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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 74 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 76 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). 77 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. 78 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 79 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 80 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 81 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). 82 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 83 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 84 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 85 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 86 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 87 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. 88 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.) 89 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 90 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). 77 91 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 92 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.’ 93 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 94 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 95 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 96 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 97 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). 98 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 99 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. 100 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 101 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. 81 102 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. 82 103 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. 104 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.’ 105 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 106 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). 83 107 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. 108 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. 109 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). 88 110 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 111 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). 112 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. 91 113 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). 114 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). 115 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 116 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). 96 117 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.’ 118 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 119 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. 99 120 “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 121 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 122 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 123 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. 100 124 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 102 125 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). 126 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). 127 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. 128 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 129 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. 106 130 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: 131 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 132 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 133 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 134 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’ 135 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 138 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 139 ‘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 142 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 144 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 146 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. 147 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, 148 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. 110 149 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 150 ‘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 151 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 153 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. 160 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 161 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. 162 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, 163 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 164 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 165 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. 166 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). 122 167 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 168 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: 169 [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). 170 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). 124 171 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 172 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.) 173 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 174 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 175 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 176 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 177 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 178 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. 179 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 180 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 181 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 182 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. 183 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. 184 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). 130 185 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). 131 186 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. 133 187 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. 188 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. 189 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). 135 190 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. 136 191 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). 139 192 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). 193 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 194 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. 141 195 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. 142 196 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, 197 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 198 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. 199 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 200 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. 145 201 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). 202 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. 203 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. 204 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 205 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 206 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: 207 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). 208 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 210 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’). 211 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 212 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). 213 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). 152 214 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 215 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. 154 216 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 217 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 218 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 219 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.) 155 220 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.) 156 For Booth, the gun is an important prop for the performance of the kind of masculinity that he wishes to embody. 157 ‘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). 221 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. 222 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. 223 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). 224 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. 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