Читать книгу Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History - D.A. Hadfield - Страница 20

As feminist theatre practitioners attempt to negotiate some place within theatre history, much debate has arisen over where exactly that place should be. As a politically-grounded theatrical strategy, intent on questioning the status quo of traditional representational practices, feminist theatre practically had to begin as an “alternate” or “marginal” theatre. Lizbeth Goodman goes so far as to argue that feminist theatre predicates a politic of alterity that makes it, of necessity, always alternative:

The alternate eventually becomes the mainstream as other “alternates” emerge. For the most part, however, feminist theatre is still largely “alternate.” Only a major structural change in all theatre could transfer feminist theatre as a genre into the mainstream, for the emphasis on collective and non-hierarchical ways of working which are intrinsic to feminist theatre mitigate against “mainstreaming.” (27)

However, Goodman’s argument is valid mainly for a particular type of feminist theatre, the collaborative or collective model that, as Hollingsworth points out, does not necessarily appeal to all theatre practitioners who identify themselves as feminists. There are, moreover, several valid arguments against working only in forms that deliberately segregate feminist theatre from the mainstream, as Patricia Schroeder points out. If feminists entrench themselves firmly in the theatrical margins, refusing to engage with the critical mainstream, there is a very tangible risk that “fewer feminist concerns will be dramatised, 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” (Schroeder, “Locked” 165). Alternate theatre tends to aim for, and draw, alternate audiences, people who most likely already sympathize with the need for social, political, and representational alternatives. At some point, preaching only to the choir becomes self-serving; feminist theatre must be able to reach a broader audience to make new converts. Moreover, deliberately seeking a place in the margins may, in fact, entrench more firmly the “legitimacy” of the theatre to which feminist theatre offers only an alternative. And then, too often, theatre that takes place in the margins doesn’t attract enough attention, and therefore doesn’t leave behind enough textual residue to create a sense of historical legitimacy and value. Added together, these arguments offer the possibility that the refusal to engage with the centre becomes as likely to perpetuate unequal power relations as help dismantle them.¹

Perhaps twenty or thirty years of provisional visibility is enough. Even Case admits that there is value to having feminist theatre practitioners work in mainstream modes rather than assuming a situation where “if they work in traditional forms, they are not feminists (or feminine), and . . . their work is discounted because of their preference for those forms, rather than seen as marking an advance for women in the field by making their professional work visible” (Feminism 130). For feminism to pose a legitimate challenge to the representational status quo, it must first be seen and heard by those who would not go out of their way to encounter it, the very bourgeois audiences who make up and exist quite comfortably within the status quo. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women had become increasingly more visible as a politicized identity category. Perhaps the time was right for feminist theatre to make an appearance within the mainstream of Canadian theatrical production.

As Rina Fraticelli has pointed out, the women who will most easily find a place in the traditionally male-dominated mainstream theatrical institutions are those who are willing to work in familiar and convenient modes of production, those who could almost pass as “small, high-pitched, bumpy men” (Lushington 7). In theatre this translates to the type of work that Cynthia Zimmerman assumes in her introduction to Fair Play, theatre that begins with the script, the already written words that provide a readily accessible starting point for the almost invariably protracted rehearsal process. For women preferring or able to work within this form, their gender could actually be a marketable asset, in the same way that being identified as “Canadian” was valued during the quest for a national theatrical identity. Women like Sharon Pollock and Judith Thompson, for example, became hot theatrical properties in the 1980s because they were able and willing to work within fairly traditional structures. Carol Bolt paraphrases Pollock’s claim that “we were both really lucky because when we started writing, theatres could produce our plays and get both a Canadian and a woman in their season in one shot! . . . That was part of our ‘charm’”² (Rudakoff and Much 188). Even Thompson herself admits that “[i]t’s probably been easier for me being a woman playwright because many theatres like to say they’re producing women’s plays” (Rudakoff and Much 102).

