the
Christian right make legal abortion the subject of on-going dispute in the U.S.A. Alesha E. Doan
considers historical and contemporary abortion debates in America in Opposition and Intimidation:
The Abortion Wars and Strategies of Political Harassments (2007).
62
In fact, we could argue that both playwrights occupy postcolonial spaces. Drawing on Homi
Bhabha’s ‘Narrating the Nation.’ S. E. Wilmer argues for Parks’s status as a postcolonial writer
(‘Restaging the Nation’ 442). Bhabha focuses on former British colonies in his analyses. Wilmer
69
logic that colonised and enslaved people are wild, weak and incapable of managing
their own affairs. The idea of ‘civilisation’ has been used to validate subjugation,
where the dominant group imagines itself as a father, guiding his young protégé
towards the light.63 Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) explores this idea in relation to
western perceptions of eastern cultures. According to Said:
To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or
Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either as
silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by them,
or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist's
grander interpretive activity, necessary for his performance as superior judge,
learned man, powerful cultural will. (208.)
Colonial metaphors, in particular, have involved a feminisation of the colony. 64 The
colonising power is imagined as the male seducer, and the prospective colony as his
sexual conquest.65 However, keeping the gendered image but changing the
perspective refigures the relationship as the disgraceful rape and condescension of
subaltern groups, such as people of African origin in America and Irish proletariats
during British colonial rule. For each group, the quest for liberation involved
embracing and re-imagining its feminised identity, recreating the icon of female
submission as one of maternal strength and regeneration.
applies these ideas to African-Americans, arguing that they have experienced a colonisation of the
body and that they continue to occupy a peripheral space in American culture. He analyses Parks’s The
America Play and The Death of the Last Black Man in this context to show how the dramatist ruptures
petrified conceptions of national identity and attempts to re/make history.
63
Many postcolonial theorists consider this Eurocentric duty to enlighten apparently uncivilised
peoples. Writers such as Edward Said attempt to reveal this ‘them and us’ divide to be a purely
imaginary boundary. Said’s Orientalism (1978) examines this idea in relation to Western perceptions
of Eastern cultures. In more general terms, and focusing on the interconnectedness of race, class and
gender, bell hooks’ writings explore the imagined binary oppositions that produce and maintain
systems of oppression. More specifically, hooks anticipates the erasure of the divide between coloniser
and colonised, for example in her essay ‘Marginality as a site of resistance’ (1990).
64
The feminising of the colony is a familiar trope in colonial art and literature. See, for example,
Stephanie Pratt’s American Indians in British Art: 1700 – 1840 (16-20). In A Dying Colonialism,
Fanon discusses the trope in relation to veiled Algerian women (35-63).
65
Jonathan Swift in his pamphlet ‘The Story of the Injured Lady’ (1746) for example, allegorically
expresses Ireland as a lady seduced and exploited by England, represented as a gentleman. Pratt draws
on Helen Carr to explore the genderising of the colonial relationship, asserting the relationship between
coloniser and colonised has been expressed as ‘man and woman, seducer and seduced, and even rapist
and victim’ (16). Kadiatu Kannah acknowledges the gendered colonial trope in her essay ‘Feminism
and the Colonial Body’ (based on a conference paper delivered at the National University of Ireland,
Galway in 1992). Kannah draws on Fanon’s study of the veil in A Dying Colonialism to assert that ‘the
familiar discourse of rape between coloniser, and colonised country, becomes elaborated through
images of rending veils, of exposing bodies and forbidden horizons (347).
70
Much of the Irish literature that emerged in the early twentieth century
reflected this nation-building process and sought to fortify the indigenous aspects of
Irish identity. Reconstructing the feminisation of the colony, the mother figure came
to represent Ireland and its hopes for the future. The figure of Kathleen Ni Houlihan
can be seen to personify Mother Ireland, especially in Yeats and Lady Gregory’s play
Caitlin ní Houlihan (1902).66 As Sara Gerend exemplifies, nationalist writers such as
Patrick Pearse sought to construct Ireland as a sexually pure space (36). Gerend also
explores how the literary image of the mother helped to circumscribe women’s roles:
However the metaphor also suggests that the mother is the primary ‘part’ that
Irish women should play in the independence movement. The valorisation and
idealisation of the female subject as a selfless protector of children prescribes
motherhood as the patriotic goal for Irish women. […] Instead of viewing
women as participants in the public realm, literary nationalists construct the
ideal Irish woman as a mother confined to the domestic sphere. (35-36.)
The influence of Catholic morality on state legislation also contributed to the creation
of this ideal feminine paradigm. Despite the fact that the 1916 Proclamation put forth
a model of equal citizenship, by 1937 citizenship for a woman ‘was now defined
solely in terms of her function as a wife and mother’ (Beaumont 563). The
construction of the Irish nation reflected Catholic teachings that saw housework and
child-rearing as the kinds of work best suited to a woman’s nature (Beaumont 564). 67
Similarly, the African American community has appropriated the ideal
mother figure in an endeavour to fortify its identity. Black women were denied
conventional maternal rights during slavery; hence, liberation entailed a compensatory
embracing of such rights and a reverence towards an image of the black mother as
selfless and devoted to domestic duties. The mother also has a central role in African
The idea of Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s title character in Caitleen ní Houlian as the nationalist
emblem of Mother Ireland has been widely discussed. Joseph Chadwick, in ‘Family Romance as
National Allegory in Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Dreaming of the Bones’ (1986), argues that
the ‘family romance of Cathleen ni Houlihan […] forms the basis of [a…] mother-figure who
personifies Ireland (156). Elizabeth Cullingford discusses the agendas behind and appropriation of the
figure in Irish literature in her 1990 essay ‘“Thinking of Her…as…Ireland”: Yeats, Pearse and
Heaney.’ For a more recent exploration of Cathleen ní Houlihan, see Henry Merritt’s 2001 essay
‘“Dead Many Times”: “Cathleen ni Houlihan,” Yeats, Two Old Women, and a Vampire.’
67
According to Article 41 of the Constitution of Ireland, ‘the State recognises that by her life within the
home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’ and
‘the state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity
to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’ This article (which has not been altered
since its inception in 1937) continues to foster the notion that a woman’s place is in the home and to
indirectly discourage women’s access to anything that might cause them to neglect their domestic
duties.
66
71
traditions. Recuperating this custom aided African-Americans in asserting their
difference and independence from the dominant group. This perhaps contributed to
the perpetuation of black maternal stereotypes such as the welfare mom, the mammy
and the matriarch. Patricia Hill Collins discusses how black male scholars have
responded to these reductive images:
Black male scholars in particular typically glorify black motherhood by
refusing to acknowledge the issues faced by black mothers […]. By claiming
that Black women are richly endowed with devotion, self-sacrifice, and
unconditional love—the attributes associated with archetypal motherhood—
Black men inadvertently foster a different controlling image for Black women,
that of the ‘superstrong Black mother’. (150.)
It appears that black male scholars’ attempts to counteract the enduring stereotypes of
black femininity actually resulted in a more positive but equally stifling image of
black motherhood. This idealised but reductive image of black motherhood represses
the diverse struggles of real mothers.
As we have seen in Chapter 1, in plays such as Betting on the Dust
Commander (1987), The Death of the Last Back Man (1989) and The America Play
(1993), Parks symbolises reproduction and evokes the urge to procreate. Parks evades
closure in these works through a use of episodic structures. The America Play and The
Death of the Last Black Man, in particular, celebrate the positive, regenerative aspects
of reproducing. These plays can be compared to Cixous’ vision of writing the body in
terms of their non-linear, pluralistic forms and the ways in which they ‘proclaim
woman as the source of life, power and energy’ (Moi 105).68 This is important in the
cultural milieu of black people in America. The ancestors of most black Americans
were brought from Africa during the era in which slavery was a legal institution.69
The slave trade dismantled the family unit and denied maternal rights. In this context,
images of fecundity and propagation help to fortify African American identity.
However, these images might be seen as problematic when we consider the work of
academics such as Hill Collins, helping—like the work of black male scholars—to
perpetuate an image of the ‘superstrong Black mother’ (150). In Parks’s later works,
the dramatist addresses more fully the complexity of black motherhood using plot
Chapter 1 offers a detailed discussion of Parks’s early plays in the context of feminist theory from
the mid-1970s on.
69
The slave trade was practiced in colonial America before the United States was founded in 1776, and
continued until the mid-19th century.
68
72
development and realistic characterisation; she moves away from these optimistic,
regenerative maternal representations. Parks interrogates such stereotypes as the
supermom and the welfare mom in her more recent plays. In doing so, she addresses
the gap between maternal icons and the lived experience of mothering.
Unlike Parks, Carr has sought to interrogate traditional, reductionist images of
motherhood from early in her career. While she offers a celebration of maternal power
as an exaggerated alternative to patriarchal culture The Deer’s Surrender (1990), as
we have seen, she offers sharper satires of idealised maternity in Low in the Dark
(1989) and This Love Thing (1991). At the level of form, Cixous’ ideals are also
relevant to Carr’s early work. Cixous argues in ‘Aller á La Mer’ (1975) that
imagining a return to the pre-oedipal mother—a time before the regulatory Symbolic
phase imposed its phallocentric order—could positively influence women’s creative
expression (547). Carr employs juxtaposed role-plays or vignettes which dramatise
surreal scenarios and porous personae in Low in the Dark and This Love Thing. The
plays stylistically express a desire for the Lacanian Imaginary which, in the context of
Cixous’ theories, has the potential to disrupt an oppressive Symbolic Order.70
Moreover, references to motherhood in Low in the Dark and This Love Thing are
highly subversive and satirical. Low in the Dark, in particular, extensively and
hilariously pokes fun at a role sanctified in Irish culture. Carr provides humorous
satires on the arrogance associated with reproduction in these early plays. She
continues and intensifies her challenge of maternal images in her later, more
naturalistic dramas. In 2003, Carr offers some explanation for these disruptive
strategies:
[…We] have this blessed Virgin myth embedded in us, and there is some huge
arrogance about carrying life and all the importance of it. They like to talk
about child birth, which is beautiful, but there is another side of it where it is a
mystery (qtd. in Kurdi 95).
Idealised maternal images have helped to construct and maintain the reductive Mother
Ireland metaphor and the oppressive power of Catholicism in Irish history. Carr’s
dramatic oeuvre showcases an effort to rupture these petrified maternal ideals and to
reveal the ambiguities and contradictions of motherhood.
Chapter 1 offers an extensive discussion of Carr’s early plays in the context of feminist theory, and
in particular, French feminist theory.
70
73
Later in their careers, both playwrights began to venture into the darker
chasms of maternity. Works such as Parks’s In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A
(2000) and Carr’s ‘Midlands Trilogy’ (1994-1998) and Woman and Scarecrow (2006)
draw offer more complex and politically potent contemplations on motherhood.71 The
mothers in these plays are simultaneously shamed and revered, welcomed and
shunned, empowered and powerless, liberated and contained, loving and hostile,
nurturing and murderous.72 These works expose the enduring contradictions of
motherhood, question women’s seemingly natural urges to mother, rupture static
maternal visions and dramatise motherly ambivalence. These plays, particularly those
that stage Medean maternal infanticide, complicate the simplistic dialectic of good
mother versus bad mother.
Maternal Images in the Early, Experimental Works
Motherhood is explored in hilariously bizarre ways in Marina Carr’s Low in the Dark.
This absurdist piece requires a set design that evokes and playfully probes the spaces
of masculinity, femininity and, more pertinent to this exploration, motherhood. Stage
right, the male characters inanely build a wall, occupying a zone filled with the
components of various DIY projects; that is to say, the components of traditional
masculinity. The female figures, a mother called Bender and her grown-up daughter
Binder, remain stage left for much of the action, in a bizarre bathroom area. In Irish
tradition, as well as in popular maternal iconography, the mother figure is linked to
the kitchen; this association constructs the figure as a wholesome nurturer. Carr
defiles the Irish mother’s purity—or at least, reveals it as an artifice. She locates
motherhood in a space that is still limited and still feminine, but one that is linked to
In Rhona Trench’s recent volume on Marina Carr, she dedicates Chapter 1 to Ullaloo, Low in the
Dark and Woman and Scarecrow because, she claims, ‘all three are experimental in style, having much
in common with plays in the non-naturalistic approach that Martin Esslin describes in The Theatre of
the Absurd’ (18). I would argue that while Woman and Scarecrow shares a sense of stasis and
surrealism with the early works, it has more in common with the plays Carr has written since 1994. As
well as being infused with the surreal, the early plays employ strange, non-naturalistic settings and
language. Moreover, these plays eschew psychological characterisation, and are, as Tom McIntyre
describes it, ‘freewheeling as regards structure’ (75). While it incorporates the angel of death/alter ego
character of Scarecrow, Woman and Scarecrow offers an immense, sympathetic exploration into a
dying woman’s psyche. Woman, Auntie Ah and Him represent average people, inhabit a domestic
setting and speak ordinary language. The action progresses chronologically, culminating in woman’s
death—the closure we have anticipated throughout. Trench does provide an insightful analysis of all
three plays in the context of Kristeva’s theory of abjection (29-94).
72
Verna A. Foster’s 2007 article is entitled ‘Nurturing and Murderous Mother in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In
the Blood and Fucking A.’
71
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the body, nudity and, by extension, sexuality.73 Through a use of masterful spatial and
visual coding, Low in the Dark encourages theatre practitioners to evoke the gap
between the almost chaste, unsullied image of the Irish mother and the repressed,
sexual genesis of this role. Simultaneously, the use of the bathroom points to the
restriction of feminine spaces.74
In Low in the Dark, Carr also utilises an absurdist theatrical style to
satirise female arrogance about reproduction and the culturally-inscribed notion of the
all-powerful mother. Bender, the prolific mother, sits in the bathtub rapidly and
repeatedly producing children. Having given birth to the first baby (doll) in the
opening scene of the play, Bender announces ‘[t]here’s plenty more where she came
from…as soon as I get my figure back I’ll have another and then another because I am
fertile!’(10). A ridiculous argument between Bender and her daughter Binder ensues,
in which they vie over who is the most fertile, with Binder bragging about her
youthful abundance of ovaries. Carr evokes an attitude that endows female creative
power with an almost god-like status. This power is something envied by the male
characters in Carr’s early plays. Scaife tells us:
Marina had an idea for the play, that she got from the notion that there was, in
some men, a sort of pregnancy envy, that some old bachelors grew humps on
their shoulders as a sort of surrogate pregnancy: by the end of the play
everyone has been pregnant except for Curtains (12).
Male ‘pregnancy-envy’ is enacted through the male character Bone’s performative
pregnancy in scene three. Similarly, the supposedly enviable omnipotence of
motherhood is communicated through the dialogue in Carr’s later play This Love
Thing (1991), when the character of Eve (representing the Biblical Eve) tells the male
characters: ‘I created God…He was jealous of me…You’re all jealous of me as well!
Of my power to create.’ By dramatizing such ludicrous activities and petty exchanges,
Carr ridicules reproductive power, maternal self-importance and the myth of motherly
omnipotence.
Sihra aptly points out that locating the mother in the bathroom ‘undermines the traditionally
sanctified role of motherhood in Irish culture’ (‘House of Women’ 203).
74
Sihra’s ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’ (2007) explores how Carr, in Low in
the Dark and other works, interrogates the limited spaces that women continue to occupy.
73
75
Similarly, Parks offers a humorous take on the female role as carrier of life in
The America Play. However, while her covert wit in this work furtively alludes to
sexuality and the body, it is not as subversive as Carr’s in Low in the Dark and This
Love Thing; instead, the tone is more celebratory. First produced in 1990, The
America Play takes place in a theme park which—as the stage directions tell us—is an
exact replica of the ‘Great hole of History’ (159). Temporally, it jumps between
repetitive fragments depicting a black man who impersonates Abraham Lincoln in the
past and his wife, Lucy, and son, Brazil, digging for artefacts from his life in the
present (after he has died). In her interview with Steven Durkman, Parks describes
how, through the use of playful punning, she has encoded references to the female
body in the language of The America Play (300). It appears the ‘Great Hole of
History’ is more than just a theme park; it is also a symbol of femininity—
specifically, the female sexual and reproductive organs. Hints to this effect can be
discerned from Brazil’s description of the time his parents spent at the theme park:
‘[…] He and Lucy they / honeymooned there. At thuh original Great Hole. Its uh
popular spot. / He and Her would sit on thuh lip and watch everybody who was / ever
anybody parade on by’ (179). However, Parks claims that most audiences either miss
the humour of such gags, or overlook their symbolic referents altogether (Durkman
300).
Although Parks discusses only The America Play’s playful puns in her
interview with Durkman, the characterisation of ‘The Great Hole of History’ as a
feminine entity also empowers womanhood and motherhood. This is achieved by
associating the hole with the words ‘Great’ and ‘History.’ Furthermore, despite the
connotations of emptiness in the word hole, when taken together, the words
paradoxically construct women as the perpetuators of ‘History’ through maternity.
While African-American history is filled with gaps and traumas, the phrase celebrates
the mothers whose fecundity and nurturing acts supported the survival of the race.
There is also a deliberate interplay between the words ‘hole’ and ‘whole’ which
probes the concept of femininity as phallic lack, in relation to the perceived
‘wholeness’ of masculinity. With the phrase ‘He digged the Hole and the Whole held
him’ (159), Parks reimagines male/female, whole/hole dialectics in a way that
celebrates femininity. The phrase may be read as ‘He ‘digged,’ meaning ‘loved’ in
African American Vernacular English, a woman and was made ‘whole.’ Here, Parks
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suggests that the union between male and female constructs wholeness, an idea that is
also explored in The Death of the Last Black Man.
Contrary to what its title suggests, The Death of the Last Black Man in the
Whole Entire World uses maternal representations to celebrate the survival of African
people in America, in spite of slavery’s destructive power.75 Parks constructs the
character of Black Woman with Fried Drumstick as a mother figure who repeatedly
urges Black Man with Watermelon to eat, and attempts to nurture and heal the
wounds that racial violence has inflicted on his body: ‘Swallow it down. I know.
Gimme your pit. Needs bathin’ (125). The play celebrates and empowers a traditional,
domestic version of motherhood which Parks represents through the caring and
sustaining actions of Black Woman. Like Carr in Low in the Dark and This Love
Thing, Parks links the fecundity of motherhood to power, but again without Carr’s
satirical approach. The play also fortifies motherhood through poetic associations of
femininity with reproduction. In order to express Black Woman’s power, Parks’s
creates perennial images of growth and organic multiplication within the character’s
dialogue:
Thuh dirt itself turns itself. So many melons. From one tuh 3 tuh many. Look
at um all. Ssuh garden. Awe on that. Winter pro-cessin back tuh spring-time.
They roll on by us that way. Uh whole line gone roun. Chuh. Thuh worl be
round. Moves that way so they say. You comed back. Yep. Nope. Well. Build
a well (128).
Parks ties womanhood to Mother Nature by associating this mother figure with the
fecundity and abundance of the earth, along with the birth and renewal associated
with spring.
Yvette Louis contextualises the play in the aftermath of slavery—which
denied black women conventional maternal rights. In doing so, she argues that Parks’s
images of motherly domesticity can be viewed as radical and empowering, rather than
reductionist. She argues that, in this play, domesticity becomes a site of resistance
since it symbolises black women’s access to, and success within, social institutions
such as marriage and the family (149). According to Louis:
75
For more on maternal imagery and the theme of survival in The Death of the Last Black Man, see
Yvette Louis inspired interpretation in ‘Body Language: The Black Female Body and the Word’
(2001).
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Representations of the black male body in pain predominate in the play, while
such female characters as Black Woman with Fried Drumstick are represented
as nurturers and sustainers who heal broken bodies. Black Woman with Fried
Drumstick resists the framework of racial violence, handles the neighbors,
kills hens, cooks, feeds, informs, and keeps the faith. A motherlike figure, she
is constructed as a powerful female under the extreme circumstances of
slavery and its aftermath (Louis 148).
The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World abounds with positive
and empowering images of domestic motherhood, created through the actions and
dialogue of the play’s female characters. Since its context is the racial violence
inflicted upon black people throughout history, it could actually be retitled: ‘The
Survival, Re-Birth and Sustenance of Black People in the World through Maternal
Power.’
However, the figure of Black Woman with Fried Drumstick is idealistic and,
as such, elides the complexities and anxieties of contemporary mothering. When
placed in a contemporary American context, Louis’s claim that the play celebrates the
‘success’ of black women in marriage and motherhood exposes the gaps and
omissions both in this aspect of her argument and in Parks’s representation of
motherhood; both overlook such diverse situations as mothers working outside the
home, single mothers struggling to cope with parenting alone and impoverished
women unable to provide for their families. Parks could be criticised for staging a
mother character who functions only as a domestic caregiver and—using powerful
nature imagery—elevating that role to reverential status. Hill Collins complains that
images of devoted, self-sacrificing black women foster a reductive image of black
mothers and repress the diverse struggles of real mothers (150). In this context, Parks
can be seen to project a problematic, essentialised image of black motherhood in The
Death of the Last Black Man. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 5, Parks’s staging of
stereotypes in the play as a whole can function to expose and undermine the cultural
pervasiveness of such images in popular culture—particularly when special attention
is played to costume design in productions of The Death of the Last Black Man.
While The Death of the Last Black Man portrays endurance through posterity
in a favourable light, portions of Parks’ earlier work, Betting on the Dust Commander,
connote a more pessimistic survival anxiety. Betting on the Dust Commander is
similar to Carr’s Low in the Dark in terms of its repetitive, non-linear style. Moreover,
these two works explore female anxiety about the ephemeral nature of fertility.
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Although the dialogue in Carr’s Low in the Dark satirises the way in which women
feel empowered by the ability to reproduce, it also resonates with the fears and
pressures associated with femininity and potential motherhood. Bender’s comment
about getting her figure back highlights the pressure faced by contemporary women to
maintain the physique which is typically viewed as attractive, despite having borne
children. The mother-daughter argument that follows concerns that restrictive anxiety
of the ‘ticking’ biological clock:
Binder I had a dream last night your uterus fell out.
Bender I dreamt your ovaries exploded!
Binder At least I have ovaries and eggs, lots of eggs, much more than you
because I’m young. I’m in my prime. (10.)
Parks addresses this issue more poignantly in Betting on the Dust Commander. In this
two-hander, the female character Mare pleads with her husband Lucius, conveying an
urgent yearning for children: ‘We could have wee ones Luki, I’d teach em tuh speak.
I’d teach em tuh say good morning I’d teach em to tell time. They learn real quick.
Didnt make nothing thuh first time maybe we could try again’ (85). Procreation is
important to Mare because it would allow fragments of herself to endure after her
death through the skills she would teach to her children, as well as the biological traits
she would pass on to them. Mare’s yearning for children communicates the human
will to survive that accompanies fear of death.
Parks refigures natural maternal urges as death anxiety by using metarepresentation to suggest that the figures of Betting on the Dust Commander are
already deceased. As we have seen in the last Chapter, one gets the disturbing feeling
that the slideshow scenes of the play, which are accompanied only by the
disembodied voices of Lucius and Mare, consist of posthumous fragments which have
outlived this couple. This intensifies the impression of the two characters, who are
onstage in the intermediate action of the play, as ghostly figures trapped in a
repetitious, purgatorial state of being—not unlike Tilly and Tomred of Carr’s Ullaloo
(1989). With her urges to reproduce, Mare embodies Parks’s preoccupation with
survival; since this early play, the theme of survival has developed organically
throughout her work. Mare’s broodiness is made all the more moving because it
seems that she ultimately missed out on motherhood. Instead, it appears that the
character lives on only through two-dimensional images of her appearance such as the
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pictures in the slideshows that bookend the action of the play. These representations
are fragments of individuals who, it seems, no longer exist. Hence, they make our
glimpse into Mare’s survival anxiety all the more moving. We are left with the
impression that her maternal urges remain unfulfilled. Here, the holocaust of slavery
might provide a useful context for understanding Mare’s maternal ‘urges.’ She
communicates anxiety about survival that is palpable in a black, American milieu in
which women were historically denied conventional maternal rights.
The Dialectic of Power
Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays’ and Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… appropriate use tragedy to
examine the maternal dialectic of power. In Of Woman Born (1976), Adrienne Rich
explores how this conflict of control applies to mothers by comparing the experience
of mothering to the institution of motherhood. She posits that although mothers have
power over their children, this power is limited to the domestic sphere. In her view,
the institution of motherhood—by encouraging economic and social dependency—
actually functions to make women powerless in the wider world. As Maroula Joannou
summarises, ‘a mother’s will to power over her children is therefore the correlative of
her powerlessness in the world’ (48). In these works, Parks and Carr consider
motherhood in terms of its enduring dual relationship to both empowerment and
powerlessness: as mothers, these women are empowered variously by their abilities to
create and sustain life, their possessiveness and authority over their children and the
perceived social status of the maternal role. The matriarchal power that these Hesters
have within their families is both at odds with, and compensates for, the subjugation
they experience in their communities.
Parks and Carr intensify the dialectic of the power in these plays by locating
their protagonists in oppressive social contexts. As a traveller, Hester Swane of Carr’s
By the Bog of Cats… is disempowered by her exclusion—and potential expulsion—
from the prejudiced Irish community in which she lives. It appears that she has signed
over her property to her former lover Carthage who wants her to move on from their
locality so that he can start a new life in a more socially and economically viable
match with his fiancée Caroline. Hester La Negrita of Parks’s In the Blood also
experiences social exclusion because of her extreme poverty and the culturally
inscribed stigma attached to having five children of varying parentage. Hester Smith
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of Parks’s Fucking A is subjugated because of her lower social class, along with her
undesirable profession as an abortionist. Her powerlessness is most evident when it is
juxtaposed to the corrupt and tyrannical authority of characters such as The Mayor
and The First Lady; the latter was responsible for the long-term imprisonment of
Hester’s son Boy whom she caught stealing some food when he was just a child.
Joannou considers sociological studies which reveal that motherhood remained
attractive to women with lower levels of socio-economic status throughout the rise of
feminism in the 1960s and 1970s:
But in working-class communities where women had more limited career
choices, motherhood continued to be an attractive option for women,
compensating for poorly paid, low-status jobs and providing them with
approval and respect in their communities. (43).
Joannou highlights the way in which this counterbalancing function of motherhood
can lend a sense of social status to those for whom it is limited. Using the form of
tragedy, Parks and Carr create situations of intense hopelessness that reveal
motherhood’s enduring compensatory aspects. Parks’s Hesters are sympathetic,
psychologically-developed characters that represent individuals within the society’s
underclass. They respond to cultural marginalisation by asserting and exerting
extreme maternal authority.
In In the Blood and By the Bog of Cats…, the dramatists use revelatory
exchanges between characters to illustrate maternal possessiveness. Although the
Hesters of these plays have no social influence and few material possessions, they
have their children and they cling compulsively to parental power. In In the Blood,
Hester’s friend Amiga Gringa suggests that she send her children away to give her a
chance at ‘freedom’, a ‘chance at life’ (28). However, Hester defends her status as a
mother: ‘My kids is mine. I get rid of em what do I got? Nothing. I got nothing now,
but if I lose them I got less than nothing’ (28). Hester does not have money or
property, but she has her children. Her children compensate for her ultimate poverty:
they are her ‘5 treasures’ (21). Although the varying paternity of her children is one of
the reasons for her social exclusion, her status as a mother paradoxically elevates her
from a state of ‘less-than-nothingness.’ In Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, Hester
continually asserts her authority as Josie’s mother. Her words in a confrontation with
Josie’s father Carthage demonstrate the absolutist way in which she sees her maternal
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potency; she jealously guards this control against Carthage and Josie’s prospective
stepmother, Caroline: ‘So I’m meant to lie back and let Caroline Cassidy have her
way in the rearin’ of my child […]. If it’s the last thing I do I’ll find a way to keep her
from ya’ (290).
During these moments of By the Bog of Cats…, Hester’s words are grave and
portentous but the relationship between Carthage Kilbride and his mother, Mrs
Kilbride, provides pertinent comic relief. Mrs Kilbride’s dialogue mirrors Hester’s
maternal possessiveness in hilarious ways. She functions as a satire on the
stereotypical interfering Irish mother, who is unwilling to relinquish power over her
son’s affairs. In Scene Four of the play, Mrs Kilbride comically reminds Carthage that
she is his mother and that she ‘won’t be goin’ away. Ever’ (282). In her childish
taunting of her granddaughter Josie, she expresses her wishes that she and Hester
would leave and ‘give your poor Daddy back to me where he rightfully belongs’
(279). This mother’s possessive, megalomaniac behaviour endures despite Carthage’s
status as an independent adult and father. While she is drawn in a more realist way,
Mrs Kilbride is reminiscent of Carr’s early experimental figures: like Binder and
Bender, she becomes a caricature that parodies female stereotypes, in this case,
maternal possessiveness.
Through the use of striking imagery, Parks’s Fucking A offers for
consideration the notion of the child as the mother’s possession and the paradox of
maternal power. The ‘stinking weeping’ ‘A’ branded on Hester Smith’s chest
resonates with the branding of slaves, signifying their status as possessions. This
highlights how she is constrained in servitude by the dystopian society in which she
lives, as well as alluding to the way in which women’s and particularly mothers’
bodies have historically been viewed as public property. However, Hester herself also
uses a kind of ‘branding’ to assert her maternal power; that is, her perceived
‘ownership’ of her son. When Butcher asks her how she will recognise her son after
years of separation, she tells him of how she marked or branded him:
When they comed to take him away, just before they took him, I bit him. Hard.
Right on the arm just here. I bit hard. Deep into his skin. His blood in my
mouth. He screamed but then he was screaming anyway. After theyd tooked
him away I went and bit myself. Just as hard and in the same place exactly.
See the mark I got? My Boys got one too. Identical. (116).
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In the same way as one etches one’s name on an object to indicate possession, Hester
has used her teeth to etch her mark onto the body of her child. The permanent scar left
behind indicates that Boy (or Monster, as he is known as an adult) is her son and
belongs to her alone. Hester’s stamp of possession on her son’s body correlates to
society’s stamp of ownership on her own. The mark Hester makes on her son
indicates her perceived maternal authority. However, society’s mark on Hester reveals
her restriction in the wider world. Symbolically, Parks evokes the dialects of maternal
power and possession. In doing so, she exposes how a mother’s authority over her
child is at odds with societal control over her own body and actions.
In the Blood also deals with a kind of branding and explores the use and
control of the maternal body. Hester la Negrita perceives her children to be her
possessions or her ‘5 treasures’ (21). Yet, she has no husband, no money and no skills
which means she relies on others and on the state for survival. Her community
(represented by the chorus as in Greek tragedy) has branded her a slut. The word is
not imprinted on her body, but it is scrawled on the wall of her home under the bridge.
As well as revealing how ‘welfare moms’ are stigmatised in America (which will be
discussed later), this labelling represents society’s ownership of Hester’s body. Even
those who should protect her rights and her welfare have all taken advantage of her
subjugation and dependency. There are six confessions in the play. In these
monologues, characters such as the doctor, the welfare lady, the reverend and Hester’s
friend Amiga Gringa disclose the ways in which they have taken possession of her
body in various sexual exploits. The doctor’s decision to have her sterilised shows
how Hester’s body is not her own; the use of the term ‘spay’ on the chart that he uses
to express his recommendation reduces her to the status of an animal, decisions about
whom lie with her owners (41-43). The final stage image depicts the imprisoned
Hester who has now been forcibly ‘spayed,’ with the chorus circling around her
lauding the removal of her ‘womanly parts’:
THAT’S WHY THINGS ARE BAD LIKE THEY ARE
CAUSE OF
GIRLS LIKE THAT
THAT EVER HAPPEN TO ME YOU WOULDNT SEE ME
DOING THAT
YOU WOULDNT SEE THAT HAPPENING TO ME
WHO THE HELL SHE THINK SHE IS
AND NOW SHES GOT TO PAY FOR IT
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HAH! (108.)
The state has now taken ultimate possession of her reproductive organs by removing
them from her body. Here, visual image and dialogue point to a significant
contradiction of motherhood: while a mother is relegated to a limited and private
space, but her body and her children become public concerns.
In the Blood dramatizes how motherhood can constrain women and
circumscribe their freedom. Even on a smaller scale, the characters take advantage of
Hester’s status as a mother and the sacrifices that it entails. An early scene with
Amiga Gringa reveals how Hester had previously asked Amiga to sell a watch for her.
Although it was an expensive watch, Amiga gives her only five dollars following the
sale. When Hester declares that she should have sold it herself, Amiga replies: ‘But
you had the baby to watch’ (27). This adds resonance to Aminga’s declaration that
without her children holding her back, Hester would have more opportunities to
succeed in the world (28). This scene and the confessions show how being a mother—
especially an unskilled single mother—can relegate women to a state of desperate
reliance.
A central irony of In the Blood lies in how motherhood furthers Hester’s
poverty and curtails her autonomy, yet she sees family as a sanctuary from her
condescending society. Hester loves her ‘5 joys’ and is convinced that her family will
shortly get a ‘leg up’ (12). Even when her prejudiced community’s labelling and
exploitation of her finally drives her to murderous violence, she expresses this idea of
motherhood as a refuge. The drama’s sixth confession, Hester’s own, takes place in
the penultimate scene of the play. She places her hand in her dead son’s blood and
declares that she should have had more children:
I shoulda had a hundred-thousand
A hundred thousand a whole army full I shoulda!
I shoulda.
One right after the other! Spitting em out with no years in
between! (107.)
This scene resonates with the meditation on the power of maternal fecundity provided
in Carr’s Low in the Dark, in which Bender absurdly produces babies ‘with no years
in between.’ Rather than satirising the myth of motherly omnipotence, however, In
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the Blood’s harrowing and intense penultimate scene exposes maternal power as
consolation for extreme powerlessness in the world. Joannou tells us that although
traditional motherhood attracted a wealth of criticism during the rise of feminism,
‘[i]n black communities many women regarded the family as their main refuge
against a hostile, racist society […]’ (43). Hester’s final speech involves creating such
a refuge against the hostile and hypocritical society that has, arguably, driven her to
infanticide. She fantasises about using her ability to reproduce to create an army of
children to protect her, a counter-community of her own that will compensate for her
exclusion from society at large.
Questioning the Natural Mother
Revealing the compensatory function of motherhood, as Parks does in In the Blood,
also urges audience members to question the supposedly natural urge to mother.
Rather than fulfilling a biological yearning to reproduce, Hester of Parks’s In the
Blood and Woman of Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006) appear to have desired
children in order to fill voids in other aspects of their lives and to heal their
insecurities. Woman and Scarecrow is a linear deathbed lament that combines realism
with surreal, supernatural elements. Confined to her bed, Woman is interrogated by
Scarecrow—a character who embodies her alter ego or more appropriately, the best
part of herself that she has suppressed throughout her life. The play stages a debate
between these two personas with many of their arguments hinging on Woman’s eight
children:
WOMAN: Leave my children out of the witch turnings of your mind.
SCARECROW: Numbers. You just wanted numbers. You wanted to look and
say this one is mine and this and him and her and those and that pair up there
in the oak tree. Mine. All mine. Greedy for numbers. Insatiable for the head
count. (16.)
Like Hester’s in In the Blood, Woman’s children here resemble material possessions
that compensate for the emptiness in her life. However, while Hester is emotionally
deprived through mistreatment, as well as lack of means and property, Woman’s void
seems only emotional. Yet an equally immense and harrowing lack of fulfilment
characterises the tragic ending of each play. Hester never gets her ‘leg up’ and finally
finds herself in a more hopeless situation than ever. Woman, confronted with her
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failings in life, fights death till it claims her, clinging desperately to her recollections
and telling Scarecrow that she is ‘not ready’ (68).
Woman and Scarecrow reveals how motherhood may be reproduced through
the mother-daughter relationship and how having children of one’s own can
counterbalance the loss of a matriarchal figure. One of Woman’s neuroses appears to
stem from her mother’s death. Sporadically throughout the drama, she muses
romantically about the red coat that her mother supposedly bought her before she
died. Pitched against this is her sentimentality about her children and her reverence
towards procreation. The juxtaposition is most evident when she considers that she
might be pregnant in Act Two:
WOMAN: What do we have, minutes? Seconds? The twins aren’t even six till
February. Auntie Ah, I think I’m pregnant. Three months. It’ll go to the grave
with me.
AUNTIE AH: Aren’t you too old to be pregnant?
WOMAN: Either that or the menopause but it feels like a baby…that
exhilarating surge I get each time…life…life…overwhelming, unstoppable
life.
SCARECROW: Ask her did you ever have a red coat. (46.)
The attachment to her mother, metonymically represented by the red coat, is linked to
her own maternal desire.76 This can be illuminated in the context of feminist
sociologist Nancy Chodorow’s hypothesis published in The Reproduction of
Mothering (1978). In this milestone in philosophies about motherhood, Chodorow
employs object-relations theory to explore how women create and re-create the
mother-daughter relationship in a cyclical process beginning with the daughter’s birth
through ‘intrapsychic and intersubjective’ means (ix). She theorises maternal
subjectivity as follows:
Many women may experience what feels like a drive or biological urge to
become mothers, but this very biology is itself shaped through unconscious
fantasy and affect that cast what becoming pregnant or being a mother means
in terms of a daughter’s internal relation to her own mother. (ix.)
In Woman and Scarecrow, the extent of Woman’s loss and the profound effect of her
Here, I am using the phrase ‘maternal desire’ in clinical psychologist Daphne de Marneffe’s sense of
the word—that is the desire to spend time mothering and the urge to care for one’s children. For an
exploration of how we might think about this desire and where it might fit in a woman’s life, see de
Marneffe’s Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner Life (2007).
76
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mother’s death become clear when she describes a significant moment with her dying
mother. As they looked at each other, Woman caught a stark glimpse of her own
death day. The transfixing imagery in Woman’s speech explains how the two swam in
each other’s eyes, ‘spellbound, unsmiling, conspirators too wise to fight what has
been decreed on high, long, long ago’ (48). Using rich, suggestive language, Carr
envisions the way in which a mother’s life (and death) informs her daughter’s; the
speech also alludes to how the role of mother is reproduced through generations.
The final moments of Woman and Scarecrow are pertinent to the paradox of
maternal power in which a mother’s authority over her children stands in stark
contrast to her powerlessness in the wider world; the dialogue here reveals
motherhood as a role that can both authorise and delegitimise women. Scarecrow
urges Woman to admit various truths throughout the drama. During her life, Woman
missed opportunities to be truly happy because she was a conformist who was
‘martyred […] to mediocrity’ (28). The dialogue reveals that there was once a man
with whom Woman could have found contentment. However, she remained instead in
an unhappy marriage which she finally describes to her husband as ‘[e]xile from the
best of ourselves’ (60). In her on-going dispute with Scarecrow, she uses the children
as her excuse for staying with her cheating husband. Children intensify Woman’s
entrapment and stifle her opportunities, whilst simultaneously offering a
compensatory fulfilment. Hence, her situation resembles Hester’s in In the Blood.
Scarecrow interviews Woman during the final moments of her life while filling out a
questionnaire on her behalf:
WOMAN: Will all of this be used against me?
SCARECROW: It will be used. (Reads) And the children, admit it, they were
your shield to beat the world away?
WOMAN: Yes, they were.
SCARECROW: You hid behind the nappies and bottles?
WOMAN: The mountainous bellies and the cut knees, the broken arms, the
temperatures, the uniforms, the football, the music, the washing machine, the
three square meals, yes, I hid behind it all. Yes, I used them. They were my
little soldiers. I was the fortress. (66.)
Here, the dialogue shows how the domestic, maternal space can entail a dual-function
as a protective stronghold on the one hand and an oppressive prison on the other. The
prospects of happiness have eluded woman’s grasp (because she let them); her
authority in her home over her private army of children is her consolation prize. Like
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Parks in In the Blood, Carr uses military language to show how motherhood can
operate as a shield against the world. In In the Blood and Woman and Scarecrow, each
playwright uses her protagonist’s speech to expose the role of mother as a generic,
iconic mask behind which women may hide. In doing so, each dramatist reveals
compensatory reasons for mothering and obliquely questions accepted ideas about
biological urges to reproduce.
While Carr’s early work provides absurd satires of motherhood, many of her
later, more realist works seek to ‘question the idea of the “natural” mother’
(McMullan, ‘Unhomely Women’ 14). In plays such as Woman and Scarecrow and
The Mai (1994), this is achieved through the use of recognisable settings and
language, as well as plot and character development. The Mai strikingly
demythologises motherhood through the characterisation of the eponymous
protagonist’s grandmother, Grandma Fraochlán. She appears to be addicted to her
opium pipe. Unseen by the audience, ghosts appear to her during her drug-fuelled
reveries; her conversations with them and with the other characters convey an appetite
for the erotic. This is significantly at odds with the stereotypical image of the pure and
prudish Irish mother. Furthermore, her own daughter Julie disparages her maternal
skills. Defending herself in a heated row with Grandma Fraochlán, she describes how
difficult life was for herself and her six siblings because of her mother’s fiery
temperament, the way in which all her energy went into pleasing their father who
‘thought she was an angel’, and how her grief after his death turned her into ‘a
madwoman’ (145). In October 2010, Chapter Theatre performed The Mai at Cork
Arts Theatre. Under the direction of Judy Chalmers, the production provoked
sympathy for Julie through Judy Donovan’s passionate delivery of the character’s
complaints. During the row, Antoinette Hilliard, playing Grandma Fraochlán, pushed
provocatively into the reeling Julie’s space. The actors’ movements helped to develop
the confrontational, rebellious aspects of Grandma’s character, as well as enlivening
her problematic relationship with her children. Ironically, this elderly matriarch of the
family deviates most from the traditional image of the Irish mother and is
characterised as the most un-motherly figure in the play.
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Antoinette Hilliard (Grandma Fraochlán), Judy Donovan (Julie) and Tess Healy
Maguire (Agnes) in Chapter Theatre’s production of 2010 The Mai, directed by
Judie Chalmers.
In order to challenge the notion of the natural mother, Carr also uses Grandma
Froachlán to probe the conventional model of the nuclear family. In Act One, she
expresses her adoration for her late husband whom she tenderly refers to as the ninefingered fisherman. Evoking the usually suppressed tension between romantic love
and parental love, Grandma Froachlán suggests that perhaps ‘parents as is lovers is
not parents at all, not enough love left over’ (144). Her characterisation offers an
innovative challenge to the convention of lovers becoming parents, as well as
suggesting an alternative: that they simply do not. This is particularly evident in the
following speech:
I know I was a useless mother […]. There’s two types of people in this world
from what I can gather, them as puts their children first and them as puts their
lover first and for what it’s worth, the nine-fingered fisherman and meself
belongs to the latter of these. I would gladly have hurled all seven of ye down
the slopes of hell for one night more with the nine-fingered fisherman and may
I rot eternally for such unmotherly feelin’. (182.)
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Grandma Froachlán’s love for her husband is clearly stronger than her motherly
instincts. However, in a country in which contraception was unavailable, and attempts
to prevent conception were considered sinful, she was left with no option but to
follow accepted conventions and to progress (un)naturally from the role of lover to
that of mother. Grandma Froachlán even identifies her own ‘unmotherly feelin’’ as
sinful. Here, Carr probes the Catholic Church’s idealisation of motherhood. In doing
so, she reveals the way in which the Church’s power over Irish society provided the
passionate ‘lovers’ that Grandma Froachlán represents with no option other than
parenting, even though the role felt unnatural to them. Carr positions Grandma
Froachlán as both sensuous and un-motherly, which disrupts the seamless, culturallyendorsed link between sexuality and reproduction in Catholic Ireland.
