Читать книгу Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History - D.A. Hadfield - Страница 10

To begin redressing this absence, feminists³ have begun to write the gaps in the stages of a History that has excluded women. These historical (re)visions must address the traditional separation between “public” and “private” spaces and render visible a female tradition in both drama and theatre that has been publicly erased. Tracy Davis articulates a mandate for feminist theatre historians that begins by problematizing the boundaries between public and private: “If feminist historians are going to rewrite history, the revisions must cut deeply. Not only lives have been left ‘blank.’ The importance of theatre as a medium of culture, the social context of performers and performance, and assumptions inherent in the ‘unrevised’ versions of history are all issues central to the study of public figures (particularly women) whose livelihoods depended on the observation and approval of private individuals (particularly men)” (64). In Feminism and Theatre, a major work of recuperative theatre historiography, Sue-Ellen Case points out that women have a tradition of playwrighting, that is to say, play “making,” dating back at least to the early Roman era. Women, who were denied access to traditional “public” theatrical venues, could nonetheless support themselves to some degree by becoming street mimes, a non-literary dramatic tradition that appears, in retrospect, profoundly feminist, a type of writing of the female body: “Their tradition was a silent one, consisting of physical dramatic invention. Their bodies were the sites of their texts” (29). Predictably, though, these early pioneers paid the price for their practice of fashioning an alternative to “legitimate” logocentric theatre in their exclusion from the structures necessary for surviving history: working in a mode that did not privilege words as the point of origin or the central focus of dramatic creation, they “were denied the permanency of the written text, along with its privileged association with theatre buildings, state revenues and pools of professional performers, all of which were available to men” (29). Without texts to represent them historiographically, these women could not take place within historical narrative, and their dramatic tradition disappeared into the silence of their bodies.

Even women playwrights with access to the materials of text and production still lacked the authority necessary to give their drama a place in historical narrative. Case enumerates a number of other early female playwrights such as tenth-century Benedictine canoness Hrotsvit von Gandersheim, the first woman playwright whose texts have survived the vagaries of history; early-eighteenth-century English strolling player and successful playwright Susannah Centlivre, whose characters in female drag “demonstrate the anger and desperation of a female character” (39); and Sor Juana, selfeducated seventeenth-century pioneer of an ethnic theatre that incorporated the sights and sounds of ethnic ritual into performance. Even though these women worked within a logocentric tradition, creating scripts for theatrical reproduction, those plays with women at their centre were devalued and uncirculated, and subsequently practically disappeared from the male-dominated tradition of theatre history. Even Aphra Behn, one of the most popular playwrights of her day, whose plays appeared on more stages than those of most of her male contemporaries, failed to gain a “legitimate” place in theatre history until recently because her playtexts were largely unpublished in popular reading editions. Again, without the texts, the plays could effectively be ignored when their production popularity petered out.

Another performance tradition pioneered by women that Case (re)presents locates itself, at least initially, in the “private” realm deemed most appropriate for women. The “salon” discussion group tradition, which Case traces back to the late eighteenth century, offered a space—usually the private home of a middle- or upperclass woman—which was in many ways more congenial for women than a public theatre space, but which very definitely offered them a “stage” on which they could generate ideas, engage in dialogues, and create a sense of character/self. By the late nineteenth century, Natalie Berney extended the salon tradition from the private into the public sphere. In an early form of feminist performance art, Berney collapsed the boundaries between public/private and performance/reality by staging her feminist and lesbian sensibilities both in public and in private. The result, as Case argues, is an attempt to project (inter)subjectivity, where the performers “totally break any sense of closure in performance by absorbing the performance into their daily lives.. . . This implies that for the spectator, who saw only a small part of it, the piece was fragmented, the performance only suggestive, partial and ultimately internal to the performers” (59). This early “private” theatrical tradition and its evolution into a type of performance art, based mainly in women’s places and women’s lives, does not take place in the traditional narratives of theatre history.