Judith Thompson has been a firm believer in the efficacy of the margins, as she revealed in a 1990 interview: “Seated on an overstuffed sofa in the Tarragon’s ‘green room,’ the 36-year-old playwright talks animatedly about the importance of remaining outside the mainstream and avoiding complacency. ‘Once an artist loses that hunger—not that I’m in danger of losing it economically,’ she adds ironically—‘the best part of their urge to create . . . that struggle . . . that sense of imbalance, just dissolves” (Rafelman, ellipsis in original). Yet she immediately balances the edginess of the margins with the recognition that “it is wonderful to be able to reach so many people,” an opportunity that working in the centre presents in greater numbers. When Christopher Newton invited Judith Thompson to guest direct a production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival’s 1991 season, it could be seen as an indication that the mainstream might at least be ready for Thompson’s kind of feminism—or that Thompson felt herself ready for the mainstream. Or, that she “wanted to direct because . . . [she] needed the money” equally as much as she “wanted to adapt the play and get inside the body of an Ibsen play” (letter 15 January 1998): the political value of the margins eventually had to bow to the economic advantages of the mainstream.

Judith Thompson has at times been relatively unabashed about the “masculinity” of her playwriting style, and the issues of power it engages. She does not do collective creations; hers is a scripted theatre, and the script is hers: “[Some feminists] think it’s somehow fascistic to set up the word as king and then have the actors serve the word. I don’t see it that way at all” (Tomc 18). She writes plays—rather than fiction or poetry—as a deliberate appropriation of public power. Early in her career, she characterized playwriting as a masculine genre that operates by “penetrating the audience” (Tomc 18), and Thompson enjoys using that type of power to force her audiences into moments of recognition about themselves.³ Thompson’s relationship with the scripted word functions as a double access-point to the very centre of mainstream theatre where the Shaw Festival plays. More than just a signal that she accepts the traditional representational structure that operates in making theatre, her preference for working through texts has allowed her to attain the very publicly visible profile and reputation that would qualify her to work at the Shaw Festival. Because her plays leave behind publishable and reproducible texts, Thompson offers few difficulties for the politics of historiographical representation, which has allowed her to establish a credible reputation as a dramatic author. Thompson has achieved her considerable success in Canadian theatre by “playing a man’s game,” and playing it well. She is currently about as canonical as a contemporary Canadian playwright can be: her name sells out houses, her plays appear in volumes and anthologies, and they are regularly included in university (sometimes even high school) curricula.⁴ Productions of her new plays usually merit reviews across the country. She has an entry in Who’s Who. In an arena where most of the main players are men, Judith Thompson is a very visible woman. If Thompson could successfully navigate the theatrical mainstream without compromising the fairly moderate feminism inherent in her presence and her production, perhaps it would indicate that the possibility of a nonconfrontational engagement between feminism and traditional theatre had arrived.

Yet, Thompson would no doubt be the first to agree with Zimmerman that the first lesson a feminist playwright must learn is that to write the play is just the beginning. Within the terms of theatrical production, Barbara Godard implicitly reframes the issue of whose authority controls representation and shapes reception when she raises questions about the reasons for and implications of the movement in Quebec theatre that has seen women apparently trade visibility on stage for “success behind the scene” (“Between” 21) as directors. Judith Thompson would be quick to point out that, in English-Canadian theatrical practice at least, it is the director who wields the greatest authority in terms of shaping a representation, more powerful than the writer, and certainly more powerful than the actresses he blocks. For Thompson, this ascendancy of the director has profoundly feminist ramifications: “This development is, of course, a clear reflection of a deeply patriarchal society feeling threatened by all that is female and baring its teeth. The writer, I believe, is a female force. . .. The writer gives birth to the work and the director, like society, shapes the newborn, making it a supposedly coherent, hard-hitting and palatable creature with his stamp on it” (“Why” 106). Even a play written by a woman can be rendered safe for the patriarchy with a male director taking the responsibility and credit for realizing the production.

Thompson did not reach this self-conscious awareness until well into her theatre career. Earlier in her career, she admits that she always sought out male directors for her premieres, in an attempt, she speculates, to locate public “father figures” (“Why” 106), perhaps for herself, certainly for her productions. In her experience, Canadian theatre is predicated on the “hunchbacked colonial mentality” (“Why” 105) that demands an omnipotent patriarch director, “a traditionally male kind of authority figure, a bearded man who knows the play better than any of them, who has the answers to all their questions and who, preferably, speaks with a British accent” (“Why” 105). With her 1990 premiere of Lion in the Streets, Thompson cut out the middle man and appropriated a greater degree of control of her artistic vision by directing that production herself, to great critical and popular acclaim, and to great admiration from Christopher Newton. After attending a performance of that production, Newton invited Thompson to the Shaw Festival to direct Hedda Gabler, one of the great classics of the modern dramatic canon with almost a century of interpretive tradition behind it—a play scripted by a famous man, featuring one of modern drama’s most famous literary women.