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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: PLAYING at LIVES: LIFE WRITING ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: PLAYING AT LIVES: LIFE WRITING AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DRAMA Ryan Matthew Claycomb, Doctor of Philosophy, 2003 Dissertation directed by: Professor Brian Richardson Department of English Amidst the trends of confessional narratives and theories of gender performativity that took root in the 90s, the feminist maxim “the personal is political” is no longer sufficient to account for the complexities of women’s lives transformed into life -stories and live performance s. Given the push to recover silenced women, and the more complex discourse that governs both feminist art and criticism, it is not surprising that feminist life -writing has found many of its richest realizations in performance. On the feminist stage, history, narrative, bodies, voice, identity and community all converge in three related dramatic forms that we can group under the heading of “life -writing”: autobiographical performance, biographical plays and staged oral histories. In this study, I take a look at these forms and argue that each one offers both theoretical obstacles and political possibilities to the feminist playwrights and performers who use them. By placing narratives of real lives within the context of performance, these artists point out the degree to which gender, identity, and history are socially constructed performances and are subject to the manipulations of power. And by highlighting the gender biases embedded in these performative notions, they are then able to revise and reconstruct them within a new framework, one that resists hegemonic power and acknowledges difference. In three chapters, I examine how feminist playwrights and performers use body, voice, community and history to create potent rhetoric out of women’s life nar ratives. In the chapter on autobiographical performance, I argue that narratives of the self in performance deconstruct notions of selfhood as a way of avoiding essentialism and establishing female agency. At the same time, however, these narratives rely on historical referentiality and an essentialism of the self to reinforce their efficacy. The chapter on biographical drama asserts that feminist playwrights respond to the imperative to reclaim lost feminist lives, but must do so in ways that subvert th e objectifying impulses of life writing. Finally, the oral history chapter shows that the communal subjectivity established in these plays generates feminist notions of community in its performance, even as it advocates for such community among its audien ces. PLAYING AT LIVES: LIFE WRITING AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DRAMA By Ryan Matthew Claycomb Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2003 Advisory Committee: Professor Brian Richardson, Chair Professor Jackson Bryer Professor Susan Leonardi Professor Laura Rosenthal Professor Catherine Schuler ©Copyright by Ryan M. Claycomb 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Performative Lives, Performed Selves: Autobiography in Feminist Performance 18 The Feminist Appeal of Autobiographical Narrative 24 Deconstructing the Unmediated Body as Object 30 The Performativity of the Self 37 The Performative Self and the Performative Community 53 Histories of the Self as Public Histories 59 Chapter 2: Reclaiming the Exemplary Life: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama 81 Issues and Obstacles 84 Motives and Strategies 93 Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies as Staged Biography 111 Suzan -Lori Parks’ Venus: Implicating the Present by Interrogating the Past 118 Helene Cixous’ Portrait of Dora : The Subject Acts Out 125 April De Angelis’ Playhouse Creatures : Women’s Theatre as History / Women’s History as Theatre 137 Conclusion 150 Chapter 3: (Ch)oral History: Docudrama and the Communal Subject 154 Oral History as Feminist Form 159 Oral History and Community 163 Oral History and the Com munal Subject 174 Oral History as History 181 Caveats: The Hegemony of “We” 185 Oral History as Feminist Drama 195 Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues: Essentializing Community 196 Susan Snyder’s Size Matters : The Writing on the Stall 211 Conclusion 223 Conclusion: Performing Authorship, Performing Lives 225 Works Cited: 236 ii Introduction In the summer of 1998, Jennifer Ambrosino, Producing Director for The Theatre Conspiracy (TTC) —a Washington, D.C. feminist theatre company for which I served as literary manager in the late 1990s—joked that she was tired of directing plays about real people —that she wanted a little fiction in her life. And no wonder. She was at that point directing a staged reading of Allison Pruitt’s The Trial of Susan B. Anth ony for the Source Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C., had just finished with TTC’s run of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies (a life of fín -de-siècle iconoclast Isabelle Eberhardt), and had helmed Lynn Kaufman’s Shooting Simone (about Simone de Beau voir) the season before. And I had experienced the same phenomenon. As coordinator