Like Sue-Ellen Case, Kerry Powell investigates the politics of production that colluded to keep women playwrights off the stages of theatres and history. In Women and Victorian Theatre, his own very significant revision to traditional Victorian theatre histories, Powell chronicles an impressive array of women playwrights, both those who wrote original plays as well as novelists who were almost forced into writing for the stage to maintain legal control of their novels’ theatrical representations.⁴ Powell’s analysis of why these women’s plays have disappeared from history replays a depressingly familiar scene: in an era where men alone had the power to define what constituted “good” drama, it was all too easy to overlook plays written by women, “many of which dealt with women in a sustained, reflective, and original fashion” (79), which almost certainly did not fit easily into the sorts of predefined representations of women that men could unequivocally endorse. Indeed, for most Victorian men, the very existence of the woman playwright was essentially a genetic impossibility, since the foremost authorities of the day tended to define playwriting in scientific and mathematical terms, qualities that were considered antithetical to the more emotional female character (79–80). This biological determinism allowed Victorians to deflect attention away from the material reality that saw male actor-managers almost exclusively in charge of the mainstream (i.e. important) theatres, validating and valuing only works that affirmed the patriarchal status quo. It also deflected attention away from the influence of the Club system, the “backstage” network that heavily influenced the politics of production. As Powell explains, “Victorian playwrights associated with one another in men’s clubs such as the Garrick or Savage where they would meet for a drink and dinner and enjoy the company of other men in predominantly masculine professions.. . . Their exclusion from these coteries helps explain why women were never prominent among Victorian managers and playwrights” (72, 73). Conveniently blinded to the implications of male power and control of access to the materials of production, “the Victorians made a conscious effort to persuade themselves that women by nature could not and did not write for the stage, barring a few exceptions which only proved the rule. Aspiring women playwrights, therefore, could have felt little or no sense of a women’s tradition where none was recognized” (Powell 127). It is time that theatre histories consider both the causes and the implications of women’s exclusion from their pages.

In addition to the very necessary work of enlarging the tradition of theatre historiography to include the previously ignored contributions of women, however, contemporary theatre practice has given rise to a number of plays written by women, about women, giving women the opportunity to stage their own representations. Not surprisingly, many of these representations engage head-on with the problems of history and tradition that have for so long served to devalue and disenfranchise women’s experiences: “It is revealing that so many feminist plays deal with historical settings and figures. Most of the playwrights begin with unravelling women’s past as a first step to understanding present day . . . women” (Hodkinson 14). Rewriting historical characters allows feminist theatre practitioners to “create historical identities for themselves and offer challenges to male hegemony that had so long controlled theatre history on and off the stage. Women theatre practitioners created theatre pieces about historical women . . . and about mythical women . . . to rewrite the received mythic heritage that women believed had been corrupted and distorted by patriarchal culture” (Canning 533). By presenting histories about women previously ignored or misrepresented by History, these productions comprise another important stage in women’s presence.

From a self-conscious feminist point of view, the thrust of this project is not simply to replace patriarchal representations with equally hegemonic identities authored by women. Any feminist representation of women must be careful not to recover a presence that replicates the same totalizing narrative that rendered women historically absent. Contemporary feminist performance and feminist historiography share in common the ideology and practice that “[f ]eminists must attend not simply what is represented, but representation itself ” (Wilson, “Politics” 74). The politics of representation does not begin and end with the play presented on the stage, which is precisely why “[f ]eminist theatre historians are rarely satisfied with ‘recreative’ approaches” (Davis 65) to history and historiography. Instead, the “interplay of performance’s psychological, sociological, biological, and economic factors contributes to the challenge of recent historiography; feminists add the importance of the personal dimension of social activity to this list and insist on the political significance of everything” (Davis 65). Representations of women on stage and in the pages of history must remain sensitive to the fullest possible context that scripts them, to recognize that the definition of subjectivity is more process than product, and that the politics of representation is far-reaching.

And there’s the rub. In order to avoid reproducing the theatre of monolithic authority, feminist theatre artists explore strategies for breaking down the hegemonic framework of (re)presentation in every aspect of theatre, from the structure of producing units, to the social and economic context of the venue, to the nature of the performance event itself. Oftentimes, these strategic revisionings cause real difficulties for a historiographic methodology that still has not adequately equipped itself to represent them.

In her foundational work of Canadian feminist theatre historiography, Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada, Cynthia Zimmerman acknowledges the complexities that surround the historiographical survival of a production, which “depends on a whole network of people: those who suppressed or encouraged its coming to life in the first place, the collective of artists who then shaped and interpreted the work for the critical first production, and then those at the publishing end who determine what gets into print” (15). While she does outline the rationale surrounding the limits of her study (10–11), her assertion that in the complex network of public production faced by Canadian women playwrights, “to write the play is just the beginning” (15), betrays a bias towards traditional or classical theatre—and with it, the logocentric model of drama as defined on the text/performance axis—in the same logic that erased the tradition of “play-making” that Sue-Ellen Case has identified. For much feminist theatre, creating a performance may be more a function of play-making than play-writing, where to write the play is definitely not the beginning—in fact, it may not be part of the process at all.