Carr continues this work in Portia Coughlan (1996) which is set in the present
and offers for consideration the view that motherhood does not come naturally to all
women. The dialogue reveals that the eponymous protagonist had been encouraged by
her father to relinquish her place at university and to marry the wealthy Raphael
Coughlan at seventeen. Portia is now a mother of three. Although she appears utterly
trapped, she doubts her ability to leave the Belmont Valley and has never even taken a
holiday. She is haunted by the ghost of her dead twin, whom only she can see. The
action centres on her thirtieth birthday, and the fifteenth anniversary of his death;
throughout, she challenges an ideal image of motherhood: drinking first thing in the
morning, distaining housework and taking little interest in her children. When
Raphael tells her that four year old Quentin has been crying for her, she shows little
sympathy assuring her husband ‘he’ll grow out of me eventually’ (221). She also
reminds him that she never wanted children:
I never wanted sons nor daughters and I never pretended otherwise to ya; told
ya from the start. But ya thougt ya could woo me into motherhood. Well, it
hasn’t worked out, has it? You’ve your three sons now, so ya better mind them
because I can’t love them, Raphael. I’m just not able. (221.)
The characterisations of Portia Coughlan and Grandma Fraochlán question the
assumption that maternity is the ‘culmination or destination of female development’
(Parker 19). Carr uses these characters to obliquely challenge negative attitudes
towards the ‘barren’ or childless woman. These characters stimulate audience
awareness of the concept that, despite widespread patterns in female experiences, ‘all
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women do not experience their sexual and reproductive bodies in the same way’
(Chodorow xiv). Portia Coughlan will also be discussed later in this chapter in the
context of maternal ambivalence, and in detail in Chapter 5, as an example of how the
play reveals performativity, as well as how direction and costume design can increase
its feminist potential.
Disciplining the Maternal Subject
To return to Chodorow’s hypotheses on the reproduction of mothering: Chodorow
theorises in terms of internal object relations and unconscious mother-child
communications. In her preface to the second edition of The Reproduction of
Mothering (1999), she explains that some feminists have viewed this connectedness
as a poor model for imagining a desirable, autonomous femininity (ix). However,
while she does argue for unconscious mother-child relations, her notions of repetition
and reproduction pave the way for constructionist theories of gender and performative
models of its constitution such as Butler’s. Texts of any kind that expose the
performative aspects of gender or, more specifically, motherhood introduce the
liberating prospect that these roles might be construed in different ways. Although
Butler does not theorise about parental roles specifically, this section applies her
general philosophy of gender performativity—as discussed in her 1994 essay
‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’—to representations of family and
maternity in the plays of Parks and Carr. In doing so, it demonstrates how each
playwright promotes the notion that accepted ideals of motherhood and family are
culturally constituted. The Foucaultian aspects of Butler’s essay, in which she
discusses how society produces, regulates and, if they transgress, punishes gendered
subjects applies to how Parks and Carr expose society’s disciplining of the maternal
subject.77
The Mai and In the Blood expose the ways in which society enforces the
acceptable family structure. Hence, these works show how family is constructed in
the same way that Butler believes gender is performed, that is ‘under a situation of
duress […] with clearly punitive consequences’ (‘Performative Acts’ 156-157). Butler
Although analogies can be drawn between these aspects of Butler’s work Foucault’s approach to
identity categories, she interrogates some aspects of his work in her book Gender Trouble (1990).
Here, she posits a discontinuity between his approach to sex in his critical introduction to the Herculine
Barbin journals and in his book The History of Sexuality 1 (127-124).
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draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in order to explain that, rather than a
natural fact, gender is a historical situation:
As an intentionally organised materiality, the body is always an embodying of
possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In
other words, the body is a historical situation, as de Beauvoir has claimed, and
is a manner of doing, dramatizing and reproducing a historical situation.
(‘Performative Acts’ 156.)
Like the gendered body, the traditional western family structure is a historical
situation. We ‘do’ family in accordance with the models provided by the culture in
which we are nurtured; we do it in order to conform to the dominant order and evade
social marginalisation. Both Carr and Parks are from Catholic backgrounds; The Mai
and In the Blood show how the religious and moral ideals of societies help to
construct the performative, historical condition of motherhood. While Carr’s The Mai
certainly dramatises the historical situation of family through its characterisation of
women from four generations, both this play and Parks’s In the Blood also explore the
social stigma attached to single motherhood.
Although Grandma Froachlán is characterised as un-motherly, particularly
through her obsession with her husband, The Mai’s obsession with Robert is
inextricably linked to her children, and to the socially-prescribed idea of the family
and the home. Millie tells us that after Robert left ‘The Mai set about looking for that
magic thread that would stitch us together again and she found it at Owl Lake, the
most coveted site in the country’ (111). The Mai went on to build an opulent dwelling
by the lake, where she housed herself and her children and willed her husband to
return, and where the action of the play it set. Both literally and metaphorically, the
building of this house demonstrates that The Mai strives to be a homemaker. Its size
and opulence serve cathartic and compensatory functions for the protagonist. They
allow her to prove her own autonomy and achievement without the support of her
husband, whilst also physically representing a status that might compensate for the
social stigma attached to his absence. Throughout the play, The Mai appears to be
plagued by the conflict between these two possibilities: autonomy and stigmatisation.
Using recognisable characters and language in The Mai, Carr promotes female
independence; she also questions culturally and politically enforced Irish stigmas. In
Ireland, divorce was illegal at the time in which the play is set, the summers of 1979
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and 1980. It was also legally unavailable at the time in which it was staged, in 1994.
However, the 1995 divorce referendum was pending. Mary Robinson had been
President of Ireland since 1990, the first woman to fill this role. It was in this context
that the first productions of The Mai probed pertinent issues about women’s
autonomy. A proposal to amend the constitution in order to allow divorce had been
defeated in 1986. The results of the 1995 referendum indicated that only a marginal
majority of Irish people were in favour of divorce.78 Evidently, the legal dissolution of
marriages remained a sensitive and controversial issue. Ireland’s 58-year-old
constitutional ban on divorce was, of course, inextricably linked to the power of the
Catholic Church. In the social worlds of both the characters on stage, and the audience
members in the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, where the play premiered, there was still a
palpable shame attached to ‘the failed marriage,’ particularly when children were
involved. The taboo was validated by both church and state; in Ireland in 1994,
divorce was not only ‘sinful’, but it was unlawful. Audience members would,
therefore, have identified with the unsurprising way in which the eponymous
protagonist of The Mai clings so obsessively to the possibility of saving her marriage,
and ‘stitching’ her family back together. However, in addition to voicing an
alternative to motherhood through the character of Grandma Froachlán, the
playwright dramatises societal behaviour that enforces acceptable models of family,
and reveals that the conventional family is performative.
Carr uses The Mai to expose the hypocrisy of traditional attitudes that are
heavily influenced by Ireland’s laws and religion; these attitudes prevailed during the
time in which the play is set and at the time in which it was first staged. The way in
which The Mai’s two aunts, Julie and Agnes, react to the shameful possibility of
having a divorcee in the family  their niece and The Mai’s sister Beck  reveals and
ridicules common Irish prejudices about marriage and the family. Upon hearing that
Beck is getting divorced, the aunts resolve to change her mind and seek her out at The
Mai’s house. Carr constructs a comical stage image in which Julie and Agnes, the
78
The Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution Act, 1995, was approved by referendum on the 24th of
November 1995 and signed into law on the 17th of June 1996. This deleted article 41.3.2, which stated
that ‘No law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage.’ It allowed for the
substitution of a new article 41.3.2, allowing divorce in certain circumstances. The criteria decrees that
spouses must have lived apart for at least four of the previous five years of marriage and that there is no
prospect of reconciliation (‘Constitution of Ireland’). The final count revealed 50.3% in favour of
ending the ban on divorce and 49.7% opposed the change. For results of Irish referendums, see Took
and Donnelly’s ‘Elections Ireland.’
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defenders of social order and maintainers of tradition, peer like detectives through
The Mai’s window, with Julie considering the possibility that Beck might be
pregnant: ‘God forbid! A divorcee with a child, born after the divorce […] if she is,
with the luck of God she’ll miscarry’ (136). Julie also expresses relief that Robert has
returned, which means that the aunts have at least one less family member to worry
about (136). These two characters represent the way in which communities compel
the performance of the socially acceptable family. According to Butler:
To guarantee the reproduction of a given culture, various requirements, wellestablished in the anthropological literature of kinship, have instated sexual
reproduction within the confines of a heterosexually based system of marriage
which requires the reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes
which, in effect, guarantee the eventual reproduction of that kinship system.
(‘Performative Acts’ 159.)
While Butler has not provided detailed theories about parental roles as specific kinds
of gendered performances, the way in which she conceives the mechanism of gender
performativity is relevant to The Mai’s representation of family. The aunts in The Mai
represent the Butlerian idea of society as a regulatory force, thus reminding the
audience that the traditional family is culturally constituted, rather than ‘natural.’
Their negative perceptions of single parenthood help to explain The Mai’s
unwillingness to consider an alternative to a family unit that includes her husband.
When Robert begins an affair, the Mai chooses suicide over the possibility of
happiness as a single mother. The play’s outcome serves to remind the viewers of the
potential damage created by social taboos and the prospect of cultural exclusion. The
poignant stage image of the dead protagonist promotes enquiry regarding the
relevance and necessity of restrictive cultural models of gender and the family.
Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… also deals with the way in which single mothers
continue to be stigmatised in contemporary society. In the fourth scene of the play,
Mrs. Kilbride taunts Josie about her status as illegitimate. In the same way that the
entire cast of In the Blood, representing the prejudices of American society, brand
Hester’s children as ‘bastards’ at the beginning of the play, Mrs Kilbride repeatedly
refers to Josie as a ‘bastard’ throughout the fourth scene of By the Bog of Cats….
Although her character is comically exaggerated, Mrs Kilbride’s attitude reflects the
way in which rural Irish society, and in particular the older generation, continues to
exhibit condescending behaviour towards single, state-dependant mothers. This
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prejudice is also partially rooted in Catholicism and Mrs. Kilbride’s harsh and
unchristian treatment of Josie highlights the hypocrisy that continues to prevail in
rural Ireland. However, she goes on to say ‘[d]on’t you worry, child, we’ll get ya off
her yet. Me and your daddy has plans. We’ll better ya into the semblance of
legitimacy yet, as soon as we get ya […]’ (281). Although the stigma of illegitimacy
is attached to the child, Mrs. Kilbride suggests that it is possible to override this by
teaching her at least to ‘act’ legitimate. This involves removing her from the care of
her mother, with whom ultimate responsibility for this stigma lies. Due to her status
not only as a traveller but as an unmarried mother, Hester will always be excluded
from society at large. Her daughter, if she can be separated from her, might have a
chance at integration. These parts of the play point to the reductive attitudes towards
unmarried women and minority groups which circumscribe and maintain their social
stigmatisation.
Like Julie and Agnes in The Mai, and Mrs Kilbride in By the Bog of Cats…,
Parks’s chorus in In the Blood demonstrates Butler’s notion of society as a punitive
force that compels gender (or, in this interpretation, maternal) performativity.
According to Butler, failure to perform correctly as a man or woman leads to cultural
exclusion (156-157). We can apply these ideas to the concept of maternity and how
Parks stages it in In the Blood. Hester is ostracised because of her failure correctly to
perform motherhood—to conform to ‘the conventional model of the good mother’
(Foster, ‘Nurturing’ 77). From the beginning of the play, the chorus stigmatises
Hester due her five ‘illegitimate’ children and her lack of a husband. Like the aunts’
dialogue in The Mai, the chorus’s chattering disapproval reveals certain societal
prejudices, particularly in the play‘s prologue:
SHE MARRIED? / SHE AINT MARRIED / SHE DON’T GOT NO SKILLS
CEPT ONE / CANT READ CANT WRITE / SHE MARRIED? / WHAT DO
YOU THINK? / BURDEN TO SOCIETY / HUSSY / SLUT / […] / WOMAN
GOT 5 BASTARDS / AND NOT A PENNY TO HER NAME / […] I’LL BE
DAMNED IF SHE GONNA LIVE OFF ME /[…]! (6-7.)
The words of the chorus reflect the way in which single mothers are stigmatised,
particularly when they depend on the state for financial support.
However, the way in which Parks characterises Hester in the first scene
contradicts the chorus’ condemnation of her. The protagonist is filled with love for
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her children and hope for the family’s future: ‘5 children I got. 5 treasures. 5 joys. But
we aint got our leg up, just yet’ (12). While Hester goes without food to feed her
children, she presents them with their meals in a fun and good-natured way: ‘Todays
soup the day, ladies and gents, is a very special blend of herbs and spices. The broth is
chef Mommies worldwide famous “whathaveyou” stock’ (17). Beyond their obvious
poverty, most of the behaviour and rapports within this family match how one would
expect a conventional household to function. By echoing the criticisms typically
directed towards the African-American, state-dependent mothers that Hester
represents, and pairing it with an ensuing characterisation of Hester as a devoted, selfsacrificing and optimistic mother, Parks exposes how the ‘issue’ of single motherhood
is constructed by culture and maintained by society; thus, she opens up the possibility
that it may not be as problematic as it seems.
In her essay on the black female body in The Death of the last Black Man in
the Whole Entire World (2001), Louis comments:
The recent political preoccupation with welfare reform and unwed
motherhood, for instance, has given a “Black face” to welfare that has made it
easier for conservatives to blame African American families than to go to the
socioeconomic roots of poverty (144.)
This statement has also been applied to In the Blood, to which it seems far more
relevant (Geis 130). Parks’s earlier play, The Death of the Last Black Man, offers a
positive image of nurturing motherhood that Louis sees as counteracting such
negative attitudes towards state-dependant black mothers (which, as we have seen, is
problematic in its essentialism). However, In the Blood is more overtly political in
this area; the condescending outlook towards black mothers who live off the state is
central to the play. Unlike The Death of the Last Black Man, In the Blood exposes the
superficiality and hypocrisy of such admonishing attitudes. Like The Mai, the tragic
outcome of In the Blood exposes the stifling and destructive potential of the punitive
society.
In the Blood thematically resembles The Mai in that it deals with the hope of
stitching back together the broken family and performing this model in a socially
acceptable way. When applied to the representation of maternity in Parks’s play,
Butler’s notion of punitively-enforced, culturally-constructed gender also illuminates
how this dramatist represents motherhood. Scene 7 of In the Blood concerns the return
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of Hester’s first love Chilli, who is also the father of her firstborn. Chilli carries with
him a basket of ‘props’, including a wedding dress, a veil and a ring and proposes to
finally ‘make an honest woman’ out of Hester. These props represent the idealised
version of motherhood that he and society would prefer Hester to adopt. Through
Chilli’s actions and dialogue, scene 7 exposes this image of the mother, and by
extension the family as—to use Butler’s term—‘cultural fictions’ (157). He tells
Hester:
I carried around this picture of you. Sad and lonely with our child on your hip.
Struggling to make do. Struggling against all odds. And triumphant.
Triumphant against everything. Like—hell like Jesus and Mary. And if they
could do it so could my Hester. My dear Hester. (96.)
This speech suggests that it is not Hester whom Chilli wishes to marry, but his own
culturally informed fiction of who she ought to be. Parks reinforces the idea that such
visions of femininity are imaginary by including the photograph to be used as a stage
prop; this is a synthetic representation and not the “real” Hester. This image or replica
accords much more with the cultural ideals of motherhood than does the protagonist,
which emphasises the artificiality—the performative status—of such ideals.
Idealised icons of mothers, and, in particular, religious iconography of the
Virgin Mary inform the content of the photograph and Chilli’s image of Hester as an
almost virginal martyr. However, the embodiments of Hester’s promiscuity—her four
children by fathers other than Chilli—again lead to punitive consequences for the
protagonist. When Chilli finds out about these children, he rejects Hester because of
her inability to live up to the motherly paradigm based on purity and heterosexual
monogamy that both he and the chorus (or society) value. Chilli proceeds to take all
his props—the ring, the dress, the veil—and to pack up his basket; despite Hester’s
pleas, he apologises and exits. Hester’s final opportunity to be happy—or indeed, her
last chance to conform to the conventional model of family—vanishes with Chilli’s
departure. Woman and Scarecrow is comparable to these moments when Woman
reveals to her husband (Him) that she was unfaithful during their marriage. Despite
his own philandering, his reaction is one of utter disbelief. Significantly, he accuses
her of ‘acting the weeping virgin, the bleeding martyr’ (39). As in In the Blood,
Christianity informs a false image of femininity. Seeing only motherhood’s iconic,
saintly mask, men such as Chilli and Him are appalled when it is removed. In these
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scenes, the playwrights reveal the immense gap between maternal icons and
actualities.
Chilli’s and indeed society’s, rejection of Hester shows how, in Butler’s terms,
‘culture so readily punishes or marginalises those who fail to perform the illusion of
gender essentialism’ or to ‘do their gender right’ (162, 157). In the context of Butler’s
theories about gender constitution, Parks can be seen to refigure the deterministic
forces of fate and destiny, which are common in Greek tragedy, as the power of social
compulsion. Examining Park’s use of the structure of classical tragedy in this play,
Carol Schafer identifies Hester’s tragic flaw as her ‘error to distinguish that love is
separable from the act of love making’ (192). According to Schafer:
As representative of the chorus, the patriarchal Chilli invites the audience to
imagine Hester as innocent and then see her as she is. Her tragic flaw is
illuminated by the audience’s recognition that Hester can never be the
idealized object of the gaze. (193.)
Schafer’s discussion focuses on the ways in which the play appropriates the form of
tragedy. Yet, if we consider tragic destiny as a representation of society’s regulatory
force, In the Blood’s materialist feminist meanings are inescapable. Butler argues that
failure to conform, to perform one’s gender correctly, provokes cultural exclusion
(156-7). This illuminates the way in which Hester’s promiscuity leads to a
disciplinary response from her community: she fails to embody socially-acceptable
motherhood. Hester claims that she feels ‘the hand of fate’ coming down on her, but
Parks recreates the classical idea of fate as the magnetism of dominant history and
custom, enforced by the regulatory society (77).79 Hester’s tragic flaw is certainly
linked to her inability to distinguish between love and sexual intercourse; this leads to
her perceived promiscuity which in turn causes her to have five children by different
fathers. These ‘5 treasures’ are also Hester’s curse: they prevent her from ever
fulfilling socially-endorsed models of femininity and motherhood (12). Hence, Parks
uses the form of tragedy to expose how the punitive society sanctions and enforces
certain modes of being, and subjugates those who do not or cannot conform.
79
Drawing on The Scarlet Letter, Parks also titles scene 8 ‘The Hand of Fate’ (99).
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Good Mother versus Bad Mother
Through their representations of motherhood, Parks and Carr dismantle binary
constructions of good and bad mothering. In an essay entitled ‘The Heaven and Hell
of Mothering’ (1997), Ros Coward argues that newspaper coverage of maternal
infanticide in Britain and America demonstrates a return to basic beliefs in good and
evil and a move away from considerations of context which were fashionable in the
1960s and 1970s. According to Coward:
The shift can be explained partly by a simultaneous increase in acts of extreme
violence and a growing exploitation of abuse as a defense. But in part this
return to fundamentalist notions of good and evil has been whipped up by the
Right. The Right in America has been actively campaigning against more
forgiving interpretations of human behaviour, framing poor lives such as
Susan Smith’s in terms of ‘evil.’ They see evil as a fundamental condition of
humanity which gets the upper hand in a society which has abandoned
traditional morality in favour of seeking self-satisfaction. (114.)
Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays’ all echo Euripides’ Medea
and her murderous acts in ways that reinterpret, complicate and endow with
contemporary relevance maternal infanticide. These works, along with Carr’s The Mai
and Portia Coughlan demonstrate how ‘maternal ambivalence is determined by
complex interactions of external and internal reality and has to be socially and
culturally located’ (Parker 19). This activity is important in the context of Dolan’s
idea of the utopian performative, which is underpinned by a desire to reanimate
humanism. She seeks to reimagine totalising and proscriptive visions of humanism as
‘multiple, respecting the complexities and ambiguities of identity while it works out
ways for people to share and feel things in common, like the need for survival and for
love, for compassion, and for hope’ (Utopia in Performance 22). The representations
of motherhood in Carr’s ‘Midlands Trilogy’ and Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays’ ‘usefully
point us toward redefinitions of concepts and values once held dear but more recently
exhausted under the terms of postmodernism and the political ascendancy of a hardly
compassionate American conservatism’ (Utopia in Performance 20). While Dolan
focuses on America, her thesis is also relevant to Carr’s work since, as Coward points
out, right-wing fundamentalism has permeated the media on both sides of the Atlantic.
Moreover, Carr’s The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats… have all been
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performed in America and elsewhere.80
The way in which contemporary western society continually ignores the
welfare of a mother in favour of the protection of the child is exemplified in critical
mis-readings of The Mai. Writers such as Eilis Ní Dhuibhne have suggested that The
Mai appears careless towards her children (71). Yet, throughout the play, the
protagonist strives to keep her family and her home together. Taking this into
consideration, she does not seem to possess the ‘unmotherly feelin’’ of her
grandmother. She describes in an argument with Robert the homely, motherly duties
in which she has engaged, while he has been spending time with his mistress: ‘I
collected the children from their schools, I did twelve loads of laundry, I prepared
eight meals, I dropped the children back to their schools […]’ (155). To implicate The
Mai as a careless mother is to downplay Robert’s reprehensible behaviour and poor
parenting skills.
In this context, Ní Dhuibhne’s reading of The Mai reveals the enduring gender
inequality of parental responsibility. Robert asks Millie if she is ‘Orla or Millie’ when
he encounters her after his five year absence in Act One, clearly displaying his
indifference towards the child (109). In another row with Robert in Act Two, The Mai
is appalled by his blatant disregard for his family: ‘How can you do this to your
children! They’re haunted! Do you know that! Your children are haunted. And you
don’t give a fuckin’ damn!’ (156). This is a significant scene in terms of The Mai’s
inner conflict between the liberating possibility of autonomy and the restraining
expectations of society. Throughout the row, she alternates between beseeching
Robert to consider their children and boldly asserting her independence: ‘This is my
house and I’ll speak as I fuckin’ well like!’(156). Nevertheless, it is clear that she
longs to repair her marriage, and her attempts to do so are inextricably linked to her
children, and to the conventional idea of the nuclear family. To read The Mai’s
obsession with rebuilding her relationship with her husband as a sign of carelessness
towards her children is to completely ignore the broader spectrum of the stifling social
context in which the play is set. Carr dramatises an oppressive Irish community
though the dialogue between Julie and Agnes. These characters—who yearn for the
80
Emily Mann directed The Mai at the MacCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey in 1996. (Mann also
directed the premiere of Carr’s Phaedre Backwards at the McCarter in 2011). Portia Coughlan was
performed by Sugan Theatre Company at The Boston Centre for the Arts in 1998, directed by Carmel
O'Reilly. By the Bog of Cats… received its American premiere at Irish Repertory Theatre, Chicago, in
2001. These works continue to be revived internationally.
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younger women in their family to fulfil conventional, socially-sanctioned models of
maternity based on heterosexual monogamy—expose the prevailing attitudes at the
time of the play’s setting and its staging.
David Callaghan, in his Theatre Journal review of a 1996 production of The
Mai at the McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey, tells us that the play’s ‘one
hundred year old matriarch,’ Grandma Froachlán (played in this production by Myra
Carter), has an obsession with her long departed husband which he sees as ‘in many
ways the root cause of her clan’s insecurities’ (373). Similarly, Ní Dhuibhne identifies
‘the way in which parents hand on legacies of pain to their children’ as a key theme in
the play, and suggests that the drama’s message may be that ‘excessive emotional
abuse of children […] through [parental] carelessness […] allows no redemption’
(71). These respondents fail to locate the female characters of The Mai within the
oppressive milieu that contributes to their actions. In The Mai, Carr provides a
critique, not of mothers or parents who ‘emotionally abuse’ their children, but of an
authoritarian Irish Catholic society that has stifled women’s independence for
generations. Grandma Froachlán, her daughter Ellen, and Ellen’s daughter The Mai
are all portrayed as torn between their own autonomous desires and the socially
prescribed roles expected of them. Callaghan’s identification of Grandma Froachlán
as the ‘root cause’ of her family’s problems serves only to highlight the immense
responsibility and idealised expectations that were still placed on women in 1996—
here in an American production context. Carr’s play seeks to interrogate such
pressures and ideals. Contrary to Ní Dhuibhne’s claim that Grandma Froachlán’s
function in the play ‘is almost wholly comic,’ she is portrayed as a complex character;
Carr constructs the character as loyal and protective even as she eschews archetypal
models of motherhood (71). The Mai is portrayed not as a careless or unnatural
mother, but as a modern, independent woman who breaks down under the combined
pressures of motherhood without the support of her partner, a career that she needs to
retain in order to provide for her family and, most of all, the repressive late 1970’s
society in which she is placed, a society that still lawfully stigmatised alternatives to
the conventional family structure when the play was staged in 1994.
Similarly, Park’s Hester in In the Blood attempts to live up to the image of the
ideal mother; however, she faces immense pressures that actually drive her further
away from ever achieving this goal. While her community judges and uses her, she
goes without food so that her children can eat. As I shall explore in more detail in
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Chapter 3, the confessions reveal that the members of Hester’s society, who criticise
and ostracise her, have all participated in her exploitation. Thus, Parks exposes the
hypocrisy of Hester’s community, who have labelled her as a ‘BURDEN TO
SOCIETY,’ a ‘HUSSY’ and a ‘SLUT’ (7). In doing so, Parks prompts the audience to
examine its own judgements and hypocrisies. Hester experiences repeated rejection
because, for her, reproduction does not occur ‘within the confines of a heterosexually
based system of marriage’ (159). In the first scene of the play, the word ‘slut’ is
scrawled on a wall of the set. Since Hester is illiterate, she asks her son Jabber to read
it to her, but he refuses—presumably not wishing to offend her. Hester, by the
penultimate scene of the play, has been discarded by her first love, Jabber’s father
Chilli. The Reverend D then rejects and verbally abuses her, also calling her a slut.
Hearing the word ‘slut’ from the Reverend D, Jabber confesses that this is the word
written the wall (104). It is his innocent repetition of the derogatory term with which
society has branded Hester that pushes her to commit her murderous act. The
confessions, and the way in which the chorus satirises societal prejudices, work with
the shocking outcome of the play to implicate Hester’s society, and by extension, the
audience members, in her downfall. As Verna Foster has aptly identified, Parks’s
Hester tries to conform to the accepted paradigm of ‘the good mother’ but ‘[t]he strain
of doing so without any support contributes to [her] fatal actions’ (77).
The shocking actions of nurturing, self-sacrificing mothers in In the Blood,
Fucking A and By the Bog of Cats… leave us with the heart-breaking impressions that
if real-life women like these had further support, crimes like these could be prevented.
Infanticide in Fucking A and By the Bog of Cats… is construed as an act of love in
which the protagonist takes her child’s life in order to protect him/her from a worse
fate.81 This complicates maternal infanticide and forces us to reconsider the
fundamentalist notions of good and evil that Coward invokes. In addition, in In the
Blood and By the Bog of Cats…, Parks and Carr use theatre to remind us of what
Coward sees as the message of real-life tragedies involving mothers killing their
children:
Mothers need support, particularly if they are on their own. Yet this current
idealisation of motherhood denies women the chance to come to terms with
Chapter 3 discusses these issues in more detail in the context of the playwright’s re-imaginings of
Medea’s tragic act.
81
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the confusing mixture of emotions that motherhood involves. […] [It] is not
surprising that commentators reach out for ‘evil’ as an explanation.
Unfortunately, in doing so, many women are deprived of ways of
understanding their own feelings. They are cheated of ways of recognising
when they should go for help. (118.)
In the Blood and Portia Coughlan stage maternal ambivalence in ways that
challenge what Parker identifies as contemporary ‘assumptions in relation to
motherhood which render ambivalence a source of shame or object of disbelief’ (17).
In In the Blood, the stoical Hester never fully voices the fears she alludes to when she
continually refers to ‘the hand of fate.’ Citing Parker and Thurer, Foster states that ‘we
may infer that most mothers at one time or another feel both intense love and
murderous rage against their children. Common though it may be, the latter feeling is
perceived as so taboo that few women can bring themselves to talk about it’ (76).
Portia, the non-conformist iconoclast of Carr’s Portia Coughlan breaks this taboo and
actually vocalises her fears of harming her children:
I’m afraid of them, Raphael! What I may do to them! Don’t ya understand!
Jaysus! Ya think I don’t wish I could be a natural mother, mindin’ me children,
playin’ with them, doin’ all the things a mother is supposed to do! When I look
at my sons, Raphael, I see knives and accidents and terrible mutilations. Their
toys is weapons for me to hurt them with, givin’ them a bath is a place where I
could drown them. And I have to run from them and lock myself away for fear
I cause these terrible things to happen. (233.)
Her self-endowed freedom to voice these fears may be seen to prevent her from
harming her children. Perhaps her suicide is partly an endeavour to protect them.
Unfortunately, like The Mai, Portia’s entrapment and limited options contribute to her
own demise.
Despite the protagonists’ tragic demises in Carr’s ‘Midland’s Trilogy’ and
Woman and Scarecrow and Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays,’ we can—in different ways—
find hope in these works.82 In The Mai and Portia Coughlan, for example, hope can
be found in the plays’ structures. Carr resists suicide as closure in these works. In The
Mai, a two-act play, this is achieved through the brief appearance of Robert carrying
The Mai’s corpse at the end of the first act. Early revelation of tragedy is much less
subtle in Portia Coughlan: the entire second act of this three-act work focuses on it,
The subtitle of Dolan’s Utopia in Performance is Finding Hope at the Theatre and she showcases
theatre’s transformative power through a variety of examples—including tragedy.
82
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forcing us even to sit through Portia’s wake, before being confronted again with the
live protagonist in the final act. In her interview with Mike Murphy, Carr claims to
have designed the plays in this way to evade melodrama (55). Yet, in a way, these
narrative interruptions create a circularity that harks back her cyclical and repetitive
early works. We witness these characters dead, then alive again. Our knowledge of
their imminent deaths in the final moments of the plays forces us to remember the
images of their dead bodies, and, consequently, the live action that follows. As a
result, what we remember of these plays is brought around in a cyclical loop,
repeating these scenes of life and death. This repetition leaves it up to us to imagine
what revisions might be necessary to allow these characters to flourish. These works
are not prescriptive but provocative, and that is important from a materialist feminist
perspective. Their open-ended conclusions invite multiple interpretations. Yet, even
the tragic endings of By the Bog of Cats and Woman and Scarecrow, as well as
Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A, promote a ‘melancholic yearning for a different
future, fuelled by wistful but persistent hope’ (Dolan, Utopia 142). Rather than
instating a new absent, naturalised authority, the dramas stimulate audiences to
consider how the dominant and dominating status quo might be diffused, restructured
or deconstructed to accommodate women like these.
Conclusion
Parks and Carr have engaged with the subject of motherhood since their early careers.
From the beginning, Carr has challenged mythologised images maternity, evidenced
in works such as Low in the Dark. She moves, however, from absurd, placeless satires
of the role towards a more sustained and localised critique of Irish attitudes to
motherhood in tragedies such as The Mai and By the Bog of Cats…. Comparable is
Parks’s later work such as In the Blood and Fucking A; in the former, the dramatist
exposes and challenges the stigmatisation of black, state-dependent mothers in
America; in both, she reveals the complexities elided by figuring mothers
oppositionally, as either good or bad. In these later plays, she deviates from her
representation of Black Woman with Fried Drumstick in The Death of the Last Black
Man, which celebrates a mother’s reproductive power and status as a domestic
caregiver. While this image can be understood in the context of Cixous’ thesis, it is
problematic in its essentialism.
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As the work of Carr and Parks becomes more plot-driven and influenced by
such forms as realism and tragedy, each dramatist’s work arguably becomes more
political and her interrogation of traditional familial ideals intensifies. The plays that
draw on Medea, Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A,
expose the socio-cultural conditions that can contribute to maternal infanticide.
Coward shows how the media in Britain and America have construed as evil real-life
tragedies involving mothers who kill their children. In this context, Parks’s and Carr’s
Medean works participate in important cultural work by challenging what Coward
sees as a resurgence of the right-wing, good versus evil dichotomy, and by revealing
the complexity of maternal ambivalence. Chapter 3 will move from text to inter-text
to explore in more detail the political ways in which Parks and Carr appropriate
Medea and The Scarlet Letter, as well as how Carr reimagines King Lear and Parks
incorporates historical data.
The representations of motherhood in Carr’s ‘Midland’s Trilogy’ and Woman
and Scarecrow and Parks’s ‘Red Letter Plays’ reveal the culturally constituted aspects
of contemporary motherhood and the stifling falsity of the ‘good mother’ icon. To
draw once more on Butler’s theories, she states that if we reveal gender to be
constructed, then it is ‘capable of being constituted differently’ (155). Therefore, these
plays offer for consideration the possibility that alternative versions of the motherly
role might be acceptable. All possess the feminist potential to usurp ideal
constructions of motherhood, as well as femininity in general. This in turn encourages
audience members to consider possibilities beyond these valued yet restrictive
maternal ‘conceptions.’
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Chapter 3: Rereading the Canons
Introduction
Traditionally, literary and historical canons have reflected and served the interest of
dominant cultures. Hence, in the discourse of theatre studies, ‘feminist historicorevisionist activity’ has been vital (Aston, An Introduction 3). My interpretation is
concerned with this activity in drama itself, for, through the craft of theatre-making,
Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks negotiate with what can be seen as a white,
patriarchal knowledge base. Many of their works show how theatre can function as ‘a
public space for renewing our critical attention to the machinations of dominant
ideology’ (Dolan, Utopia 141). How do female playwrights relate to traditions which
have historically marginalised female writers, and misrepresented women in general?
How does an African-American dramatist such as Parks reanimate black perspectives
that have been relegated to the cultural periphery? As we have seen in Chapter 1, Carr
and Parks initially marked their exiles from revered literary practices and the
mainstream theatre institution by distorting narrative conventions using surrealist,
experimental dramaturgy. However, as each playwright’s career progressed, both
began to adopt the stylistic features of tragedy and realism which have dominated
institutionalised, western theatre. Early works such as Parks’s The Death of the Last
Black Man (1989) and Carr’s This Love Thing (1991) are peppered with deliberate
intertextual allusions such as Biblical and popular cultural references. However, for
each dramatist, the project of using theatre to reconfigure a canonical story becomes
more sustained as she accommodates to conventional dramaturgy. Each writer, in her
later works, uses theatre to reimagine well-known literary sources; Parks also rereads
mythologised history. This analysis focuses on the use of appropriation in Carr’s By
the Bog of Cats… (1998), Meat and Salt (2003) and The Cordelia Dream (2008), and
in Parks’s The America Play (1993), Venus (1996), In the Blood (1999), Fucking A
(2000) and Topdog/Underdog (2001). I wish to argue that, in these works, Carr and
Parks destabilise the authoritative fixities of literary and historical canons. In so
doing, they demonstrate the instability of meaning and the mutability of ‘truth.’ By
appropriating the content of established texts—as well the forms of conventional
mainstream theatre—these plays undermine the canonical ideals that they may at first
appear to validate.
Appropriating the classics could be seen to perpetuate the dominant status of
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the white, male authors at the centre of western tradition.83 Arguably, some writers
link their works to those of well-known authors as a kind of branding; appropriation
allows such writers ‘to give resonance to their own efforts’ (Fischlin and Fortier 6).84
For both Parks and Carr, the move towards re-imagining canonical texts, along with
the adoption of techniques associated with dominant theatre forms such as realism and
tragedy, certainly accompanied their mainstream acceptances. As discussed in
Chapter 1, Parks and Carr began their careers with experimental works produced in
small, fringe venues. Parks’s journey towards critical and commercial success in
America can be traced through the off-off-Broadway productions of works such as
Betting on the Dust Commander and Devotees in the Garden of Love, through the
productions of The America Play and her tragedies Venus, In the Blood and
Topdog/Underdog at The Public Theatre off-Broadway to Topdog/Underdog’s
transfer to Broadway and its acquisition of a Pulitzer. In Ireland, Carr’s move towards
the theatrical mainstream is tantamount to her move towards the main Abbey stage.
Ullaloo’s production at the Abbey’s studio theatre, the Peacock, represented a false
start in Carr’s journey when it was taken off after a few performances. However,
following the success of her tragedies The Mai and Portia Coughlan at this venue, By
the Bog of Cats… was produced on the Abbey’s main stage. Due to international
success, on-going revivals appearance on academic syllabi, works such as
Topdog/Underdog and By the Bog of Cats… have placed both playwrights within
what could be considered to be a western canon. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that
Carr and Parks rework canonical literature/history in ways that question and
undermine canon formation and composition.
Acts of appropriation raise countless questions regarding ‘originality,
authorship and intellectual property rights’ (Sanders 46). In essays such as Parks’s
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1999) and Carr’s ‘Dealing with the Dead’
(1998), each dramatist claims that her theatre is ‘haunted’ or ‘possessed’ by writers of
In her 2006 volume Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sander’s points out that adaptation and
appropriation tend to be circumscribed by the parameters of the traditional canon, and that they often
serve ‘to reinforce that canon by ensuring a continued interest in the original source text’ (98). Derek
Attridge makes a relevant comment in his 1996 essay on J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: ‘The perpetuation of any
canon is dependent in part on the references made to its earlier members by its later members’ (169).
84
Fischlin and Fortier, editors of Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the
Seventeenth Century to the Present (2000), argue that while some adaptors seek to ‘supplant or
overthrow’ his canonical status, others ‘borrow from Shakespeare’s status’ (6). The latter could be a
strategy employed by many writers who appropriate the work of classical authors. Also see Julie
Sanders’s 2006 volume Adaptation and Appropriation (46).
83
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the past. Interestingly, Parks’s and Carr’s ‘possessed’ dramas promote enquiry about
possession in its multiple meanings, particularly ownership.85 For Parks the
‘definition of possession cancels itself out’ and the ‘relationship between possessor
and possessed is, like ownership is [sic], multidirectional’ (‘Possession’ 3). Many of
Parks’s and Carr’s re-imaginings raise the question: ‘who can or should own any
narrative?’ Furthermore, by appropriating or taking possession of canonical stories,
these playwrights give voice to those who are dispossessed by such narratives and/or
society.
Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A offer
linear plots culminating in maternal infanticide. Each of these tragedies centre on a
female social outcast named Hester. Hence, the dramatists simultaneously re-imagine
two literary classics: Euripides’ Medea (431BC) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter (1850). Appropriating the form and content of canonical literature and
theatre can be seen as problematic from certain feminist perspectives. Case claims
that the classics aspire towards universal ideals, and that those ideals are responsible
for obliterating female subjectivity in theatre (‘Personal’ 4). Arguing that Athenian,
Roman and Elizabethan drama tends to be both sexist and classist, she concludes:
‘[e]ach culture that regards it as valuable to revive those classic plays actively
participates in the same patriarchal subtext which created those female characters as
‘Woman’ (Feminism and Theatre 12). But how does this bode for new versions of
male-authored works? Janelle Reinelt showcases the pitfalls of feminist revisions in
‘The Politics of Form: Realism, Melodrama and Pam Gems’ Camille.’ Camille (1984)
is a version of a 19th century play, The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas
fils, and Gems explicitly aligns her approach with feminism (Gardner, ‘Pam Gems’).
However, Reinelt claims that Gems adheres too much to the narrative conventions
and romantic aesthetics of the original (99). In this article, Reinelt doubts that the
dominant mimetic conventions of institutionalised Western theatre could be employed
to ‘make any kind of feminist statement’ (ibid 96). She challenges traditional theatre’s
ideological frame, which after a temporary crisis, reinstates the status quo and the
85
In her 2007 essay on Parks’s Hester plays, Rena Fraden discusses the way in which Parks ‘comes to
be possessed of and even by her subject’ (434). Fraden draws on Shawn-Marie Garret’s essay ‘The
Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks,’ published in 2000. For a discussion of Carr’s literary possession, see
Richard Russell’s 2006 article ‘Talking with the Ghosts of Irish Playwrights Past: Marina Carr’s By the
Bog of Cats….’ However, these articles limit their explorations to national contexts.
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order of the Father.86
Yet, it is revealing that Parks and Carr choose to draw on Euripides’ Medea
and Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, transgressive female protagonists who reside in
literary worlds where their communities view them with suspicion and fear. Through
an adept use of tragedy, both Parks and Carr culturally transpose the female outcast
archetype to a more immediate context. Steve Wilmer, is his 2007 essay ‘Women in
Greek Tragedy Today: A Reappraisal,’ counters Case’s dismissal of classical tragedy.
His analysis focuses on how women playwrights and practitioners have continued to
stage and reinterpret such works as Medea and Antigone, concluding that the
aggressive actions of some classical female protagonists can challenge oppressive
ideals relating to marriage, the patriarchal family and the general status quo (‘Women
in Greek’ 116).87 This illuminates the political potential of literary figures such as
Medea and Hester Prynne. There is a moral ambiguity evident in both Medea and The
Scarlet Letter. The central character of each work exhibits iconoclastic tendencies.
These features have the potential to destabilise classic conceptions of unified
character and fixed ‘universal’ ideals from within the canon. Parks and Carr update
and negotiate with the transgressions, ambiguities and dualities in Medea and The
Scarlet Letter. In doing so, the dramatists intensify the disruptive potential of these
narratives.
Carr’s two re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), The Cordelia
Dream and her children’s play Meat and Salt also showcase the political efficacy of
literary appropriation. Carr uses these plays to reveal the ways in which literary texts
and orally-transmitted stories are interlinked, which prompts us to contemplate why
some narratives are privileged over others. The Cordelia Dream and Meat and Salt
can work to challenge the concept of originality and the revered notion of the author
as inspired individual—ideals which lie at the foundations of literary canons. Carr
also seeks to redress the reductive images of women in Shakespeare’s King Lear by
endowing her versions of Shakespeare’s Cordelia with a subjectivity that is lacking in
the original. Carr’s interpretations of Cordelia give voice to this character, a character
86
As I have mentioned, Reinelt has since softened her anti-realist views, which is evident in her 1994
essay on the Brecht/Lukács debates. Reinelt’s reconsideration of realism signals a loosening of feminist
formal strictures that welcomes theatre’s diversity.
87
Amongst others, Wilmer examines the classical appropriations of dramatists such as Carr and Cherríe
Moraga, as well as the work of directors such as Deborah Warner, concluding that the aggressive
actions of some classical female protagonists can challenge the status quo.
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that in Shakespeare’s play is arguably marked by extreme reticence and relative
voicelessness. Carr’s re-imaginings of Shakespearean theatre provide feminist
resistance by creating female subjectivity and disrupting the basis of a western,
patriarchal canon.
Parks gives voice to minorities and the oppressed by appropriating history in
The America Play, Topdog/Underdog and Venus. In both The America Play and
Topdog/Underdog, the image of President Abraham Lincoln is paired with a ‘Lesser
Known’ African-American man. Each of these black, ‘lesser known,’ characters
works as a Lincoln impersonator in a theme park, allowing members of the public to
shoot at him with plastic bullets. While these two plays are based on the mythologised
figure of Abraham Lincoln and his assassination, Venus stages Parks’s fictionalised
reinterpretation of the tragic story of Saartjee Baatmann: a 19th century African
woman who was brought to England to be exhibited in various freak shows. By selfconsciously repeating and revising history, Parks endeavours to re-imagine it as more
inclusive and whole while paradoxically revealing its deficiencies and ‘holes.’ These
strategies reveal how theatre can question the value and validity of accepted historical
‘facts.’
In Carr’s re-imaginings of King Lear, and Parks’s appropriations of history,
the dramatists write representations of marginalised people into well-known stories.