for TTC’s Emerging Women Playwrights Series that summer, I read over 50 scripts from around the country, and of these, at least 15 were biographically oriented. One of th em, Jamie Pachino’s Theodora: An Unauthorized Biography, became one of our featured readings for the series. That made four biographies in two years between Jennifer and myself, which doesn’t count Studio Theatre’s production of Suzan -Lori Parks’ Venus, the Source Festival’s Soulmates: The Passion of Petra Kelly , by Nancie Carraway, or Horizons Theater’s partially improvised In Good Company, which featured several historically prominent women , all produced in the Washington DC area within the span of a couple of years in the late 1990s. At around the same time, the Spring of 1998 to be exact, feminist performance artist Karen Finley stood at the steps of the Supreme Court and told the world that she felt that Senator Jesse Helms had been sexually harassin g her through his political 1 attacks on her and the other artists now known as the “NEA Four.” When the Supreme Court verdict against the artists came down that summer, Finley interrupted her autobiographical show Return of the Chocolate -Smeared Woman to hold a press conference, a blurring of the lines of life writing and life, of making history and of history -making. Finley’s co -plaintiff in the case, Holly Hughes, would go on to perform her account of the trial two years later in her show, Preaching to the Perverted . And finally, only a few months after Finley’s incendiary Supreme Court statements, and a few stops up the metro, Eve Ensler brought her wildly popular oral history play The Vagina Monologues to a highly successful run at the Studio Theatre. What these events, all concentrated in a short span in the late 1990s, tell us is that theatrical events that draw their material from the lives of real women have been very near the center of feminist theatrical practice, if not near the center of dramati c production itself, over the last few decades. This observation speaks to a more firmly established space for feminist ideology on the contemporary stage, and furthermore to the influence of the 1970s feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” But am idst the growing trend of confessional narratives and theories of gender performativity that took root in the 90s, this old feminist maxim is no longer entirely sufficient to account for the complexities of women’s lives transformed into life -stories and live performances. Given the push to recover silenced women, and the more complex discourse that governs both feminist art and criticism, it is not surprising that feminist life writing has found many of its richest realizations in performance. On the fem inist stage, history, narrative, bodies, voice, identity and community all converge in three 2 related dramatic forms that we can group under the heading of “life writing”: autobiographical performance, biographical plays and staged oral histories. In this study, I take a look at these forms and argue that each one offers both theoretical obstacles and political possibilities to the feminist playwrights and performers who use them. By placing narratives of real lives within the context of performance, these artists point out the degree to which gender, identity, and history are socially constructed performances and are subject to the manipulations of power. And by highlighting the gender biases embedded in these performative notions, they are then able to revise and reconstruct them within a new framework, one that resists hegemonic power and acknowledges difference. Before embarking on a long project on life writing in feminist drama, we must first recognize that these foundational terms —drama, feminist, and life writing—are unstable and that they require some definition from the outset. Let us first begin with “drama.” I, like many others who navigate the murky waters between English, Theatre, and now Performance Studies programs, recognize that the boundaries between drama, theatre and performance are neither fixed nor uncontested. The traditional distinction between “drama” and “theatre” is made between a written play and its live realization in the theatrical space, and the traditional distinction bet ween “theatre” and “performance” suggests, as Marvin Carlson puts it, that performance (or performance art) breaks down the notion of an “other” that “traditional theatre has regarded . as a character in a dramatic action embodied . by an actor” (C arlson, Performance 6). Instead, performance artists “do not base their work upon characters previously created by other artists, but upon their own bodies, their own 3 autobiographies, their own experiences in a culture or in the world, made performative by their consciousness of them and the process of displaying them for an audience” (6). Carlson’s definition seems to set performance art and drama (via traditional theatre) at odds with one another. However, any consideration of life - narratives in performance must acknowledge that the autobiographical component of much performance art makes the assumption of such a distinction between drama and performance troubling.
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