The traditional theatrical model that Zimmerman invokes defines performance as “the translation of the script from the page to the stage,” in which “the script is placed at the centre of the theatrical performance and the other production elements come merely to serve its (re)presentation on stage” (Wilson, “Politics” 74). The script, in this model, becomes the ultimate arbiter of authority: “[T]his location of the script at the centre of performance accords it privilege and implies a hierarchical structure within theatrical practice. The playwright is author; his script—his word—is constituted as the authority to which the theatrical production must defer” (Wilson, “Politics” 74). The first difficulty this logocentric model presents for feminist theatre practice is implied in Wilson’s choice of the masculine pronoun to refer to the author—the script, the word, is most often male-authored. Margaret Hollingsworth describes the process by which women writing plays in the traditional, male, script-based mode failed to materialize: “[W]hile their works were not censored, they were suppressed—gently, insidiously suppressed” (21). She continues with an explicit analysis of the patriarchal ideology that discouraged both the development and the emergence of a women’s playwriting tradition:

It was not that men went out of their way to promote work by members of their own sex; it was just that they understood it better and therefore valued it higher; they shared the point of view and perspective of their fellows, they did not have to go out on a limb, or put themselves out greatly to know what the potential of the work might be.. . . Men were responsible for creating and nurturing the theatrical form, and for centuries they made sure the territory was not impinged upon by women. (21)

Not only have men had greater access to the materials of theatrical production, they also have the power to define “quality” in theatre, enabling them to create a closed system where feminist production becomes less and less a likely possibility. As Hollingsworth points out, in order to be produced in the Canadian theatrical establishment, a feminist playwright “will probably have written a historical drama which is almost entirely unthreatening, like The Fighting Days” (25).

This history of feminist playmaking, then, often becomes a matter of negotiation and choice, an immediately political activity where the feminist playwright must consider whether it is more important for her play to have immediate or enduring impact—whether she can afford to work in the non-traditional, nonlogocentric model reminiscent of social action theatre and risk being marginalized right off the pages of history, or whether she would be better served by creating a work that might “gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history” (Kristeva 447), and survive in the record of theatre history to educate a potentially wider range of audiences, removed in time and place from the original performance event. This book explores, in part, the possibility of doing both.

This study will examine the strategies employed on behalf of some contemporary Canadian feminist playwrights and productions that have managed to achieve a place in the recorded history of Canadian theatre. To undertake such a study, there must be a beginning, and the beginning is the words, or more precisely, the “texts”—literary and non-literary—that represent the residual effects of a past performance event. While these texts are designed to supplement the performance context of a theatrical transaction, in the aftermath of the performance, these supplements are required to stand in for a past and otherwise essentially unrecoverable event. The academic study of past theatrical productions can only be undertaken via texts; therefore, only plays that have made the transition from stage to some type of page offer an opportunity to read the history of women’s representation. Any such study must immediately acknowledge that certain types of dramatic production lend themselves more readily to such historiographic representation. The resulting analysis must reflect the negotiated dialectic between theatre and history, and how each is constantly challenging and redefining the boundaries of the other.

In order to circumscribe a manageable context within the potentially infinite network created by the acknowledgement of “the political significance of everything,” I have made several deliberate decisions on what to include. The plays I have chosen all begin with a thematic concern about women’s history and historiography, both literal and literary, allowing the layers of textual representation to reflect each other and resonate as the medium mirrors the message. The plays all originate with anglophone Canadian women playwrights, in productions geared mainly towards Toronto-area audiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This geographic choice, while perhaps predictable, is not intended to appear inevitable: it is by no means meant to endorse “Torontocentrism,” or to imply an acquiescence to any assumption of Toronto as the apex of Canadian cultural achievement or the only city with theatre worth considering. Instead, the real reasons for this choice are as pragmatic as they are historically significant. The first one involves the inevitable spectre of regionalism that attends any argument that attempts to take into account the politics of production in Canada. Whether “region” is defined in a traditional, geographical sense, or whether it is considered to be, as William Westfall argues, an entity created by the application of a particular set of abstract criteria (231), a region implies a particular demographic, culture, and audience. Whether a theatrical production responds to a sense of regionalism already defined or creates the region by constituting and addressing itself to a particular audience, the regional context will inevitably impinge on the full spectrum in the politics of production and reception. By concentrating on productions that were geared towards a single “region,” I hope to reduce as much as possible the variables that attend the constitution of an audience and a “theatrical community.”