Hence, these playwrights rewrite and attempt to ‘right’ history. 88 The presence of the
traditionally marginalised voices of black people and/or women in these plays
reminds us of their absence in the historical and literary canons.89 Moreover, the ways
in which the playwrights draw on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Euripides’
Medea endow these narratives with contemporary relevance. Reworking canonical
texts, as well as appropriating dominant theatre conventions, allows these playwrights
to place at the centre of the contemporary mainstream stage iconoclastic minority
figures of vast political potential.
By stating that Parks and Carr ‘re-write and attempt to right history,’ I am appropriating a pun used
by Rayner and Elam in their 1994 article ‘Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History in Suzan-Lori
Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.’ Elam and Rayner argue that
Parks ‘appropriates and critiques historical narrative—not only to challenge and re-write history, but to
right history’ (449).
89
In ‘Staging a New Literary History: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, In the Blood and Fucking A’ (2008),
Carol Schafer asserts that ‘by utilising forms established by Western European males throughout
history, [Parks] creates a new literary “tradition” to fill the absence where the presence of African and
African-American women frequently was omitted’ (182).
88
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The ‘Hester’ Plays
In Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Parks’s In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A
(2000), the dramatist employ conventional, linear plot structures culminating in
tragedy. By the Bog of Cats… emulates Aristotle’s narrative principles by staging one
plot which lasts a single day, beginning at dawn and ending at dusk. In the Blood also
incorporates aspects of Greek tragedy, including a chorus representing the main
character’s community. Both plays follow chronologically the seemingly fated
downfalls of flawed protagonists. Parks’s and Carr’s classically-influenced
catastrophes take place in identifiable, contemporary milieus. Most of the action in By
the Bog of Cats… occurs outside, on a vast, flat bog that reflects some of the
landscape of its Irish Midlands setting; the play is written in a Hiberno-English
appropriate to this locale. The dialogue of In the Blood is written in contemporary,
African-American Vernacular English. Much of the action takes place under a bridge
with graffiti on the walls: a recognisable urban slum. Fucking A calls for a use of
Brechtian distancing techniques, such as onstage supertitles and singing. Yet, it is
structured as a tragic tale of intense melodrama. Parks herself likens it to ‘a Jacobean
revenge tragedy’ (qtd. in Dinitia Smith). This drama is set in a futuristic dystopia.
Each of these plays incorporates traditional techniques that have historically
dominated the western theatre institution. By the Bog of Cats… and In the Blood
employ recognisable settings and language. In all three, the dramatists make use of
linear structures, plotted action and sympathetic, psychologically-developed
protagonists.
In Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A, and Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, the
playwrights place centre stage representations of oppressed members of the
underclass. Common to all three works is a female social outcast named Hester who
goes on to kill her child. Parks’s two plays, published together as The Red Letter
Plays, are deliberate re-imaginings of Hawthorne’s famous fallen woman. Parks
claims, ‘I only read the book once, just so I could riff on it’ (qtd. in Dinitia Smith).
Pearl, the child of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, lives on to inherit a fortune. However,
each of Parks’s Hesters murders her son. The plays thereby evoke Medea, whose
difference within her community—like these protagonists—incited suspicion and
fear. Parks explains that she abandoned Fucking A to write In the Blood, but that she
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later decided to finish her original, more adventurous work; nevertheless, she insists
that her two Hesters are entirely separate characters (Sova 32). Carr, in an interview
with Mike Murphy, asserts that the plot of By the Bog of Cats… ‘is entirely Medea’
(55). Yet, as scholars such as Clare Wallace have explicated, characters’ names in
Carr’s drama are often emblematic (‘Tragic Destiny’ 441-2). Although Carr has
deliberately re-worked Medea in By the Bog of Cats…, her allusion to The Scarlet
Letter is also useful for interpreting the play. I wish to argue that—in the Hester
plays—Parks and Carr appropriate the form of tragedy and the content of literary
classics in ways that promote important and immediate political enquiry. In doing so,
the playwrights continue to eschew the unitary meanings and universality that
feminists have problematised in traditional theatre.
Through a proximation and intensification of Hawthorne’s ideas in The Scarlet
Letter, Parks’s ‘Red-Letter Plays’ reveal the slippery nature of what constitutes sin, as
well as who carries blame and how they should be punished. As we have seen in the
last chapter, In the Blood centres on Hester La Negrita, a marginalised black woman
supported by social welfare with five children of varying paternity. The members of
Hester’s community see her as a burden due to her lack of skills. They view her
continual production of more mouths to feed as a drain on public resources and
eventually, after she has murdered her son, the authorities imprison and forcibly
sterilise her. Fucking A’s Hester Smith has been forced to fill the undesirable role of
abortionist, and has been branded with an A on her chest, in order to atone for the
crimes of her son, incarcerated as a child after stealing some food. Throughout the
play, this Hester saves money to buy her son’s freedom from prison. Hawthorne’s
exploration of judgement, labelling and concepts of sin and penance in The Scarlet
Letter, as well as his hints at a hypocrisy that underlies Puritan righteousness,
cautiously encourages some social critique.90 Yet, The Scarlet Letter’s style,
characterisation and authorial voice make ethics ambiguous rather than clear and
90
Hawthorne indicates an underlying hypocrisy masked by high social standing at various stages
throughout The Scarlet Letter. Dimmesdale hides from the public his part in Hester’s scandal and
continues his clerical duties. Chillingworth, the physician, masks his burning resentment for
Dimmesdale with the pretence of friendship. And Hester, the fallen woman, empathises with many of
her fellow townspeople imagining that they too have committed similar sins which they repress
beneath a façade of devout puritanism. She considers that ‘the outward guise of purity’ might be a lie
‘and that if the truth were to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides
Hester Prynne’s’ (73).
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paradigmatic.91 The novel tentatively offers for consideration the question as to
whether the action symbolised by the ‘A’ (adultery) is an act of sin or of love.92
Similarly, ‘The Red-Letter Plays’ evoke many questions: Who controls the
construction of sin or crime and in whose interest? Who suffers as a result? What do
these concepts mask and protect? These enquiries are significant in contemporary
American and western contexts still influenced by Christian conservatism. Parks
expands Hawthorne’s subtle enquiry and imbues it with contemporary relevance by
exploring in her re-imaginings immediate problems relating to control and ownership
of the body. Hence, she reveals the issues of repression, conservatism, social control,
penance and penitence—which are central to the 17th century, Puritan world of The
Scarlet Letter—to be just as pertinent in the current western milieu.
In In the Blood, Parks probes accepted notions of sin and morality by
stimulating uneasy and contrasting processes of audience-character identification. The
action opens on a chattering chorus who condemn the protagonist’s behaviour before
we meet her:
THE NERVE SOME PEOPLE HAVE / SHOULDNT HAVE IT IF YOU
CANT AFFORD IT AND YOU KNOW SHE CANT / SHE DONT GOT NO
SKILLS / CEPT ONE / […] FIVE BRATS / AND NOT ONE OF THEM
GOT A DADDY / […] I’LL BE DAMNED IF SHE GONNA LIVE OFF ME
(5-7.)
Parks makes the social condemnation of Hawthorne’s Hester relevant by evoking
familiar contemporary criticisms directed towards uneducated women who depend on
the state for support. By presenting the situation first from the perspective of Hester’s
community, Parks initially constructs as understandable the chorus members’
frustration with an underprivileged woman who chooses to continue reproducing
rather than developing her skills. Hester’s plight, from this perspective, seems
partially self-inflicted. Yet, Parks’s ensuing representation of Hester as a selfless,
loving and optimistic caregiver undermines the way in which the protagonist is
Michael J. Colacuricio’s ‘The Spirit and the Sign’ (1985) offers enlightening discussions involving
the ways in which authorial voice, characterisation, signs and symbols function in the moral ambiguity
of The Scarlet Letter. He also offers for consideration the reaction of contemporary reviewers who
were divided on the novel’s moral tendency (8-10).
92
Colacurcio aptly points out that the way in which Hester is ‘neither fully repentant of her sin nor
adequately punished by God’ adds to the moral ambiguity of The Scarlet Letter (13-14). In ‘The Scarlet
Letter as a Love Story’ (1962) Ernest Sandeen reframes the novel as a tragedy of love rather than a tale
of sin and reveals that the novel is partially motivated by the passionate bond which Hester and
Dimmesdale share.
91
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initially presented. We sympathise with this stoical, impoverished Hester throughout.
However, Parks punctuates the action with monologues from prominent members of
the protagonist’s community. Speakers such as the doctor, the reverend and the
welfare lady describe sexual acts in which they engaged with Hester. Hence, Parks
intensifies the societal hypocrisy which Hawthorne hints at in The Scarlet Letter. The
intimacy of these ‘confession’ scenes in In the Blood also forces us into an uneasy
identification with the authorities that have labelled Hester’s actions as aberrant. Parks
interrupts the plotted action in ways that encourage the audience to examine its own
cultural tourism and, perhaps, hollow righteousness.93
In her various confession scenes, Parks excavates libidinal urges which are
repressed in a society that construes such fetishes as sinful or sexually deviant.
Welfare (Hester’s caseworker) confesses that she and her husband needed to spice up
their sex life; in order to do so, they engaged in an erotic and partly sadomasochistic
threesome with Hester: ‘She stuck her tongue down my throat and Hubby doing his
thing on top my skin shivered. She let me slap her across the face and I crossed the
line’ (62). Welfare continues by stating that this was a once-off sex act because ‘the
maintenance of the system depends on a well-drawn boundary line’ and Welfare is,
after all, ‘a married woman’ (62). It appears from this dialogue that Welfare supresses
her desires beneath a façade of social status and conformity. Through the intimacy of
the monologue, Parks invites the audience to identify with Welfare and, as such, to
examine its own hypocrisies and repressions. Parks’s Reverend D also confesses to
the viewers. This character reinvents Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne’s
partner in sin. Hawthorne’s Hester protects Dimmesdale’s identity throughout the
novel. As Dimmesdale continues his clerical duties despite his part in the affair, he
comes to embody the theme of repression in The Scarlet Letter. Parks transposes
Dimmesdale’s final confession to a contemporary context through Reverend D’s
monologue: ‘The intercourse was not memorable. And when she told me of her
predicament I gave her enough money to take care of it’ (79). Distinctions between
attraction and repulsion are blurred in the Reverend D’s confession. He finds Hester’s
‘suffering’ to be ‘an enormous turn-on’ (78). Yet, he concludes by expressing hatred
93
Geis maintains that Parks uses distinctive stylistic strategies in such plays as Venus, In the Blood and
Fucking A to ‘get the audience to examine its own guilty spectatorship and cultural tourism’ (SuzanLori Parks 128).
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for her hunger (79). These confessions reveal potent and complex libidinal urges that
usually remain repressed due to the ideological workings of social sanction and taboo.
In Fucking A (2000), Parks re-imagines The Scarlet Letter’s themes of
penance and penitence by evoking such immediate and controversial issues as
juvenile punishment and parental responsibility. Yet, like Hawthorne’s novel, it can
be argued that Parks’s play remains morally ambiguous. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester
is neither fully repentant for her ‘sin’ nor adequately punished by God (Colacurcio
13). Parks’s Hester Smith does not commit a crime, but she is punished for the sin of
another: her son, Boy. The backstory to the action we see on stage involves an
impoverished child who is incarcerated for stealing food and a mother who must also
atone for his crime by either going to prison or performing community service.
Hence, this play, which premiered in 2000 in the aftermath of the Columbine High
School massacre (1999), promoted pertinent enquiry about such subjects as juvenile
crime and parental accountability. Several major episodes of juvenile violence
occurred in the USA during the 1990s, including the Columbine murders; these
stimulated public debate as to whether parents should be held responsible for the
crimes of their children.94 As a result, many states have proposed or enacted laws that
make parents or guardians an additional party in the punishment and accountability of
juvenile offenders.95 In Fucking A, Hester Smith shares a portion of her son’s penance
and pays money towards his freedom. The protagonist’s unfortunate situation raises
questions about how much we can blame on parenting. Moreover, the severity of
Boy’s crime—stealing food—diminishes in the context of ‘the poverty of the world of
the play’ (Fucking A 115). Boy’s own penance—rather than purifying him—entirely
alters his identity, turning him into a monster. These elements of Fucking A work to
blur the distinctions between sin and morality, and to question the contemporary
functions of penance and penitence.
Fucking A stages complex moral scenarios. As such, the play evokes and
probes subjects of on-going debate across a range of contemporary conservativeliberal and religious-secular issues including torture, the death penalty, abortion and
94
In a 2004 New York Times interview with Tom and Susan Klebold (parents of one of the Columbine
shooters, Dylan Klebold) David Brooks considers surveys which reveal that 83% of Americans believe
that the parents of the two juvenile killers were partly responsible for their children’s crimes.
95
For scholarly information and analyses regarding the proposal and enactment of parental
responsibility laws in the context of juvenile crime, see E. Brank’s ‘Paying for the Crimes of Their
Children: Public Support of Parental Responsibility’ (2004) and Raymond Arthur’s ‘Punishing Parents
for the Crimes of Their Children’ (2005).
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euthanasia. In the course of the play, Hester is told that her son is dead and vows to
take revenge on the First Lady who was responsible for his incarceration (184). The
audience, however, is made aware that Boy—or Monster as he is now known—is
actually alive. He escapes from prison. He has an affair with the First Lady through
which she becomes pregnant. The First Lady is married to the Mayor and passes the
unborn child off as her husband’s. Hester enacts her revenge by kidnaping and
drugging the First Lady, after which she forcibly aborts the foetus. Meanwhile, Hester
has failed to recognise the dangerous criminal, Monster, as her son. There is a
moment of irony in which she describes him as evil and states that his mother is
probably dancing (196). However, Hester eventually discovers Monster’s true
identity. He is being tracked by bounty hunters who intend to torture him to death, so
he begs her to kill him: ‘Us killing me is better than them killing me’ (219). Hester’s
ensuing infanticide is depicted as a final and tragic act of love in which she gives her
son a quick and painless death to save him from the worse fate of prolonged torture:
‘She gently pets his head. Then, with a quick firm motion, she slits his throat like
Butcher taught her. He dies. She holds him in her lap’ (220). Hester has wiped out her
own bloodline through two murderous acts motivated by intense love for her son.
Parks promotes enquiry regarding rightness, rights, life and the body through the
complexity of Fucking A’s paradoxes.
Fucking A asks how and at what point we might curtail the legalisation of acts
that seek to mutate the body or extinguish life itself. This is achieved through Parks’s
intricate development of the revenge plot and her use of dramatic irony. Abortion is
offered for consideration through Hester’s occupation, the ‘A’ that is branded on her
chest and the way in which she unwittingly kills her unborn grandchild. Hester’s
friend Canary describes the protagonist’s profession as ‘one of those disrespectable
but most necessary services’ (121). Here and as the plot develops, Parks reveals the
contradictions of abortion. It allows women control over their bodies, but it is still a
source of stigma and shame. Hester’s mark points to the real-life burden placed on
those who administer the procedure. Canary’s dialogue and the regular callers who
avail of Hester’s services show that abortion might be necessary for women’s
autonomy. Yet, the coercive way in which Hester aborts the First Lady’s unborn
child, not realising that the baby is her son’s, reveals the potential misuse of the act.
On the other hand, there is in the play a certain understanding for the taking of life in
some contexts. Hester’s tender murder of her son, at his request and to save him from
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a more gruelling end, points to issues such as assisted suicide and euthanasia. Fucking
A suggests reasons both for and against controversial acts that affect human life. As in
much of her work, here Parks evades guiding her audience along a clear and singular
political line. Instead, she promotes layers of philosophical enquiry concerning
contemporary legal and moral debates. In doing so, the dramatist resists the
prescriptive meanings that feminists have criticised as intrinsic to patriarchal tragedy.
Here, the relevance of Dolan’s concept of the utopian performative is clear. Fucking A
evades fixed, static or didactic images (Utopia 7). Instead, it promotes a social
scrutiny that is ‘processual, […] an index to the possible, to the “what if,” rather than
the more restrictive, finite image of “what should be” (Utopia 13).
Carr’s use of Greek tragedy in By the Bog of Cats… has been widely explored,
(by Eamonn Jordon and Marianne McDonald, for example), but few have deliberated
on the significance of the protagonist’s namesake.96 Yet, it is revelatory to consider
Carr’s play in relation to the nineteenth-century American novel that the name of
Carr’s main character brings to mind. The Scarlet Letter can be described as a tale of
passion versus authority and the ambivalence of human motivations in relation to
these forces (Colacurcio 10-11). Hawthorne conceptualises this theme from the
beginning of the novel by juxtaposing the image of the wild rose (representing
passion) to that of the prison door (representing authority).97 These are the first of
many symbols in a novel which seems utterly preoccupied with the nature of signs,
stigmas and stigmata—from the embroidered A that Hester Prynne is forced to wear,
to the social stigma attached to the adulterous affair and illegitimate child which drive
the novel’s plot, to the mysterious physical scar in the shape of an A that may have
appeared or been branded on Dimmesdale’s chest. The indeterminacy of the A is
evident throughout The Scarlet Letter, standing for adulterer but changing, like many
Jordon’s ‘Unmasking the Myths?’ explores the use of Greek tragedy and mythology in Carr’s By the
Bog of Cats… and On Raftery’s Hill. McDonald’s ‘Classics as Celtic Firebrand: Greek Tragedy, Irish
Playwrights, and Colonialism’ looks at the use of Greek tragedy in the wider context of Irish drama,
referring also to By the Bog of Cats…. Wallace in her essay ‘Tragic Destiny,’ makes a brief reference
to the significance of Hester’s name in By the Bog of Cats…. The protagonist’s appellation, in
Wallace’s view, ‘aligns her with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, a fallen woman
with an illegitimate child’ (442). Wallace’s discussion of the connection between Carr’s and
Hawthorne’s texts ends here; however, her insightful analysis of stigma and stigmata in Carr’s
‘Midlands Trilogy’ evoked, in my mind, several links between the ways in which both Hawthorne and
Carr employ and probe the significance of signs (441-3).
97
The contrasting symbolism of the wild rose and the prison door has been very widely discussed in
Hawthorne criticism. See, for example, George Edward Woodberry’s 2006 volume Nathaniel
Hawthorne (165) or Q.D. Leavis’ The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel,
published in 1985 (55-6).
96
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signs, according to society’s altering attitudes.98 By the Bog of Cats…, like The
Scarlet Letter, is concerned with the opposing forces of passion and authority, as well
as the operation of signs and stigmas in relation to those forces.
Hester Swane, the protagonist of By the Bog of Cats…, is a member of the
travelling community. She is branded variously in the world of the play as a ‘tinker’
(279), a ‘piebald knacker’ (311) and a ‘witch’ (280, 331). Moreover, Hester’s
daughter, Josie, is referred to as a ‘bastard’ by her paternal grandmother (279).
Hester’s former lover Carthage Kilbride has decided to marry a local girl Caroline
Cassidy—apparently for the financial and material gains that this union will afford
him. Although Carthage is Josie’s father, he and Caroline (and his controlling mother)
want Hester to leave her home on the bog; they have also threatened to remove her
daughter from her care. Hester, however, jealously guards her custody of Josie and
insists on remaining on the bleak bog bordering a community that has largely cast her
off. Hence, her actions resemble those of Hawthorne’s Hester. Hester Prynne bears
her penance, throughout the novel, without complaint. However, when the authorities
threaten to separate Pearl from her sinful mother, she fights to keep her daughter in
her care (93-6). Hawthorne’s Hester continues to reside with Pearl in a remote
woodland cottage, adjacent to the Puritan settlement that has shunned her—even
though she is free to live wherever she chooses (67). After Pearl has grown up and
married, Hester returns to this cottage and remains there for the rest of her days,
continuing, by choice, to wear the scarlet letter (222-3). It appears that both
Hawthorne’s and Carr’s Hesters feel strangely at home on the near frontiers of
communities which oppress, stigmatise, shame and brand them. These women seem
unable to conceive freedom from their roles as outcasts. In both texts, this can be seen
to point to the ways in which individuals accommodate to the categorisations that
society places on them.
Throughout By the Bog of Cats…, the protagonist appears to be torn between
passionately transgressing acceptable codes of behaviour and attempting to conform,
to belong within her society. Carr highlights Hester’s liminality by placing her in a
caravan on a bog bordering her community and having her fiercely cling to that
peripheral space. On the one hand, Hester desires to conform to authoritative, societal
norms and to be assimilated into the dominant culture: ‘I had a father too! Ya’d swear
98
The mutability of the sign—specifically the letter A—is evident throughout The Scarlet Letter. This
chapter discusses later how the meaning of the ‘A’ changes from ‘adulteress’ to ‘angle’ to ‘able.’
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I dropped from the sky the way ya go on. Jack Swane of Bergit’s Island, I never knew
him—but I had a father. I’m as settled as any of yees’ (295). On the other hand, she
seeks to undo the conventions of rural, settled culture through violent destruction,
exemplified when she burns down her house (which she has signed over to Carthage),
along with Carthage’s sheds and the livestock therein. Throughout the action leading
up to the play’s climactic moments of devastation, Hester’s neighbours evoke the
authoritative fixities of her gender role in an endeavour to purge her wild and
passionate behaviours. This is evident from the first scene of the play, when Monica
criticises Hester’s brooding and nightly roaming of the bog based on her status as a
mother: ‘The child, Hester, ya have to pull yourself together for her, you’re goin’ to
have to stop this broodin’, put your life back together’ (268). Carr’s Hester can be
compared to Parks’s Hester of In the Blood: Hester Swane is portrayed as a loving
mother but her attempts to conform to the conventional model of motherhood do not
succeed because of her failure to reconcile herself with society. This leads her, finally,
to undo her maternal status altogether through the ultimate transgression of
infanticide.
Carr showcases a striking and productive duality through the character of
Hester Swane. Monica’s urging of Hester to perform her motherly role correctly
reveals the performativity of the role itself. In her essay ‘Performative Acts and
Gender Constitution,’ Butler posits that failing to perform one’s gender role in
accordance with socio-cultural codes of behaviour results in punitive consequences
such as reprimanding by others and cultural exclusion (155). Hester suffers both
reprimanding and exclusion due to her differing cultural status as a member of the
travelling community and her passionate, violent acts of resistance. Hester’s identity,
which is split between that of a conformist and of a transgressor, unfixes ideal visions
of femininity and reveals gender performativity. Moreover, like Parks in Fucking A,
Carr portrays the climactic act of infanticide towards the end of By the Bog of Cats…
as a loving murder. Hester, having resolved to commit suicide, tells her daughter that
she is going somewhere ‘ya can never return from’ (338). Josie begs to go with her.
Hester, having suffered the psychological torture of maternal abandonment, finally
decides to honour Josie’s request in order to save her daughter from a tormented life
like her own. In a stage image strikingly similar to that in the final scene of Fucking
A, this Hester ‘cuts Josie’s throat in one savage movement. […] And Josie dies in her
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arms’ (339). As explored in the last chapter, staging maternal infanticide as an act of
love denaturalises conventional perceptions of motherhood.99
The split subjectivity of Hester in By the Bog of Cats… allows Carr to shatter
the archetypal messages and characterisations associated with the literary canon, even
as she appropriates the tragic form and a classical plot. Hester verbalises the opposing
forces of order and disorder that torment her psyche in a confrontation with Caroline:
‘Listen to me now, Caroline, there’s two Hester Swanes, one that is decent and very
fond of ya despite your callow treatment of me. And the other Hester, well, she could
slide a knife down your face, carve ya up and not bat an eyelid’ (285). Carr
appropriates tragedy, but evades the sense of unitary meaning which feminists have
criticised as intrinsic to that form. As Melissa Sihra has accurately observed in
relation to the play, ‘classical notions of identity and the so-called “stable” or
“unified” character are […] interrogated. Through the unconscious voice of Carr’s
narrative the implicit is made explicit’ (‘Stitching the Words’).
By the Bog of Cats… is comparable to The Scarlet Letter in its focus on signs,
symbols and stigmas. In both texts, an exploration of the ways in which individuals
imbue signs with the authority to determine and to circumscribe identity is balanced
by an effort to dismantle the fixity of signs. The main character of each text allows
her life to be controlled by determining symbols. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester has
been wearing her badge of shame for many years when Chillingworth tells her that the
council are considering letting her remove it (144). Hester, however, calmly refuses:
‘“Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be
transformed into something that would speak a different purport’” (144). Hester’s
insistence on wearing the symbol of her outcast status, and living on the margins of
the community which imposed it, reveals how individuals allow socially-enforced
classifications to dictate how they live their lives. By the Bog of Cats… exhibits, from
the outset, Carr’s similar preoccupation with the determining power of symbols and
categorisations. The action opens on Hester dragging a dead black swan across the
bog. The swan is linked to Hester’s surname since ‘Swane means swan’ (275). It
becomes clear that the swan also signifies the protagonist’s impending death.
Catwoman relays a prophetic spell with which Hester’s mother, Big Josie, mystically
conjoined her daughter’s life to that of the swan: ‘‘‘That child,” says Josie Swane,
Chapter 2, ‘Maternal Contradictions,’ explores Carr’s and Parks’s ‘Hester’ plays in more detail and
analyses further the staging of maternal infanticide.
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“will live as long as this black swan, not a day more, not a day less”’ (275). Carr
adheres to the tragic formula in that Hester’s death at the end of the play fulfils this
fatal prophesy. By the Bog of Cats… ends with Hester’s suicide. Both The Scarlet
Letter and By the Bog of Cats… incorporate potent signs which the characters link to
divine or metaphysical forces. Yet, that both Hesters choose to act in accordance with
the limitations that these signs evoke suggests that the potency of signs is a product of
human behaviour. In this way, both texts demystify and destabilise names, brands and
signs. Catwoman’s advice to Hester in By the Bog of Cats… becomes more
meaningful than the black swan in this context: ‘There’s ways round curses. Curses
only have the power you allow them’ (276).
The Scarlet Letter reveals simultaneously the power and mutability of signs.
Hester Prynne’s life appears circumscribed and determined by the letter she wears on
her breast. Yet, Hawthorne reveals the indeterminacy of symbols by continually
altering the significance of the letter ‘A’ throughout The Scarlet Letter. An old sexton
tells Dimmesdale that the townspeople have interpreted the mysterious apparition of a
red ‘A’ in the sky to stand for ‘angel’ (134). Meanwhile, Hester’s statement regarding
her badge has indeed come to pass: it has ‘transformed into something that would
speak a different purport’ (144). Hester becomes, through her charitable deeds, a
‘self-ordained a Sister of Mercy’ (137). Accordingly, the symbol on her breast morphs
in its signification into something like a nun’s cross, with some members of Hester’s
community refiguring the ‘A’ as a symbol for ‘able,’ as in strong or capable (137).
Hawthorne undercuts the power of the sign in The Scarlet Letter by exposing the
variability of its meaning. He acknowledges that certain categorisations can
circumscribe and limit human behaviour. Yet, the shifting nature of symbols in his
novel shows the relation between signs and the things that they signify to be
culturally-constructed and socially-dependent.
Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A, as well as Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…,
offer meditations on the nature of signs which are comparable to Hawthorne’s. In
their ‘Hester’ plays, both dramatists reveal the ways in which signs can both limit and
liberate. These are strategies of immense feminist efficacy. To appropriate the words
of Adrienne Rich, they point to:
how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as
well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male
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prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name—and therefore live—
afresh. (‘Re-Vision’ 35.)
Rich’s statement applies to the way in which the dominant culture controls
signification, and how access to the codes of the privileged class can both liberate and
limit those on the margins of that culture. While Hester Swane of By the Bog of
Cats… allows herself to be limited by her mother’s curse, she disregards property
rights, legal documents and the authority of the written word by describing the forms
in which she signed her house over to Carthage as ‘‘[b]its of paper, writin’, means
nothin’, can as aisy be unsigned’ (283). Both of Parks’s Hesters are outside the
written sign system and limited in social standing because they can neither read nor
write. In Fucking A, Hester Smith’s illiteracy in English is balanced by her fluency in
a language intrinsic to her trade. Parks has invented a dialect called TALK which
enables the female characters of Fucking A to discuss gynaecological matters in code.
TALK places the audience in a position in which certain sounds mean nothing
without their English translation. The way in which Parks infuses meaningless sounds
and letter combinations with signification purely for the purpose of this play
demonstrates the arbitrary relation between the sign and that which is signified. In In
the Blood, Hester’s opportunities for social advancement are seriously limited by her
illiteracy. However, her inability to read the word ‘slut,’ which is scrawled on the wall
of her ‘home’ under the bridge, enables her liberation from the way in which her
community has branded her. When her son, Jabber, finally tells Hester what these
letters mean, it incites in her a passionate rage that leads her to infanticide (105-106).
She is, consequently, imprisoned and sterilised (107-109). Access to the authoritative
signifying codes of the written word—which Hester hopes earlier in the play will
eventually free her family from the poverty trap—actually contributes to her tragic
demise and ultimate limitation. To Hester, the word is nothing but marks on the wall
till Jabber utters it aloud. Hence, the word slut in In the Blood functions to reveal that
signs, like curses in By the Bog of Cats…, only have the power we allow them.
Revealing the indeterminacy of the sign, as well as the arbitrary relation between the
sign and that which is signified, un-fixes petrified meanings and opens the possibility
of—to paraphrase Rich—seeing, naming and, therefore, living afresh.
The literary figures of Hester and Medea are both torn between the forces of
rectitude and passion, leading to polarised outcomes. As The Scarlet Letter
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progresses, Hester becomes a stoical, almost saintly figure. She bears her penance
with honour: she continues to live on the margins of the community that has shunned
her and, even in that isolated space, to wear the scarlet ‘A’ as ordered by the local
authorities. Her needlework is a potentially profitable skill, yet she donates to the poor
all her earnings keeping only subsistence for herself and her daughter. She persists in
her thankless charity work, adopting a life of seclusion and self-sacrifice. She fights
only to retain her child and her integrity. There are, however, moments in the novel
when visceral urges—like those that incited her adulterous affair—resurface. At one
point, she contemplates both suicide and infanticide, reasoning that the former might
hasten her own journey to eternal justice, and the latter would protect her daughter
from the perils of womanhood (141). Later in the novel, Hester briefly reunites with
her former lover and partner in sin, Reverend Dimmesdale. As the pair plans a
clandestine departure with their child, Pearl, Hester throws off her scarlet letter (172).
She then removes her cap, shaking free the luxuriant locks it had imprisoned (173).
These acts symbolise a brief eruption of her dormant fervency. Yet, by the end of the
novel, these passions appear to have been purged. After both her lover and her
husband have died, Hester voluntarily resumes her reclusive life in the same
peripheral space, continuing to wear her badge of shame. Medea, on the other hand,
seems consumed by feelings of jealousy and betrayal. Abandoned by Jason, she
cunningly hatches a monstrous plot for revenge. However, a gripping monologue in
which she struggles with her decision to murder her children exposes her internal
struggle (1021-80). Nevertheless, she finally succumbs to her vengeful desires, killing
Glauce, Jason’s bride-to-be, and resolutely fulfilling her plan to commit infanticide.
Medea then escapes to a new life in Athens, where she had previously secured refuge
with King Aegeus.
The striking duality of Hester and Medea lend a certain moral ambiguity to
these works. Yet, how could Hester bear her burdens and the dark, hopeless
containment of a life almost devoid of happiness with such immense stoicism? On the
other hand, how could Medea’s vitriol reach such monstrous levels as to lead her to
commit heinous acts in such a calculated way? In their appropriations of Hester and
Medea, Parks and Carr work towards neutralising these extremes. They culturally
transpose the characters of Hester and Medea to more immediate contexts, thereby
imbuing the stigmatised, fallen woman scenario with contemporary relevance.
Moreover, in their re-imaginings, Parks and Carr intensify each protagonist’s latent
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duality, which works to humanise these mythologised characters. The dramatists
carefully navigate that boundary between rectitude and passion. The ways in which
these Hesters kill their children distort the lines between good and evil. Hester la
Negrita is caring, uncomplaining and optimistic throughout In the Blood, despite her
stifling circumstances and sexual exploitation. Her sudden rage on hearing the word
slut becomes understandable in this context. The murder of Jabber is constructed as a
crime of passion, in which both intense love and murderous rage exist
simultaneously.100 Hence, the act works to blur the distinctions between love and hate.
In Fucking A and By the Bog of Cats…, each protagonist commits infanticide at her
child’s request and to save him/her from a worse fate. In each drama, the protagonist’s
personal history, oppression and stigmatisation can be seen to cloud her judgement.
This resembles the situation of Euripides’ Medea. Unlike Medea, however, the
infanticides that Hester Smith and Hester Swane commit appear more motivated by
intense love than by vengeance. As we have seen, Hester Prynne considers taking the
fate of her child into her own hands in a similar way. Hester Smith and Hester Swane,
however, follow through on actions that Hawthorne’s Hester dared only to
contemplate.
There are striking differences between the texts by Parks and Carr and the
works that inspired them. However, the similarities between these plays and their
literary ancestors are also important. Like aspects of Medea and The Scarlet Letter,
morals in these dramatists’ ‘Hester’ plays are deliberately and productively
ambiguous. Michael J. Colacurcio describes Hawthorne’s work as follows: ‘Moral
questions in Hawthorne’s fiction must be handled with care; and as for moral
prescriptions, shake well before using’ (9). This statement also applies to In the
Blood, Fucking A and By the Bog of Cats…. Audiences may not morally favour the
murderous acts committed by the protagonists of these works. However, Parks and
Carr reframe and refigure Medean infanticide in ways that help us to understand it.101
Citing Parker and Thurer, Verna A Foster states in her 2007 essay entitled ‘Nurturing and Murderous
Mothers in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In The Blood and Fucking A’ that ‘we may infer that most mothers at
one time or another feel both intense love and murderous rage against their children. Common though
it may be, the latter feeling is perceived as so taboo that few women can bring themselves to talk about
it’ (76).
101
For more on staging infanticide in Parks’s and Carr’s Hester plays, see Chapter 2.
100
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Gender and the Canon in Carr’s Re-Imaginings of King Lear
Marina Carr’s re-imaginings of King Lear, Meat and Salt and The Cordelia Dream,
demonstrate the deconstructive potential of staged appropriations of patriarchal
theatre. Carr achieves this by revealing in these plays the inextricable links between
various literary and artistic works, as well as by rereading (or wilfully misreading)
Shakespeare’s Cordelia. The Cordelia Dream was commissioned by the Royal
Shakespeare Company. The production ran from December 2008 to early January
2009 at Wilton’s Music Hall in London, directed by Selina Cartmel. The drama
problematises the idea of artistic originality as well as that reverence towards
authorship that lies at the basis of literary canons. Carr’s earlier King Lear-inspired
children’s play Meat and Salt (performed in 2003, with a similar work by Jim Nolan
under the composite title ‘Sons and Daughters’) was staged as part of the Peacock’s
Outreach and Education programme. It is a dramatisation of a short story that Carr
had written previously. In both plays, Carr uses appropriation as a form of
deconstruction. Drawing on cultural theorist Catherine Belsey’s recent book Why
Shakespeare? (2007), my interpretation focuses on how Carr re-imagines a literary
classic in ways that question traditional ideals of originality. The analysis reveals how
Carr’s re-imaginings of King Lear problematise conventional perceptions of
authorship and intellectual property. On one level, Carr contributes to Shakespeare’s
fame; by using his play as a source, she helps to perpetuate his status as canonical.
However, I will focus on how she simultaneously and paradoxically uses her
appropriations of King Lear to refigure patriarchal representations of women and to
shake canonical foundations.
Beyond its title, Carr links The Cordelia Dream to King Lear by dramatising a
fraught father-daughter relationship. Carr moves away from the rural settings of her
Midlands plays by placing The Cordelia Dream’s action in a recognisable urban
milieu: the interior of a professional’s apartment within a secure building. The play’s
two middleclass characters speak in neutral, middleclass accents. By using these
elements—as well as a chronological plot—Carr follows the parameters of stage
realism. However, as in many of her later plays, Carr incorporates aspects of the
surreal into her use of this dominant form.102 The Cordelia Dream concerns an aging
Surreal elements bubble beneath the surface, and sometimes penetrate the action, of Carr’s more
traditionally-styled works. In Portia Coughlan, for example, the protagonist is haunted by the ghost of
her dead twin, who also appears on stage. In ‘Feminist Meanings of Presence and Performance in
102
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composer who strives towards the creation of the masterpiece that will secure his
immortal fame. In two acts, this two-hander stages a parent-child power struggle
between this character, Man, and his daughter, Woman. Man’s troubled relationship
with Woman, a more successful composer, is fuelled by his stubborn pride and
jealous ego; he perceives her inheritance of his artistic gift as her theft of his talent
and beseeches her to be silent so that he can achieve his true potential before his
death. However, Carr more explicitly links these characters to Shakespeare’s Cordelia
and Lear by evoking a dream of Shakespeare’s play. At the beginning of Carr’s
drama, Man is alone at his piano, but a visit from his estranged daughter soon
interrupts his solitude. It transpires that her visit was prompted by a haunting dream in
which she was Cordelia and her Father was Lear, standing over her limp, dead body
on the stage. Woman tells Man that, in the dream, he says: ‘howl, howl, howl, howl’
in a brazen, cynical and triumphant manner (19). As well as fortifying the link
between hypertext and hypotext, the dream parodies King Lear by amplifying Lear’s
frustrating petulance.103
The character of Woman in The Cordelia Dream offers a strikingly powerful
reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Cordelia. By inscribing her own reading of Lear’s
favourite daughter onto her version of the character, Carr addresses the ways in which
women are, arguably, misrepresented in the original play. Writing in the Irish Times
in 2009, Eileen Battersby quotes Carr’s (mis)interpretation of Cordelia: ‘“I’ve always
considered Cordelia to be confrontational; here is Lear facing his big day, about to
divide his kingdom and she is looking for a fight, she refuses to play the game, to do
the expected party piece”’ (‘Savage Realism’ 9). Carr develops her vision of the
confrontational daughter by allowing her character of Woman repeatedly to fight back
against her father. Unlike Cordelia, Carr’s Woman has the strength and the speech to
criticise her father’s behaviour: ‘Your pretensions are appalling. Your treatment of me
is appalling. Of my mother, of my siblings. Who gave you licence to treat everyone so
badly?’ (25). Moreover, Woman’s dialogue reveals that she was not banished by her
Theatre,’ Cathy Leeney argues that realism does not have to be conservative, yet she places Carr’s
Portia Coughlan within the parameters of ‘neorealism’ (93). However, as Lee A. Jacobus points out in
The Bedford Introduction to Drama (1997), the realist tradition historically entails ‘expressionist
qualities evident in the dream passages in Strindberg’s Miss Julie and the romantic fantasies of Hedda
in Hedda Gabler’ (617).
103
Hypertext and hypotext are terms coined by Gérard Genette for the adaptive work and the source
text respectively. For a further discussion, see Newman and Doubinsky’s 1997 translation of his 1982
work, Palimpsests (ix).
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father. Rather, she has chosen to stay away: ‘All my energies go in staving you off. I
have erected a force field around myself so you cannot get through’ (21). Although
she also dies off-stage, Carr’s ‘Cordelia’ returns from the grave (as a ghost) and has
the last word at the end of the play. Through revision and resurrection, Carr grants her
character the subjectivity that is lacking in the original play. If Carr’s Woman is a
version of Shakespeare’s Cordelia, as the dream suggests, then Woman gives voice to
a marginal figure who is relatively voiceless in King Lear.104
The political efficacy of The Cordelia Dream lies in the difference between
Shakespeare’s quiet and marginal Cordelia and Carr’s strong, forthright Woman. The
presence of this subjectivity in Carr’s hypertext further illuminates its absence in the
original. Such misrepresentation of women is prominent throughout patriarchal
theatre. Academics such as Case have provided extensive studies of the misogynistic
or reductionist images of womanhood in Shakespearean and ancient Greek theatre.
According to Case, these female roles are commonly identified as ‘the Bitch, the
Witch, the Vamp and the Virgin/ [or] Goddess’ (Feminism and Theatre 6). The
absence of women from public life in ancient Greece, and in the Elizabethan era
(which, in ways, sought to emulate the earlier period) caused, in Case’s view, a
suppression of ‘real women.’ Instead, ‘culture invented its own representation of the
gender, and it was this fictionalised ‘Woman’ who appeared on the stage […]
representing the patriarchal values attached to the gender while suppressing the
experiences, stories, feelings and fantasies of actual women’ (ibid 7). By
appropriating King Lear, Carr endeavours to replace such reductive representations of
femininity with the real ‘Woman,’ which historically was suppressed in western
theatre.
Carr creates female subjectivity from the generic female characters of
patriarchal drama by conflating Cordelia with Goneril and Regan to create her
‘Woman.’ While Goneril and Regan are clearly represented as ‘Bitches’ in King Lear,
Shakespeare’s Cordelia may be viewed as the conversely essentialised ‘Virgin’ figure.
104
Catherine Cox views Cordelia as a silent, mourning virgin, echoing Christian images, while Gayle
Whittier sees King Lear as Shakespeare’s ‘most misogynistic’ (367) tragedy, evidenced by what she
sees as the play’s nausea at female sexuality (367, 368). According to Kathleen McLuskie, ‘Cordelia’s
saving love, so much admired by critics, works in the action less as a redemption for womankind than
as an example of patriarchy restored’ (98-99); for McLuskie, Cordelia becomes a ‘static and almost
inanimate daughter of sorrows’ by the end of the play (101). Peter Erickson argues that Cordelia
becomes a victim at the end of the drama (112-115), while Janet Adelman posits that Cordelia is little
more than an icon (120-126).
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These characters are reductive feminine icons created and represented on the
Elizabethan stage by men. Although the title, as well as the description of the dream
of Cordelia, leads the audience to believe that Shakespeare’s Cordelia is the source for
Woman, Man explicitly points to this conflation of the three daughters from King
Lear by calling Woman ‘Regan’ and by telling her: ‘you think you are Cordelia to my
Lear. No, my dear. You’re more Regan or Goneril spun.’ When he is insane in the
second half of the play—which is another aspect of King Lear that Carr has
appropriated—he refers to her as ‘the dog-hearted one’ (29); dog-hearted is the phrase
that Lear uses to describe Goneril and Regan (King Lear 103). Carr’s confrontational
Woman even threatens to knock her aging father to the ground at the end of act one,
further blurring the distinctions between the Bitch and the Virgin (27). The Cordelia
Dream offers a more balanced representation of femininity than Shakespeare’s pure,
stoical and idyllic Cordelia, or his scheming, selfish and calculating Goneril and
Regan.
Carr’s text redresses the misrepresentations of women in King Lear and
Cartmel added to the RSC production a playful subversion of the ‘false females’ on
the Shakespearean stage. The Elizabethan practice of male actors in drag playing
women ‘reveals the fictionality of the patriarchy’s representation of the gender’ (Case,
Feminism 7). According to Case, ‘classical plays and theatrical conventions can now
be regarded as allies in the project of suppressing real women and replacing them with
masks of patriarchal production’ (ibid). Carr’s dialogue inverts this idea when Man
describes Woman as a ‘dog-hearted ingrate,’ who is ‘disguised as a [real] woman’
(33). Here, Carr points to how her play ‘masks,’ or perhaps unmasks Shakespeare’s
reductionist images of women with her staging of female subjectivity. Cartmel’s
production works with such textual clues, as well as locating the play firmly within
Carr’s repertoire. In a subtle parody of the Elizabethan tradition, Cartmel had
Michelle Gomez (playing Woman) put on Man’s tuxedo. This moment in the
production harks back to the first play of Carr’s to be performed, Low in the Dark, in
which a female character, Binder, put on a hat and tails to role-play as a man.105 Yet,
The Cordelia Dream is explicitly inspired by the Elizabethan King Lear. The stage
image of the woman in men’s clothing takes on added significance in this context.
105
Cross-dressing on the stage problematises gender and reveals its performative quality by exposing it
as, in the words of Alisa Solomon, ‘a disguise, a set of effects’ (Re-Dressing the Canon 7). See Chapter
5 for an analysis of how clothing and costume in plays by Carr and Parks can reveal gender
performativity in order to renounce identity categorisations.
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The subversive image reminds the audience of how cross-dressed men represented
women in Elizabethan productions of Shakespeare’s work, thereby furthering the way
in which Carr’s more recent play illuminates and subverts how women were
misrepresented in the patriarchal tradition.
The 2008 RSC premiere of The Cordelia Dream received, in general, a
negative critical reception. While reviewers such as Kate Bassett and Timothy
Ramsden see the play’s literary references as pretentious, contrived and even elitist, I
wish to argue that these literary references are central to the play’s meanings and to
the cultural work that it does. Critics seem to take issue not with how the play reimagines the content of King Lear, but with the literary conversations—including the
way in which the two characters overtly discuss Shakespeare’s play—throughout the
script. Bassett, writing for The Independent, sees the ‘discoursing on famous lines in
King Lear’ as ‘tedious and clumsy.’ In a review published on the UK theatre website
Reviewsgate, Ramsden claims that the writing ‘repeatedly hammers’ the Lear link. He
describes the work as ‘a literate, literary play, synthetic and calculated, with little
sense about it.’ Battersby cites in her Irish Times article Carr’s response to such
slating of The Cordelia Dream (‘Savage Realism’ 9). Carr, predictably, defends her
work by claiming that many reviewers missed the point of the play. However, perhaps
Carr is correct on some level. Arguably, The Cordelia Dream is about the nature of
art. The RSC production opened with David Hargreaves as Man, seated at a grand
piano, playing a beautiful melody in a sparsely furnished studio apartment. This
dishevelled, bearded man, wearing only underwear and a sleeping bag, epitomised the
image of the obsessed, solitary artist as he repeatedly ignored the resounding buzzer
to resume his creative endeavour. The script goes on to communicate the anxieties
that exist between preservation and annihilation, survival and death. This play selfreflexively muses—like many of Shakespeare’s sonnets—on the immortal potential of
artistic creations. Through her characters’ references to Shakespeare, Carr evokes the
function of literary canons to immortalise, to mythologise individual authors. Perhaps
what many respondents missed is that the conversations about King Lear in the
dialogue deliberately and self-consciously point to Carr’s act of appropriation in ways
that accord with the play’s, and indeed Carr’s own, deconstructive views about
authorship. Such ‘literary’ features are useful in furthering the play’s interrogation of
how art is culturally perceived and valued.
Carr’s views on the nature of art, and consequently her self-perception as a
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writer, diverge from ideas of the artist as an enlightened, individual creator. Michel
Foucault’s 1969 essay, ‘What is an Author?’ is useful in understanding Carr’s
deconstructive vision of authorship. Here, Foucault argues that, rather than an
originator of meaning, the author is a function of discourse:
We are accustomed […] to saying that the author is the genial creator of the
work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an
inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author
is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all
languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to
proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an
indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not
precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture,
one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free
circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and
recomposition of fiction (118-119.)
Revered notions of art and authorship are fundamental to the construction of literary
canons. As we shall see, The Cordelia Dream stages a resistance to these ideals. Carr
is the daughter of novelist and playwright Hugh Carr and, as we have seen, she draws
on a variety of literature when writing her own plays. In this context, it is
understandable that she ponders in ‘Dealing with the Dead’ (1998) whether the ability
to write is an inherited gift, or acquired through the diligent study of canonised writers
(190). Nevertheless, when she spoke about her work at a reading in NUI, Galway
(2008), she expressed her apprehension about the notion of plagiarism, since no idea
can exist in a void. She reminded the audience that even Shakespeare shamelessly
pilfered the ideas of others.
As well as revealing and rectifying the lack of female subjectivity in an
Elizabethan classic such as King Lear, the content of The Cordelia Dream questions
canon formation in a broader way by interrogating its underlying principle of
authorship. Carr aptly challenges intellectual property through the character of
Woman in The Cordelia Dream. At one point during the play, Man accuses Woman
of ‘romanticising’ herself. But from lines such as ‘my gift was prodigious’ and ‘I am a
great artist’ (24), it appears that Man is more obviously engaged in this project of selfromanticising.106 The references to art, music and literature throughout The Cordelia
It can be argued that many of Carr’s characters seek to romanticise their lives. This is prevalent, for
example, in The Mai (1994). For more on the way in which Carr and Parks reveal the human impulse to
romanticise life or to act in accordance with prevalent narratives, see Chapter 4.
106
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Dream serve to underline Man’s wish to emulate the images of the ‘great masters’
that have gone before him and to transcend annihilation through the creation of art.
Such desires lie at the heart of the play’s conflict. Towards the end of act one, Man
declares: ‘I am a genius. A genius! And you are a charlatan who stole my gift when I
wasn’t looking. You are a charlatan who has plagiarised from everyone’ (24). Woman
replies:
That’s what art is. Plagiarism and cunning disguise, a snapping up of
unconsidered trifles. [...] You think it’s loose living, bad behaviour and the
jottings of your hungover soul. It isn’t. Artists are the most disciplined people
on the planet. And I hope some day to call myself one.’ (24-25.)
Through such dialogue, Carr seeks to challenge the traditional reverence towards art
and the artist. Contemplations on the art of music, which are central to The Cordelia
Dream, may be seen to represent literature allegorically. Carr uses this allegory to
question canonical ideals about literature and authorship. In her appropriation of King
Lear, Carr employs the conflict between her characters to interrogate the analogous
reverence towards the talent of specific white male writers on which the western
canon of literature has traditionally been predicated.
Carr’s deconstructive views regarding authorship can be traced back to her
earlier re-imagining of King Lear, Meat and Salt (2003). This children’s play also
promotes a strong female subjectivity, thereby giving voice to Shakespeare’s pure and
reticent Cordelia. Like Carr’s more recent play for children, The Giant Blue Hand
(2009), Meat and Salt was narrated as it was acted on stage, with the characters
speaking the dialogue. Textually, this work retained its original form as a story, with
the production—directed by Andrea Ainsworth—adding music and atmospheric
sounds and lighting, as well as stylised and exaggerated movements which enlivened
the comedy of the piece. In the opening scene, we meet Big Daddy, and his three
daughters, Big Daughter, Middle Daughter and Little Daughter. Big Daddy’s name
alludes to another work from the western canon: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof. He is a Lear-like figure who requires each daughter to profess her love for
him. As soon as the daughters begin to speak, it becomes clear that Carr has blended
the fairy-tale quality of the piece with contemporary references in ways that add to the
play’s humour. For example:
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Oh Big Daddy,’ said Middle Daughter rising, ‘I may be your middle daughter
but my love for you is not middling. I love you more than Westlife, more than
Eminem, more than Serena the teenage witch [sic], more than Bart Simpson,
more, much more than Frodo out of Lord of the Rings and more than Harry
Potter out of Harry Potter. I even love you more than Derry Coady.’ ‘And who
is Derry Coady?’ boomed Big Daddy. ‘A boy I love at school’ said Middle
Daughter. ‘A boy you love at school! Love! Love! You can love only me!’
Big Daddy started to turn purple.
When little daughter tells her father that she loves him ‘as meat loves salt,’ he is
furious. Carr’s use of appropriation to develop her reading of Cordelia as
confrontational becomes evident in Little Daughter’s response:
It’s a figure of speech, which proves how clever I am and how lucky you are
that I love you so well considering how you have treated us since you got rid
of my mother with her horse’s feet. And while we’re on the subject, Big
Daddy, I thought my Mother’s feet were lovely.
Like Woman of The Cordelia Dream, this earlier ‘Cordelia’ openly criticises her
father’s flaws. Here, Carr also gives voice and subjectivity to Shakespeare’s original
character.
Diverging from Shakespeare’s King Lear, Carr places the character of the
youngest daughter at the centre of Meat and Salt, where her autonomy and pride can
flourish. Although she has been expelled from her father’s kingdom, Carr’s narrative
imaginatively stages a folkloric version of Shakespeare’s banished Cordelia’s untold
story. Little Daughter proceeds to embark on a series of fairy-tale style adventures,
culminating in her encounter with the Young King, who is interviewing every girl in
the area in an endeavour to find a bride. As she stands before his throne, we are told
that the exasperated Little Daughter wonders ‘[w]as she forever to be facing boys and
men on thrones?’ The young king mocks her, calling her ‘a beggar with attitude’ and,
angered by his treatment of her, she announces: ‘If truth has attitude, then yes, I have
attitude […] I have nothing left except my pride and I refuse to part with it. Goodbye.’
Carr reimagines Cordelia to expand on the sense of attitude that can be detected in a
resistant reading of the original character. She empowers her version of the character
with autonomy and allows her to reject the ‘boys and men on thrones’ that attempt to
force her into various ‘masks of patriarchal production’ (Case, Feminism 7).
King Lear, however, was not the only source for Carr’s Meat and Salt. The
Irish Playography database describes this work as ‘based on a King Lear-like
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folktale.’ Carr’s literary agents, the staff of Leah Schmitt’s Office at The Agency,
confirm that both King Lear and the folktale As Meat Loves Salt were sources for the
story and play.
Drawing on Catherine Belsey’s Why Shakespeare?, I wish to suggest that, by
simultaneously appropriating Shakespeare’s text and a folktale from the oral tradition
that preceded it, Carr succeeds in not only problematising authorship, but—whether
intentionally or not—in reclaiming the possibly feminine origins of this story from a
historically patriarchal tradition. Belsey asks why the work of Shakespeare has
achieved such fame and why it has constantly been reproduced above the work of any
other writer. She proposes to shed some light on this question by proving that
Shakespeare was not just influenced by texts such as ‘Ovid’s Latin poetry, […] his
English predecessor Chaucer, as well as the latest writers Spenser and Marlowe,’ but
by the more ephemeral, oral tradition of story-telling (ix-xi). She asks ‘have we
tended to overlook another debt—to the unwritten stories that must have been in
circulation among the county people in Warwickshire and the old wives of London?’
(ix). Belsey points out the comparable endurance and adaptability of fairy-tales and
Shakespeare’s plays: ‘it is worth noting that a whole genre of fireside stories has
shown even greater durability, and a parallel adaptability, in many languages’ (ix). By
establishing links between folk and fairy tales and Shakespeare’s drama, Belsey aims
to prove that the audiences of Shakespeare’s plays were already familiar with his plots
and characters because they were inspired by well-known stories. Since many of such
tales survive in some form today, the characters and parts of the plots of many
Shakespearean plays are still recognisable to contemporary audiences. This
contributes, in Belsey’s view, to the initial and on-going success of his works. As to
the question of how familiar Shakespeare himself was with such fireside tales at the
time, she looks to his play texts for proof, demonstrating the ways in which, during
madness, many of his characters revert to language that is recognisable from
childhood tales. She uses a quote from King Lear as one of her examples. As Edgar
performs the insane character of Poor Tom, his rambling includes: ‘Child Rowland to
the Dark Tower came, / His word was still, ‘Fie, foh and fum, / I smell the blood of a
British man’ (King Lear 1978-1981). This clearly echoes the calls of the giant in ‘Jack
and the Beanstalk.’
By using both King Lear, and the folktale that preceded it, as her sources for
Meat and Salt, Carr challenges the idea that the story of King Lear belonged to
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Shakespeare. She does this by dismantling ideals of originality. The figure of the
author becomes mythologised within the literary canon. However, Carr uses a fairytale—or a myth—paradoxically to demythologise authorship. Belsey identifies
folktales such as ‘Cap o’ Rushes,’ which evolved into the similar tales ‘Love like
Salt’ and ‘As Meat Loves Salt,’ as stories that either directly or indirectly influenced
the plot of King Lear. She explains that fables such as these, transmitted through the
oral tradition were ‘the special province’ of women: ‘women’s household tasks,
tedious and repetitive as many of them must have been, were lightened by spinning
good yarns and passing them on as “gossip”’ (Why 14). Indeed, storytelling has often
been associated with the fireside image of the old woman or the old wife (ibid). Carr’s
act of simultaneously appropriating a text from the patriarchal canon and a remnant of
the more marginal, feminine tradition of storytelling in Meat and Salt balances the
relationship between textuality and orality—in which textuality is usually privileged.
As well as imagining a more independent and empowered version of Cordelia, Meat
and Salt helps to relocate the story of King Lear within its feminine origins. The
Cordelia Dream also conjures the forgotten feminine influences on canonical works.
The play ends with Woman providing Man with a gift of the swan song that he has
been struggling to create. This may be the masterpiece to secure Man’s immortal
fame. However, the singularity of authorship is exploded through the stage image of
Man and Woman collaborating to create this piece. The image also points selfconsciously to Carr’s appropriation of Shakespeare, constructing adaptation as a
father/daughter dynamic.
Carr illuminates the wide dissemination of the narrative employed in King
Lear by alluding to similar, well-known stories in Meat and Salt. In doing so, the
dramatist disrupts traditional, unitary visions of authorship. Carr’s play evokes,
through citation, narratives such as Cinderella and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Whilst wandering the mountain of the moon-hounds, Little Daughter loses her shoes,
thus linking Meat and Salt to Cinderella. Little Daughter eventually finds herself
stranded and alone. Here, her predicament resembles Jane Eyre’s when Bronte’s
character has left Thornton and wanders the heath looking for food and shelter. Like
Jane, Little Daughter is mistaken for a beggar—in this case, at the palace of the
Young King. While admitting, like Bronte’s character, that her need is great, Little
Daughter uses the exact words of Jane Eyre to assert: ‘I am no Beggar’ (Jane Eyre
391). Meat and Salt illuminates the links between Cinderella, Jane Eyre and King
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Lear, reminding us that all three texts share various elements. According to Belsey’s
research, an early version of Cinderella may be identified as a source for King Lear;
the folktale can be traced back as early as the ninth-century, with one of its earliest
forms occurring in China of the time (Why 46). Carr overtly points to stories that her
audience of children will be familiar with, such as Cinderella, as well as works that
they will encounter later on, such as King Lear and Jane Eyre. Meat and Salt
playfully points out the ways in which texts and stories influence and feed into each
other, thereby problematising artistic originality and challenging the ways in which
some narratives are revered, while others are marginalised.
The intertextual elements of a literary work may be deliberate or accidental,
and may incorporate more marginalised genres in which authorship is ambiguous.
Carr’s re-imaginings of King Lear show how appropriation can destabilise revered,
traditional ideals regarding originality and expose as a myth the mystically-inspired
author figure. Problematising the notion of authorship and exposing the various
interconnections between printed texts and mutable, orally-transmitted stories can
work to demythologise literary canons. Carr has aptly chosen the collaborative field
of theatre—in which the director, actors and various other participants may be viewed
as the multiple authors of the production—to carry out this important cultural work.
Parks’s The America Play, Venus and Topdog/Underdog
In his poem ‘Digging’ (1966), Seamus Heaney likens the act of writing to agricultural
work. Though of a more archaeological nature, Parks’s concept of the analogous
relationship between writing and digging is similarly organic in that, through her
writing/digging, she attempts to nourish and restore an African American identity
starved of history:
Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect
place to ‘make’ history—that is, because so much of African American history
has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright
is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre
and real-life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, hear the bones
sing, write it down (Parks, ‘Possession’ 4).
As discussed in Chapter 1, Parks’s uses her ‘Rep and Rev’ (repetition and revision)
technique in the dynamic structures of early works such as Imperceptible Mutabilities
(1987) and Betting on the Dust Commander (1987). The concept of ‘Rep and Rev’
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can also be applied to the way in which she represents history in The America Play
(1993), Venus (2006) and Topdog/Underdog (2001). These three plays may be viewed
as a continuum showcasing Parks’s gradual adoption of more mainstream styles: in
The America Play, the dramatist’s work remains experimental though a use of
surrealism and episodic structure; while Venus incorporates explicit distancing
strategies, it is Parks’s first trial with
linear, tragic narrative; finally,
Topdog/Underdog adheres to the model of realist, domestic tragedy.107 Historical
events are imaginatively repeated and revised within each play and between The
America Play and Topdog/Underdog. Yet, these works remind us that neither Parks’s
re-imaginings nor subsequent historical findings can fill the ‘holes’ in history and
make it ‘whole’ due to a myriad of divergent historical perspectives. In these three
plays, Parks destabilises historical canons that have privileged white patriarchy by
evoking the mutability of historical ‘fact,’ and by contrasting transient lives with
figures immortalised in recorded history and its mythologised narratives. While she
differs from Carr here in her use of the historical rather than the folkloric, the outcome
is comparable. Carr reveals as myth the canonised author’s inspired originality and,
thereby, points out the deficiencies of literary history. Parks exposes the myths and
omissions of a western, Eurocentric historical record that elides the perspectives of
subjugated people.
In The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Parks appropriates the Lincoln
myth in ways that reveal the oversights of recorded history. Both plays juxtapose the
figure of President Abraham Lincoln to a ‘Lesser Known,’ African-American man.
Ironically, each man works as a Lincoln impersonator in a theme park, allowing
members of the public to shoot plastic bullets at him. David J. DeRose questions the
psychology behind a black man masquerading as President Lincoln:
[…A] Lincoln impersonator appears to be a simple enough matter, but what
culturally induced masochism compels a man, particularly a black man, to
take upon himself the person of Abraham Lincoln in order to be shot again and
again? (409-410.)
107
Carol Schafer also argues that Venus as a transitional play, but she sees it as part history play and
also part of a new phase in Parks’s career that places women centre stage. Schafer refers to this phase
as the ‘new literary tradition,’ arguing that Venus, In the Blood and Fucking A ‘place women’s bodies
centre stage to question their status as objects of possession and desire’ (‘Staging a New Literary
History’ 181).
136
This preoccupation with Lincoln is indicative of the ambivalent relationship which
African Americans hold with the sixteenth president of the United States. On the one
hand, he is The Great Emancipator, but many also feel that he patronised them.108 In
Topdog/Underdog, Booth, named after John Wilkes Booth, voices this strange
relationship when he says, ‘You play Honest Abe. You aint going back but you going
all the way back. Back to way back then when folks was slaves and shit’(17). The
idea of ‘going all the way back’ highlights the way in which Abraham Lincoln is
ingrained in public memory, in comparison to those clearly forgotten ‘folks’ who
were ‘slaves and shit.’
In Topdog/Underdog, Parks brings a central figure in the abolition of slavery
into a contemporary, black urban realm in order to probe the validity of history.
However, she also shows that the relationship which black Americans hold with their
African heritage is as ambivalent as perceptions of Abraham Lincoln. According to
Louise Bernard, Parks ‘is not concerned with origins as such’ (689). The dramatist
separates her writing from archetypal models of postcolonial literature which
incorporate ‘original’ traditions in retort to the coloniser or oppressor as an autonomyboosting strategy. Yet, African origins are not completely eclipsed in Parks’s work. In
the first scene of Topdog/Underdog, Booth announces that he is changing his name.
The ensuing discussion about names reveals the black American attitude to Africa to
be far more complex than a simple urge to reclaim ancestral origins:
LINCOLN: […] And some of them fellas who got they african names, no one
can say they names and they cant say they names neither. I mean, you dont
want yr new handle to obstruct yr employment possibilities (8).
Lincoln’s advice to his brother about changing his name is not only permeated by
contemporary identity politics, but it reveals a cultural assimilation which represses
black anxiety about diaspora. According to Paul Gilroy, ‘[T]he history of black
nationalist thought […] has had to repress its own ambivalence about exile from
Abraham Lincoln’s ambivalence towards African-Americans is well-documented. See for example
Allen C. Guelzo’s 2003 volume Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (129-31) or the 1972 textbook
by Edwin C Rozwenc et al., The Restless Americans (260-61). For a discussion of the symbiotic
relationship between Lincoln’s duality and black American’s suspicion of ‘The Great Emancipator,’
see Kevin Gaine’s 2011 essay ‘From Colonization to Anti-Colonialism: Lincoln in Africa.’ The latter
appears in a useful collection of essays, The Global Lincoln (2011), edited by Richard Carwardine and
Jay Sexton. Together, these essays offer useful, historical research regarding the global image and
influence of the mythic figure of Abraham Lincoln and reveal how he has become a mutable symbol,
who is continually adapted to suit the requirements of those who evoke him.
108
137
Africa’ (The Black Atlantic ix). Through Lincoln and Booth’s discussion about names
in the opening scene of Topdog/Underdog, Parks points to the social, economic and
assimilationist forces which contribute to this ambivalence.
Parks
uses
historical
appropriation
in
The
America
Play
and
Topdog/Underdog to contrast an underclass of African-American performers with the
mythic figure of Abraham Lincoln. In doing so, she reveals the racist, classist,
Eurocentric perspective of canonised American history. References to Lincoln as ‘The
Great Man’ and, comparatively, to his impersonator as ‘The Lesser Known’ in The
America Play symbolise the dialectic of endurance and transience. This microcosm
for all those whom history forgets or remembers is expanded in Topdog/Underdog,
when the Lincoln impersonator (who is also called Lincoln) is actually shot dead by
his brother, Booth. Parks mirrors the assassination of President Lincoln in this
climactic moment of Topdog/Underdog’s plot. However, the way in which she
constructs her Lincoln as a poverty-stricken black man in a world of crime and urban
poverty reminds her audience of the multitude of murdered black men whose lives
slip into a historical void. These ‘lesser known’ assassinations, which her Lincoln and
Booth scenario represents, are unlikely to be remembered by future generations. Parks
explores apprehension about historical inclusion by pairing the historical white
Lincoln with the contemporary black Lincoln in Topdog/Underdog. In The America
Play, The Foundling Father repeatedly voices similar concerns: ‘Much later when the
Lesser Known had made a name for himself he began to record his own movements.
He hoped he’d be of interest to posterity. As in the Great Mans footsteps’ (162).
Although these lines portray The Foundling Father as optimistic and hopeful, they
paradoxically evoke the audience’s sympathy. The audience is privy to the
unlikelihood of this naive Lincoln impersonator character ever following in ‘The
Great Man’s footsteps.’ The Foundling Father’s endeavours to record his actions are
poignantly indicative of a yearning to make one’s mark, to reinforce the significance
of the self, to survive through memory or heredity. However, the way in which Parks
challenges historical ‘truth’ also serves to undermine The Foundling Father’s efforts.
Through
appropriation
and
juxtaposition,
both
The
America
Play
and
Topdog/Underdog evoke the biased nature of public memory.
The America Play reminds us that any kind of legacy will be inevitably
subjective and fragmented. The Foundling Father encourages his son Brazil to
maintain the family’s heritage by becoming a showman. However, The Foundling
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Father (whose status as an orphan is indicated by his name) is more concerned with
emulating The Great Emancipator. He wishes to be recorded in history and to survive
in future consciousness, like Abraham Lincoln. Yet, the dialogue serves to remind us
that, even though certain histories are canonised, they are never accurate or complete:
THE FOUNDLING FATHER AS ABRAHAM LINCOLN: […] The Great
Man had his log cabin into which he was born, the distance between the cabin
and the Big Town multiplied by the half-life, the staying power of his words
and image, being the true measurement of the Great Man’s stature. (162.)
Brokenness is indicated by Parks’s use of the term ‘half-life.’ The mythic endurance
of Abraham Lincoln belongs to parts of his whole self—his words and image. The
distance between the log cabin and the Big Town signifies the split between his true
self and his mythologised image; the latter is a historical construct. Parks interrogates
historical ‘truth’ by revealing the fictionality of the Lincoln we ‘remember.’ She
furthers her revelation of the gap between Lincoln, the man, and The Great
Emancipator myth by referring to Lincoln’s humble birth: ‘the log cabin into which
he was born.’
Parks uses striking imagery to counterbalance the divergent historical statures
of Lincoln and his impersonator in The America Play. This is achieved through the
image of the Lesser Known digging the Great Man’s grave, described by The
Foundling Father in Act One of the play (161). The notion that the two are ‘dead
ringers’ makes the image both striking and unsettling (161). This is heightened by the
morbid term for ‘look-alike’ that Parks employs: we imagine the grave of the late
president being dug by his black doppelganger. Here, the two are in ‘virtual twinship’
in all aspects besides race (164). This reveals the erosion of African American history
through diaspora and slavery to be both arbitrary and unjust.
The America Play is peppered with clever and complex puns which further
Parks’s interrogation of perceived historical truth. According to Drukman, Parks has
‘put into motion this idea of an origin-less father of our county’s history with the use
of the pun character name’ (288). The Foundling Father’s name suggests that he has
no parents, but Lincoln’s black doppelganger is also orphaned because he lacks the
recorded, ancestral history of white Americans. The play continually contrasts the
canonisation of Abraham Lincoln to the historical void experienced by Black
Americans. Throughout the drama, there is a deliberate interplay between the words
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‘whole’ and ‘hole’, for example, ‘He digged the Hole and the Whole held him’ (164).
This punning, as well as the continual references to ‘The Great Hole of History,’
illuminates the impossibility of wholeness or truth with regard to historical narratives.
In the light of these references, the grave-digging image also serves to remind us that
both men inevitably end up in the same place—a hole. Neither of their stories is
whole, due to historical exclusion on the one hand and the subjective nature of
[his]story on the other.
Parks explores a similar kind of ‘Swiss cheese’ remembrance in Venus. While
many of Parks’ plays deal specifically with African American history, Venus is
concerned with nineteenth-century British colonialism. However, the issues that
surround the story of the Hottentot Venus precondition contemporary African
American identity as much as Emancipation. Just as The America Play and
Topdog/Underdog are concerned with Abraham Lincoln, a figure central to American
history, the actual historical events that Parks deals with in Venus occurred at a
turning point in the colonial period. Saartjie Baartman, who is represented by the
character of the same name (also called ‘The Girl’ and ‘The Venus’) in Venus, was
brought from South Africa to England in 1810 by Hendrik Ceza Boer. Her story took
place at a time between Britain’s withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and
the abolition of slavery throughout the empire in 1834 (Elam and Rayner, ‘Body
Parts’ 266). Baartman was exhibited at the Piccadilly Circus in London for her bodily
anomalies, namely, her distended labia and enlarged posterior (a ‘condition’ known as
steatopygia).109
In taking Saartjie Baartman as the subject of her play, Parks again incorporates
a fractured history and identity. Baartman’s unique preservation in the historical
canon occurred because of her body parts; her sexual organs have synecdochically
become who she is in the historical consciousness of posterity. According to Elam and
Rayner, ‘For the Venus Hottentot, the derriere was indeed the cause and the sign of
her history, and a case in which the part became the whole, while Saartjie Baartman
disappeared’ (‘Body Parts’ 271). Baartman’s preservation is ‘literally’ twofold. The
fragments of her story concerning her ‘parts’ or anomalies are literally and explicitly
preserved in historical documentation; after her posthumous dissection by French
A concise history of Baartman’s situation is included in Zine Magubane’s 2001article, ‘Which
Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the
“Hottentot Venus”’ (187).
109
140
anatomist George Curvier, those actual body parts were literally preserved and
displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until as recently as 1994 (ibid 226).
Parks is thereby dealing with a doubly-divided identity. Both Baartman’s body parts,
and her story parts, were broken, separated and dispersed—leaving only fragments to
endure after her death.
Repetition and Revision is Parks’s key tool for reassembling fragmented
histories. She takes the shards of ‘truth’ and incorporates them into her theatre, taking
artistic licence to rework them in an endeavour to write marginal perspectives into
history. However, as we have seen, her plays also remind us that all historical stories
remain incomplete. Actual artefacts such as letters, newspaper articles and extracts
from George Curvier’s notebook, are integrated into the text of Venus. For instance,
during the intermission The Baron Docteur (the character representing George
Curvier) reads the actual details of Baartman’s post-mortem from his notebook (9199). Similarly, fragments of the Lincoln myth are incorporated into The America Play.
Lincoln was assassinated while attending a performance of Tom Taylor’s Our
American Cousin (1858). Parks incorporates the line from the play that the president
was allegedly laughing at during the moments in which he was murdered (160). John
Wilkes Booth’s purported words after killing Lincoln are included in the dialogue of
the customers who shoot plastic bullets at The Foundling Father (165). The alleged
words of Mary Todd Lincoln (170) and of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (169) as
Lincoln died are also incorporated into the text of the play. All of these supposed
quotes are accompanied by footnotes in printed copies of The America Play. Parks
emulates ‘reliable’ academic discourse, but she uses words such as ‘alleged’ and
‘purported’ to undermine the validity of this footnoted data. The unsupported status of
this information reveals canonical history to be composed as much of hearsay as it is
of truth.
Sartjie Baartman might be viewed, from a contemporary perspective, as a
victim of colonial oppression. Parks’s ‘Rep and Rev’ technique in creating Venus devictimises Baartman by making her version of the figure compliant in her own
exhibition. This is evident when The Venus tells The Mother-Showman: ‘We should
spruce up our act. I could speak for them. Say a little poem or something’ (51). Rather
than entirely lamenting Baartman’s situation or condemning those who showcased
and studied her, Parks complicates reductionist models of oppressor versus oppressed.
Parks’s Baartman is multifaceted; one nuance of her story is that she likes being
141
looked at. This calls into question the morality of Parks’s revisionist approach to
history—particularly when dealing with issues as sensitive as biological determinism
and racial supremacy, which are prevalent in the case of Saartjie Baartman. The
injustice of such attitudes is recognised today, but should Parks de-victimise her
fictional Baartman, if the real Baartman was indeed a victim? Elam and Rayner offer
for consideration this complex question:
It is not clear whether in watching the play now an audience can escape the
same contradictory arguments over rightness and rights that were waged when
Baartman was alive. Similar arguments can be made over Parks’s own use and
display of Baartman’s story: for she too is making money from a repetition
and spectacle of Baartman, exploiting her even as she tries to help. (Elam and
Rayner 269.)
The presentation of Saartjie Baartman’s body incited controversy during such a highly
charged period in colonial history. Parks’s resurrection and re-presentation of her
story is almost as provocative today. However, her project seems more restorative
than exploitative. She brings Baartman back into historical consciousness by staging
her story; here, the dramatist makes a more inclusive history. The representation may
be fictional, but the views of those who take issue with this can be challenged in the
context of Parks’s revelation of history itself as fiction. There is no way of knowing
the ‘real’ Baartman, or the extent to which she felt victimised. Parks endeavours to remember the woman by at least endowing her with some complexity.
As the title of Jean Young’s essay suggests, she argues that Parks is guilty of
‘The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman.’ According
to Young, Park’s Venus diminishes white male complicity in Baartman’s exploitation
and premature death. Generally, Young argues that the play replaces the on-going
objectification of the black female body with a pseudo, post-feminist liberation.
Young accuses Parks of misrepresenting of Baartman’s story:
Baartman was a victim, not an accomplice, not a mutual participant in this
demeaning objectification, and Parks’s stage representation of her complicity
diminishes the tragedy of her life as a nineteenth-century black woman
stripped of her humanity at the hands of a hostile, racist society […]. (700.)
Young also cites a passage in the play in which, it appears, Parks reconstructs
Baartman as an individual free to make choices, who opts to leave South Africa based
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on the promise of gold. Young goes on to explain that the few survivors of
Baartman’s tribe who remained after Dutch military expeditions were forcefully
scattered throughout the colony and constrained in servitude, in which they were
denied the right to make such autonomous decisions (701).
I wish to argue that Parks’s reconstruction of Baartmann’s story endows it
with immediate and important political efficacy. Her dramatic reimagining is as
applicable to contemporary issues such as sexual harassment and exploitation of
human resources as it is to Victorian racial ideologies and inhumane exhibitions.
Young examines an interview in which Parks explains her reasons for the way in
which she re-imagined Baartman, and claims that Parks offers ‘a reductionist
argument’ for her problematisation of the (according to Parks) often over-simplified
race issue (700). However, Young’s reading of the play may actually be seen as
reductionist. She employs quotes from Venus to show how Park’s endows her
Baartman with the freedom to choose; yet, this apparent autonomy is but one element
of Parks’s intricate plot. When The Girl (Baartman) is propositioned about going to
England, The Brother patronisingly dismisses her misgivings about the trip:
THE GIRL: Do I have a choice? Id like to think on it.
THE BROTHER: Whats there to think on? Think of it as a vacation! 2 years of work
take half the take. Come back here rich. Its settled then. (17.)
Later on we learn that The Girl does not receive the payment that she was promised.
Similarly, when the Baron Docteur asks her if she would like to go to France with
him, she again questions her right to choose:
THE VENUS: Do I have a choice?
THE BARON DOCTEUR: Yes. God. Of course. (87-88.)
Although The Baron Docteur is assertive, rather than suavely dismissive, Saartjie’s
apparent autonomy is completely usurped by the previous scene, in which The Baron
Docteur has already purchased her from The Mother-Showman. This kind of coercion
seems even more abominable since it exists beneath a veneer of pseudo-equality. In
this context, Young’s claim that Park’s is guilty of ‘completely ignoring the issues of
power and control’ seems erroneous (704). Parks draws from the complicated,
contemporary world of her experience in order to evade essentialised representations
143
of white versus black, or oppressor versus oppressed. The multifaceted nature of
Venus evades directive, binary constructions of right and wrong; instead, it promotes
critical scrutiny of history and the present, simultaneously.
Parks represents Baartman as a nuanced character in order to re-dignify, rehumanise and re-member a woman dehumanised in her lifetime and preserved in
dismemberment in the interest of ‘history.’ On the one hand, the Baartman portrayed
in Venus is vulnerable, deprived, victimised and trapped. On the other hand, she is
strong, greedy, indifferent and free. For example, although she is not paid as she was
promised, she stands up for herself by saying, ‘I should get 50 a week. Plus better
food, uh lock on my door and uh new dress now n then’ (53). Her assertiveness can
stand as a paradigm for some of the forgotten aspects of the black experience
throughout history—for example strength, courage and a will to survive. Elam and
Rayner also discuss the reflexive nature of the pose which The Venus strikes,
defiantly retracting the gaze of her onlookers (Elam and Rayner 278). The Venus is
not simply an uncomprehending victim to be pitied; her character is multilayered,
allowing audiences to relate to and respect her.
In plays such as Venus and The America Play, Parks shows how history is
processual rather than petrified. For Dolan, presenting the processual ‘allows
performance a hopeful cast, one that can experiment with the possibilities of the
future in ways that shine back usefully on a present that’s always, itself, in process’
(Utopia 13). These plays open infinite possibilities for interpreting the past and the
present and, hence, for imagining the future. Parks reveals recorded history as
inevitably coloured by perspectives that are far from definitive in terms of truth and
morality. Baartman’s story will never be ‘whole’ and Venus does not yield any
concrete answers. The play merely rotates her story, like the physical revolving of
The Venus on stage (1-2), in order to present as many fragments and perspectives as
possible. Like the multifaceted construction of The Venus, the play encompasses a
variety of white supremacist attitudes, motivated variously by economics, science and
megalomania. These are matched by liberal, humanitarian counters to Baartman’s
treatment and to the race issue in general. However, there are contradictory nuances
even within these seemingly polarised perspectives. Some liberals feel that The Venus
has the right to exhibit herself, while others oppose it. Sometimes, even liberalism is
permeated by a patronising racial superiority, as can be seen from the dialogue of
Witness #3 when The Venus is before the law: ‘As a friend to liberty […] I am no
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advocate of these sights, on the contrary, I think it base in the extreme, that any
human beings should be thus exposed!’ (72). Divergent perspectives are particularly
evident in the trial scenes of the play, where Parks has skilfully incorporated actual
letters and reports concerning Baartman’s case, as she has done in the above quote.
The way in which human subjectivity renders history mutable and unfixed is
also revealed The America Play. This is evident, for example, in Brazil and Lucy’s
conflicting memories of the same events. Lucy corrects her son, saying, ‘That Hole
back east was uh theme Park son. Keep your story to scale’ (180). Throughout the
play, Lucy repeatedly checks Brazil on the accuracy of his stories. Moreover, the
Foundling Father refers to the wonders in his ‘Great Hole of History’ theme park as
‘Reconstructed Historicities’(163). This term verges on the oxymoronic, but it
showcases the way in which Parks plays with language to call into question the value
of history and to reveal historical narratives as a series of ‘Reconstructed
Historicities.’ Hence, she shows how historical ‘truth’ is inevitably coloured or
recreated by human subjectivity.
Parks develops her use of repetition and revision throughout her writing
career. In ‘From Elements of Style,’ the dramatist discusses her reasons for exploding
linear narrative in her early works. She wonders: ‘Could Time be tricky like the world
once was—looking flat from our place on it—and through looking at things beyond
the world we found it round? Somehow I think Time could be like this too’ (10). The
structures of Parks’s early plays are repetitive, offering a circular, rather than
chronological, vision of time. The playwright also makes time cyclical by repeating
and revising allusions to history and cultural output in her early experiments.
However, Parks continues to promote ideas of time as cyclical, simultaneous and
monumental even in plays that are structured and styled in accordance with
chronological
patriarchal
traditions
such
as
Venus,
In
the
Blood
and
Topdog/Underdog. This can be seen in the modernising elements of Venus and In the
Blood, and in the historical repetition in Topdog/Underdog, where the fate of the
characters appears to have been predestined by their names (Lincoln and Booth).
Parks’s incorporation of history is at once ‘now’ and ‘then’: ‘Yesterday today next
summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 dieded thuh last black man in thuh
whole entire world’ (The Death of the Last Black Man 102). Here, in Parks’s earlier
work The Death of the Last Black Man (1989), Black Woman With Fried Drumstick’s
dialogue seems to sum up Parks’s view of history as cyclical, immediate and
145
constantly in flux—an attitude which continues in the later plays.
There is an analogous relationship between writing and digging in Parks’s
plays. Similarly, in The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, an obsession with
food and eating is matched by an obsession with writing. Yes And Greens Black-Eyed
Peas Cornbread’s lines ‘You should write this down. You should hide it under a rock’
are repeated and revised throughout the play (103). Meanwhile, Black Woman With
Fried Drumstick continually urges Black Man With Watermelon to eat. These two
preoccupations, writing and eating, are interwoven in that they strive towards
fecundity; just as food maintains survival and propagation, writing sustains narratives,
historical or otherwise. Nevertheless, Parks’s theatre seeks to show that no narrative is
definitive and that all stories are continually in the making.
Conclusion
Carr and Parks establish deconstructive approaches to the patriarchal knowledge base
through a use of theatrical experimentation in their early plays. This interpretation
shows how each playwright continues her deconstructive strategies through a
politicised use of appropriation. In Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Parks’s In the
Blood and Fucking A, the playwrights adopt the tragic form and draw on two literary
classics. Each playwright updates, negotiates and intensifies some of the disruptive
oppositions which are evident in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Euripides’
Medea. In doing so, Carr and Parks expose the cultural production, and explode the
determinacy, of signs, stigmas and categorisations. Carr’s re-imaginings of King Lear
and Parks’s appropriations of history imaginatively insert marginalised perspectives
into literary and historical canons. Moreover, these plays also seek to question the
value and validity of those canons. Appropriating literature, history and dominant
theatre forms allows these playwrights to place figures on the periphery of western
culture at the centre of the mainstream western stage. Ultimately, Carr and Parks use
appropriation to illuminate and probe those invisible authorities that privilege,
exclude and ascribe value, and to subvert the dominant cultural suppression of
perspectives which might threaten the status quo. Dolan’s assertion regarding
Deborah Warner’s Broadway production of Medea (2002) and Mary Zimmerman’s
off-Broadway adaptation of Metamorphoses (2001) also applies to these works; here,
Parks and Carr show how ‘old myths imagined in new ways continue to live, but that
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we can also create new mythologies’ (Utopia 164). Chapter 4 examines play texts in
conjunction with stage imagery to explore Parks’s and Carr’s treatment of another
dominant mythology: heterosexual, romantic love. Comparably, these dramatists
reveal the links between love narratives and heterosexual performativity; in doing so,
they demythologise the culturally-endorsed paradigm of heterosexual monogamy and
open the possibility of accepting alternative life paths.
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Chapter 4: Love as a ‘Fabricated
Epistle’
Introduction
At a wedding feast, the bride advises the groom to pretend it is the best day of their
lives. The guests that drift in and out of the reception include a blind seer, a ghost,
three more ‘brides’ and a priest. The priest is armed with an imaginary gun and his
pyjamas are visible from beneath his clothes; he replaces the bride’s name with that of
the groom’s former lover during the speeches. The groom’s mother confuses her
newly-married son with her own late husband. The ‘real’ bride takes two photographs
of the groom—both with other females in white gowns. Meanwhile, the third
alternative bride figure violently disrupts the celebration, claiming that the big day
should rightly be hers.
What I have just described are scenes from Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…
(1998). This is a linear, plot-driven re-imagining of Euripides’ Medea in which the
playwright appropriates both the form and content of the classical, male-authored
canon. Claire Wallace, in her exploration of Carr’s use of tragedy, sums up how the
dramatist’s stylistic shift might appear from a politically-aggressive, feminist
perspective (‘Crossroads’ 87). Carr’s theatre might be seen from this vantage point as
having ‘developed in a negative sense veering from a playful satirical feminism to
grim patriarchal tragedy’ (ibid). Yet, the dreamlike scenario described above, peopled
by shadowy figments and doubles, as well as parodic images of religious authority
and traditional heterosexual roles, seems like it would be more at home within the
fluid, self-reflexive echo chambers of Carr’s early, satirical experiments. By means
of such techniques, Carr’s theatricality and visual potency, evidenced in the language
and imagery described above, continues to destabilise hegemonic conventions from
within the mainstream institution.
Traditional
western
weddings,
especially
those
involving
religious
ceremonies, are performative, ritualistic affairs comparable to theatrical performance.
The members of the wedding party—or the key players—usually rehearse their
dialogue and actions in advance of the event. Typically, when the ‘day out’ arrives,
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the costumed participants inhabit spaces designated for such proceedings, partake in
choreographed processions, follow cues, deliver lines and stand or sit on display, all
in front of an audience of spectators. The organisers, like many theatre practitioners,
put their own creative slant on a revival of scenes often enacted. Unlike a play,
however, nuptial performances tend to continue right through the evening: events
such as posing for photographs, dining, speeches and dancing often follow a familiar,
formulaic, pre-planned sequence. In this context, the wedding reception depicted in
Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, becomes a show within a show. It can work to reflect the
audience’s own voyeurism. These scenes exemplify how some of the dramatist’s
theatrical scenarios provide theatre practitioners with opportunities to restructure ‘the
relationship between the performers’ space and the audience space as a two-way
mirror’ (Cerquoni 187). Such is the deconstructive potential of metatheatre: its selfreflexivity allows it to call attention to theatre’s representational strategies.
Representing performance penetrates classic realism’s fourth wall by reminding
audiences that they are watching a play. Moreover, when the performances that
metatheatre portrays are familiar routines and cultural rituals—as is the case in many
of Carr’s and Suzan-Lori Parks’s works—it can also illuminate the representational
strategies, or perhaps, ‘re-presentational actions,’ of everyday living.110 By representational actions I mean those consciously or unconsciously performative
activities that seek to replicate socially-sanctioned models, such as the ubiquitous
paradigms of heterosexual monogamy in western culture.111 Exploring the ways in
which Carr and Parks stage performances relating to the western conception of
Erving Goffman adapted the term ‘dramaturgy’ into the field of sociology in his seminal volume
The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life (1959). Drawing on the work of Kenneth Burke,
Goffman uses theatre as a metaphor for explaining social interactions. A more recent and more relevant
examination of the connection between theatre and habitual activities is Alan Read’s Theatre and
Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1995). Combining the theoretical frameworks of philosophy
and theatre studies discourse, Read explores the relationship between theatre and quotidian urban life.
He defines theatre an ‘extra-daily dimension,’ which depends upon the cultural perception we call
everyday life (ix). The productivity of theatre and everyday life are, for Read, symbiotically contingent.