The other, more insidious, reason is a direct implication of the availability of the residual texts alluded to earlier. From the perspective of a time and space removed from the original context of production, the only way to study past performance is through its representations in the texts it has left behind. In order for those texts to be made historically and critically visible, they must first be available for study. In this respect, Toronto has benefited greatly from what amounts to a rather prosaic coincidence with profound historiographical implications: its proximity to the University of Guelph, which began in the 1980s to situate itself as the epicentre of archival holdings and research on Ontario theatre companies. Leonard Conolly, a theatre historian, scholar, and one-time chair of the drama department at Guelph, recalls how the University’s first major theatre archive acquisition—the Shaw Festival archives—came about “more by chance than design.” Quickly envisioning the potential, Conolly subsequently made it a personal mission to accumulate as much archival material as possible from theatres and deposit it at the University of Guelph. Although not necessarily the specific focus of his interest, Toronto theatres quickly came to make up a significant portion of the collections because the high cost of arts space in Toronto and the impermanence of many theatre companies in their venues made it impractical and often undesirable to store archival materials onsite. These collections could usually be acquired for the cost of a rental van and a short trip along the highway from Guelph to Toronto. Built on Conolly’s enthusiasm for preserving theatrical history, the L. W. Conolly Theatre Archives (as they are now known) make a vast wealth of textual residues readily available to researchers, thereby rendering a swath of productions historically visible. The focus on Toronto-area productions in this book, quite simply, takes advantage of this availability. However, contrary to the classical historical assumptions that history preserves the records of our greatest achievements, the historical survival of these production records does not necessarily mean that these productions were intrinsically more exemplary or noteworthy than others that exist only in the historical echoes of vague remembrances, or have disappeared altogether from history. To be sure, I think these are all significant productions, but any self-conscious historical inquiry should be honest enough to acknowledge history’s dirty little secret: even if those production residues were not necessarily archived because of their historical significance, they have certainly become historically significant because they were archived.

This same practicality is partially the basis for the choice of time period for the productions under consideration: they all occurred during this period of focused archival acquisition. However, focusing on feminist productions in the late 1980s and early 1990s also goes beyond the vagaries of temporal coincidence. As Robert Wallace has pointed out, the mid-1980s represented a period of “gentrification” (102) in Toronto theatre, where the energetic “alternative” theatres that had emerged in the previous decade moved towards an establishment status with the acquisition of property and the relatively reliable support of the audiences they had cultivated. It represents, then, a period when theatres whose ideas had seemed marginal, perhaps even antithetical, to the pursuit of a homogenous nationalism were exploring the possibility of being acknowledged and validated. And a public that could accept—or at least entertain—the possibility that the construction of nationalism might be a multivalent process could be open to seeing the same thing about the construction of gender. Like the gaps and spaces in historical narrative made visible by postmodernism, the mainstreaming of the alternate theatres made visible the gaps and spaces in identity politics, spaces that feminist theatre practitioners, like feminist historians, were poised to exploit.

As useful as the alternate theatre movement might have been for opening the possibility of identity interrogation, the parallels between alternative theatre and feminist theatre in Toronto resonate in less optimistic ways as well. As Wallace documents, the movement towards establishment status for the “Toronto Four” alternates (Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto Free Theatre) was accompanied by

a shift in their priorities: once governed by primarily political (read: nationalistic) and aesthetic concerns, these theatres now became equally, if not more, preoccupied with financial survival.. . . No longer marginal in the city’s cultural industry—if only by virtue of their operating budgets—the “Toronto Four” began to pursue methods of operation, development, production and promotion that brought them closer in style and structure to Canada’s regional theatres than ever before. (103)

Having moved from the margins into (or at least towards) the centre, these theatres became more visible and financially viable, but at the expense of their ability or willingness to challenge and encourage questioning of the politics of the system of which they were now firmly part. The feminist theatre productions examined in this book echo this trajectory: while the most recent production, Judith Thompson’s “successful” 1991 Hedda Gabler at the Shaw Festival, might imply that feminism has finally taken a place in mainstream theatre, the historiographical gaps and silences resonate with the intense resistance that Thompson encountered by refusing to make theatre the way the patriarchal hierarchy of the Shaw Festival wanted her to. The subsequent resurrection of Thompson’s adaptation and its re-entry into history might offer a small glimmer of optimism for a feminist future, but it is not coincidental that the production and those open to embracing its interpretive politics and possibilities have moved back into the margins. For Sally Clark, the attempts to attach a “feminist” label to what were often essentially mainstream commercial ventures resulted in plays that were neither feminist in their politics nor successful in their box office, but facilitated their script publication and the possibility of remaining in a form that made them productive sites of feminist inquiry. Only the earliest productions considered here, those that found a better ideological compatibility between theatre company and audiences in more marginal spaces, created a synergy that led not only to a “successful” intersubjective theatrical experience, but also to a productive form of remaining that admirably challenged the logocentricity and linearity of traditional historiography. Unlike the historical narrative surrounding Thompson’s Hedda Gabler, which modestly tries to cover its gaps, Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell’s The Book of Jessica and the texts surrounding The Anna Project’s This Is for You, Anna prefer to expose theirs, disrupting their historical presences with reminders of their absent performance dynamics.