He denies the existence of the idealised empty space, which is often associated with avant-garde
performance. He seeks instead to recover a theatre defined by places and people (13-19). Read
examines ‘a discrete and little documented domain of operations which circulate between the most
habitual daily activity and the most overt theatrical manifestations distanced but never fatally removed
from that everyday world’ (2). Moreover, he maintains that ‘good theatre has an invaluable role to play
in disarming the tyrannies of the everyday’ (2).
111
My understanding of ‘re-presentational actions’ is influenced by Judith Butler’s conception of
performativity, put forth in her seminal 1999 book, Gender Trouble. In Butlter’s view, individuals
replicate historically performed, socially-sanctioned behaviour models—gendered acts which appear
natural. See her 1988 essay ‘Performative Acts’ for a succinct explanation of how she perceives gender
performativity.
110
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romantic love—including, but not limited to, wedding customs—reveals how theatre
can question gendered rituals.
Striking images associated with romantic heterosexual love permeate the
works of Carr and Parks. In works that have achieved international, mainstream
success such as Carr’s The Mai (1994) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Parks’s
Venus (1996), In the Blood (1999) and Topdog/Underdog (2001), the dramatists stage
stylised nuptial rituals and passionate scenarios, utilising familiar romantic signifiers.
In doing so, Carr and Parks question naturalised assumptions about heterosexual
union and reveal its culturally-informed construction. Similar political strategies can
be traced back to each playwright’s early experiments. For example, the satirical use
of wedding gowns in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… is also evident in her episodic,
surrealist work The Deer’s Surrender (1990). Subversive images of the bride icon
also recur in Parks’s oeuvre, from marginal, experimental one-acts such as Devotees
in the Garden of Love to her stylistically intermediate play, Venus, and finally her
deterministic tragedy In the Blood. Many of Carrs’ and Parks’ works demonstrate the
ways in which restrictive constructions of heterosexual monogamy are inscribed and
maintained by dominant cultural narratives—a preoccupation which is perhaps most
evident in two of their earliest plays. The first play that Carr wrote, Ullaloo
(performed in 1991) and Parks’s Betting on the Dust Commander (1987) are
comparable in their portrayal of the mundane routines of figures occupying
temporally cyclical and spatially liminal realms. These experimental two-handers
represent long-term, heterosexual union in ways that reveal the repetitious,
performativity of the gender roles involved in such arrangements. Parks’s and Carr’s
subsequent works echo and develop this early, political efficacy, proving that each
playwright’s concerns have developed organically throughout her theatre career.
The staging of stories, role-plays, routines and rituals of romantic love allows
these dramatists to maintain an interrogative approach in their later works. Their plays
remain subversive, despite the use of classic realism’s conventions such as plot and
psychologically-developed characters. According to Keyssar, ‘[c]ritics hostile to
realism argue that realism obliterates or disguises the construction of the world—all
appears seamless and ‘natural,’ and therefore appropriate’ (‘Introduction’ 5).
Evidently, this is a problem for materialist feminism; however, Parks’s and Carr’s
dramatic oeuvres—including the more realist works—are replete with the
constructivist meanings pertinent to this branch of feminism. Far from disguising as
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‘truths’ what are actually ideological constructs, Parks and Carr illuminate those
strictures that circumscribe our behaviours and sustain oppressive social roles. As
well as Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this interpretation draws on
psychoanalytic research and theories of narratology and social construction, including
the works of Ethel Person and Mary Gergen. Applying these theorists’ analyses of
heterosexual relations to Parks’s and Carr’s plays reveals how the dramas in question
point to the historically constituted, cultural narratives that inform emotional
behaviours. Such gendered cultural narratives produce and help to maintain what
Butler refers to as the heterosexual matrix: a ‘hegemonic discursive/epistemic model
of gender intelligibility’ in which bodies make sense only in the context of ‘a stable
sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses
female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory
practice of heterosexuality’ (Gender Trouble 151). Both playwrights disrupt the
heterosexual matrix by exposing the performativity of conventional, heterosexual
union through an adept use of subversive metatheatre. Butler argues for the positive,
transformative politics of parody: it can illuminate the naturalised, invisible
assumptions concerning gender identity (Gender Trouble 146). Ultimately, Parks and
Carr represent gendered rituals in ways that expose the storied nature of conventional
romantic love in the West. As discussed in my Introduction, critics and academics
tend to locate and discuss Parks and Carr as they relate to their national contexts. In
the case of Parks, issues concerning race also dominate responses to the playwright’s
work. As a result, criticism elides the dramatists’ deconstructive approaches to the
western models of heterosexual love, marriage and wedding rituals. Through
comparative analysis, the subsequent explorations will endeavour to address these
gaps in scholarship and criticism concerning Parks and Carr respectively.
Performativity and Metatheatre in By the Bog of Cats…
Contemporary emotional scenarios exhibit a tension between ideals of romantic,
heterosexual love that emerged in the Romantic and Modernist eras respectively. The
facets of heterosexual union in the contemporary West include intense emotion on the
one hand, and logic and economics on the other. If heterosexual union is a historical
construct, then contemporary constructions of romantic love may be viewed as ‘a
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pastiche of preexisting forms’ (Gergen and Gergen 233).112 During the Romantic era,
love began to be viewed as something spiritual and inexplicable. The still prevalent
idea of the ‘soul mate’ emerged: ‘[t]he identification of self with soul, and soul with
spirituality, was also linked to the conception of love as an eternal bond’ (Gergen and
Gergen 225). Heterosexual love was visceral and all-consuming; impulses such as
jealousy were viewed as beyond human control. Hence lovers were passionate,
idealistic and prone to irrational behaviour.113 However, the advent of Modernism
helped to quell some of love’s passionate absolutism by emphasising its ‘democratic,
rational, efficient aspects’ (Gergen and Gergen 230). More pragmatic ideas of love as
a relationship that we have to work on came to the fore, with the behavioural sciences
offering advice in this area.114 Gergen and Gergen suggest that, during the Modernist
era, even prospective romantic relationships were informed by a kind of ‘cost-benefit
analysis’ (230). Thus, romantic attachments were predicated on such questions as:
‘What are the personal gains and losses associated with any given investment of time;
in what degree is a given activity profitable?’ (ibid). These considerations have
enduring relevance in a contemporary western context in which love competes with
the career as a prospective route to happiness.
Yet, culture—particularly popular culture—is still saturated with models of
love that seem more in line with the visceral passions of the Romantic era. Popular
music exemplifies the way in which love continues to be constructed as visceral,
passionate, irrational and violent in contemporary western culture. In Bryan Adam’s
‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ (1991), the speaker claims he would die for his
love. Celine Dion’s ‘Think Twice’ (1994) compares a relationship to fire and faith, its
difficulty to a storm, and finally offers to sacrifice everything for love. In Aerosmith’s
‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ (1998), the speaker lies watching his lover sleep,
professing his everlasting passion. The video for Britney Spears’ ‘Everytime’ (2004)
depicts the singer attempting suicide in the bathtub while professing her need for her
love object. The title speaks for itself in terms of violent passion with ‘Bleeding Love’
(2007), the first single of Leona Lewis of The X Factor fame. More recently, a man
By way of historicising her arguments in ‘Romantic Love: At the Intersection of the Psyche and the
Cultural Unconscious,’ Ethel Person traces the development of love, beginning with eleventh-century
Provence. She points out that many historians agree on this time and place as the starting point of this
western conception; as well as Lewis, she cites de Rougemont, 1956 and Campbell, 1968 (386).
113
For a more detailed description of love in the Romantic era, see Gergen and Gergen’s ‘What is This
Thing Called Love’ (224-226).
114
Gergen and Gergen also provide an extensive exploration of love in the Modernist period (226-231).
112
152
offers to go to various life threatening extremes for his loved one—including catching
a grenade—in Bruno Mars’ ‘Grenade’ (2010). Love arguably depends on ‘certain
cultural configurations and the presence of romantic role-models’ (Person 385).
Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… stages the contemporary western tension between
passionate and pragmatic love, and ultimately reveals the fabricated nature of both.
Carr explores these two facets of contemporary relationships by juxtaposing Hester’s
descriptions of the relationship that she and Carthage once shared with Carthage’s
current engagement, which is based mainly upon status and economic gain.
In By the Bog of Cats…, Hester expresses a belief that the attachment between
herself and Carthage is a visceral, passionate connection. Yet, Carr undermines such
emotional formations by calling into question the verity of Hester’s assumptions. The
protagonist conceives her bond with Carthage as mysterious, all-consuming and
verging on the violent, which evokes the conception of heterosexual desire which
Gergen and Gergen associate with the Romantic era:
There’s things about me and Carthage no wan knows except the two of us.
And I’m not talkin’ about love. Love is for fools and children. Our bond is
harder, like two rocks we are, grindin’ off wan another and maybe all the
closer for that. (269.)
Hester considers this relationship to be passionate enough to transcend what she sees
as naive views of love. Her description of the connection as beyond the scope of
conventional love is also in line with her status as an outsider on the margins of
society. Additionally, however, the drama reveals Hester’s tendency to romanticise
her past. In relation to her mother in particular, the protagonist ‘is never sure how
much of her memory is a product of her own imagined narrative based purely on
desire’ (Sihra, ‘Stitching’). In this context, her description of the relationship may be
taken as partly fantasy. The heightened, imagistic language that she uses to describe
the affair also evokes a sense of artistry or fabrication. Hester’s memory of herself
and Carthage becomes—in this context—a story that she tells herself and others, an
imaginative construct.
Yet, the alternative to this love-construct—Carthage’s engagement and
subsequent marriage to Caroline—is portrayed as equally dubious and even more
performative. Like the marriage between Jason and Glauce in the source play for By
the Bog of Cats…, Euripides’ Medea, the acquisition of wealth and power is
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fundamental to Carthage’s union with Caroline. Hester accuses him of abandoning
her, along with their daughter Josie, ‘for a few lumpy auld acres and notions of
respectability’ and warns him that Caroline’s father, Xavier, could potentially mistreat
him (289). Carthage gloatingly replies: ‘He’s treatin’ me fine, signin’ his farm over to
me this evenin’’ (289). Although love is generally a necessary precursor to marriage
in western culture, for Carthage pragmatism outweighs passion.115 However, his
fiancée Caroline desperately clings to the socially sanctioned idea of the happy
marriage based on love: ‘It’s me weddin’ day. It’s meant to be happy. It’s meant to be
the best day of me life’ (284). The divergent perspectives of Caroline and her
husband-to-be undermine the validity of their union. Caroline’s focus on what a
wedding is ‘meant to be’ shows how her notion of love is based on a western
paradigm and how it is encouraged by culture’s ‘romantic role-models’ (Person 385).
Beyond its ultimate status as a farce (which I alluded to at the beginning of
this chapter), the wedding reception scene contains some dialogue that exposes the
wider, historically-constituted, performativity of love and marriage. Caroline’s advice
to Carthage to ‘pretend’ that it is the best day of their lives reveals romantic actions as
performative (303). In addition, Xavier’s good wishes for the couple points to the role
of history and culture in contemporary constructions of love: ‘I wish yees well and
happiness and infants rompin’ on the hearth’ (309). As Sihra points out, these words
‘parodically echo De Valera’s romantic vision,’ expressed in his 1943 St. Patrick’s
Day broadcast: ‘The Ireland That We Dreamed of’ (‘Stitching’).116 Here, De Valera
envisions Ireland as the home ‘of a people living the life that God desires that men
should live,’ a land ‘bright with cosy homesteads’ and ‘joyous […] with the romping
of sturdy children.’ De Valera’s image of Ireland is firmly rooted in the concept of
marriage as a religious institution that serves procreation. Evidently, such marital
ideals can be traced right back to the formative years of the Irish nation. Carr’s parody
of De Valera’s idealism calls attention to the historical and cultural constitution of
Irish marriage. According to Butler:
Person cites sociologist William Goode’s notion of the romantic love continuum. While it is viewed
as a ‘tragic or comic abnormality’ in countries such as Japan and China, it ‘would be considered
disgraceful to marry without love’ in western society (385).
116
In her 1999 article, ‘Stitching the Words’, Sihra juxtaposes Eamon De Valera’s romanticised vision
of Ireland as ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads’ with Carr’s
demythologisation of family and religious authority.
115
154
To guarantee the reproduction of a given culture, various requirements, well
established in the anthropological literature of kinship, have instated sexual
reproduction within the confines of a heterosexually based system of marriage
which requires the reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes
which, in effect, guarantee the eventual reproduction of that kinship system.
(159.)
Marriages, such as the one represented by the union of Carthage and Caroline, are not
only informed by cultural configurations, but they help to maintain those restrictive
systems. At the reception, Catwoman predicts ‘[s]eparate tombstones’ for the pair
(308). This exposes the legal aspects of the marriage, like Hester’s description of the
documents in which she signed her house over to Carthage, as ‘[b]its of paper, writin’,
means nothin’, can as aisy be unsigned’ (283). By revealing the constituted,
performative nature of contemporary relationships, Carr opens the possibility that
such attachments could be imagined in alternative, less restrictive ways.
By the Bog of Cats… uses many of the tools of theatrical realism such as:
recognisable characters and settings; a dialogue of ordinary language; a chronological
structure; a climax; and a sense of closure at the end. Cultural and materialist
feminists tend to take issue with these aspects of realism.117 However, the discussion
above demonstrates the ways in which the play succeeds in deconstructing models of
heterosexual monogamy. Yet, the absurdity of the wedding reception in Act Two can
transgress the boundaries of realism altogether; as such, it furthers the interrogative
potential of the drama as a whole. Through a combination of language and stage
images, this scenario usurps the conventions of traditional wedding celebrations and
satirises marriage in general. Carthage questions the vows he and Caroline have taken
soon after the couple has arrived at the reception (303). Far from having the best day
of her life, Caroline tells her husband that she feels like she is ‘walkin’ on somewan’s
grave’ (303). The next lines from Mrs Kilbride, who is dressed also in a white, bridelike outfit, serve to underline the farcical nature of this marriage: ‘Oh the love birds!
The love birds! There yees are, off hidin’. Carthage, I want a photo of yees. Would
117
Cultural and material feminists tend to take issue with the combined mimetic characteristics of
realism such as: psychologically coherent characters; a dialogue of ordinary language; the use of
domestic or, at least, recognisable settings; a chronological structure; a climax; and a sense of closure
at the end. Although liberal feminists often welcome traditionally structured dramas—at least, as long
as they place women centre stage and allow female voices to be heard—cultural feminists prefer fluid
or circular dramatic structures to conventional linearity. Cultural feminists argue that such structures
more adequately reflect women’s approaches to the world and female biological experiences. Finally,
materialist feminists are interested in exposing the constructed nature of gender, as well as other social
roles (Schroeder, Feminist Possibilities 21).
155
you take it Caroline?’ (303). The use of the term ‘love birds’ immediately after the
couple’s pessimistic conversation further falsifies their union by reminding us of what
they are not: ‘love birds.’
Like Josie’s inside-out jumper (Act 1, Scene 4) and the reference to Father
Willow’s inside-out vestments (305), much of the dialogue in the second act makes
visible that which is normally concealed. As Sihra points out, a series of Freudian
slips within the characters’ speech leads to a staged ‘manifestation of the
Unconscious’ (‘Stitching’). Father Willow distractedly referring to Caroline as Hester
exemplifies the slippery nature of classifications in these scenes (308). Sihra also uses
such examples as Mrs Kilbride’s announcement: ‘if Carthage will be as good a son to
Caroline as he’s been a husband to me then she’ll have no complaints’ (311). This
Freudian slip continues the oedipal undercurrents of Mrs Kilbride’s earlier description
of her son coming to sleep in her bed after his father died: ‘Often I woke from a deep
slumber and his two arms would be around me, a small leg thrown over me in me
sleep’ (310).118 When Father Willow is supposed to be saying grace, he divulges
instead how he was almost a groom himself once, but confuses his former fiancée’s
name with his mother’s (311). This undermines his already weak status as a figure of
religious authority. Moreover, the conflation of the lover and the mother in his and
Mrs Kilbride’s dialogue points to the oedipal urges at the basis of contemporary
love.119 Ultimately, the language of Act Two mixes up the prescribed roles and scripts
of the traditional Irish wedding reception, enabling the text to ‘say what it does not
say’ (Sihra, ‘Stitching’).
The wedding reception representation in By the Bog of Cats… has a striking
visual potency which is due in part to its metatheatrical status. Comparing the stage
images of Caroline and Carthage’s wedding feast in two productions of the play
For a further discussion of the Freudian slips and hints of incest throughout By the Bog of Cats…,
see Sihra’s ‘Stitching the Words.’
119
See Person’s 1991 article, ‘Romantic Love: At the Intersection of the Psyche and the Cultural
Unconscious’. Here, she argues that romantic love is constructed through the intersection of psyche and
culture. She summarises much of the psychoanalytical literature on the topic. In terms of the oedipal
urges at love’s basis, she examines the work of Freud and Chasseguet-Smirgel. Freud argues that love
is narcissistic repair; it heals the narcissistic wounds left over from childhood. In his view, we transfer
our idealisation of childhood love objects (including the mother and the self) onto our prospective
partners. Chasseguet-Smirgel posits that, in the beginning, the child is her own ideal. However, when
she realises that she depends on another for survival, she projects some of her narcissism onto the
other. The oedipus complex is a quest for perfection, for unity of self. The desire for romantic love,
then, is a quest for wholeness, achieved through union with the beloved—who is a displacement of the
original incestuous object: the mother. For a more detailed discussion of these and other
psychoanalytical theories about love, see Person’s ‘Romantic Love’ (396-400).
118
156
demonstrates the role of theatre practitioners in developing or de-emphasising the
subversive potential of Act Two. The banquet, according to the stage directions, takes
place in a room in Xavier Cassidy’s house, in which there is a ‘long table covered in a
white tablecloth, laid for a wedding feast’ (298). The wedding reception set for the
Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2001 production in Chicago, directed by Kay Martinovich,
furthered the play’s connection with realist, domestic tragedy. In its most basic sense,
realism aims to mirror reality. Realist theatre is associated with the illusion of a
‘fourth wall,’ which gives the audience the impression that they are covertly looking
in on a hermetically sealed world. For Keyssar, realism is set in private spaces
(Feminist 43). A domestic kitchen, therefore, exemplifies a realist setting. Michelle
Habeck, who designed the set for Martinovich’s production, conveyed a simple, rural
kitchen with a small, square dining table stage right. The guests were positioned
around the table on all sides, some of them with their backs to the audience. The
domestic look of the scene and the way in which the table was closed off from the
audience (by the guests) pulled the scenario back into the realm of traditional realism.
It played down the representation’s deconstructive potential by sealing off the action
and evading the latent distancing possibilities of these moments of By the Bog of
Cats….
Hester (Tracy Michelle Arnold) enters the wedding
reception scene of By the Bog of Cats…, directed by Kay
Martinovich at the Irish Repertory Theatre of Chicago
(1991).
157
While Joe Vanek’s design for the San Jose Repertory Theatre’s 2001
production of By the Bog of Cats… (directed by Timothy Near) still encompassed
Carr’s visualisation of an indoor space for the wedding supper, the stage layout
promoted a deeper level of audience involvement. A long rectangular table was
positioned centre stage and the guests sat around only three sides; the side facing the
audience was free from seats. This had the effect of pulling the audience into the
blank space at the downstage end of the table. It resembled a traditional wedding
reception with the wedding party seated at a long table, facing out onto a room filled
with guests (which is reminiscent of theatre, if we consider the wedding party as the
costumed performers and the area behind the table as the stage). In this context, the
audience space became the conventional room full of guests, dragging them further
into the scenario and mirroring the representational set-up of traditional nuptial
banquets. The stage layout promoted a situation in which the audience members were
made to feel more as attendants at the wedding than passive viewers. This had the
effect of breaking down an imaginary ‘fourth wall’ and making the audience
conscious of both the theatricality of such feasts and its own voyeurism.
Hester (Holly Hunter) climbs across the table at the wedding
reception in By the Bog of Cats… at the San Jose Repertory
Theatre, directed by Timothy Near (2001).
158
The Bride Icon
One of the most striking and potentially deconstructive parts of By the Bog of Cats…
is the wedding reception. In our increasingly secularised western society, wedding
ceremonies and celebrations are some of the most ritualistic and overtly performative
occasions that we experience. Staged representations of these rituals and the
associated iconography can have vast political potential in relation to restrictive
conceptions of marriage. In addition to the subversive humour of the wedding
supper’s dialogue, the stage image of four ‘bride’ figures competing for the affections
of one groom visually undermines the dyadic ideals of heterosexual monogamy, as
well as spiritual or naturalised conceptions of love. Mrs Kilbride’s status as a second
bride figure is emphasised by her bride-like attire and her desire to be photographed
with Carthage. As Caroline takes the picture, the stage directions tell us that they
‘pose like bride and groom’ (303). When the third bride figure, little Josie in her
communion dress, enters, it is Caroline again who photographs her with the groom.
Hester, as she brazenly enters wearing the wedding dress that Carthage bought her
nine years before, proclaims: ‘This is my weddin’ day be rights and not wan of yees
can deny it’ (312). The celebration then descends into a row that is both tense and
comical. This, combined with Caroline’s earlier effort to mask her anxiety with
pretend happiness (303), turns the wedding into a sham. The image of more than one
bride reminds us of the similarity and conformity of all bride figures in this ritual by
removing some of the visual traces of their individual subjectivities. Carr’s
quadrupling of bridal imagery shows how these events are permeated by a repetitious
theatricality. In doing so, the dramatist exposes wedding rituals as formulaic,
performances of conformity; she thereby undermines the binding sanctity of marriage.
By the Bog of Cats… is not the first play in which Carr has made subversive
use of bridal imagery. In The Deer’s Surrender (1990), the dramatist gives us an
image of a priest in bridal attire, an image which works to satirise the Catholic
Church’s requirement of clerical celibacy and its prohibition of homosexuality. The
Deer’s Surrender regularly riffs on religious motifs and its significant characters
include Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and a priest. At one point during the drama, the
priest enters wearing a wedding gown and ‘goes straight for Jesus!’ The dialogue
which ensues draws the audience’s attention towards the priest’s glaring incongruous
159
attire. Moreover, exchanges between the priest and Jesus help to construct an image
of the pair as lovers:
Priest: Do you like my frock?
Jesus: White is lovely on you.
[…]
Priest: I don’t know what I’d do without you.
Jesus: Or I you.
Here, Carr hilariously calls attention to the familiar Catholic trope which underlies
celibacy: members of religious orders remain unmarried because they are ‘married to
God.’ Carr actualises and exaggerates this trope through the language and imagery
described above. Furthermore, the homosexual image of a (male) priest as the bride of
a (male) deity constructs the notion of the priest’s ‘marriage’ to God as hypocritical in
relation to the Catholic Church’s ban on homosexuality. Carr’s queering of
Catholicism, manifested in the image of a cross-dressed priest, ridicules the Catholic
Church’s strict regulations.
Parks also uses bride icons in early experiments such as Devotees in the
Garden of Love (1991) and Betting on the Dust Commander (1987), her ‘watershed’
play Venus (1996) and one of her Scarlet Letter-inspired tragedies, In the Blood
(1999).120 In Venus, The Baron Docteur sits and watches sequential scenes of a play,
‘For the Love of a Venus,’ at various stages during the drama. This play-within-a-play
concerns the impending nuptials of The Young Man and The-Bride-to-Be. Like By
the Bog of Cats…, ‘For the Love of a Venus’ explores the idea of women’s identities
becoming suppressed by their status as brides. This is evidenced firstly in the name of
the bride character; she is defined only by her upcoming marriage. The final scene of
‘For the Love of a Venus’ also calls into question the subjectivity of the female
partner. The Young Man desires to ‘procure […] an oddity,’ to ‘love something Wild’
before he marries (48). By masquerading as the Hottentot Venus, The Bride-to-Be
attempts to fulfil that fantasy, ‘[s]ubsuming her own desires to those of her fiancé’
(Geis 39). When presented with his own bride, whom he believes to be the Hottentot
Venus, The Young Man pledges his everlasting love, using language reminiscent of a
marriage proposal: ‘By these knees Im bending on True Venus Im forever thine. I’ll
never change. Promise me the same’ (153). Removing her disguise, The Bride-to-Be
120
See Chapter 5 for a further discussion of the use of the wedding dress in In the Blood. Devotees in
the Garden of Love will be discussed later in this chapter.
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announces: ‘Dearheart: Your true love stands before you’ (154). Having just pledged
himself to a woman whom he believed to be the Hottentot Venus, The Young Man
presents his ‘true love’ with a red, heart-shaped box of chocolates. This scene reveals
that, for The Young Man, ‘true love’ does not exist; his ‘love object’ could be anyone.
This scenario underscores the lines of the Bride-to-Be, which are repeated throughout
the interval: ‘My Love for you, My Love, is artificial / Fabricated much like this
epistle’ (91, 92, 94). Hence, love becomes as emblematic as the syntax used to
express it. Furthermore, the status of this scene as part of a play within Venus, and the
way in which The Young Man falsifies the notion of ‘true love’ by directing romantic
gestures towards whom he perceives to be two different women in very quick
succession, accords with Gergen and Gergen’s view of postmodern love:
‘I love you’ is not, from the postmodern stance, considered a report of
subjective interior, a given fact about the body, heart, soul, or mind. Rather, it
is a line taken from a play about relationships that is appropriate to particular
occasions, and a resource for possible relations (233).
In the concluding scene of ‘For the Love of the Venus,’ the use of disguise
visually explores the idea of the female partner in a heterosexual relationship as a
faceless commodity or an object on display. To enable her to masquerade as the
Hottentot Venus, the actress playing The Bride-to-Be was concealed beneath a
wedding veil in this scene of the New York Public Theater’s production of the drama
(1996), directed by Richard Foreman. The use of the bride icon intensified The Young
Man’s marriage proposal rhetoric, furthering the similarity between this scene of
ritualised courtship and a traditional marriage ceremony. The audience’s inability to
see the face of the actress emphasised the idea that The Young Man projects his
desires onto a faceless love object whose subjectivity is, for him, insignificant.
According to Elam and Rayner, the use of the veil ‘indicates the strongly familiar
awareness of how white male desires project onto an imaginary, blank Other, onto
someone who is not there (‘Body Parts’ 274). However, the Bride-to-Be’s deliberate
plan to disguise herself as the Hottentot Venus indicates her compliance with the
conception of the bride or love object as blank Other. This points to the way in which
women, by putting themselves on display or by seeking to embody the constructions
of male desire, can contribute to their own objectification. When first introduced to
the Bride-to-Be, disguised as the Hottentot Venus, The Young Man circles around
her, observing her (134). The use of the wedding veil as a disguise in the Public
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Theater’s production heightened Venus’s exploration of the female spectacle, and the
way in which this play points to the reductive performances intrinsic to traditional
courtship and wedding rituals. The stage presence of The Baron Docteur watching the
play adds another layer of theatricality by mirroring the voyeurism of the audience.
With its parodic use of the performative symbols and language of love and marriage,
this scene, like the wedding reception scene in By the Bog of Cats…, isolates and
interrogates the re-presentational actions involved in courtship and marriage.
Vanek’s interpretive design for San Jose’s Rep’s production of By the Bog of
Cats… furthered the four-bride spectacle in Act Two and promoted the audience’s
self-conscious spectatorship. This helped to expose the theatricality of wedding
celebrations by, to cite Cerquoni, maximising the play’s possibility to restructure ‘the
relationship between the performers’ space and the audience space as a two-way
mirror in which the interplay of perspectives, like an optical game, create[s]
multiplicity of focus’ (187). Cerquoni’s statement in relation to By the Bog of Cats…
could equally be applied to some of Parks’s works, particularly her early play
Devotees in the Garden of Love. In this one-act drama, Parks combines language and
stage image to achieve this two-way mirror effect necessary to jolt audience members
out of passivity. While Act Three of By the Bog of Cats… exhibits four bride figures,
Devotees offers two: Lily (an older woman) and George (a young woman in search of
a husband), both of whom wear wedding gowns. Throughout the drama, the actors
look out into the auditorium, describing the actions of George’s prospective suitors as
they wage a war for her hand in marriage. This reflects and refracts the audience’s
watching of the play, creating ‘multiplicity of focus.’ In the first scene, Lily
announces: ‘Look. They all lookin at us. Look’ (137). This not only makes the
audience members aware that they are looking at these white-clad women, but—like
the use of the veil in the Public Theater’s production of Venus—it points to the
voyeurism incited by bridal attire in general; thus, it exposes the theatricality
involved in nuptial rituals.
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Mount Holyoke student production of Devotees in the Garden of Love at the
Rooke Theatre, directed by Suzan-Lori Parks (1997).
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Like the Bride-to-Be in ‘For the Love of a Venus,’ George in Devotees is
defined by her impending nuptials. She seems to relish the possibility of being on
display at her wedding: ‘Madame Odelia Pandahr says that because all the eyes of the
world are on the heart of the bride-who’ll-be’s heart thuh bride-who’ll-be’s heart thus
turns inward, is given to reflection and in that way becomes an eye itself’ (136).
However, George’s dialogue here also offers for contemplation the notion of the
female spectacle. Since everyone focuses on the bride’s outward appearance, her
‘heart’ or subjectivity turns inward; she becomes, in this context, an object to be
admired. However, the use of the pun ‘eye’ conflates the subjective ‘I’ with the ‘eye’
that looks back; this hints at dyadic compliance in the relationship between spectacle
and spectator, or object and objectifier. The relationship is comparable to the way in
which Parks connects possessor and possessed: ‘The definition of possession cancels
itself out. The relationship between possessor and possessed is, like ownership is,
multidirectional’ (‘Possession’ 3). George’s dialogue, and her reference to
‘reflection,’ accords with the way in which the play itself acts as a two-way mirror,
and reveals—like Venus—women’s compliance in female objectification.
In her later play, Venus, Parks furthers her interests in self-reflexive theatre,
and in the female spectacle. Although this play marks the beginning of her shift
towards more mainstream styles, with its relative use of a plot culminating in tragedy,
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the dramatist’s experiments in multidirectional spectacle become much bolder. The
play opens with its main figure, The Venus, revolving on stage. She exhibits herself
as The Negro Resurrectionist and The Mother Show-Man introduce her as ‘The
Venus Hottentot’ (1). The Mother Show-Man also informs the audience that ‘[t]here
won’t be inny show tonite’ since The Venus is dead (3). This calls attention to the
theatricality of the ensuing performance. As we have seen, Parks promotes
consideration of bridal spectacle by using the metatheatrical device of the playwithin-a-play, and the presence of the Baron Docteur watching this drama to mirror
the voyeurism of the audience members. The character of the Bride-to-Be in ‘For the
Love of a Venus’ repeats and revises George from Devotees in the Garden of Love:
‘The bride-to-be in both plays is a commodity, as much a prisoner of the institution of
marriage and its concomitant expectations as a willing player in the game of love,
perhaps because she doesn’t know any better’ (Geis 39). Venus’s Bride-to-Be
certainly has much in common with Devotees’ earlier bride figure. Similarly, in By
the Bog of Cats…, Carr resurrects the satirical use of bridal imagery evident in The
Deer’s Surrender. The resurgent, subversive use of wedding gowns in Parks’ and
Carrs’ works exemplifies the ways in which both playwrights revive and re-imagine
earlier characters and scenarios in order to expand their politicised uses of theatre into
the mainstream context.
The Storied Nature of Love
While By the Bog of Cats… is at its most theatrical in the second act, which stages
the often-repeated cultural ritual of the wedding feast, the theatricality of Carr’s
earlier play The Mai (1994) lies in the staging of another cultural performance:
storytelling. The Mai is essentially a tragic metanarrative of love in that it stages a
tragic story told from the perspective of one character. The adult narrator Millie, who
remains on stage for the entirety of the action, tells the story of her mother, The Mai.
The action involving the other characters is actually a representation of Millie’s
memories, which she participates in intermittently, taking on the role of her teenage
self. Since a subjective narrator mediates the drama, the verity of this story is called
into question. Millie’s narrative could be, like Hester’s memories in By the Bog of
Cats…, as much ‘a product of her own imagined narrative based purely on desire’ as
it is truthful (Sihra, ‘Stitching’). Millie’s story of The Mai is mythologized by the use
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of the definite article before her mother’s name; it is also paralleled by a folktale, ‘The
Pool of the Dark Witch.’ Millie also recounts this tale, which concerns the tragic love
of Coillte and Bláth that supposedly centres around their family home on Owl Lake
(147). Throughout the drama, The Mai’s mother Grandma Fraochlán recounts her
memories of her own lost love, the nine-fingered fisherman and the characters refer to
other prevailing narratives, canonical and popular alike, such as the Bible (128),
Cosmopolitan (162) and Tristan and Isolde (131). Thus, The Mai stages the story of a
story, which is informed by more stories.
The pervasive power of story within the play reflects and illuminates the
ubiquity and potency of cultural narratives—such as romantic love—in the daily lives
of audience members. Social psychologist Mary Gergen conducts extensive research
on ‘the social ramifications of narratives’ cultural potency’ (267). In her 1994 article
‘Once Upon a Time: A Narratologist’s Tale,’ she raises questions such as: ‘What are
the stories available in a culture?’ (269); ‘How do the stories we tell influence how we
live?’ (ibid); and, is there ‘something about our narrative traditions that has impeded
women’s progress in the public realm’? (271). These questions are pertinent to the
kind of enquiry that Carr promotes in The Mai, and are fundamental to the play’s
interrogative potential. The Mai stages ‘re-presentational actions’ in that the
characters seek to perform in accordance with prevailing love narratives. In particular,
this drama demonstrates the way in which ‘stories and narratives specific to a
particular culture […] are internalised in such a way as to shape the individual’s
(unconscious or preconscious) choice of life path, modes of gratification and priority
of values’ (Person 389). By illuminating the human tendency to romanticise life, The
Mai reveals how individuals strive to create and control their own narratives of love
based on historically-constructed scripts. Like By the Bog of Cats…, The Mai
illuminates the constructed nature of love, thereby opening the possibility of liberation
from some of the structures that constrain and limit our lives.
The opening scene of The Mai stages the return of the protagonist’s husband
Robert after a five year absence. The scene is permeated by the culturally-scripted
rhetoric and props of romantic love and is metatheatrical in its representation of what
appears to be an often-repeated lovers’ ritual. Firstly, The Mai hears Robert’s
beautiful cello music; she follows the sound and opens the sliding doors to reveal
Robert, engrossed in his playing. He tells her that she is ‘as beautiful as ever’ (107).
He then showers her with gifts—including the typical romantic signifiers of flowers
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and perfume (108-109). He asks if the perfume is still the one she wears and she
confirms that it is. Earlier in the scene, he taps her shoulder, hip bone and ankle with
the cello bow; he then draws the bow across her breasts and she laughs. These actions
appear as a routine in which the couple had often participated when they were
together five years earlier—a comfortingly familiar role-play that they can easily slip
back into. The scenario, it seems, is not only informed by the over-arching love
scripts provided and endorsed by western culture, but by the couple’s shared
memories, or narratives of nostalgia.
Similar to The Mai’s opening scene, scene seven of Parks’s In the Blood offers
a performative scenario of romantic love that is explicitly infused with the signifiers
of this cultural narrative. Like Robert in The Mai, In the Blood’s Chilli has returned to
his former lover, Hester, after a long absence. His search for her is motivated also by
nostalgia: ‘We had romance. We had a love affair. We was young. We was in love’
(88). As he admits, Chilli is seeking ‘a wife’ (89). He desires a happy ending for his
narrative; he seeks completion and an antidote to his ‘loveless life’ (89). Since he is in
search of a wife, Chilli’s props include a wedding dress and a veil which he puts on
over the clothes Hester already wears. This moment, in which Chilli puts the dress on
Hester, represents how he endeavours to project his own image of his ideal love
object onto her; his ideal is frozen in an old picture of Hester holding their child
(reminiscent of the Virgin Mary and Jesus) that he carries with him.121 Chilli puts on
their song, to which they dance; then, he presents Hester with an engagement ring.
Like Parks’s earlier uses of the bride icon, this scene also demonstrates the
insignificance of the prospective bride’s subjectivity—particularly in terms of how the
plot develops. As discussed in Chapter 2, when Chilli discovers that Hester has four
other children born after the one that he fathered, he takes back his gifts, packs them
into his basket and leaves. The situation or ‘narrative’ he tries to control is shattered
by the revelation that Hester has a conflicting story of her own—that she is not a
‘blank Other.’ Yet, he appears unwilling to relinquish this imaginary ideal. His
retrieval of the props suggests that he may endeavour to apply the signifiers of his
ideal love onto someone else; this, as well as his use of the indefinite article before
‘wife,’ advances the idea that his lover’s individual subjectivity is insignificant.
121
For a further discussion of the use of props and clothes in this scene, see Chapter 5. See Chapter 2
for more detail on the use of the Virgin Mother icon.
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Moreover, it emphasises the way in which desire itself can work to objectify the other
partner in a relationship.
The stylised use of typical nuptial props in the moments of In the Blood
discussed above illuminates the ritualism of romantic actions. These props serve to
remind audiences of traditional western wedding customs. Hence, they work to reveal
the theatricality of proposals and marriage ceremonies. The performances of love in
both this scene of In the Blood and in the opening scene of The Mai employ the
archetypal signifiers of romance—nostalgic music, perfume, flowers, a ring—to
expose the formulaic, constructed nature of romantic scenarios. These stage images
demonstrate the use of cultural love scripts (and props) to inform the collaborating
imaginations of two people. Thus, both dramatists use theatrical performance to
reveal gender performativity; they expose romantic, heterosexual love as a ‘creative
synthesis’ (Person 383). Exposing the cultural fabrication of limiting yet sociallyrevered romantic scenarios undermines, denaturalises and reveals the reductive nature
of these actions.
It becomes clear in the course of The Mai that the eponymous protagonist
seeks to create for herself a fairy-tale.122 She wants her life to be ‘huge and heroic and
pure as in the days of yore’ (163). Regretfully, she tells her sisters: ‘I wanted to march
through the world up and up, my prince at my side, and together we’d leave our mark
on it’ (163). However, if her story is a fairy-tale, then its happy ‘ending’ actually
occurs at the beginning as The Mai and Robert, hand in hand, exit to the bedroom
after their romantic reunion. If the play depicted Robert’s departure, The Mai wishing
on a star that the spell would be broken and that he would return (as described by
Millie after the opening scene), followed by the closure of the lovers’ reunion, then it
would satisfy The Mai’s endeavour to mythologise her life. However, as part of her
critique of the restrictive absolutism of idealistic love constructs, Carr stages the
aftermath of The Mai’s happy ending, in which the protagonist’s story takes instead a
more difficult and finally tragic course. Robert does not fulfil The Mai’s mythic
In her study of The Mai, Eilis Ní Dhuibhne suggests that Carr’s The Mai and On Raftery’s Hill are
subversions of classical fairytales in that they deal with the trauma of an adolescent seeking to be
healed and to grow into independent adulthood. However, according to Ni Dhuibhne the traumas of
Millie of The Mai and Sorrell of On Raftery’s Hill are never healed—for these ‘princesses’ there are no
happy endings (71-72). This is certainly the case in both plays, but if The Mai is a subverted fairytale,
then its 40 year old princess is the title character. Millie tells us of how her mother used to style the hair
of a little Arab princess one summer when she worked in London. Linking the two, Millie describes
them as ‘[t]wo little princesses on the cusp of a dream, one five, the other forty’ (153).
122
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fantasy beyond the opening sequence. However, as Carr’s The Mai and (as we have
seen) many of Parks’s works also seek to reveal, it is not only love that is a creative
synthesis; so too is the image of the beloved.
Through the dialectic of presence and absence, The Mai and Parks’s
Topdog/Underdog (2001) reveal the constructed nature of the beloved. While
Topdog/Underdog’s Booth regularly discusses his relationship with Grace, her
absence from the stage indicates her lack of subjectivity within Booth’s world. Booth
claims that he and Grace were together for two years, but that ‘she needed time to
think’ when he had some employment problems (38). In the third scene of the play,
Booth swaggers into the bed-sit he shares with his brother, boasting about his
romantic reconciliation with Grace:
She wants me back. She wants me back so bad she wiped her hand over the
past where we wasn’t together just so she could say we aint never been apart.
She wiped her hand over our breakup. She wiped her hand over her childhood,
her teenage years, her first boyfriend, just so she could say that she been mine
since the dawn of time (33-34).
As we have seen, in By the Bog of Cats… we are never sure how much of Hester’s
memory might be fantasy; in Topdog/Underdog the interaction between the brothers
reveals Booth’s stories about Grace to be partly imagined. After Booth has provided
extensive descriptions of his sexual reunion with Grace, Lincoln announces: ‘You
didnt get shit tonight’ (39). The subsequent action further falsifies Booth’s stories, as
he waits for Lincoln to fall asleep so that he can (re)immerse himself in his
pornographic magazines. Grace’s absence allows Booth ultimate control of a love
narrative that should involve two-way collaboration. Moreover, his account of their
date appears to be heavily influenced by the pornographic scenarios he regularly
encounters in his magazines: ‘Well—she comes to the door wearing nothing but her
little nightie, eats up the food I’d bought like there was no tomorrow and then goes
and eats on me’ (35). He goes on to explain that they made love ‘dogstyle’ and ‘in
front of a mirror’ (36). As well as the possible influence of pornography, this sexual
position underscores the fictionality of his stories about Grace, and the way in which
they deny her idiosyncratic identity. Grace becomes both replica and stereotype. From
Booth’s perspective—both literally and metaphorically—she is a mere reflection.
Moreover, her identity becomes (like the title character of Venus) subsumed by the
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metonymic symbol of black femininity: the bottom. Western culture is saturated with
objectifying images of women and popular music videos regularly hone in on female
body parts such as the bottom. Here, Parks reveals how these images can influence
male desire and maintain women’s objectification.
Similarly, in The Mai, the title character’s perception of love is influenced by
the narratives and imagery to which she is exposed. As the action unfolds, it becomes
evident that The Mai’s pining and longing for the absent Robert, as described by
Millie, is informed by her grandmother’s romanticised recounting of her relationship
with her husband (The Mai’s grandfather) Tomás or ‘the nine-fingered fisherman.’
Grandma Fraochlán reveres the love she shared with her husband before his death; her
memories of their time together are frozen in an idealised (and, it appears, highlyfictionalised) state. Her conservative, pragmatic daughter Julie reminds her that he left
her ‘penniless with seven offspring’ (143). However, Grandma Fraochlán continues to
mythologise her narrative of remembered love as something sacred and transcendent:
And if you’re one of them lucky few whom the gods has blessed, they will
send to you a lover with whom you will partake of that most rare and sublime
love there is to partake of in this wild and lonely planet. I have been one of
them privileged few and I know of no higher love in this world or the next.
(143.)
This poetic speech emphasises Grandma Fraochlán’s strong association with the
imagination and the sensuous throughout the play. As Leeney aptly discerns, the
character’s ‘frequent use of the word “sublime” is replete with associations of English
Romanticism’ (‘Authentic Reproductions’ 62). Indeed, Grandma Fraochlán’s
conception of romance adheres to the kind of love that Gergen and Gergen associate
with the Romantic era: visceral, transcendent and all-consuming (224-226). As such,
her views of love anticipate Hester’s in By the Bog of Cats….
Characters such as Grace, the nine-fingered fisherman and Robert signify what
H.G. Wells refers to as ‘The Lover Shadow.’ This, according to Wells, is ‘a
continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope: an
aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction
picked up from observation, descriptions, drama; reveries of understanding and
reciprocity’ (53). Wells continues:
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[W]hen we are in love it means we have found in someone the presentation of
the promise of some, at least, of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The
beloved person is for a time identified with the dream, attains a vividness that
captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated’
(55.)123
Similarly, Person posits that we create ‘within our minds that complex of qualities
that seems to us to constitute our ideal love’ (404). The notion that this ideal love is
imaginatively created, based on prevailing love narratives, then projected onto our
beloved, or more appropriately, our ‘love object,’ is evident in Grandma Froachlán’s
stories of her husband. The selectivity of her memories is exposed through a
juxtaposition of her words with those of Julie. The absence of the nine-fingered
fisherman affords Grandma Froachlán subjective control of their story. Similarly, for
The Mai, who also seeks to shape her own story, the narrative of absent love is
actually more empowering than the narrative of present love. In Robert’s absence,
The Mai is free to mythologise their love story in line with heroic tales and Grandma
Froachlán’s reminiscences. When Robert has returned, and is present in the flesh, her
grandmother’s stories of the nine-fingered fisherman ‘make our men [in The Mai’s
case, Robert] seem like nothing’ (143). Like Booth’s fantasy love with the absent
Grace in Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, it is the nothingness or the non-presence of the
absent lover that allows these characters to take control of their creative narratives. In
The Mai absence allows the men, the ‘love objects,’ to remain as just that: objects.
Both playwrights expose how the image of the beloved is constructed in line with
prevailing images and narratives.
Like In the Blood, Venus, Devotees and, to a lesser extent, By the Bog of
Cats…, The Mai and Topdog/Underdog demonstrate the way in which romantic love
can deny the subjectivity of the beloved. In western culture, this tendency is indicated
most clearly by the use of such terms as ‘love object’ and ‘object of my affection.’ In
The Mai, Robert’s return, and exertion of his own subjectivity upon the protagonist’s
love narrative shatters her fairy-tale fantasies. The collision of their stories reveals the
discrepancies between storytelling theorist Joseph Campbell’s notion of the
monomyth and Mary Gergen’s related idea of the minimyth. Campell sees the
monomyth as a framework for all stories. It concerns a hero who embarks on a quest,
123
The notion that the prospective lover exists as a romantic construct prior to his or her materialisation
is articulated in many popular songs such as Michael Bublé’s ‘Haven’t met you yet’ (2009) and Savage
Garden’s ‘I knew I loved you (before I met you)’ (2001).
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confronting various challenges, and becoming wiser or more powerful. Robert’s
behaviour emulates the monomyth in that he strives towards success as a composer, as
well as the accompanying philandering life-style of the prototypical artist.124
However, as Gergen reveals, stories which focus on female characters leave women
with little to emulate beyond models of dependency and passivity: ‘Cinderella scrubs
the floor; Sleeping beauty sleeps; Snow White makes supper for the elves; Rapunzel
spins as her hair grows’ (271). In a framework that constitutes what Gergen refers to
as the minimyth, each of these women, rather than solving her problems
independently, waits for a prince to save her. The Mai’s obsession with love and her
desire for a ‘heroic’ life, complete of course with a prince, points to the way in which
our narrative traditions have impeded women’s progress in the public realm. The
divergent perspectives of The Mai and Robert reveal the differences between the male
orientated monomyth and the woman-centred minimyth. Scaife shrewdly identifies
how this divide permeates Carr’s work:
The Women are obsessed with the artistic or the romantic, the notion of ‘the
story’ that is separate from the here and now. The men are preoccupied with
the land or the accumulation of money. They see the possibility of their
redemption through their future achievements or the goals they hope to fulfil’
(12).
While Scaife’s assessment is also relevant to Caroline and Carthage’s divergent
approaches to marriage in By the Bog of Cats…, The Mai in particular reveals how
culture (in the form of the narrative traditions) contributes to the reproduction of the
gender hierarchy.125 Even The Mai’s final and tragic decision—to drown herself in
the lake—emulates the folktale of Coillte and Bláth, in which the heartbroken Coillte
drowns in a lake of her own tears; the protagonist thus fulfils the curse of Owl Lake.
Through her representations of heterosexual relations, Carr exposes the way in which
In ‘The Woman in Love’ De Beauvoir discusses the discrepancies between a man in love and a
woman in love (The Second Sex 652-679). In her view, for a woman, love becomes a religion. She cites
Byron to highlight the gender distinctions in approaches to romantic love: ‘The word love has by no
means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause for the serious misunderstandings that
divide them. Byron well said: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole
existence”’ (652). The way in which Carr represents The Mai and Robert’s relationship resonates with
Byron’s expression, as well as De Beauvoir’s conception of feminine devotion.
125
In her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, Butler considers and criticises MacKinnon’s idea of sexual
hierarchy producing and consolidating gender. According to Butler ‘In this view […it] is not
heterosexual normativity that produces and consolidates gender, but the gender hierarchy that is said to
underwrite heterosexual relations […]. It may be that MacKinnon wants merely to outline the selfreproducing mechanism of gender, but this is not what she has said’ (xii-xiii).
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narrative traditions help to romanticise hierarchical constructions of gender or what
Catherine MacKinnon has identified as ‘the sexualisation of inequality between men
and women’ (6).
The Mai evokes a striking sense of determinism; the notion of history
repeating itself is particularly evident in relation to the performance of romantic
relationships. Reviewing the play’s American premiere at the McCarter theatre,
Callaghan discerns: ‘Grandma’s obsession with her long departed husband is in many
ways the root cause of her clan’s insecurities’ (373). However, it appears that the
insecurities of this family are created by the power they invest in narrative itself. The
play traces a feminine custom of passing on idealised love stories even further back
than Callaghan suggests. In the course of the dialogue, we learn that Grandma
Fraochlán’s own mother claimed to have conceived her with ‘the Sultan of Spain’
(169). Evidently, this is as mythologised a version of the truth as Grandma
Fraochlán’s stories of The Nine-Fingered Fisherman. The Mai continues the trend,
yearning for an absolutist version of love that is exposed in the course of the drama as
a naive fabrication. Despite the tragedy of The Mai’s death, the creative—yet
ultimately destructive—cycle of storytelling continues with Millie, who admits to
telling her son the following idealised version of her courtship with his (now absent)
father:
I say your daddy is an El Salvadorian drummer who swept me off my feet
when I was lost in New York. I tell him his eyes are brown and his hair is
black and that he loved to drink Jack Daniels by the neck. I tell him that high
on hash or marijuana or god-knows-what we danced on the roof of a tenement
building to one of Robert’s cello recordings. (164-165.)
The Mai is the first play in which Carr appropriates the tragic form. Diverging
from the works which preceded it, the action follows in a relatively chronological way
the seemingly fated downfall of a flawed protagonist. Yet, Carr politicises her use of a
form intrinsic to the patriarchal institution by revealing the performativity of the
characters’ actions. The dramatist refigures tragic destiny in ways that are relevant to
Butler’s theory of gendered acts: The Mai’s characters behave in accordance with
dominant models and expectations. Leeney detects a sense of ‘destiny as heredity’ in
this work (‘Authentic Reproductions’ 61). Yet, rather than genetics, I would argue
that an unhealthy investment in stories dictate the characters’ destinies. Stories
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become powerful models of aspiration in The Mai. This means that The Mai’s tragic
destiny becomes what Gergen refer to as, ‘narrative forces beyond the potential of the
individual to overcome them’ (273). The notion of story as predestination is
particularly evident in Millie’s mythic speech at the end of Act One:
A tremor runs through me when I recall the legend of Owl Lake. I knew the
story as a child. So did The Mai and so did Robert. But we were unaffected by
it and in our blindness moved along with it like sleepwalkers along a precipice
and all around us gods and mortals called to us to change our course and, not
listening, we walked on’ (148.)
The words in this speech are at odds with its message. While the heightened, poetic
language conveys a metaphysical situation, the content—especially in the context of
the play’s familial stories—reveals the human tendency to repeat the acts of
prevailing models. However, as Leeney also notes:
Carr’s multiple strategies of developing the notion of destiny and the
inevitable all have some ontological dimension, and in every case reveal a lack
which is amended through simulation—illusion, fantasy, false memory, story.
Although the dramas achieve a ‘destined closure,’ more powerful is the
traumatic unstable space of subjectivity they open. (‘Authentic Reproductions’
63.)
The Mai stages a situation in which narrative forces appear beyond the characters’
power to transcend. However, the play’s revelation of the human tendency to perform
in accordance with stories—and in particular, love stories—has the potential to
prompt audience members to question the motivations behind their own romantic
actions. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the patriarchal mode of ‘destined
closure’, The Mai interrogates the idealism of love narratives that stifle women’s
autonomy.
Grandma Froachlán’s words of reprimand to Robert sum up the way in which
The Mai promotes a materialist enquiry in relation the nature of romantic love:
And thousands stayed, war or no war, or brung their wives and children with
them. But not you, no, and not your father, and sure as I’m sittin’ here, you’ll
not be stoppin’ long, because we can’t help repeatin’ Robert, we repeat and we
repeat, the orchestration may be different but the tune is always the same.
(123.)
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This speech espouses the play’s central philosophy: there are certain actions that ‘we
repeat and we repeat,’ without question. While romantic love is often assumed to be
visceral, mysterious and personal, The Mai stages love scenarios as a series of
repeated acts. In doing so, Carr challenges naturalised assumptions about love,
exposing it as a creative synthesis that is highly dependent on prevailing cultural and
familial narratives. By revealing the fabrication of the heterosexual, monogamous
love on which marriage depends in our culture, Carr reminds us that there might be
valid alternatives to this life path. However, she steers clear of describing those
potential options; she points towards undefined possibilities rather than offering
‘finite image[s] of “what should be”’ (Dolan, Utopia 13).
Repetition, Reflection and Stifling Monogamous Bonds
Early, experimental works such as Carr’s Ullaloo (1991) and Parks’s Betting on the
Dust Commander (1987) anticipate each playwright’s revelation of heterosexual
performativity. These plays reduce the gendered modes of being intrinsic to the
institution of marriage to the performance and repetition of acts. In The Mai, Carr
investigates ideas of entrapment, cycles and repetition that she began to explore in
Ullaloo. These concepts are also highly relevant to Parks’s ‘Rep and Rev’ approach to
writing theatre and her peculiar interest in the shape of time: ‘Could time be tricky
like the world once was—looking flat from our place on it—and through looking at
things beyond the world we found it round’ (‘Elements’ 10). While The Mai depicts
scenarios that repeat through five generations of women, Ullaloo and Betting on the
Dust Commander consider the cyclical and the repetitious in relation to the day-to-day
performance of heterosexual relationships.
Betting on the Dust Commander signals the bourgeoning of a dialectical
obsession that Parks carries into most of her subsequent plays. Throughout her theatre
career, the dramatist continues to interrogate that liminal space between reality and
representation, fact and fiction, life and art. Her plays are simultaneously products of,
and riffs on, a postmodern culture in which the boundaries between these dialectics
are often blurred. In the words of Neal Gabler:
To compare life to a movie is not to say, as the cliché has it, that life imitates
art, […] [r]ather it is to say that after decades of public relations contrivances
and media hype, and after decades more of steady pounding by an array of
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social forces that have altered each of us personally to the power of
performance, life has become art, so that the two are now indistinguisable
from each other […]. (74.)
Though Betting on the Dust Commander is short, cyclical and belongs to Parks’s early
avant-garde period, the play anticipates many of Parks’s subsequent chronological
and plot-driven works. Betting on the Dust Commander’s portrayal of routine,
survival, economics and addiction are extended most overtly in the award-winning
Topdog/Underdog. Sustained by their ‘med-sin’ (alcohol), Lincoln and Booth
repeatedly struggle to perform acceptable constructions of financial and social
viability in a precarious situation of economic and emotional poverty. The idea of
representing representation introduced in Betting on the Dust Commander is most
significantly ‘repeated and revised’ (to use the jazz terminology that Parks has coined
to describe the poetics of her theatre) in Venus. Betting on the Dust Commander, by
virtue of its repetitive, circular structure, is inconclusive. Its elusiveness eschews
paradigmatic resolution, promoting instead layers of enquiry. However, even in her
more stylistically conclusive plays, Parks continues to question the distinctions
between authenticity and fabrication. Her characters, despite the stylistic shift in her
oeuvre, struggle to construct their own realities in performative rather than instinctual
ways, through such activities as repetition, mimesis and social acting.
A deep-set preoccupation with the human tendency to repeat is evident in both
Carr’s and Parks’s works, from early plays such as Ullaloo and Betting on the Dust
Commander to later works such as By the Bog of Cats… and Topdog/Underdog.
Published in the collection The America Play and Other Works (1995), Parks’s
Betting on the Dust Commander is introduced by an epigraph taken from Gertrude
Stein’s The Making of Americans. This quote resonates with a philosophy that Carr
expresses in The Mai through Grandma Froachlán’s speech regarding the repetitious
nature of human behaviour:
Repeating then is in everyone, in every one their being and their feeling and
their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them
repeating…Slowly every one in continuous repeating, to their minutest
variation, comes to be clearer to some one (Stein qtd. in Parks, 1995).
The inclusion of these lines foreshadows Parks’s use of repetition in the text. Butler
posits that gender is something performative, rather than innate, constructed through
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the repetition of gender ‘acts.’ Failing to act one’s gender means non-conformance to
socio-cultural codes of behaviour, resulting in punitive action such as reprimanding
by others and cultural exclusion (‘Performative Acts’ 154-166). The quote is an apt
introduction to the way in which Betting on the Dust Commander employs stylised
repetition to reveal the performativity of tedious marital routines.
In Betting on the Dust Commander, Parks establishes her interest in the
performative ritual of marriage by bookending the action of the play with the
slideshow of Lucius and Mares’ wedding photographs (accompanied by their
disembodied voices). She also echoes the performative vows of a marriage ceremony
by including images of sickness and health as well as affluence and poverty
throughout the intermediate rendering of the monotony of Lucius and Mares’ married
lives. The play begins as it ends, and the dialogue in between is also repetitive.
Structurally, it consists of three scenes, labelled A, B and C. In the second scene, the
same set of dialogue is repeated twice. This is framed by first and last scenes which
are also identical in dialogue. The slide show and its accompanying lines indicate the
theatricality of the wedding day and the performative nature of marrying. J. L. Austen
in his lecture ‘How to Do Things with Words’ exemplifies the verb ‘to marry’ as a
performative word, in which ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ are one and the same (147-153).
However, the imagery throughout the play, as well as the use of repetition,
demonstrates how performativity—in Butler’s sense of the word—continues
throughout a couple’s married lives. Lucius is seen sneezing in the first and last scene
of the play, while Mare sneezes throughout the second and third scenes. The couple’s
poverty is recurrently punctuated by transient periods of wealth when Lucius wins
some money through his gambling hobby/addiction. Hence, Parks demonstrates how
nuptial performativity is carried far beyond the wedding day itself. The dramatist
skilfully folds linearity in upon itself and utilises repetition to convey the recurring
performance involved in heterosexual monogamy.
Parks uses Betting on the Dust Commander to represent the performative
monotony of married life. This has the potential to prompt audience members into
questioning their own habits—the acts that they repeat. The dramatist offers for
consideration the idea that gendered identities are produced and maintained by such
repetitious routines. The bird noises that rise up at the beginning of each scene
reinforce a cyclical sense of time passing, which is also emphasised by the way in
which the text comes full circle, taking us right back to the opening scene at the end
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of the play. The circular, repetitive structure emphasises a sense of entrapment which
is associated with married life in the play, as well as evoking Parks’s idea of time as
‘round’ in shape. These features anticipate ideas that Parks explores in
Topdog/Underdog. Lincoln and Booth appear trapped in a basic, urban bedsit, a
confined space in which time passes slowly and each week resembles the last:
‘BOOTH: Every Friday you come home with your pay check. Today is Thursday and
I tell you brother its a long way from Friday to Friday’ (9). Topdog/Underdog has a
linear structure. However, repetition is also evident in that the play is peppered with
recurring representations of performance such as the lines involved in the three-card
monte hustle. Like Topdog/Underdog, the portrayal of repetitious routine in Betting
on the Dust Commander gives the depressing impression that these characters are
caught in a cyclical, deterministic trap. Furthermore, the reiteration of the same
dialogue a second time in Betting on the Dust Commander, and the ritualised acts
depicted in both plays, accord with Butler’s notion of performativity in that gender
role performance is ‘not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual’ (Gender Trouble
xv).
Diamond’s 1991 New York production of Betting on the Dust Commander
creatively furthered the sense of despondent, seemingly endless monotony. In the
second scene of the production the repeated set of dialogue was evidently a
palimpsest of the first set of dialogue. Although the lines remained the same when
they were redelivered, they were spoken in a wearier, more somnolent fashion
(Holden). This indicated the aging of Lucius and Mare, accelerating the passage of
time in the play. The directorial decision to make the repeated dialogue more sluggish
also emphasised the stale, mundane exhaustiveness of marital routine which is
intrinsic to this work. Moreover, textual images that emphasise this theme of
deadening routine were, in this production, accompanied by tangible signifiers such as
actual dust and props suspended from the ceiling. These props became ‘almost
suffocating metaphors for unfulfilled lives’ (Holden). Diamond’s creative vision
thereby maximised Betting on the Dust Commander’s revelation of marriage as an
institution that is often replete with entrapment and repetition. Here, the work of the
director increased the play’s subversive potential.
Carr’s Ullaloo is comparable to Betting on the Dust Commander on several
levels. Ullaloo’s Tilly and Tomred exist in a comparable purgatorial time-warp; their
odd, repetitive actions and dialogue indicate that, like Lucius and Mare, these figures
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are trapped in an unfulfilling, possibly marital, relationship. The piece opens on Tilly
and Tomred engaged in stylised rituals: Tilly folds and unfolds her red ball gown and
Tomred repeatedly measures and records the length of his toenails, rubbing them with
a cream—presumably to aid their growth (1). The characters engage in similar
habitual actions throughout the play, and petty, tautological arguments continually
resurface. Critics, such as the Nowlan writing for The Irish Times, struggled with the
meaning of Ullaloo and it was taken off the Peacock stage after only a few
performances. However, Butler’s theory of gender performativity offers a useful
interpretative tool to comprehend its rich, political efficacy. For Butler, gender is ‘an
identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylised
repetition of acts’ (‘Performative Acts’ 154). In this context, Ullaloo can be seen to
show how repetition helps to construct and sustain stifling gender roles. The cyclical
feel of the play helps to reveal how gender performativity operates temporally in the
maintenance of heterosexual monogamy and the wider heterosexual matrix.
Carr continues her consideration of the mundane exhaustiveness of marital
routine in later plays such as Portia Coughlan (1996) and Woman and Scarecrow
(2006). However, her most extensive exploration of this theme since Ullaloo is
offered in her more recent work, Marble (2009). In this play, Carr continues to
employ the features of mainstream realism that she began to use in 1994 such as
progressive action, recognisable settings and psychologically-developed characters
speaking familiar language. Like Woman and Man in The Cordelia Dream (2008),
Marble’s characters exist in the functional yet tasteful interior spaces of the Celtic
Tiger’s urban middleclass. The drama concerns two married couples, Anne and Art,
and Catherine and Ben. These characters are placed in a context far closer to that of
the audience than the surreal scenario that Tilly and Tomred inhabit. Yet, the
portrayal of daily marital life here is just as restrictive and monotonous as the
representation of heterosexual monogamy in Ullaloo. Marble, for the most part,
employs the tools of theatrical realism. Yet, like so many of Carr’s works since The
Mai, a fluid and liberating dream-world bubbles beneath and, at times, penetrates the
drama’s coherent surface. The plot centres on a dream shared by Catherine and Art in
which the two are making passionate love in a marble room. Carr destabilises
enduring paradigms of heterosexual monogamy in western culture by revealing these
characters’ repressed desires for partners other than their spouses. The dramatist
juxtaposes the ‘realities’ of mundane married life which Catherine and Art inhabit on
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stage with descriptions of their dreams which indicate a liberating, fantasy realm to
which these characters can escape.
Carr lays bare the homogenous, repetitious routines involved in contemporary
marriage by rendering the similar scenarios of two couples. She conveys the sameness
of these couple’s lives by suggesting in her stage directions that all characters use the
same minimalist living room ‘as if it is their own’ (8). Recurring motifs construct
these characters as slaves to capitalism (pertinent to the Celtic Tiger era, which had
just come to an end at the time of Marble’s Dublin premiere) and indicate the
conformity of their gendered identities. Ben and Art wear suits and carry briefcases or
piles of documents. Each female character regularly appears in her nightdress, glass of
wine in hand, while the men—from the opening scene—are portrayed drinking
brandy and puffing on cigars. A lethargic lifestyle of superfluous spending is
conveyed through images of the characters entering the living space with bottles of
water or take-away deli items such as coffee, pastries and sandwiches. Despite
evidence of affluence, the gender roles in this cosmopolitan world remain traditional:
the men go to and from work while the women are confined to the home and the task
of childrearing. Carr thereby evokes the enduring limitations of contemporary marital
roles. In the Abbey production, director Jeremy Herrin expanded on Carr’s
representation of women’s domestic captivity through stage images of stagnancy
which harked back to the dramatist’s previous work. Herrin regularly placed Aisling
O’Sullivan (Catherine) or Dearbhla Crotty (Anne) languishing on the sofa. Hence, he
created images of female confinement reminiscent of Ullaloo’s Tilly, who regularly
spares her bodily resources by lying in bed, and the ailing, bed-ridden Woman of
Woman and Scarecrow. Marble’s characters ‘sleepwalk’ through life, enslaved by
convention. The dream that Catherine and Art share is portrayed as a much more
lively and liberating experience than the deadening routines of their daily lives. Carr
contrasts the realms of waking and of sleeping to reveal the way in which individuals
drift through life, robotically acquiring the necessary props and unquestioningly
emulating the repetitious acts of socially-sanctioned modes of being. Like The Mai,
Marble calls attention to the way in which, through much of our waking lives, we
behave like sleepwalkers.
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Abbey prodcution of Marble, directed by
Jeremy Herrin (2009).
Right: Anne (Dearbhla Crotty)
Below: Ben (Peter Hanly) and Catherine
(Aisling O’Sullivan)
We have seen how Carr explores the ways in which representation informs
reality through the use of story in The Mai. Similarly, in Betting on the Dust
Commander, Parks juxtaposes simulacra with their referents in order to reveal the
reciprocal relationship between reality and representation. In doing so, she exposes
the material fabric and fabricated aspects of heterosexual union. It is clear from
examining her oeuvre that she is interested in the way in which we seek to imitate
representations such as photography, film, history, story and art. This is evident, for
example, in In the Blood when Chilli uses an old photograph of Hester to inform his
aspirations of their reunion and in Topdog/Underdog when Booth seeks to emulate the
pornographic material that he regularly examines. These synthetic constructs act as
props informing, as well as expressing, the characters’ self-perceptions. Elam and
Rayner have described Parks’s play (‘For the Love of a Venus’) within the play,
Venus, as the paradoxical ‘representation of representation’ (279). The inclusion of a
slideshow of Lucius and Mares’ wedding photographs in Betting on the Dust
Commander may be considered in a similar light; the photographs represent the world
of the play, the ‘reality’ performed by the actors on the stage. The two slideshow
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scenes, which introduce and conclude the entire (repetitious) dialogue of the drama,
exhibit snapshot traces of the intertwined lives of Lucius and Mare, accompanied by
conversations from the day they wed. These moments signify the way in which
anecdotal dialogue is produced and preserved through the continual retelling of a
couple’s memories of their wedding day to family and friends. Parks thereby
communicates the way in which material and verbal signifiers of remembered love
help to validate and maintain the relationship.
Carr uses mixed-media to a similar end in Ullaloo. After one of the couple’s
many petulant arguments, Tomred puts on a black and white, home movie depicting a
man and a woman engaged in romantic scenarios, which appears as a recording of a
scenario that took place around the middle of the 20th century. Whether we take this
as footage of another couple, or of Tilly and Tomred during their younger years, it
clarifies to some degree why these characters have remained in such a stifling union
that oscillates between the mundane and the quarrelsome. Their enduring relationship
is informed by prevailing reflections of heterosexual monogamy, including their own
memories. The power of nostalgia in maintaining their bond is evident during one of
the play’s more poignant moments, when the couple reflect upon a particular time in
which they engaged together in an unnamed experience. While they cannot agree
whether this particular instance was the first or last time that they partook in the act,
they concede that it was, for both of them, ‘a [significant] time’ (14). During these
scenes, Carr reveals the power of prevailing love narratives in constructing and
maintaining a heterosexual relationship, which comes to imprison two people long
after they have grown apart. This establishes an interest in narrative forces that
individuals cannot seem to overcome, which, as we have seen, Carr develops in later
works such as The Mai.
In Parks’s Betting on the Dust Commander, the use of mixed-media evokes a
connection between life and a slideshow. This is achieved through Parks’s
punctuation of play’s action with the same sequence of frozen images. In an interview
with Shelby Jiggetts, the dramatist explains that she moved around a lot when she was
growing up and suggests that her writing career may have been shaped by ‘the
pageant of people […] not connected to any one backdrop’ that she encountered
through her life (qtd. in Jiggetts 309). Parks’s own memories are like a slideshow, and
the analogy between life and a slideshow in Betting on the Dust Commander exposes
her resulting preoccupation with the ways in which recordings and representations
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influence how we live: the connections between life and history, or life and art.
Specifically, the slideshow in Betting on the Dust Commander interrogates the
tenuous relationship between life and its captured image, photography. Since the
photos depict a 1950s’ wedding, one could place the moments in which the actors are
on stage as temporally beyond this period—perhaps even after Lucius and Mare have
died. The photographs depict the enduring traces of this couple’s relationship. By
pairing these slide show scenes with moments in which the actors are on stage, Parks
shows how representations (in this case, stories and photographs) of marriage are
more constant and, as such, more ‘real’ than the actual events that occurred.
Parks’s preoccupation with this potentially infinitely-reflexive notion of
representing representation is also evident through her juxtaposition of duplicate
images throughout the play. The potency of these images is multi-layered and the
dialectic of reality and representation is extended through Parks’s contrasting of real
flowers with fake flowers and a live bird with one that is dead but preserved. Just as
the disparity between the ‘active’ scenes (those in which the actors are on stage) and
the slideshow scenes of the play links love to the synthetic representation of love, the
pairing of real flowers with plastic flowers considers natural phenomena in relation to
their synthetic imitations. Fresh flowers die; the plastic flowers that Lucius and Mare
use for their wedding are more permanent: ‘Expensive plastics got the real look to em,
Lucius. Expensive plastics got uh smell. Expensive plastics will last a lifetime but
nobodyll know, Lucius. Nobody know’ (75). If ‘nobodyll know’ the difference
between real and expensive synthetic flowers, and if synthetic flowers are more
permanent, then—though they are mere representations of nature, of ‘actual’
flowers—on some level they are more real, more constant. Similarly the dead bird,
which Lucius has preserved in ‘uh ziplocked bag’ for Mare to keep under her pillow,
may be viewed as more real now (in its preservation) than in its transient life (87). By
employing signifiers of reality and signifiers of representation in this complex way,
Parks prompts her audience to ponder what in this or any relationship is real and what
is performed, constructed or symbolic.
Conclusion
Parks’s and Carr’s subversive representations of romantic love show that the dramatic
writing of each playwright retains its preoccupation with the factitiousness of gender
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roles. From early, experimental dramas such as Ullaloo and Betting on the Dust
Commander to later works such as The Mai and Topdog/Underdog, these dramatists
stage the re-presentational actions of heterosexual love. In doing so, Parks and Carr
reveal how these acts are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by prevailing
cultural models and narratives. These dramatists use self-reflexive strategies of
immense political potential throughout their theatrical oeuvres to show how gender
roles and heterosexual relationships are culturally constituted.
During the mid-1990s, Parks and Carr began, ostensibly, to move away from
the margins and write for the mainstream by using plots and portraying recognisable
characters, settings and language. Linear, plotted structures can invite us to become
utterly absorbed in the story. Materialist feminism takes issue with the passivity
incited by such realist devices and the way in which the form aims to reflect and
naturalise the world as it is, stabilising rather than embracing transitory crises in the
existing order.126 From this perspective, realist strategies promote little opportunity
for change. Yet Parks’s and Carr’s later, more conventionally-styled, works continue
to destabilise an oppressive status quo. The dramatists achieve such a disruptive effect
by exposing gender performativity and laying bare the repetitious fabrications of
heterosexual monogamy. As we have seen, metatheatrical devices, as well as stage
imagery and scenography, can demystify socially-sanctioned western paradigms of
gendered courtship and the institution of marriage. The final chapter explores in more
detail the subversive potential of metatheatre and visual aspects of performance by
showing how clothing and costume can be harnessed to reveal gender performativity.
Parks and Carr rupture petrified concepts of gender roles and relations to open the
possibility of imagining these constructions in less restrictive ways.
126
For more on the ways in which feminists have problematised traditional forms such as realism, see
the section entitled ‘Feminist Aesthetics’ in Chapter 1.
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Chapter 5: Clothing, Costume and
[De]Construction
Introduction
Feminist theory often attempts to divorce anatomy from gender, and physiological sex
from the cultural performance of identity. The concept of gender as a cultural
construct was popularised by the second wave feminists of the 1970s.127 Considering
socially-sanctioned sex roles as separate from their physical underpinnings has since
helped feminists to question institutionalised gender inequality. More recently, Judith
Butler has advanced theories that explore how masculinity and femininity are
constituted by, and work to re-constitute, the oppositions that govern how we live and
understand the world.128 In her essay ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’
(1988), Butler argues that rather than a natural fact, gender is a series of repetitious
bodily acts.129 Binary genders appear natural and fixed because they are sociallycompelled and historically-constructed. However, if we begin to accept gender as
culturally constituted, we open up the possibility that gender could be constituted
differently (‘Performative Acts’ 154-155). Gender performativity borrows much of its
terminology from theatre studies discourse; correspondingly, theatre can help to
expose the constructed nature of human behaviour. I want to suggest that if, as Butler
argues, gender identity is covertly and coercively created through a repetition of acts,
127
Theories about the distinction between gender and sex were not only adopted by second wave
feminists. As scientist and feminist Anne Fausto-Sterling discusses in Chapter 1 of Sexing the Body
(2000), sexologists John Money and Anke Ehrhardt also helped to promulgate the theory that sex and
gender are separate categories (3). Fausto-Sterling’s book is a useful addition to gender studies
discourse in that she interrogates the distinctions between masculinity and femininity from a biological
as well as a socio-political perspective.
128
Butler develops her theory of gender performativity in her seminal book, Gender Trouble (1990).
Later, in Bodies that Matter (1993), she responds to those who endeavoured to debunk her thesis on the
basis of biological difference. In the later volume, Butler offers an extensive consideration of the
discursive materialisation of bodies. In The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Dolan also leans towards this
poststructuralist view in relation to the constitution of physical sex. She explains that ‘the female body
is not reducible to a sign free of connotation’ and that women ‘always bear the mark and meaning of
their sex, which inscribes them within a cultural hierarchy’ (63). While Dolan’s remarks are womanfocused and Butler’s ideas are based more widely on gender, Dolan’s comments here could certainly be
expanded to include all bodies.
129
See Judith Butler’s paper ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay on Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory’, published in The Performance Studies Reader (2004), edited by Henry Bial.
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then the ‘actors’ must also be compelled to use various props which help them to
‘play their parts.’ From this perspective, clothing can be viewed as a component of
gender; it is an integral element of the ‘act.’
The materiality of the body can pose a challenge to theories of gender
performativity. If the gender dyad is a performative construct, then how do we
account for sexual difference? Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) explores issues such
as the extent to which words and other signs can craft bodies. She argues
convincingly that bodies, too, are constructed because they are infused with and by
significations without which they would not ‘matter’ at all. In response to those who
seek to separate sex and gender, who argue that sex is a fixed, material precursor onto
which the gender construct is grafted, Butler argues that ‘sex posited as prior to
construction will, by virtue of being posited, become the effect of that very positing,
the construction of construction’ (Bodies 5). In this context, ‘sex does not accrue
social meanings as additive properties but, rather, is replaced by the social meanings it
takes on’ (ibid). The body, nude or clothed, is never free from signification. Butler
rethinks matter as ‘not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that
stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call
matter’ (Bodies 9). If materialisation takes place historically within the gendered,
heterosexual matrix then, to some extent, bodies too are constructed and even
performative. Rethinking the static ‘fact of the matter’ as an on-going process of
materialisation—channelled through and inextricable from discourse—broadens the
possibilities of feminist deconstruction.130
This chapter explores how Carr and Parks denaturalise gendered bodies by
staging characters who explicitly employ garments and accessories to manifest their
gendered roles. In doing so, the dramatists utilise performance to expose the cultural
construction of femininity and masculinity. Analysing the significance of clothing in
these playwrights’ works, as well as the costuming opportunities such drama provides
for the stage, illuminates some of the ways in which theatre can intervene in our
perceptions of gender. By their gendered nature, clothes help individuals to
incorporate—to perform and embody—the accepted truths of masculinity and
Butler emphasises the difference between deconstruction and destruction: ‘To deconstruct matter is
not to negate or do away with the usefulness of the term. […] This unsettling of “matter” can be
understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter’ (30).
130
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femininity; clothes thereby reaffirm these truths. 131 Parks and Carr expose clothes
variously as gendered cultural significations and material props in the production of
identities. Hence, costume design can add further meaning to the plays in
performance. By examining the symbolic efficacy of clothing and costume in
contemporary theatre, this interpretation aims to shed some light on Dolan’s question:
‘How can the liveness of theatre performance reveal performativity?’ (‘Geographies’
431.)
Both Carr and Parks often employ a self-conscious theatricality in their works
as discussed in the last chapter. Each dramatist points to the ubiquity of cultural
performance by staging a variety of acts from storytelling and role-playing to
gendered rituals such as marriage. Indeed, Parks’s The America Play (1994),
Topdog/Underdog (2001) and Venus (1996) explicitly concern performance, with the
latter even containing a play within a play. For each playwright, dressing up often
functions as part of this metatheatricality. From the cross-dressing of characters
involved in gendered role-plays in Carr’s Low in the Dark (1989), to the significance
of white dresses in the final play of what has become known as her ‘Midlands
Trilogy’, By the Bog of Cats… (1998), clothing has long had humorous as well as
revelatory functions in Carr’s work. Garments are used self-consciously in Low in the
Dark in ways that unsettle the boundaries between the sexes and reveal gender as
performance. In By the Bog of Cats…, we are presented with four female characters,
all wearing white dresses at Carthage Kilbride’s wedding. As we have seen, Carr uses
farce to rupture the traditional image of the wedding, and by extension, the legitimacy
of marriage.132 Wedding-gowns also feature significantly in Parks’s Betting on the
Dust Commander (1987), Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992) and In the Blood
(1999). Having examined Betting on the Dust Commander and Devotees in the
In Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling aims to address ‘such issues as how—through their daily lives,
experiments, and medical practices—scientists create truths about sexuality’ and ‘how these truths,
sculpted by the social milieu in which biologists practice their trade, in turn refashion our cultural
environment’ (5).
132
See Chapter 4 for more on this. Also, in ‘“One bog, many bogs”: Theatrical Space, Visual Image
and Meaning in Some Productions of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats...’, Enrica Cerquoni offers an
interesting analysis of the visual effects of three productions of the play. She examines the Irish
premiere at the Abbey in 1998, as well as two American productions which took place in 2001: the
West Coast premiere at the San Jose Repertory Theatre and the Irish Repertory North American
premiere, produced in Chicago. In relation to the 1998 production in Ireland, Cerquoni observes: ‘In
the blackly comic wedding space of celebration all traditional structures of society were subverted.
Church, State, family and marriage, they were all under attack and exposed as false icons. Fouéré’s
entrance as Hester in the world of “others” (or was it her own world?) in her “spoiled” and “unfit”
dress ultimately defied and disrupted the ideology of the established order’ (186).
131
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Garden of Love in the last chapter, I will focus here on the image of In the Blood’s
protagonist Hester wearing a wedding dress over her regular clothes. This image
significantly undermines idyllic femininity by exposing it as performative. Although
wedding gowns are usually used to construct ideal womanhood, the ways in which
both playwrights use white dresses actually probe certain feminine ideals, in addition
to interrogating the performance of marriage and, by extension, romantic love.133
Costume has been central to the metatheatre of Parks’s drama from the stereotype
figures of The Death of the Last Blackman in the Whole Entire World (1990) to her
two ‘Lincoln impersonator’ plays, The America Play and Topdog/Underdog. Beyond
the fake beards, stove-pipe hats and white make-up involved in the reversed
minstrelsy impersonations of Abraham Lincoln in these plays, clothing is inextricably
linked to the performance of gender in the more realist Topdog/Underdog. For
example, the stage image of Lincoln and Booth trying on the suits that Booth has
acquired during a busy day of shoplifting represents the aspirations towards viable
models of masculinity that are at the centre of this play (23-24). Lincoln comments,
‘they say the clothes make the man’ (24). The phrase sums up some of the play’s key
preoccupations: masculinity and blackness are performances that are culturallyconstituted; outer garments are as entangled as concepts of physicality in the
composition of gendered and racial bodies.
Butler does not deny the materiality of the body. Instead, she is concerned
with reconsidering the way in which we view matter as a pre-existing given. She
argues that materiality’s status as a concept is the context in which it may be viewed
as performative:
In relation to sex, then, if one concedes the materiality of sex or of the body,
does that very conceding operate—performatively—to materialize that sex?
And further, how is it that the reiterated concession of sex—one which need
not take place in speech or writing but might be ‘signalled’ in a much more
inchoate way—constitutes the sedimentation and production of that material
effect? (Bodies 11.)
The term ‘sedimentation’ evokes a productive geological metaphor. The gradual,
historical process by which the ‘matter’ of sedimentary rock is formed is useful in
understanding the materialisation of the body and the symbiotically connected
Chapter 4 explores in detail Carr’s and Parks’s subversive representations of wedding imagery,
marriage and romantic heterosexual union.
133
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construction of gender. As we shall see, the layered image of this rock in cross-section
illuminates the significance of clothing in Parks’s and Carr’s works. Each playwright
employs in her theatre visual layers of male and female significations to highlight the
construction and materialisation of gender. As the outer materializations of distinct
gendered identities, clothing reiterates and reinscribes sexual difference. In this
context, clothes may be viewed as parts of Butler’s sedimentation process. The theatre
works of Parks and Carr promote a use of costume that exposes the ‘sedimented’
nature of gender; hence, the dramatists stimulate the possibility of reconstituting
gender roles.
Dress is not entirely based on human choice, but governed by a set of invisible
ideological workings that Butler refers to as the heterosexual matrix. For Butler,
rather than an act or procedure initiated by a subject, construction is a temporal
process that operates through a reiteration of norms. Due to its status as a ‘sedimented
effect of reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is
also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the
constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the
norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labour of the
norm’ (Bodies 10). The sedimented nature of Butlerian construction is self-petrifying
and disguises its own genesis. Yet (like sedimentary rocks) ‘sedimentation’ is,
simultaneously, its weakness: the gaps and fissures offer potential sites of alteration or
destabilisation. Parks and Carr create stage images which widen the gaps and fissures,
separating the sediments. In doing so, they create theatre with the potential to rupture
the rock-solid, surface-appearance of sex.
This interpretation focuses on the disruptive possibilities of clothing and
costume to compare the radical early works of each playwright with her more recent,
more ‘conformist’ pieces which draw on the traditional theatre forms of realism and
tragedy. In doing so, the analysis will show how the dramas that employ dominant,
mainstream styles can probe society’s regulatory norms as effectively as the early
experiments. So, while these playwrights move towards methods associated with
institutionalised patriarchal drama, they continue to create interrogative theatre with
powerful political potential.
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Clothing, Costume in Experimental Theatre
In their earlier, more experimental works, Parks and Carr create characters that are
symbolic rather than sympathetic. This is one strategy that differentiates the
dramatists’ early styles from the dominant mimetic conventions of the mainstream
theatre institution. The personas of Parks’ and Carrs’ early plays accord with feminist
theatre discourse in that they are representative, rather than realistic. They circumvent
the audience’s emotional involvement and, hence, appear to have more overtly
political functions than characters in their more recent works.134 Carr’s Low in the
Dark and Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World
construct gendered (and, in the case of Parks, also racial) stereotypes for the stage.
Clothing functions significantly in typecasting these figures. As is generally the case
when analysing the staging of stereotypes, one must question whether these
performances work towards simply re-inscribing or subversively undermining the
reductionisms that they represent. The aim when staging such caricatures is usually
subversive humour or satire. This appears to be the objective both in Carr’s Low in the
Dark and in Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man—although, as we have seen in
Chapter 2, Parks’s characterisation of Black Woman With Fried Drumstick as a
domestic caregiver can be seen to essentialise the maternal role. Yet, can these early
plays work to destabilise the fixities of gender? In what ways can staging stereotypes
usurp rather than reinforce oppressive essentialisms? How can costume design help to
promote gender conscious enquiry in such avant-garde theatre? Analysing Carr’s Low
in the Dark and Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the context of clothing
and costume allows us to explore these questions.
Low in the Dark
Allusions to the cultural polarisation of the genders are prominent throughout Low in
the Dark. The play requires a set, for example, with a clearly defined women’s space
in the shape of a bizarre bathroom and a men’s space, containing ‘tyres, rims,
unfinished walls and blocks strewn about’ (5). This drama stages what might be
thought of as gendered reductionisms: the men build a wall, while the female
character Bender regularly gives birth in the bathtub, producing children at ridiculous
134
Chapter 1 discusses the early plays in the context of the feminist quest for socially-conscious,
politically aware theatre which deviates from the formal conventions of the sexist, classist patriarchal
institution.
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rates. In Crooked Sixpence’s 1989 production at the Project Arts Centre Dublin, Joan
Brosnan Walsh (Bender) and Sarahjane Scaife (Binder) wore boned costumes with
cone-shaped breast cups that unzipped to reveal suckling babies’ faces (Scaife 10).
Carr’s stage directions also tell us that the floor of the entire set should be chequered
in black and cream. The use of these two starkly contrasting colours, reminiscent of
the Chinese yin and yang, evokes dichotomy and thus, one could argue, highlights the
gender divisions that this drama is concerned with. However, in this work, Carr
deliberately fuses and confuses the binary conventions of gender—particularly
through the use of cross-dressing and cross-gender performance. From another
perspective, therefore, the chequered pattern of these two contrasting colours paves
the way for how the play self-consciously shuffles typical male and female
appearances and behaviours.
Low in the Dark is a metatheatrical work in that it is a composed of various
gendered role-plays, punctuated by moments of storytelling—as well as quarrels
between the characters regarding the content of these stories and role-plays. The
characters make explicit use of the props and clothes that are conventionally
associated with women and men in order to perform female or male roles; the use of
these gendered props reveals the fabrication of femininity and masculinity. As
McMullan aptly discerns: ‘The foregrounding of the body and costume point to the
construction of identity through social and gender conditioning inscribed on the body’
(‘Gender’ 42).
As well as enacting their own genders, some of the characters in Low in the
Dark also perform as the opposite sex. Four of the play’s five figures participate in
gendered role plays: wearing a hat and tails Binder performs as her mother Bender’s
love interest, while the male characters Baxter and Bone take turns playing the female
in a similarly fictional courtship. Baxter enters the action of the play in scene two,
wearing ‘high heels, a woman’s hat, a dress and a necklace’, as well as appearing to
be pregnant (16). Cross-dressing in performance has attracted some feminist
disapproval.135 For example, Erika Munk states that ‘most men in drag are no more
subversive than whites in blackface were when minstrel shows were America’s most
popular form of entertainment’ (93). However, staged cross-dressing can also be
According to director and scholar, Lesley Ferris, ‘[c]ross-dressing in performance is riddled with
dissention and ambiguity. She elaborates as follows, [c]ontemporary drag, for example, answers to a
viable gay aesthetic while simultaneously promulgating misogynistic images of women’ (‘Current
Crossings’ 9).
135
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political and can be utilised to expose the ways in which gendered bodies are
constructed.136 Such cultural work could take place, for example, by providing
alienating stage images which reveal the cultural make-up of masculinity and
femininity. Case contends that, ‘[t]hrough the drag role, one can perceive how social
constructs are inscribed on the body’ (‘Gender as play’ 24).137 This can be applied to
the ways in which Carr uses clothing and, in particular, cross-dressed characters in
Low in the Dark so as to reveal gender as performative and culturally constituted.
Through the use of a metatheatrical gender-play, Carr isolates the cultural signs of
masculinity and femininity in order to deconstruct the genders.
Theatre performance is pertinent to, and can expose, socially-constructed
behaviours. Applying Butler’s theory of performativity can elucidate these
possibilities. Based on her hypothesis, the cultural constitution of gender is hidden by
the credibility of its performance:
[B]ecause gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of
gender, and without those acts there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus,
a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. (‘Performative Acts’ 157.)
We accept gender as a natural fact because its constituting acts are repetitive and
historically constructed; gender precedes our existence. These acts participate in the
creation of gender and—to appropriate one of Erving Goffman’s chapter titles—they
incite ‘belief in the part one is playing’ (17).138 The collective belief in polarised
genders forms the outer shell that disguises its innards, its ideology. In ‘Performative
Acts’ Butler aims ‘to show some of the ways in which reified and naturalized
conceptions of gender might be understood as constituted and, hence, capable of
being constituted differently’ (‘Performative Acts’ 155). Hence, theatre that
demonstrates performativity has transformative power in relation to stifling social
roles. If drama can show that gender is comprised of acts and parts, it suggests that
For more on the question of whether drag can be used as a politicised theatrical device, see Dolan’s
‘Gender Impersonation’ or Case’s ‘Gender as Play’.
137
In ‘Gender Impersonation’, Dolan remarks that Case’s claim is ‘a politicised view that forces
confrontation with gender as a performed role, donned as easily as the male or female clothing that
signifies it.’ She continues by claiming that ‘[w]hile drag is a joke trivialised in the camp context, as a
feminist theatrical devise meant to point to real-life gender costuming, it effect is quite different.’ She
suggests that in Churchill’s Cloud 9 ‘cross-dressing is used to foreground a new vision through the
political structure of the gender play’ (9).
138
‘Performances: belief in the part one is playing’ is the first chapter of Goffman’s seminal 1959
volume The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (17-24). Goffman was one of the first theorists to
provide a specific and extensive analysis of the socially-constructed roles that we play habitually.
136
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these components could be rearranged. Theatre can thereby open up the possibility of
rethinking gender.
In several ways throughout Low in the Dark, Carr reveals the genesis of
gender by isolating and exposing its material components, as well as its performative
acts. The first moment in which this effect becomes apparent is Binder’s use of the hat
and tails to aid her cross-gender performance as Bender’s lover (15). Binder puts on
these cultural signs of masculinity in full view of the audience. However, when they
are not in use, they hang on a brush in the bathroom. Butler argues that the gendered
body is ‘an embodying [of] possibilities’ (‘Performative Acts’ 156); Binder’s partially
cross-dressed body is, then, the semi-materialisation of masculinity. The isolation of
these cultural signs, which limply hang waiting to be ‘embodied’ when they are not in
use, expose clothes as some of the many components of masculinity. Binder’s
donning of the hat and tails to participate in the role-play provides a stylised
demonstration of how dress helps create the gender dyad. This self-conscious use of
clothing thereby reveals its immense cultural meaning—in this case, its status as a
prop in the performance of masculinity. In fact, since Binder puts on the hat and tails
each time she plays Bender’s male love interest, these material items come to
represent masculinity itself. The repeated use of the hat and tails in Binder’s
performance as a man allows the play’s viewers to associate these items with
masculinity throughout the production—whether they are in use or not. Masculinity
is, thereby, metonymically reduced to a set of cultural significations.
Low in the Dark reveals the constitution of gender by reducing masculinity
and femininity to the cultural signs of which they are comprised. This is also evident
in Act 1, Scene 2, when Baxter and Bone discuss items of clothing left behind by
women with whom one of them has been romantically involved. These ‘souvenirs’
include an earring, a pink sock and a slip.139 The items become gendered synecdoches
in that, rather than using names, Baxter and Bone refer to these women as the item
that they have left behind:
Baxter I love a slight squint. Remember the blue slip?
Both turn in their eyes.
One of her eyes turned ever so slightly.
Bone Gave her a dotty look.
McMullan points out that, ‘items of clothing such as pink socks become signifiers of gender which
can be exchanged between male and female characters’ (‘Gender’ 43).
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Baxter Very attractive that dotty look. Does she use her wrists?
Bone Yeah, she goes like this a lot.
Twiddles his right wrist. Baxter does likewise. (23.)
This exemplifies the way in which the character’s role-plays condense men and
women to material objects—as well as gestures—which we readily associate with the
genders. In doing so, it detaches these layers of meaning, extracting them from the
overall concept of gender. Hence, it reveals the cultural components of gender. As
Butler suggests, revealing the constituted nature of gender enables the possibility of
redefining it, perhaps as something more fluid and mutable (‘Performative Acts’ 155).
Since Low in the Dark discloses (rather than obscures) the constitution of gender, it
opens the possibility of rejuvenating and rethinking sex roles. The moment discussed
above is also important in terms of the way in which Baxter and Bone mimic the
feminine wrist gesture.140 Their enactments of this gesture force the audience to focus
on the isolated movement itself and to see it as a component of femininity. This
deconstructs gender in a similar way as the image of the hat and tails, as well as the
way in which the men name women after their items of clothing; it does so by visually
and self-consciously separating the components of the female role. Directing the focus
towards such isolated parts of a whole exposes the way in which culture has
constructed (as well as essentialised) the genders. Moreover, the exchange between
Baxter and Bone exemplifies the productive way in which metatheatre operates in this
play.
Much of the humour of this work lies in the absurd, metatheatrical crossgender role-plays that it stages. Each set of characters regularly participate in such
role-plays, with the character who plays their own gender prompting the other weary,
partially cross-dressed participant. This is evident, for example, in the following scene
in which Bone prompts Baxter with his ‘lines’:
Bone (determined to finish the scenario, as before, points to the wall) I do
everything to please you.
He waits for a response from Baxter. None is forthcoming. He forces the
knitting into Baxter’s hand, annoyed.
Yes you do, darling!
140
In her article on deconstructing gender through gesture, Sande Zeig claims that gestures are as
material ‘as clothing which one may ‘put on’ and ‘take off.’” According to Zeig gestures produce
meaning, whether they are ‘the gestures that have been assigned to us’ or ‘those that have not been
assigned to us’ (13).
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Baxter Yes you do darling!
Bone And I love you for it!
Baxter And I love you for it! (19.)
Similarly, another enactment between Bender and Binder begins with Bender
demanding that her daughter put on the hat and tails, and Binder impatiently doing so
as she ‘rattles off’ the required lines (34-35). While Binder puts on the hat and tails in
front of the audience, Baxter enters the action of the play in scene two, wearing ‘high
heels, a woman’s hat, a dress and a necklace’, as well as appearing to be pregnant
(16). The role-playing ensues, with Bone ‘acting’ as a man (indicated by his building
of a wall) and Baxter performing as a woman (indicated by the clothes, the feminised
voice and the knitting). At one point, according to the stage directions, the ‘real
Baxter erupts out of the role-play’ (17). Here, the self-reflexive revelation of
performance offers ample comic relief. However, such theatricalist features carry far
more weight than simply humour.
The image of the cross-dressed Baxter performing as a woman is hilarious
because it lacks authenticity, like similar roles in commercially successful shows such
as pantomime. With regard to cross-dressing on stage, Lesley Ferris asks: ‘does crossdressing undermine conventional masculine and feminine behaviour or does it
reinscribe the binary, the “truth” of masculinity and femininity?’ (‘Crossings’ 18).
While Low in the Dark wittily plays with stereotypes, the drama also works to
destabilise the masculine/feminine binary, and this is due to its metatheatrical nature.
According to Butler:
[T]he tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and
polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own
production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions
whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness.
(‘Performative Acts’ 157.)
In society, the fictive nature of gender is obscured by the repetitiveness by which it is
performed. However, in Low in the Dark, cross-gender role-playing lacks authenticity
because the characters’ own genders are still evident throughout these enactments.
During role-plays, characters correct and rehearse their performances of the opposite
gender in front of the audience; they prompt each other with their ‘lines’ (comprised
of stereotypically male or female phrases); and, from time to time, their own voices
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even interrupt the role-plays. This deliberate theatricality highlights the artifice of
gender in society and exemplifies Butler’s notion of polar genders as ‘cultural
fictions’. The self-conscious ways in which cross-gender performance is employed in
the play, the stylised mimicking of masculinity and femininity, directs the focus
towards the way in which these roles are repeated and performed in Low in the Dark,
and—by extension—in society. This isolates and exposes the actual ‘acts’ that
constitute gender. In the context of Butler’s theories, the work demonstrates the
performative sedimentation of femininity and masculinity.
An analysis of the deconstructive ways in which clothing and costume
function in Low in the Dark would be incomplete without some consideration of the
enigmatic figure of Curtains, a female character who ‘is covered from head to toe in
heavy, brocaded curtains and rail’ (5). Throughout the drama, Curtains tells a long,
meandering story (or series of stories) about a generic man and woman ‘walking low
in the dark through a dead universe’ (59). This tale stops and resumes intermittently,
and it appears that the other characters are familiar with its content. In fact, they each
contribute to the story as well as arguing about the ‘events’ that unfold, for example in
Act One, Scene Six. This demonstrates the repetitive and mutable nature of stories. It
shows how many tales are told so often—or exist in so many forms—that the listeners
are already aware of the outcome. It also reveals how each teller changes a story
slightly from her or his own perspective.141 It is significant that Low in the Dark’s
main storyteller is completely covered by heavy cloth. Reading this character and her
stage image in the context of Carr’s oeuvre as a whole reveals how these creations
function in relation to genders and canons.
The character of Curtains in Low in the Dark has deconstructive potential
similar to Carr’s re-imaginings of King Lear: The Cordelia Dream (2008) and her
children’s play Meat and Salt (2003), which are discussed in Chapter 3. This is
because Curtains, like aspects of these later works, problematises the ideals that are
basic to literary canons: originality, the singular identity of the author and the
privileging of written texts over orally-transmitted narratives. Curtains’ storytelling in
Low in the Dark paves the way for Carr’s future considerations of this oral tradition,
Stories, and in particular folktales, are prevalent in much of Carr’s later work. The Mai, in
particular, explores the often damaging power of story. The eponymous protagonist of this work is so
obsessed with romanticising her own life in accordance with familial stories and myths that she
tragically takes her life; however, the ultimate tragedy of the play lies in the way in which The Mai
passes her psychosis regarding the creation and manipulation of the ‘self-story’ onto her daughter,
Millie. For more on this, see Chapter 4.
141
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as well as the ways in which she demythologises authorship. Curtains’ costume works
in conjunction with the absurd, generic and sometimes collaborative quality of her
stories to reveal the porous, collective nature of narratives. Throughout the play, she
creates or tells stories, but her identity is completely obscured by the cloth that
surrounds her. Carr’s work is preoccupied with the difficulty in attributing an entire
work to any single author because narratives evolve and feed into each other over
time. If we look to the ways in which some of Carr’s later works problematise
authorship, we can read the entirely covered Curtains as a stage image that
demonstrates the impossibility of identifying the original source of any story. 142
Belsey argues that folktales were, historically, ‘the special province of women
(Why Shakespeare? 14).143 Indeed, storytelling has often been associated with the
fireside image of the old woman or the old wife. Curtains is a female character, which
helps to locate storytelling within a feminine tradition; this is in keeping with later
works such as The Mai, in which both familial and mythological tales are passed on
through at least four generations of women. However, unlike any character in The
Mai, Curtains appears in a costume which completely covers her from view,
obliterating her physical identity. Carr’s stage directions tell us that ‘[n]ot an inch of
her face or body is seen throughout the play’ (Low in the Dark 5). The stage image
evokes a historical void and can be read as evidence of Carr’s tenuous relationship
with patriarchal canons and the dialectics of orality and textuality. The presence of
Curtains’ stories, combined with the absence of her identity, evokes the nameless,
faceless women involved in the historical creation and transmission of narratives and,
by extension, the female writers omitted by literary canons. From this perspective,
Curtain’s dialogue and visual appearance offer for consideration the ways in which
women’s identities have been obliterated by patriarchy and the written word.
In Chapter 3, for example, I argue that Carr’s Meat and Salt questions the idea that the tale of
daughters who are required to profess their love for an egotistic king belongs to Shakespeare. Hence,
Carr challenges the singularity of authorship that is at the base of the literary canon. She identifies both
King Lear and the (mutable) folktale that preceded it as her sources for Meat and Salt. Carr balances
the relationship between textuality and orality, in which textuality is usually privileged, by
simultaneously appropriating a text from the patriarchal canon and a text from the more marginal,
feminine tradition of storytelling. In this context, Meat and Salt also helps to relocate the story of King
Lear within its feminine origins.
143
In Why Shakespeare? Catherine Belsey considers that one of the reasons for the ongoing fame of
Shakespeare and the accessibility of his drama might be that the audiences and readers of these works
were (and are still) already familiar with his plots and characters, because they had already encountered
them in fairytales that have lived on from oral traditions that originated long before his time.
142
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The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World
Carr’s stage directions in Low in the Dark give some indications as to the costuming
of actors. However, Parks does not provide such suggestions for The Death of the Last
Black Man. In relation to the lack of stage directions in her drama, Parks explains
that: ‘action goes in the line of dialogue instead of always in a pissy set of
parentheses. How the line should be delivered is contained in the line itself’
(‘Elements’ 15-16). Similarly, ideas as to how the actors should be costumed in The
Death of the Last Black Man can be extracted from the names of the characters they
play. The titles of the characters in The Death of the Last Black Man are even more
emblematic than in Low in the Dark. Names such as, ‘And Bigger and Bigger and
Bigger,’ ‘Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread’ and ‘Old Man River Jordan’
are inspired by literature, film and recognisable stereotypes of blackness. As we shall
see, figures’ names have heavily influenced the costume design throughout the play’s
production history. The resulting costumes have helped to construct specific images
of blackness; some of these are recognisable from popular culture, others are more
obscure. The presence of familiar black stereotypes on stage can demonstrate the
ubiquitous nature of such images in popular culture. Such reductionist representations
have contributed to the weakening of black identity throughout American history.
However, like Low in the Dark, The Death of the Last Black Man can stage
stereotypes in ways that undermine them. The following analysis seeks to reveal how
The Death of the Last Black Man works to usurp the degradation of gendered and
racial stereotypes, and how costume design can add to this reversal.
The main figure of The Death of the Last Black Man is called Black Man With
Watermelon. This appellation, and the costuming of actors who have played the role
in various productions, have constructed stage images of a familiar, degraded version
of black masculinity. However, these visualisations are at odds with the play’s content
which works to fortify black identity. The Death of the Last Black Man was first
produced at BACA Downtown, Brooklyn in 1990 under the directorship of Beth A.
Schachter. In 1992, Liz Diamond directed a production at Yale Repertory Theatre. In
Diamond’s production Black Man With Watermelon wore a pair of dungarees and
was bare-foot and bare-chested. This simple pair of workman-like or child-like
dungarees served to create an image of the figure as an uneducated, unsophisticated,
manual labourer or slave. The clothing aided the construction of this character as the
archetypal infantilised black man, recognisable from literature and film. In addition,
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when the actor playing Black Man With Watermelon wore a rope noose around his
neck, the audience were reminded of the history of violence perpetrated against black
men. Director Rob Melrose also made use of the noose in his 2006 production of the
play at the Cutting Ball theatre in San Francisco.
Although these images could be viewed as re-inscriptions of a stereotype and
reminders of a violent history, the irony of this play’s title lies in the fact that Black
Man does not simply die, but endures several violent ‘deaths’ and continues to come
back throughout the play. In addition, the text is filled with perennial images of
growth and abundance. Scholars such as Louis argue that, with this work, Parks has
created a play about survival, rather than death; the playwright has done so by
‘recuperating and reinterpreting the history of slavery, to offer contemporary
audiences the possibility of recognizing the shared support and bonding that gave the
African American community the strength to survive the holocaust of slavery’ (146).
The play’s empowering content and the use of costume to stage a weakened image of
black masculinity create a juxtaposition that works to diffuse what the stage image
traditionally represents and to usurp the stereotype. Therefore, throughout the
production history of the play, the costuming of Black Man has actually worked to
construct a black male stereotype in order to undermine it. Jonathan Klab, who
facilitated a symposium on Parks’s work in 2004, accurately sums up how racist
stereotypes work in the The Death of the Last Black Man; they function ‘to
expropriate and diffuse what has been hurtful in other contexts’ (‘Remarks on Parks
1’). Costume design for productions of the play can expand on how it promotes a
rethinking of familiar, degrading stereotypes by evoking those violent images that the
dialogue seeks to re-imagine.
Opposition between the stage figure of Black Man with Watermelon and the
play’s poetic imagery also refigures painful cultural memories of racist violence. To
this extent, Parks seeks to celebrate, as well as lament, black history. Louis compares
The Death of the Last Black Man to Abel Meeropol’s poem, ‘Strange Fruit,’ which
was famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 (160). The piece depicts lynched
black bodies as ‘strange fruit,’ creating grotesque images of hanging corpses and
emphasising the way in which white culture has dehumanised black bodies. The
Death of the Last Black Man reminds us of Holiday’s song by linking the character of
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Black Man to fruit (specifically, the watermelon).144 Black Man’s dialogue also
furthers this linkage; for example, he refers to dying in the electric chair as being
‘juiced’ and he asks ‘was we green and stripedy when we first comed out?’ (107). In
the 2006 Cutting Ball production of the play, the image of Black Man wearing a green
‘stripedy’ shirt and a noose attached to a branch which he supported horizontally on
his shoulders served to further the connection between the black body and fruit.
Through Black Man’s repeated deaths, Parks’s play also evokes the vicious assaults
that Black people endured during slavery and its aftermath. However, Parks’s text
focuses on survival, thereby seeking to transcend the violent history of AfricanAmericans. The dramatist’s dialogue transforms grotesque metaphors of destruction
such as Meeropol’s into images of growth and renewal. The Death of the Last Black
Man resurrects the traditional ties of fruit as a symbol to provide a more positive
alternative to the image of lynched black bodies. References to rejuvenation abound
in the play. In the scene in which Blackman talks about being ‘juiced,’ for example,
Black Woman continually repeats the words ‘you comed back,’ focusing on survival
as opposed to death (105-109). According to Louis, Parks writes ‘[…] a
counternarrative to the dismembering one of slavery and its aftermath. If the black
body can only be symbolised as “fruit” (recalling Billie Holiday’s song “Strange
Fruit”), then the symbol’s traditional ties to abundance, nature and regeneration are
being repressed’(160). Fruit grows as well as ‘hangs’. The use of the branch in the
Cutting Ball Theater production of the play, as well as the colour and pattern of Black
Man’s shirt, work in conjunction with the play’s perennial imagery to identify the
black male with a living, growing ‘fruit’ rather than a lynched corpse. The costume
design in this production thereby contributed to the subversive way in which this
work stages the black male stereotype.
The reductionist stage images created by Cutting Ball’s production helped to
convey the fragile condition of black male identity throughout American history. This
honed the audience’s focus on constructions of blackness that Parks seeks to
challenge. The way in which this production visualised Black Man with Watermelon
144
In relation to characters associated with food in The Death of the Last Black Man, Geis poses the
question of whether these figures should use the food in question as a kind of prop, or whether the
actors’ costumes should refer to or symbolise the dish itself (66). Geis refers specifically to Yes and
Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread and another figure called Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, but the
question could equally be applied to the two main figures of the play, Black Man With Watermelon
and Black Woman With Fried Drumstick.
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Black Man with Watermelon (Myers Clark) in Cutting Ball’s San Francisco
production of The Death of the Last Black Man, directed by Rob Melrose (2006).
conjured a degrading black male stereotype. Similarly, Cutting Ball’s costuming of
the actor who played Old Man River Jordan worked with the character’s name and
dialogue to evoke another familiar, reductionist image of the black man as a low-paid
worker or entertainer. ‘Ol’ Man River’ is a song from Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome
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Kern’s 1927 musical Show Boat. The piece, sung by a black dock-worker, juxtaposes
the struggles of black people at the time to the carefree flow of the Mississippi. The
actor playing Old Man River Jordan in the Cutting Ball production was costumed like
the Show Boat character who sings ‘Ol’ Man River.’ This helped to promote the link
between this figure and the piece upon which his name is based. When he speaks, the
dialogue of Parks’s Old Man River Jordan is infused with an onomatopoeic musicality
reflective of water:
He spoked uh speech spoked hisself uh chatter-tooth babble “ya-oh-may/chuhnaw” dribblin down his lips tuh puddle in his lap. Dribblin by droppletts. Drop
by drop. […] On the other side of the mountain yo he dripply wet with soppin.
Do drop be dripted? I say “yes.” (112.)
Here, the dialogue also reinforces the link with the famous Show Boat song, ‘Ol’ Man
River.’145 However, it is exaggerated to the point that it takes on the semblance of an
infant babbling. This can be seen to represent the cultural infantilisation of the black
male. The costume design in Cutting Ball’s production was in keeping with such
cultural reductionisms of black masculinity. The ways in which this company
visualised Black Man With Watermelon and Old Man River Jordan allowed the
production to stage familiar, demeaning stereotypes of black men. Yet rather than reinscribing those denigrating constructions, the costume design intensified the play’s
political potential. The Death of the Last Black Man also resurrects positive icons of
black identity that have been concealed by the Eurocentric perspective of history. The
stark contrast between ubiquitous, degrading stereotypes and obscure, constructive
icons reveals the historical bias towards white patriarchy.146
Cutting Ball’s costuming of the actor playing Before Columbus provided an
antidote to the company’s imaging of Black Man with Watermelon and Old Man
River Jordan. The name and dialogue of Before Columbus reminds the audience of
African expeditions to the ‘New World’ that predated Columbus’ discovery. In
addition, the character’s speech muses poetically on the links between racist
Incidentally, the cadence of Old Man River Jordan’s speech also evidences how jazz music has
influenced Parks’s writing.
146
According to Geis, The Death of the Last Black Man ‘asks us to walk the fine line between icon and
stereotype’ (62). In fact, by juxtaposing familiar, denigrated images of black femininity and
masculinity with iconic images of blackness, the costume design of this play can produce aesthetics
that visually depict the icon/stereotype dialectic.
145
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colonialism and geographical discoveries—including the fact that the world is round
as opposed to flat:
The popular thinking of the day back in them days was that the world was flat.
[…] They stayed at home. Them thinking the world was flat kept it roun. They
figured out the truth and scurried out. Figuring out the truth put them in their
place and they scurried out to put us in ours. (103.)
Cutting Ball’s costume design for the figure accorded with this dialogue (as well as
the character’s name). The traditional African attire of this character in the production
helped to construct the figure as the pre-colonial African ancestor of Black Man with
Watermelon. The resulting image was one of a proud, regal man, untainted by
European influences. Visually, the image served to undermine the representations of
weakened and reductionist black masculinity created by the costumes of the actors
playing Black Man with Watermelon and Old Man River Jordan. The use of these
contrasting stage images contributed to the way in which the play seeks to undercut
stereotypes of blackness by reclaiming a lost heritage which fortifies black identity.
Before Columbus (Robert Henry Johnson) in Cutting Ball’s San
Francisco production of The Death of the Last Black Man, directed by
Rob Melrose (2006).
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Cutting Ball also staged a dichotomy in their costuming of the actresses playing Black
Woman With Fried Drumsick and Queen-Then-Pharaoh-Hatshepsut. These designs
intensified the play’s revelation and interrogation of historical (masculine, European)
bias, as well as the gendered and racial stereotypes that this bias has helped to
produce. The actress playing Black Woman was dressed as a slave woman—a
Mammy figure complete with head-scarf and apron. Contrastingly, the company
visualised Queen-then-Pharaoh as a majestic figure, adorned in Egyptian finery. This
costuming of the actor playing Queen-then-Pharaoh was in keeping with her
grandiose, ‘Sheba-like’ status and dialogue (113). Moreover, it conjured the historical
origins of the character.147 This character was one of the few female pharaohs in
Ancient Egypt (Geis 65). Her inclusion in the play, as an ancient figure of female
political authority, can function to empower African-American women—and women
in general. Parks reminds us that there were authoritative women in ancient times that
should receive more recognition within the historical canon. As well as undermining
Black Woman With Fried Drumstick’s appearance as a stereotypical slave woman,
the imaging of Queen-Then-Pharaoh as royal and powerful helps to disrupt white,
male supremacy in recorded history. However, Parks’s uprooting of this fascinating
woman from ancient history has the potential to inspire stage images that promote
further gender-conscious enquiry.
Hatshepsut is distinctive because of her supposed habit of cross-dressing,
involving a fake beard as well as the use of men’s clothes (Geis 65). I would like to
suggest that staging a cross-dressed Hatshepsut figure in a production of The Death of
the Last Black Man has the potential to add another layer of gender-conscious
meaning to the play. Clothing styled on the more masculine garments of ancient
Egypt and a fake beard on the female actor would demonstrate how Hatshepsut used
masculine props to help her to perform the traditionally male Pharaoh role. The stage
image would accord with the character’s name, who would appear as a female that
has put on a layer of masculinity (Queen-Then-Pharaoh); the actor would, thereby,
both enact and wear the opposite gender—while remaining visibly female. As well as
exposing the deep-set historical links between masculinity and power, this strategy
could deconstruct such associations by reducing masculinity to a set of culturallyascribed props, such as men’s clothes and a beard. My other suggestion for this
147
For a discussion of how this character can help to deconstruct and feminise the patriarchal canon,
see Chapter Two.
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figure’s costume is based on viewing the historical character’s dress habits as a
possible early instance of power-dressing. Directors/costume designers could stage
Parks’s character accordingly, so that the actor would appear in a suit and tie
influenced by the ‘masculine’ women’s fashions of the 1980s. As well as giving the
character contemporary relevance, this would show how women continue to use
masculine props (in this case, clothes) to aid them in performances of power—from
ancient times to the present. In addition, these costuming ideas underline the key role
of clothing in constructing and informing identities.
Costume in Parks’s Venus
Parks’s move towards more traditional theatrical forms began with her Obie Awardwinning Venus (1996). Throughout much of the piece, Parks uses characterisation and
style to create the atmosphere of a spectacular side-show exhibition. Hence, the work
is at its best when conceptualised in lavish and colourful productions, infused with a
circus vibe.148 Venus blends aspects of Parks’s early experiments, such as mutable
personas, with a more conventional linearity. Hence, the play can be seen to represent
an intermediate phase in Parks’s career. While Venus signifies a step towards more
conservative structures, it is a work of radical potential. In particular, Venus probes
and deconstructs the historical and contemporary construction of black female
sexuality. The ways in which theatre practitioners use costume can support this
important cultural work.
Venus focuses on the iconography of black female sexuality and the bottom as
a metonymic symbol of black femininity. In doing so, the play explores the ways in
which racist societies have historically eroticised and ‘othered’ black women. Prior to
colonial conquests, large bottoms were already associated with prostitutes, and by
extension, promiscuity (Young 706). According to pre-Victorian medical reports,
many African women ‘suffered’ from a condition called ‘steatopygia’ which
148
In 1999, Salvage Vanguard Theater erected a big top tent in Austen, Texas for their particularly
extravagant production of Venus. The way in which this company visualised the play sought to mirror
circus spectacle, with brightly coloured costumes, masks, posters and the Negro Resurrectionist
appearing as a ringmaster. In fact, the circus vibe penetrated even the promotional material for the
production, which reflected the way in which a side-show act might be advertised. One image
contained a series of captions, with the first word in large, bold letters, including: ‘SEE! The Venus
Hottentot! She Has the Biggest Ass in the Entire World!’ and ‘TOUCH! Her Prodigious Buttocks! In
the Irresistible Feeling Booth!’ Evidently, Salvage Vanguard Theater went to great lengths to recreate
the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century freak show, and to accentuate the way in which Venus works
to make its audience complicit in the voyeurism and exploitation that it depicts.
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manifested itself as an enlarged posterior (Magubane 817). This contributed to the
notion that they were promiscuous and sexually deviant. By reimagining Baartman’s
exhibition, Parks excavates the historical construction of the black female body. The
character of The Mother-Showman encourages from the theatre’s audience and
spectators within the play the same prurience that Baartman’s difference elicited from
English society: ‘Paw her folks. Hands on. Go on have yr pleasure. / Her heathen
shame is real’ (46). Hence, this work creates a situation whereby its viewers are
pulled into a re-enactment of the nineteenth-century public behaviour which
contributed to the othering and essentialising of black femininity. The audience are
made complicit in Baartman’s subjugation. Moreover, the play’s staging of
spectatorship itself reflects the audience members’ voyeurism back onto them. These
disconcerting strategies jolt viewers into an awareness of how dominant culture has
exploited and degraded black women’s bodies.
Throughout the production history of Venus, designers have sought
aesthetically to craft the iconography of black femininity in their costuming of
actresses playing Baartman. These designs have helped to recreate and intensify the
historical figure’s exhibition(ism) in socially-conscious ways. When the work was
first performed at the New York Public Theater in 1996, for example, the actress
playing Baartman wore a skin coloured bodysuit that encompassed an oversized,
almost naked, bottom. Salvage Vanguard Theater’s 1999 production—aptly
performed in a circus tent in Austin, Texas—offered a similar interpretation. Here, the
designer used padding around the bottom and thighs, as well as darkened nipples, on a
costume close in colour to the actress’s skin. In these productions, The Venus on stage
was clearly in costume; however, the image was still erotic—even pornographic—
enough to attract the audience’s prurient graze. Elam and Rayner claim that the
provocative costume in the Public Theatre production had the power to stimulate
salacious consideration as to which elements of the image were parts of the actress’s
actual body (271). This is also applicable to Salvage Vanguard’s similar approach.
The play is a fictionalised palimpsest of historical events; however, in these
productions, the spectacle of the scantily-clad female body—and the accompanying
spectatorship—was still palpable. Moreover, Parks makes Baartman a compliant
exhibitionist on one level of the play, thereby evading simplistic models of oppressor
versus oppressed. This strategy also works to endow the reimagined pre-Victorian
events with contemporary relevance; female exhibitionism has become an icon of
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post-modern popular culture, particularly in music videos. The public exposure of
women’s bodies continues to attract controversy. Representations of the black female
posterior as simultaneously exotic and erotic both ‘recuperate the butt as a site of
black beauty’ and ‘continue to objectify and commodify black women through this
rear-end view’ (Elam and Rayner 281). The visual aesthetics in productions of Venus
have amplified the way in which the writing promotes complex enquiry regarding
historical and contemporary degradation, exploitation, exhibitionism and feminine
icons.
April Matthis as Miss Saartjie Bartmaan (centre) in Salvage Vanguard’s
circus tent production of Venus, directed by Jason Neulander in Austin,
Texas (1999).
Parks’s Venus works to deconstruct as well as to construct reductionist models
of black femininity. The play demonstrates how The Venus begins to accommodate to
the construction of Black woman as exotic, erotic spectacle, as for example when she
suggests to The Mother-Showman that she should spruce up her ‘act’ (51). Here, the
Venus is portrayed as having internalised prominent conceptions of her race and sex.
Moreover, she begins to act in accordance with how she is perceived. This reveals
how dominant culture can circumscribe and label the roles of marginal people, and
how such people begin to adopt and perform these, often oppressive, roles. Hence, the
play promotes awareness of how such images are inscribed and maintained. In
productions of Venus, such as those by Salvage Vanguard and the Public Theater, the
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costume design for the central role has also helped to expose the cultural fabrication
of black femininity. Elam and Rayner aptly sum up how the padded, enlarged bottom
worked at the Public Theater: ‘The butt clearly did not belong to the actress, but it
nonetheless gave the effect of total exposure […] Venus appears on stage as a
construction, materially showing the imaginary concept of black woman as “Venus”’
(271). In productions such as this, the artificiality of the costume exposed the figure of
the exotic, licentious black woman as a historically constructed fiction. In this way,
Parks’s play and some of the ways in which it has been staged combine to reveal the
performative, historically-constructed elements of black femininity.
Venus also stages trans-racial masquerading. In performance, this works to
reveal the fabrication of the black female body’s cultural meanings. Similar
enactments are also included in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, in which
black men masquerade as Abraham Lincoln. In ‘For the Love of a Venus’, a short
play that the Baron Docteur watches in Venus, the white The Bride-to-Be
masquerades as a black Hottentot woman. Her fiancé, The Young Man, wishes to
‘procure […] an oddity’, to ‘love something Wild’ before he marries (48). By
pretending to be black, The Bride-to-Be endeavours to fulfil The Young Man’s sexual
desire. The Young Man’s desire evokes the typical Imperial conflation of colonial and
sexual conquests. In a similar vein to the conquering of a foreign land, The Young
Man wishes to ‘take’ a supposedly untamed, uncivilised and exotic Other. This aspect
of Venus demonstrates the way in which white male desire has created its own illusion
of black femininity. The Bride-to-Be’s rouse successfully convinces her fiancé. This
shows the fictionality of his conception of black women.
In ‘For the Love of a Venus,’ The Bride-to-Be is presented to The Young Man
disguised as ‘The Hottentot Venus’ (132). The Public Theater production
conceptualised The Bride-to-Be’s disguise as a veil. This strategy imbued the image
with further meanings concerning how sexual desire can impact upon the
constructions of race and gender. The function of the veil, as a religious and cultural
icon, is often protection from the prurient male gaze; but, paradoxically, it can attract
male desire through concealment. The woman beneath it becomes simultaneously
exoticised and eroticised in the mind of the spectator, whose sexual fantasies fill the
void created by the veil. Elam and Rayner apply such ideas to the Public Theater’s
production of Venus:
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The uncertainty of who is behind the veil (the actress playing Venus, another?)
combines the two plays through concealment and indicates strongly the
familiar awareness of how white male desires project onto an imaginary, blank
Other, onto someone who is not there. (274.)
The Bride-to-Be’s embodiment of this ‘blank Other’ provides a vent for The Young
Man’s erotic desire, a desire that he is unwilling to project onto his fiancée, who he
sees as pure and idyllic. By masquerading as The Hottentot Venus, however, The
Bride-to-Be teaches The Young Man that both the erotic and wholesome facets of
love can be projected simultaneously onto the same female; male sexual desire for the
exotic Other, and the exotic Other itself, are thereby revealed as projections of
western patriarchy.
Like The Death of the Last Black Man, and indeed Carr’s Low in the Dark,
productions of Venus have used costume to stage visually conspicuous, artificial
images of gender. While in The Death of the last Black Man this works to usurp
gendered and racial stereotypes, in both Low in the Dark and Venus the artificiality of
these genders on stage work to question the authenticity of gender in society. Costume
design allows productions of both plays to stage bodies that are draped in fictional and
incongruent cultural meanings. If, in society, we perceive bodies through their
historically constructed meanings, then it can be argued that the ‘truth’ of the body is
comprised of those meanings. According to Butler, the body ‘does not accrue social
meanings as additive properties but, rather, is replaced by the social meanings it takes
on’ (Bodies 5). Low in the Dark and Venus reduce gendered (and in Venus, also
racial) bodies to the cultural significations that they evoke. In doing so, these works
demonstrate that—despite its physicality—the body is also culturally constituted.149
As well as exemplifying how theatricality can reveal performativity, these dramas
suggest ways in which theatre can employ costume to challenge the inscription of
sexual and racial difference at the level of culture.
149
For detailed explorations of the extent to which the body may be viewed as a socio-cultural
construction, and how notions of two polarised sexes function in authorising which bodies matter, see
Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter. Butler wrote this work partially in response to those who challenged
her theory of gender performativity on the basis of sexual difference. Here, Butler explores such
important questions as ‘Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialised? And how is it that
treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions of its
own emergence?’ (10).
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Clothing and Costume in Traditional Theatre
Costume design in productions of Parks’s and Carr’s early plays can work in
politicised ways. The dramatists carry forth this radical potential to their more recent
works. Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) and The Cordelia Dream (2008) and Parks’s In
the Blood (1999) and Topdog/Underdog (2001) promote gender conscious enquiry.
These dramas continue the interrogative functions of the earlier, more experimental
plays—especially in terms of the costuming opportunities that they provide for the
stage. Parks’s In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog contain more stage directions than
her earlier works; her guidelines concerning the use of clothing help theatre
practitioners to carve out important stage images. Such imagery reveals and dislodges
the naturalised, apparently seamless components of acceptable gender identities. In
this context, it can be argued that, Parks’s more conservatively-styled works promote
a more intensive rethinking of gender than early works such as The Death of the Last
Black Man. Carr’s Portia Coughlan and The Cordelia Dream can function in similar
ways. However, theatre practitioners play a central role in uncovering and
illuminating such deconstructive meanings, especially in terms of how clothing is
used. This analysis demonstrates how Carr’s interrogation of gender continues along
with her move towards more traditional, mainstream theatre. Ultimately, I am arguing
that these playwrights’ stylistic shifts did not compromise the subversive potential of
clothing and costume in their oeuvres.
Carr’s Portia Coughlan and The Cordelia Dream
Portia Coughlan stages an unconventional femininity. The deviant acts of the play’s
eponymous protagonist may be viewed as a challenge to the regulatory norms that
construct and maintain the accepted ideals of her gender. The play concerns the events
surrounding Portia’s thirtieth birthday, which is also the fifteenth anniversary of the
death of her twin, Gabriel. Gabriel committed suicide and, it transpires, he and Portia
had made a suicide pact; however, Portia failed to honour her end of the deal and is
haunted by her own remorse as well as Gabriel’s ghost. From the beginning of the
drama, Portia is portrayed as a transgressor of the norms of her homemaker status.
Her husband Raphael points out her failings as a wife and mother. In the first scene,
for example, he criticises her drinking in the morning, her refusal to participate in
domestic activities such as housework, and her lack of interest in her children (193209
194). Portia’s father later criticises her promiscuous and adulterous actions, ordering
her to ‘put a halter on [her] wayward arse’ (214). By examining the text and
comparing the differing ways in which directors have staged Portia Coughlan, I will
argue that the play provides opportunities for costume to enhance the ways in which
the drama interrogates oppressive models of femininity. Garry Hynes directed the first
production of the play at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in March 1996; the production
moved to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May of that year. More recently,
Bluepatch Productions staged Portia Coughlan at the New Theatre, Dublin, in
February 2009, under the directorship of Aoife Connelly. Butler’s theory of gender
performativity is a useful interpretative tool for examining this work.
Scene five of Portia Coughlan stages the protagonist’s resistance to the
constraints of her feminine role through an interaction with her mother Marianne
(156-157). Butler’s notion of gender as historically constructed and enforced by social
sanction illuminates the mother/daughter conflict. During these moments, Marianne
points out the untidiness of Portia’s house, claiming that her daughter rejects the
example of feminine behaviour that she has set for her: ‘You’d swear you were never
taught how to hoover a room or dust a mantel; bloody disgrace that’s what ya are’
(209). The stage directions reveal that, as Marianne attempts to tidy the house ‘with
impotent rage,’ Portia ‘undoes what she does’ (209). Actions speak louder than words
in this scene, as Portia’s movements nullify those of her mother; this expresses
Portia’s desire not only to erase what she now sees as mistakes (marrying Raphael,
having children and failing to follow through on her suicide pact with her twin
brother), but also to undo the historical, familial acquisition of the gender role that she
now finds so stifling. Butler draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in order
to explain that, rather than a natural fact, the gendered body is a historical
phenomenon:
As an intentionally organised materiality, the body is always an embodying of
possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In
other words, the body is a historical situation, as de Beauvoir has claimed, and
is a manner of doing, dramatizing and reproducing a historical situation.
(‘Performative Acts’ 156.)
Marianne tries to mould Portia into a reproduction of this ‘historical’ construction of
femininity through her own exemplary actions, circumscribed by society’s threat of
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punishment for resistance. According to Butler, gender is performed under a ‘situation
of duress […] with clearly punitive consequences’ (‘Performative Acts’ 156-157).
Marianne herself follows through on society’s threat by reprimanding her daughter for
her unconventional behaviour.
Portia Coughlan’s mother-daughter conflict reveals the coercive ways in
which acceptable ways of being are enforced. The protagonist’s disavowed
abjection—her unconventional behaviour and the way in which she is reprimanded as
a result—circumscribes her mother’s perceived rectitude. Nevertheless, Portia’s
location within an ‘uninhabitable’ zone of social life positions her in opposition to
normalcy, as a ‘threatening spectre’ that challenges the cultural hegemony.150 Indeed,
Carr describes the character as a ‘walking ghost’ who has been subsumed by the
‘shadow part’ of herself; the play, the dramatist claims, is about Portia’s ‘fight to stay
in the world on her own terms’ (Qtd. in White, ‘Twin Speak’). Butler views abjection
as a ‘critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic
legitimacy and intelligibility’ (Bodies 3). In the context of Butlerian performativity,
we may read Portia’s transgressive actions as resistance to the constraints of
prescribed, naturalised femininity.
Yet, critical responses to the first productions of the play, directed by Garry
Hynes with Dearbhle Crotty in the lead role, tend to focus on the hopelessness of
Portia’s story. Writing in the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole praises Crotty’s skill in
acting ‘the part of someone who knows from the start that she is doomed and
helpless’ (‘Figures’). Similarly, in his Irish Times review, Gerry Colgan admires
Crotty’s success in ‘living her pain and bitterness, growing to a despair beyond
redemption’ (‘Magnetic’). Both critics see Portia as self-destructive. The protagonist’s
stifling situation afforded her little sympathy in Joan Fitzpatrick Dean’s academic
review for Theatre Journal: she described Portia’s characterisation as ‘inherently
unsympathetic’ (234).151 Many reviewers elided the play’s potent conflict between
female redefinition and social compulsion. Instead, they saw Portia as wilfully self-
150
For Butler, those bodies and behaviours which are excluded from the dominant realms of social life
are as significant in defining the subject as those which are included. She sees the abject refers to an
‘unlivable’ zone populated by those who ‘do not enjoy the status of a subject, but whose living under
the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject’ (Bodies 3). She sees
abjection a ‘threatening spectre’ with the potency to ‘expose the self-grounding presumptions of the
sexed subject’ (ibid).
151
O’Toole attributes the cause of Portia’s death to ‘the knotty, incestuous society of a rural Ireland
that has seldom been painted in darker colours’ (‘Figures’).
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defeating, or honed in on the play’s tragedy: the way in which Carr moves the action
‘to a climax of revelation and catharsis’ (Colgan, ‘Magnetic’). This prompts the
question: Did these reviewers or did Hynes’s production overlook some of the
interrogative possibilities of Portia Coughlan?
In order to suggest how the feminist potential of this play can be developed
more fully—and how clothing can be effectively used in the process—I will consider
Bluepatch’s 2009 staging of the play. In Portia Coughlan, the purple dress that the
protagonist’s parents give her as a birthday present can be viewed as a symbol of
abiding, conventional femininity. The second act of this three-act play disrupts the
play’s linearity by revealing its tragic outcome. Based on Carr’s stage directions,
audience members become aware of Portia’s suicide as a pulley raises her limp body
from the Belmont River (223). The final act takes us back to the end of the first,
before Portia’s death. At the end of the penultimate scene, Portia puts on the purple
dress; this is an important action in terms of the significance of clothing in the play.
The stage directions in the final scene tell us that Portia ‘sets the table, lights candles,
opens wine, pours a glass, puts on diamond bracelet’ (252). The diamond bracelet was
a birthday gift from Raphael. Portia’s actions in this scene are usually viewed as her
final (and, of course, tragic) attempts to be happy. In her review of the 1996
production, Fitzpatrick Dean tells us that Portia, ‘[t]ransformed by the beautiful dress
that her mother gives her for her birthday, […] momentarily flirts with happiness’
(234). However, Bluepatch’s more recent performance reinterprets Portia’s actions
and the dress as cultural significations that accord with her family’s—and indeed,
society’s—conceptions of femininity. According to Butler:
The act that gender is, the act that embodied agents are inasmuch as they
dramatically and actively embody and, indeed, wear certain cultural
significations, is clearly not one’s act alone. Surely, there are nuanced and
individual ways of doing one’s gender, but that one does it, and that one does
it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions, is clearly not a fully
individual matter. (160.)
Playing Portia, Andrea Scott wore the purple dress over the long, red dress that she
had been wearing throughout the performance. While the red dress symbolises
Portia’s passionate resistance, the purple dress suggests the conformist, aesthetically
pleasing model of femininity that Portia’s parents, Marianne and Sly, had envisioned
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for her. Portia, in this production, visually embodied a struggle central to the play:
social compulsion veiling the threatening spectre of resistance.
Director Aoife Connolly describes the purple dress as Marianne and Sly’s
‘mark on Portia.’ In relation to her own interpretation of the purple dress, and how
Bluepatch used it in the performance, Connolly states:
I saw the dress as Portia’s way of conforming to society. […This is why]
Portia puts it on in a slow meditative way as if the action is making her numb
and dead inside. […] The following scene sees her in the purple dress
preparing a meal for Raphael; putting on the diamond bracelet all in an effort
to fulfil the familial role of dutiful wife and mother.
It was certainly an effort, as Scott performed Portia’s actions and delivered the
character’s dialogue in a weary, forced and ultimately ‘performed’ way during this
scene. Thus, what directors and scholars have often interpreted as Portia’s final
endeavour to be happy, Connolly reinterpreted as an affected attempt to conform to
the socially acceptable model of femininity that the other characters have been urging
the heroine to adopt. In this way, Bluepatch’s production of Carr’s text further
revealed the performativity of gender evident in Portia Coughlan.
Raphael (Ben Mulhern) and Portia (Andrea Scott) in Bluepatch’s production
of Portia Coughlan, directed by Aoife Connolly at the New Theatre, Dublin
(2009).
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Theatre practitioners play an important role in politicising a play text. The
Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Carr’s The Cordelia Dream (2008)
allows us to explore further how directors can develop the gender-conscious meanings
of Carr’s theatre. As the title suggests, The Cordelia Dream is based on King Lear.
The play concerns an aging composer who strives towards the creation of the
masterpiece that will secure his immortal fame. In two acts, it dramatises a parentchild power struggle between this character, Man, and his daughter, Woman—a more
successful composer. Man perceives Woman’s inherited artistry as her theft of his
talent and beseeches her to be silent so that he can achieve his true potential before his
death. It was first performed at Wilton’s Music Hall, London in December 2008,
where director Selina Cartmell’s artistic vision and Giles Cadle’s costume design
imbued the work with meanings that are relevant to Carr’s treatment of gender
throughout her dramatic oeuvre.
Under Cartmell’s direction, the RSC production of The Cordelia Dream
revealed clothing as part of the cultural constitution of gender. Clothing became
particularly significant during the action that continued on stage throughout the
production’s interval. While audience members chattered, moved about or left the
theatre, David Hargreaves (who was ideal as Carr’s Lear-like Man) remained on
stage, removing his clothing, shifting in and out of fretful sleep and, it appeared,
gradually going mad. This echoed Lear’s actions during act three of King Lear, in
which he simultaneously sheds his clothes and, it appears, the last shards of his sanity
as the storm rages. Perhaps this feature was added in the production to anticipate
Man’s commending of act three of King Lear as truly ‘sublime’ towards the end of
Carr’s play. However, the action during the interval was reminiscent of Lear’s
reference to ‘unaccommodated man’ in act three of King Lear.152 Cartmell had Carr’s
Lear-like figure identify with this notion of unaccommodated man; by removing his
clothing, he unravelled the culturally-informed, material signs of his masculine
identity. The shedding of his clothing, as well as his ensuing madness, can be
interpreted as transgressions of socially acceptable behaviour models.
Carr draws on aspects of King Lear in terms of the themes, issues and some of
the plot development of The Cordelia Dream. The RSC’s staging successfully
Before he begins to tear off his clothes, Lear states: ‘[…]. Ha! Here’s three on’s / are sophisticated;
thou art the thing itself, / unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, / forked animal as
thou art. Off, off, you lendings! / Come unbutton here’ (King Lear 3.4).
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furthered the links to King Lear—especially through the use Cadle’s costumes.
Moreover, visual elements helped to locate this work within Carr’s own dramatic
repertoire. For example, the production incorporated a stage image of a cross-dressed
female, a directorial decision that recalls the image of Binder wearing the hat and tails
in Low in the Dark. Hargreaves took a tuxedo out of a box and put it on to aid him in
an apparently delusional performance as a composer towards the end of the
production. Woman later ended up wearing the same tuxedo. Like the image of
Binder in Carr’s earlier work, the appearance in The Cordelia Dream of Woman
putting on and wearing the tuxedo functioned to problematise gender. Through the
incongruent appearance of Woman wearing Man’s tuxedo, the stage image isolated
and drew attention to the cultural significations of masculinity. Ultimately, it revealed
gender performativity by exposing masculinity as, in the words of Alisa Solomon, ‘a
disguise, a set of effects’ (Re-Dressing the Canon 7).
Woman (Michelle Gomez) and Man (David Hargreaves) in the
RSC’s production of The Cordelia Dream, directed by Selina
Cartmell at the Wilton’s Music Hall, London (2008).
Portia Coughlan and The Cordelia Dream offer contemporary, recognisable
characters and settings which deviate considerably from the placeless figures of her
early plays. Yet, the interrogation of gender that Carr began early in her career
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continues in these more recent works. Theatre practitioners’ artistic visions can make
the gender-conscious meanings of these plays more or less explicit. Visual aesthetics
and costume have carried consistent significance in Carr’s theatre. For example, This
Love Thing’s Mona Lisa character wears a frame which signifies women’s entrapment
within reductionist, patriarchal conceptions of femininity. In The Deer’s Surrender,
Alpha, Omega and Gamma are attached to pink crosses, satirising and feminising
masculine Biblical imagery. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Tilly in Ullaloo folds and
unfolds a red ball gown—a repetitive action that evokes the construction of her
gender in the context of Butlerian performativity.153 The Mai’s eponymous
protagonist presumably drowns in Owl Lake. Her daughter Millie tells us that The
Mai was subsequently laid out in a watery blue, silk gown (128-129). This
aesthetically furthers the link between The Mai and her folkloric predecessor, Coillte,
who dissolved in a lake of her own tears (which became Owl Lake). In By the Bog of
Cats…, the image of the multiple bride figures—all clad in white gowns—becomes a
farce that paradoxically subverts traditional feminine ideals. Woman, in Woman and
Scarecrow, muses over a red coat which metonymically represents her attachment to
her mother.154 Unfortunately, a detailed analysis of the use of clothing in each of these
works is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, Bluepatch’s production of Portia
Coughlan and the RSC’s production of The Cordelia Dream demonstrate how
costume can be used in ways that interrogate traditional masculinity and femininity,
and that reveal gender performativity. This shows that directors can build upon the
ways in which Carr challenges the male/female binary by using clothing as a
theatrical device. The theatre of Marina Carr has a visual potency, which is especially
evident in the early experiments. Dramaturgic strategies which exhibit awareness of
that potential can help to politicise her more conventionally-styled plays in a
commercial, mainstream context.
Parks’s In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog
Although Parks’s In the Blood dramatises the downfall of a social outcast, it offers
directors the opportunity to interrogate socially valued models of femininity. The play
was first produced at The Joseph Papp Public Theater in November 1999 with
153
Chapter 1 offers detailed analyses of these early works and their provocative visual aesthetics.
Chapter 2 examines Woman and Scarecrow in terms of the part played by perceived motherdaughter relations in the construction of the main character Woman’s maternal role.
154
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Charlayne Woodard in the lead role. Reviewing the production for Theatre Journal,
David Krasner commends Woodard’s performance and, although he criticises the
‘unimaginative’ staging of scene 7, he identifies aspects of this scene as occasions that
showcase the play’s potential in performance (567). In this scene—as with the final
scene of Portia Coughlan—clothing and other objects become significant in the
performance of culturally acceptable femininity. The action involves the return of
Chilli (Hester’s first love and the father of her firstborn), who carries with him a
basket of ‘props’, including a wedding dress, a veil and a ring. These props represent
the idealised version of femininity that he wishes Hester to adopt. According to the
stage directions, Chilli puts the wedding dress on Hester ‘right over her old clothes’
(90). This works in a similar way to the image of Portia wearing the purple dress
chosen by her parents over her customary red dress in Bluepatch’s production of
Portia Coughlan. The image of Hester wearing a wedding gown over her old clothes
visually constructs a layer of social legitimacy which only partially masks Hester’s
usual appearance. At this point, Hester’s customary apparel has become associated
with her status as a social outcast whose behaviour—condemned by the chorus—
threatens the cultural hegemony. Hence, in Scene 7’s layered stage imagery, the
socially acceptable version of womanhood that Chilli attempts to inscribe upon
Hester’s body becomes a set of effects that conceal the ‘real’ Hester.
The wedding dress represents a culturally acceptable model of femininity.
Chilli’s dialogue and his use of props in this scene are at odds with Hester’s abjection,
which reveals such models to be what Butler describes as ‘cultural fictions’
(‘Performative Acts’ 157). The following speech from Chilli shows how it is not
Hester that he wishes to marry but his own culturally informed fiction of what she
should be:
I carried around this picture of you. Sad and lonely with our child on yr hip.
Struggling to make do. Struggling against all odds. And triumphant.
Triumphant against everything. Like—hell, like Jesus and Mary. And if they
could do it so could my Hester. My dear Hester. (96.)
Chilli’s description of the photograph evokes religious iconography of the Virgin
Mary, and associated archetypal images of femininity in western culture. He attempts
to reduce Hester to a static, two-dimensional construction of ideal womanhood: a
sexually pure, stoical mother. However, the subsequent revelation that Hester has four
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additional children by fathers other than Chilli ruptures this static image. Her children
are the physical symbols of her promiscuity and the reality of Hester’s sexual
deviance explodes petrified conceptions of femininity.
Hester is unable to live up to the paradigm of abiding femininity, based on
purity and heterosexual monogamy. In the context of Butler’s theory of coercive
gender performativity, this protagonist—like Carr’s Portia—can be seen to suffer
punitive consequences as a result. From the beginning of the play, Hester’s
community has condemned her perceived deviance. Chilli also rejects Hester, and her
encounter with him can be viewed as a microcosm of the play’s staging of a punitive
society which functions to authorise or delegitimise, to include or to marginalise.
Having discovered her children, Chilli proceeds to seize back all his props—the ring,
the dress, the veil—and to replace in his basket these symbols of unfulfilled
possibilities. He apologises and exits following Hester’s final plea (96). Our
protagonist’s last grasp at happiness—or her last chance to conform to the model of
long-term heterosexual union and to perform as an acceptable wife and mother—
diminishes with Chilli’s departure.
Chilli’s actions—putting the dress on Hester, and presenting her with the ring
and veil—represents the way in which dominant cultural practises endow bodies with
polarised, gendered meanings. Like Portia, Hester’s inability to internalise these
requirements and perform in accordance with society’s expectations leads to her
tragic downfall. In both Portia Coughlan and In the Blood, transgressive, tragic
protagonists illuminate the stifling fallacies of gender. The wearing of symbolic
clothing in both plays signifies the wearing and embodying of gendered cultural
significations. Hence, directorial attention to the action of dressing, to costume and to
gendered accessories increases the impact of costume as a theatrical device and,
thereby, enhances the political potential of these two works.
While Topdog/Underdog adheres to the theatrical conventions of realist,
domestic tragedy more than any of Parks’s other dramas, this play offers her most
complex engagement with the social performances of gender and race. George C.
Wolfe first directed Topdog/Underdog in 2001 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and
on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre in 2002. Parks’s Pulitzer-winning
Topdog/Underdog offers a tense, plot-driven and ultimately tragic psychological
study of the relationship between two poverty-stricken brothers. The familiarity,
conventionality and perceived accessibility of the play’s style and structure must have
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contributed to its vast commercial success. With the advent of Topdog/Undedog, ‘it
became time to worry that the dramatist had sold out by leaving the avant-garde and
entering the Broadway mainstream’ (Geis 112). Yet, it can be argued that this drama
expands upon the political enquiry of Parks’s earlier works. Continuity is also evident
between Topdog/Underdog and the playwright’s more experimental pieces (Geis
114). Parks’s consideration of gender and race has developed organically, and, I
would argue, her analysis of these roles reaches its philosophical peak in
Topdog/Underdog. Focusing on the performance of masculinity, Topdog/Underdog
builds on the cultural work that Parks began with plays such as The Death of the Last
Black Man in the Whole Entire World. While the latter undermines stereotypes,
Topdog/Underdog questions the construction of gender itself. Therefore, in spite of—
or perhaps because of—its realist style, Topdog/Underdog excavates the nature of
human behaviour on a much deeper, more psychological and political plane.
Topdog/Underdog reveals identity as a synthetic construct. In their paper
entitled ‘Personality as a Work of Art’ (2000), M. Pérez-Alvares and J. M.GarcíaMontes discuss identity or personality as something which is created rather than
innate:
[I]t should be borne in mind that the very term ‘personality’ incorporates the
radically theatrical sense deriving from ‘person’, in principle an actor
(persona) in the sense of playing a character, but also as an actor in the sense
of an author responsible for his performance. (157.)
Pérez-Alvares and García-Montes go on to identify two distinct personality styles,
which can exist in different proportions depending on the individual, the demands of
the individual’s society, and the context in which he or she finds him- or herself: ‘In
this regard, the art employed in the creation of the personality might be “the art of
prudence,” if the interest is ethical, or “art for art’s sake”, if the interest is aesthetic
[…]’ (159). The identities that Lincoln and Booth try to create for themselves within
the world of the play demonstrate this dialectic of ethics and aesthetics. Lincoln
attempts to perform an ethically-motivated persona. He practices the art of prudence
in an endeavour to conform to an honest, socially acceptable model of masculinity:
LINCOLN: […] One day I was throwing the cards. The next day Lonny died.
Somebody shot him. I knew I was next, so I quit. I saved my life. (Rest) The
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arcade gig is the first lucky break Ive ever had. And Ive actually grown to like
the work. (30-31.)
Lincoln wishes to leave the dangerous life of the scam artist behind him, as well as
the persona that goes with it. He does this in order to conform to the moral demands
of society and earn an honest living. He is required to wear white face paint in order
to perform this role, which symbolically links his ethical aspirations to the dominance
of white culture. Booth strives to become the antithesis of this. He wishes to perfect
the three-card monte hustler’s fast-talking routine; the constructed, creative nature of
this identity is ultimately signified by Booth’s choice of the name 3-Card (14). This
name evokes one of the most prominent black American icons of contemporary,
western popular culture: the hip-hop artist. It is also a name that speaks of luck, scam,
crime and life on the edge, thus encapsulating a particular stereotype of black
masculinity. Booth’s appropriation of this identity lacks moral or ethical motivation.
He aspires to the image for purely aesthetic purposes: ‘3-Card’ is art for art’s sake.
However, each character’s former self betrays these aspirations. Parks
demonstrates this through Booth’s fumbled attempts to enact the three-card monte
scam; a successful performance would have initiated his desired identity. Lincoln’s
inability to hold down his job—in which a wax dummy finally replaces him—and his
subsequent return to the three-card monte fraud also shows how his previous persona
triumphs over the image he wishes to carve out for himself. However, even before he
has returned to his former profession, he has begun to practise the routine quietly
when he thinks that Booth is not watching (52-54). Such activities add weight to the
words of Lincoln’s ‘Best Customer’ at the theme park: ‘Yr only yrself—when no ones
watching’ (29-30).
Each of Topdog/Underdog’s two characters struggles with the perceived
dialectics of performance and reality, mimesis and nature.155 Ultimately, the play
works to unsettle the boundaries between image and essence in ways that demonstrate
the performativity of race and gender. Booth’s trauma regarding reality and
performance becomes evident from the beginning of the play. The audience first
In his essay entitled ‘Making It “Real”: Money and Mimesis in Suzan-Lori Parks’s
Topdog/Underdog’, Jon Dietrick provides an in depth analysis of the reality/performance,
nature/mimesis dialectics that are at work in this drama. In his view: ‘Always and everywhere in the
play, Lincoln’s words, actions, and mere appearance foreground the discrepancies between surface and
meaning, nature and mimesis, intellectual and material value that so traumatise his younger brother. To
look at the issue of ‘essential’ versus ‘surface’ identity in Lincoln is to experience the vertigo of
stripping away layer upon seemingly endless layer of meaning.’ (3.)
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encounters him engaged in his own ‘studied and awkward’ mimesis of the three-card
monte hustle (11). It later becomes clear that this was his brother’s former livelihood.
Performance psychosis is revealed through Booth’s reaction to Lincoln’s entrance.
Booth is ‘spooked’ by the appearance of his brother dressed as the dead president that
is his namesake: ‘And woah, man dont ever be doing that shit! Who the fuck you
think you is coming in my shit all spooked out and shit. You pull that one more time
I’ll shoot you!’ (3). Booth’s anxiety is so potent that he even pulls a gun on
Lincoln.156 He uses the term ‘disguise’ to describe Lincoln’s attire, which underlines
the sinister connotations the appearance of his brother in white-face holds for him. As
the action progresses, it becomes clear that Booth’s uneasiness with his brother’s
appearance in the opening moments of the play stems from a struggle to distinguish
between the authentic and the simulacrum or a tendency to conflate the real and the
sign. In his analysis of reality and mimesis in Topdog/Underdog,
Jon Dietrick
observes that ‘Booth’s approach to three-card monte is of a piece with a general
approach to life he evinces throughout the play, one that values word of action,
symbol over referent, appearance over essence’ (48). Dietrick supports his argument
by evoking the dialogue between the brothers regarding the telephone. For Booth, the
value of this object lies not in its functionality, but in the outward image that
possessing a telephone helps to convey to women (Topdog/Underdog 27).157
The way in which Booth places more value on image than essence is
particularly evident in the relevance placed on clothing in the text, particularly in
scene two. Booth enters, appearing to be ‘bundled up against the cold’ (20). During a
busy day of shoplifting, he has acquired props which can be used by himself and
Lincoln to perform as—or in his view, to become, more successful men:
From his big coat sleeves he pulls out one new shoe then another, from
another sleeve come two more shoes. He then slithers out a belt from each
sleeve. He removes his coat. Underneath he wears a very nice new suit. He
removes the jacket and pants revealing another new suit underneath. The suits
still have the price tags on them. He takes two neckties from his pockets and
two folded shirts from the back of his pants. (20.)
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For Booth, the gun is an important prop for the performance of the kind of masculinity that he
wishes to embody.
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‘Booth: […] She gives you her number and she asks for yrs. You give her yr number. The phone
number of yr home. Thereby telling her 3 things: 1) you got a home, that is, you aint no smooth talking
smooth dressing homeless joe; 2) that you is in possession of a telephone and a working telephone
number which is to say that you got thuh cash and thuh wherewithal to acquire for yr self the worlds
most revolutionary communication apparatus and you together enough to pay yr bills!’ (27).
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After they have put on the suits, Booth tells Lincoln, ‘You look like the real you’; he
also encourages him to wear the suit around as it will make him feel good ‘and when
you feel good yll meet someone nice’ (25). The suits represent the conventional image
of the successful working man: the traditionally male ‘breadwinner.’ For Booth,
wearing these clothes, possessing the props of culturally viable masculinity, allow the
brothers not to perform as, but to become successful men. This is also indicative of a
western postmodern condition in which the sign subsumes its referent. Discussing the
American tendency towards self-creation, Neal Gabler tells us that by the 1970s in
America ‘performance had overtaken substance’ (198). Gabler goes on to discuss the
importance of clothing in the creation of the self. He tells us that in contemporary life,
‘clothes don’t really make the man; clothes are the man. Or, in the immortal words of
tennis star Andrei Agassi, as expressed in a commercial for Canon cameras, “Image is
everything.” And, conversely, “Everything is image”’ (206).
Booth (Mos Def) and Jeffrey Wright (Lincoln) in the Broadway
Topdog/Underdog, directed by George C. Wolfe (2002). Photo: Michal Daniel.
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Lincoln, on the other hand, evokes the costume he wears to work in an attempt to
contest Booth’s conflation of the clothes and the man, appearances and reality:
They say the clothes make the man. All daylong I wear that getup. But it dont
make me who I am. Old black coat not even real old just fake old. […] Dust
from the cap guns on the left shoulder where they shoot him, where they shoot
me I should say, but I never feel like they shooting me. (24.)
However, it becomes clear that Lincoln is as traumatised by the dialects of
appearances and reality as his younger brother. Although he asserts that the costume
does not ‘make’ him, at the end of the scene he ‘puts it on slowly, like an actor
preparing for a great role: frock coat, pants, beard, top hat, necktie’ (32). This conveys
the reverence he has for his job as well as how seriously he takes his ‘performance.’
Waking up in the costume in scene four, he becomes quite agitated. According to the
stage directions, he ‘claws at the Lincoln get-up, removing it and tearing it in the
process’ (50). These actions transform his statement that the costume does not ‘make’
him into more of a question than an assertion. But Lincoln’s own conflation of
representation and reality is ultimately conveyed in his rhythmic description of the
acts that take place during his working day:
But on the wall opposite where I sit theres a little electrical box, like a fuse
box. Silver metal. […] And thats where I can see em. The assassins. (Rest)
[…] And when the gun touches me he can feel that Im warm and he knows Im
alive. And if Im alive than he can shoot me dead. And for a minute, with him
hanging back there behind me, its real. (45.)
The brothers’ exchange regarding their estranged father’s clothes is also
revelatory in terms of Lincoln’s apprehension about the real and the sign, as well as
broader ideas about the historical, familial construction of gender. The brothers’
father’s clothes remained in his wardrobe after he abandoned his family. It transpires
that Lincoln burned the clothes because he ‘got tired of looking at them without him
[his father] in them’ (24). The clothes are the traces that the father has left behind;
they are the signs of how he constructed his image, his body. Lincoln’s destruction of
the clothes reveals his inability to separate these material components of his father’s
appearance from his actual father. This furthers the way in which this work
deliberately fuses and confuses reality and appearances—bodies and their gendered
and raced significations.
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In brothers’ dialogue regarding their father’s wardrobe, the image of clothing
can be seen to demonstrate how gender is acquired in society. Booth states in relation
to their father’s garments: ‘He had some nice stuff. I would look at his stuff and
calculate thuh how long it would take till I was big enough to fit it. Then you went
and burned it all up’ (24). Booth’s revelation of the boosted suits prompts the
brothers’ discussion of their father’s clothes. The stolen clothing may be seen to
compensate for Booth’s inability to, quite literally, fill his father’s shoes. In The
Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claims that ‘woman’ is a historical situation (38). De
Beauvoir’s argument, which inspired theorists such as Butler, implies that gender is
an act that is learned by example. If we consider the male items of clothing (the stolen
suits, the father’s garments) in Topdog/Underdog to represent the acceptable cultural
construction of masculinity, as Booth sees it, then his desire to fit one day into his
father’s clothes demonstrates masculinity as a historical situation. We have already
seen that Booth’s attempts to construct a persona are motivated by aesthetics. This
dialogue with Lincoln proves that his performance of masculinity, supported by the
stolen accessories, seeks to emulate a paternal example. The ethically-motivated
Lincoln, however, attempts to reject this version of masculinity—firstly by burning
the suits and secondly by obtaining ‘a sit down job’, ‘[w]ith benefits’ (48). However,
unable to avoid the behaviour he has learned through family history, he returns to the
volatile profession of the three-card monte hustler, a profession that is more in
keeping with the example of irresponsible behaviour that his father has set out for
him.
The gap between Booth’s aspirations and his anxieties offers for consideration
the immense pressures faced by contemporary men to achieve both sexual and
financial viability. Booth seeks to embody what he sees as successful masculinity by
appropriating the signs of the role. As we have seen, the suit allows him to appear to
have money. This, from the character’s perspective, is the same as having money. It
seems from the action in scene five that Booth has appropriated the material signs of
an active sex life for a similar purpose. In preparation for Grace’s visit (which never
materialises), he has acquired ‘2 matching silk dressing gowns, very expensive,
marked “His” and “Hers”’ (56). He strives to embody an aesthetic model of sexually
and financially proficient masculinity, but the audience’s awareness of his poverty
and non-existent sex life exposes the fabrication of the role. His actual ignorance and
insecurity about sex is revealed when he asks his brother’s advice on condoms (37).
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Lincoln suggests Magnums, which he says are ‘for “the larger man.”’ It is clear from
Booth’s response, (‘Right. Right.’), and from his fidgeting with the condoms that he is
unsure if his ‘masculinity’ will measure up to that of those for whom the condoms are
intended (38). Evidently, Booth appears to have an inferiority complex about his
manhood, which is exacerbated by his relationship with his brother. He taunts
Lincoln, by comparing him to the guns at the theme park, which only shoot plastic
bullets: ‘Yeah, like you. Shooting blanks’ (43). Yet, his jeers conceal his own
diffidence about sex. Booth endeavours to project his own sexual anxiety onto
Lincoln by suggesting that his brother is infertile.
In Topdog/Underdog, the icon of the gun may be seen as a symbol of,
or a substitute for, masculinity; hence, Booth’s dependence on his gun illuminates his
insecurity regarding his manhood. It becomes evident in the course of the play that
much of Booth’s relationship with Grace is non-existent. The details that he relays to
his brother constitute idle bragging, which compensate for his feelings of masculine
inferiority. He partially relieves the sexual frustration, which is induced by his lack of
a sex-life, by masturbating to the pornographic magazines that he hides under his bed.
When Lincoln challenges Booth’s claim of sex with Grace on the basis of the
pornographic magazines which, as he points out, are clearly still in use, Booth replies,
‘[i]f I wasnt taking care of myself by myself […] Id be out there doing who knows
what, shooting people and shit. Out of need for unresolved sexual release. Im hot
man. I aint apologizing for it’ (40). The link that Booth makes between sexual
frustration and violence is prophetic in relation to the outcome of the play. His libido
appears to be redirected through the gun as a phallic symbol; his frustration is relieved
through the pulling of the trigger, which becomes a symbolic ejaculation, firstly
offstage with Grace, then with Lincoln at the end of the play. These two characters
frustrate Booth’s perception of his sexuality: his inferiority complex, which mainly
concerns his masculinity, seems to exist in relation to his older brother. Grace, on the
other hand, antagonises him through rejection and sexual deprival. Eliminating them
both provides temporary relief from these sex-related anxieties.
Prior to his ‘symbolic ejaculation,’ however, Booth attempts to delude both
himself and his brother through his performative actions and fabricated stories,
particularly in relation to his sex life. This bravado is particularly evident in scene
three. As he enters, his moves are described as ‘exaggerated, rooster-like’ (33). He
deliberately slams to the door to wake Lincoln so that he can brag about how Grace
225
allowed him to make love to her ‘Dogstyle […in] front of a mirror’ (36). As well as
Grace’s failure to show up for her date with Booth in scene five and her absence
throughout the play, Lincoln confirms the fictive nature of his brother’s sexual
encounter when he announces: ‘You didnt get shit tonight’ (39). However, even
though Booth has fabricated the sexual encounter with Grace, the ‘dogstyle’ position
and the mirror further exemplifies the way in which Booth values the sign over the
real.
Like Carr’s Low in the Dark, Topdog/Underdog deconstructs gender by
dislodging its cultural components, which are often represented by clothing and
accessories in each of these works. In these plays, to use Butler’s terminology, sex ‘is
replaced by the social meanings it takes on’ (Bodies 5). The bottom may be viewed as
a metonymic symbol of black femininity, as discussed in the section concerning
Venus. Booth’s bragging about the dogstyle position also demonstrates the
fetishisation of the black female posterior. In terms of the rest of Grace’s body, during
his (albeit, imaginary) sexual act, Booth sees only the signs of black femininity: a
reflection of the black female body and a fetishized posterior. The description
demonstrates Booth’s obsession with signs. Moreover, by isolating the cultural
significations of black femininity, it reveals the construction of gender and race; or, in
Butler’s terms, the cultural materialisation of the body. Other aspects of the play also
work to isolate material components or signs of gender, for example the image created
by the brothers’ dialogue regarding their father’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe.
When Lincoln and Booth discuss how their parents abandoned them, Lincoln explains
that his father gave him ‘10 fifties in a clean handkerchief’ (66). Similarly, their
mother gave Booth his inheritance ‘in a nylon stocking’ (99). Each brother is attached
to an item because of its symbolic link to a parent. Their father and mother—and by
extension masculinity and femininity—are replaced by signs of the genders: a
handkerchief and a stocking, respectively. Carr’s Low in the Dark places a similar
emphasis on clothing which is particularly evident when Baxter and Bone reduce their
former lovers to a pink sock and a blue slip (23). On a similarly phenomenological
level, the evocation of the signs of masculinity and femininity in Topdog/Underdog,
separated from their actual referents, operates to break the genders down into their
cultural components. Like Carr’s Low in the Dark, Topdog/Underdog isolates the
material constituents of gender in order to diffuse its components and deconstruct its
apparently seamless fixity.
226
Topdog/Underdog contains more stage directions than Parks’s earlier pieces;
her advice helps to create stage images in which clothes represent the culturally
constituted layers of gender. While, with the earlier works, Parks left ideas about
costuming to the production team, the stage directions in Topdog/Underdog instruct
directors to use clothing and costume in ways that show the gaps and fissures in the
sedimentation of masculinity (Butler, Bodies 10). Clothes can be seen to reveal the
cultural materialisation of gender, both in the text of the play (as we have seen) and in
the opportunities that it provides for the stage. Scene two exemplifies the play’s
deconstructive potential in performance. As the scene opens, the stage directions
encourage theatre practitioners to create an image of Booth removing layer after layer
of masculine cultural significations: the boosted suits (20). The scene promotes a use
of dressing and undressing which stimulates enquiry regarding the construction of the
gendered body. If the suits represent culturally acceptable masculinity, then the image
of Booth removing the stolen clothing can stage a breakdown, an unravelling of the
role. Each of the brothers proceeds to put on one of the suits. Wearing these suits (or
props), they budget Lincoln’s wages, performing the roles of successful, responsible
men. Finally, the scene closes with Lincoln putting on his theme park costume ‘like
an actor preparing for a great role’ (32). The President Lincoln costume represents the
ethically motivated identity that Lincoln wishes to embody because it is linked to ‘a
sit-down job with benefits.’ Lincoln’s ‘whiting up’ is a requirement of the position,
which symbolically associates the achievement of socially-sanctioned gender
identities with assimilation into dominant culture. If we consider the costume to
represent acceptable, conformist masculinity, then the stylised way in which Lincoln
puts it on can highlight the performativity of this role. Bluepatch’s production of
Portia Coughlan highlights the artifice of ‘correct’ femininity through the slow,
meditative way in which Portia puts on its cultural significations. Similarly, the stage
directions of Topdog/Underdog suggest slow and obviously performed actions that
demonstrate the fabrication of acceptable masculinity.
Certain directors, such as Leah Gardiner, have maximised the significance of
clothing in productions of the Topdog/Underdog. Gardiner directed the Philadelphia
premiere of the play at the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2003. She describes the
costume design for the production as follows:
227
Moving on to the clothes: the costume designer, Andre Harrington, decided to
use a layering effect by creating different odd costume pieces. If you look at
the Lincoln character by the street playing three-card monte, he has cuffs
around his wrists which have been cut off from a shirt, and he wore a dicky
over that in the place of a jacket. The cuffs for us represented shackles,
historical shackles that slaves wore. For me they represent not just that but
also the huge number of incarcerated black men in the United States today,
whom Lincoln and Booth could very well join at any given point in their lives.
(‘Remarks on Parks II’)
The approach to clothes in this production exemplifies the ways in which directors
and costume designers can use garments to further the play’s engagement with the
construction of black male identity. Gardiner describes the approach to costume in her
production as ‘taking a naturalistic thought and blowing it up in an attempt to react to
Suzan-Lori’s sensibility’ (‘Remarks on Parks II’). In this way, the decisions regarding
costuming in this production of Topdog/Underdog resembled those in Bluepatch’s
Portia Coughlan, as well as the RSC’s The Cordelia Dream. These productions of
Carr’s work appear to free the plays from the constraints of traditional theatre by
emphasising elements that resemble Carr’s more experimental pieces, particularly in
terms of costume design. Similarly, Gardiner and Harrington’s endeavours to react to
Parks’s sensibility in the Philadelphia premiere of Topdog/Underdog helped to locate
the work within the dramatist’s oeuvre as a whole. These productions of Parks’s and
Carr’s dramas show attentiveness on stage to the significant visual power which is
evident throughout the playwrights’ works. Moreover, such performances
demonstrate how theatre practitioners can intensify the gender-conscious meanings of
theatre by using clothing as a theatrical device.
Like many ‘minority’ writers, Parks uses the form of white middleclass
patriarchy to deconstruct dominant assumptions.158 Topdog/Underdog utilises
clothing in the exchanges between the two characters, as well as in the costuming
opportunities it provides for the stage, in order to unsettle the dialectics of nature and
mimesis, interior essence and exterior acts. By demystifying naturalised conceptions
of masculinity, the play demonstrates the instability of the role. According to Butler
‘gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts
proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted
158
The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990), edited by Abdul JanMohamed and David
Lloyd, is a collection of essay that explores these and other issues. JanMohamed and Lloyd’s
introduction is particularly useful.
228
through a stylised repetition of acts’ (‘Performative Acts’ 154). The style of this piece
enables Parks to pursue the subject of gender performativity on a more psychological
and philosophical level than her early experiments. Parks’s appropriation of
mainstream techniques, and her subsequent assimilation into the mainstream
institution, might be seen as problematic from some feminist perspectives. As
discussed in Chapter 1, feminist theorists have implicated institutionalised western
theatre, and its traditionally prominent forms, in maintaining racist, sexist and classist
ideologies. Yet, this analysis suggests that Topdog/Underdog’s psychologically
developed characters and recognisable language and setting actually work to deepen
and intensify the dramatist’s interrogation of gender and race. Her commercial
success with plays such as Topdog/Underdog and In the Blood has allowed her to
stimulate social enquiry in a much wider audience.
Conclusion
Clothing, as a theatrical device, not only calls attention to theatre’s own
representational strategies, but can help theatre to function as a site of feminist or
gender-conscious resistance. On stage, costume can be employed in ways that expose
the sedimentary, materialisation of sex. Parks and Carr create works in which costume
can be seen to represent the culturally constituted ‘layers’ of the gendered body.
Masculinity and femininity appear natural and impermeable, but these playwrights
offer opportunities for theatre to make visible the layers or components, cracks and
fissures of this binary construction. By isolating and revealing certain elements of its
constitution, Parks and Carr rupture the stability of gender and, by extension, sexual
difference.
Both Carr and Parks expose gender as a culturally-informed performance
throughout their respective oeuvres. Clothing may be viewed as a prop in this cultural
performance in many of their plays. In works such as Carr’s Portia Coughlan and The
Cordelia Dream and Parks’s In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog, the dramatists
depart from their early experimentations by appropriating the mimetic conventions of
realism and tragedy. Yet, as this analysis shows, these works can expose gendered
bodies as performative and culturally constituted. Moreover, attention to the
dramatists’ visual sensibilities allows directors and costume designers to expand upon
the gender conscious meanings in these works. It seems appropriate to return to
229
Dolan’s question in her 1993 essay, ‘Geographies of Learning’: ‘How can the liveness
of theatre performance reveal performativity?’ (431). Analysing these playwrights’
works reveals that a subversive or politicised use of the visual, material signs of
gender, such as clothing and costume, can endow the ‘theatre performance’ with the
potential to ‘reveal performativity.’ Carr’s and Parks’s plays in performance
artistically demonstrate the performativity of gender.
As Butler explains in ‘Performative Acts,’ simply demonstrating that gender
may be performative has, in itself, transformative power. She goes on to explain that
if we consider gender to be constituted, then it is capable of being constituted
differently (154-155). Parks and Carr deconstruct gender in ways that destabilise its
authoritative fixities and promote the possibility of accepting diverse, multifarious
identities. So, although these playwrights’ accommodations towards the mainstream
are subjects of apprehension from political perspectives, each playwright continues to
provide opportunities for the theatrical deconstruction of gender in her more realist
works.159
159
In her discussion of Topdog/Underdog, Deborah R. Geis explores the apprehension with which
politically conscious reviewers received the play, noting that ‘it became time to worry that the
dramatist had sold out by leaving the avant-garde and entering the Broadway mainstream’ (112). In
relation to Carr’s stylistic shift, Claire Wallace notes, ‘[f]rom the perspective of positive, politically
aggressive feminism, Carr’s work might be said to have developed in a negative sense veering from a
playful satirical feminism to grim patriarchal tragedy’ (‘Crossroads’ 87).
230
Conclusion
This thesis has drawn on a wide range of feminist theory, and particularly concepts of
the ‘performative’ espoused by Dolan and Butler, to argue that Marina Carr and
Suzan-Lori Parks challenge oppressive traditions in ways that encourage us to
imagine new possibilities. Rather than providing coercive models for a better future,
which runs the risk of installing new naturalised authorities, these dramatists make
visible the construction and materialisation of dominant, gendered conventions in
order to pave the way for resistance. The thematic structure of the thesis, which traced
the development of gender-conscious meanings in Carr’s and Parks’s theatre from the
page to the stage, has sought to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the
transformative power of these playwright’s works.
Chapter 1 applied feminist discourse from the late1970s to the early 1990s to
Carr’s and Parks’s early plays in order to illuminate the subversive power of these
works, which was missed by reviewers at the time. Drawing on theatre theory and
historiography, the analysis revealed that the highly experimental forms, surreal
content and fringe production contexts of many of these plays satisfied a concurrent
materialist feminist quest for drama that deviates from the commercial, institutional
theatre and its conventions. Moreover, the critical framework that has now become
known as l’écriture feminine, encompassing the work of Cixous, Irigaray and
Kristeva, can help us to better understand Parks’s and Carr’s theatre at this stage. The
cycles and repetitions evident in each dramatist’s early theatre can be seen to evoke
Kristeva’s idea of ‘Women’s Time.’ Irigaray’s ideals concerning formal features that
unfix meaning and Cixous’ exploration of the ways in which literature can express a
desire for union with the pre-oedipal mother are relevant to each playwright’s use of
mutable personae and surreal, often placeless scenarios. In this context, Carr and
Parks can be seen—through their early plays—to have established themselves as
feminist thinkers.
The first chapter touched on issues concerning maternity by employing
l’écriture feminine, which seeks to celebrate women’s reproductive bodies and
‘cyclical’ experiences of time. Chapter 2 continued to explore the feminist potential of
Carr’s and Parks’s plays by honing in on the ways in which the playwrights have
represented motherhood throughout their theatre careers. It analysed and
231
contextualised each playwright’s move from satirical (Carr) or celebratory (Parks)
images of maternity to their more provocative, politically-charged engagements with
motherhood in the later works. Carr and Parks move towards criticising Irish, black
American and western maternal icons. In the later plays, they seek to denaturalise
maternity, reveal maternal performativity and challenge a right-wing binary of ‘good’
and ‘bad’ mothering in comparable ways. In doing so, they expose the oppressions of
the traditional family structure and raise questions concerning the perceived value of
women’s bodies, suggesting that some women might choose life-paths other than
traditional motherhood.
Maternal infanticide features in Carr’s and Parks’s ‘Hester’ plays, By the Bog
of Cats…, In the Blood and Fucking A. This was discussed in detail in Chapter 2, and
Chapter 3 furthered that exploration by examining these plays in the context of the
literary works that influenced them: Euripides Medea and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter. Chapter 3 focused Carr’s and Parks’s historical revisionist activities, achieved
through their comparable uses of theatrical appropriation. Deconstructive approaches
to literary traditions, which each playwright began early in her career by using
experimental theatre, are continued in many of the works under scrutiny here—albeit
in more conventional forms. The chapter also examined Carr’s re-imaginings of King
Lear and Parks’s appropriations of history. These works seek to insert marginalised
perspectives into western literary and historical canons. Moreover, these plays seek to
question the value and validity of those canons. Carr and Parks appropriate literature,
history and dominant theatre forms in ways that illuminate and probe those invisible
authorities that privilege, exclude and ascribe value. In doing so, they promote
possibilities for alternative mythologies and subvert the dominant cultural suppression
of perspectives which might threaten the status quo.
Chapter 4 moved from an exploration of the playwright’s subversive
engagements with literary traditions to a theoretical application of research in the field
of narratology. Narratology, as well as Butlerian performativity, helps to illuminate
the ways in which these playwright’s reveal the ‘storied’ nature of heterosexual,
romantic love in the west. This chapter moved towards analysing performance by
examining the ways in which the playwrights incorporate storytelling, as well as
gendered routines and rituals, to achieve disruptive metatheatrical effects. It also
examined how scenography and direction can help to challenge socially-sanctioned
western paradigms of gendered courtship and the institution of marriage in
232
productions of the works in question. Ultimately, the research revealed that plays
from Carr’s Ulalloo (1991) to Marble (2009) and from Parks’s Betting on the Dust
Commander (1987) to Topdog/Underdog (2001) have the potential to expose gender
performativity and lay bare the repetitious fabrications of heterosexual monogamy.
The focus of this thesis on the way in which Carr and Parks reveal gender
performativity culminated in Chapter 5. This final chapter analysed issues concerning
the body and the significance of clothing in these dramatist’s plays. Clothes, in
several of these playwright’s works, can be interpreted as gendered cultural
significations; with special attention to staging and costume design, clothes can
become important theatrical devises in performance. This part of the thesis explored
various play texts and productions to show how clothing and costume design can
reveal the performance of gender and the materialisation of sex. This, in the context of
Butler’s theories, has transformative power since rupturing naturalised conceptions of
the genders enables us to imagine these roles anew.
The early plays of Parks and Carr are politically-charged, as well as formally
and thematically subversive. For this reason, it can be argued that these works deserve
to be more regularly revived. Yet, these plays are hugely overshadowed by the
dramatists’ later works. I hope that this project will advance awareness of the
aesthetic and political potential of these early works, and that my research will
stimulate further analysis of important plays that have slipped into obscurity. Both
Parks and Carr continue to challenge oppressive, gendered traditions in their recent,
more conventionally-styled dramas. The dramatists use characters who are unwilling
or unable to perform viable models of gender to deal with issues of marginality and
exclusion, to reveal gender performativity and, ultimately, to suggest that there might
be alternative, more inclusive ways living and organising society. Moreover, by
reinterpreting revered texts, and deconstructing ideals of origins and authenticity, each
playwright ruptures the foundations of exclusionary traditions. These comparable
strategies suggest that Parks and Carr belong to a generation of playwrights that
renounce oppressive categorisations.
The research in this dissertation, and particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, proposes
the important role of theatre practitioners in politicising a play text. The works of
Parks and Carr promote a staging of subversive, visually-arresting images; costume
design is especially significant in this context. Plays written by Carr and Parks from
the mid-1990s on continue to be produced internationally. Hence, there is room for an
233
on-going and more extensive analysis of visual signifiers such as costume, set design
and gesture in productions of these dramatists’ works. This project is the first major
comparative study of the theatre works of Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks, and it
has sought to illuminate new ways of understanding each playwright’s work. I hope
that this thesis, like the plays of Parks and Carr, can promote further enquiry—
specifically regarding the gender-conscious meanings of contemporary theatre from
both within and without the mainstream institution.
234
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