Chapter 1 Introduction: Improper Naming
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Notes Chapter 1 Introduction: Improper Naming 1. The allusion of Ru, Vi, and Flo to the flowers adorning Ophelia (described in Hamlet Act IV Scenes v and vii) is probably more than a coincidence, as an early version of the play held in the Beckett Collection at Reading University Library suggests that Beckett originally called the characters Viola, Rose, and Poppy. 2. In Kane’s slightly earlier plays – Blasted (showcased in 1993), Phaedra’s Love (produced in 1996), and Cleansed (produced in April 1998) – they are given names. The characters in Crave (produced in August 1998) are referred to only by letters (C, M, B, A); and in the posthumously produced 4.48 Psychosis (2000), there are no character names. The ‘I’ that speaks throughout 4.48 Psy- chosis is singular but split: three performers speak the ‘I’, arguably reflecting a triad voiced by the ‘I’ itself: ‘Victim/ Perpetrator/ Bystander’ (Kane, 2001, p. 231). 3. These insights derive in part from a response from Vogel by email to my question about the name ‘Anna’. 4. Prefiguring Lehmann, Bonnie Marranca states, in her introduction to the three-text collection The Theatre of Images (a work each by Robert Wilson, Lee Breuer, and Richard Foreman), that ‘value came to be increasingly placed on performance with the result that the new theatre never became a literary theatre, but one dominated by images – visual and aural. This is the single most important feature of contemporary American theatre’ (Marranca, p. ix). 5. Mac Wellman, ‘Writers’ Bloc’, Village Voice 18 May 2004, retrieved: www.villagevoice.com (para 6 of 9). 6. In an essay written in Paris in 1968, while students (some of them his) were protesting against unaccountable, centralized, faceless authority, Barthes announced that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’. He makes an oft-cited distinction between the classic ‘writerly’ text, which makes the reader a passive consumer, and the ‘readerly’ text that invites the reader to (as David Lodge puts it) participate ‘in the production of meanings that are infinite and inexhaustible’ (Barthes, 1988, p. 167). It is an opposition, in my view, that supercedes Barthes’s very useful concept of the ‘scriptor’. For Barthes, the limited agency available to the scriptor is the ability to combine existing texts in new ways. One of Barthes’s intrigu- ing claims is that the scriptor has no past prior to, but rather is born with the text. 7. Increasingly, Forced Entertainment have played on the recycling of items from earlier works to generate, and sometimes to obstruct, the produc- tion of new drama. These items include the cut-out stars in 2004’s Bloody Mess, first used in 1987 in 200% & Bloody Thirsty; and a skeleton suit used in Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me? (1999) that returns in 2008’s Spectacular. 185 186 Notes 8. On the day in 2006 when I took some students to see The World in Pictures, I found a press pack from Forced Entertainment in my pigeonhole thanking me for doing so and helping us interpret its portrayal of failure. In 2008, almost immediately after we had booked to see Spectacular, we received a DVD documentary that reflected in a similar vein. 9. McKenzie’s ‘catachristening’ emerges from his dazzling reading of the famous argument between Butler and Žižek regarding catachresis (the use of words in the wrong context, and in forced, provocatively paradoxical, figures of speech) (see McKenzie, 2001, pp. 209–13). 10. ‘Trans-apparent’ is arguably a more fitting, though neologistic, translation of the French title La Transparence du Mal (1996). 11. The phrases ‘font date’ and ‘fait date’ are taken from a 1977 essay by Pierre Bordieu, ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, in which conjugations of the expression ‘faire date’ are key: The ageing of authors, works or schools is something quite different from the product of a mechanical slippage into the past. It is the continuous creation of the battle between those who have made their names [fait date] and are struggling to stay in view and those who cannot make their own names without relegating to the past the established figures […] To ‘make one’s name’ [faire date] means making one’s mark, achieving recognition. (Bordieu, p. 106). 12. Full text of Charles Mee’s plays and other works are available at www.charlesmee.org. 13. Massey gave this lecture as part of the Liverpool BBC Free Thinking Festival, at Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), 5 November 2006. 14. This quotation is from the description of The Desire Paths on Graeme Miller’s section of the site: www.artsadmin.co.uk. 15. Commenting on the relationship of political identification to aesthetic prop- erties, Slavoj Žižek describes how names such as ‘Fascist’, imported and exported to and by different organizations for political purposes, function as shells that masquerade as, and stand in for, substance via separation of the sign from its historical operation (afterword to Rancière, 2004, p. 78). What Barthes loved about Brecht is what Wolfe loves: Brecht’s penchant, via techniques such as verfremdungseffekt, for ‘detaching the sign from its effect’. Through such detachment, names like ‘Fascist’ endure, but are made to work hard. Chapter 2 Authorship: A Trick of the I 1. See Derrida (1982), p. 15. For a fuller commentary on this discussion by Derrida, see Philip Auslander’s important essay “‘Just be your self”: Logo- centrism and differance in performance theory’ (Auslander, 1997, pp. 28–9). Challenging ‘[t]heorists as diverse as Stanislavski, Brecht and Grotowski, all [of whom] implicitly designate the actor’s self as the logos of performance’, Notes 187 Auslander argues that performance cannot be based on the self because it has, like any textual mode, to construct the self (ibid., p. 30). 2. This quotation from Vogel appears in the earlier, single-play edition of the playtext: Paula Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1992), p. 7. 3. As Vogel described in a speech to the 2000 annual conference of the Associ- ation for Theatre in Higher Education (Washington DC: 3 August 2000), the texts patched within her rendition of Anna’s daydream include The Danube, a play by Maria Irene Fornes, the Stanley Kubrick 1964 film Dr Strangelove, and Ambrose Bierce’s story, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. As David Savran points out, ‘all of the action’ in Bierce’s story ‘takes place in the mind of a soldier during the moment in which he is being hanged.’ ‘[A]ction’ in Vogel’s play takes place in Anna’s mind while Carl is in the process of dying (Vogel, 1996, p.x). In The Danube, characters repeat phrases and statements from a language instruction tape: as in Vogel’s play, the machinic recitation of the tape, and of the characters’ efforts, are a key atmospheric element and structuring device. Dr Strangelove is a manic scientist like Vogel’s Todesrocheln. Strangelove’s mechanical hand, which causes him to make involuntary move- ments that include Nazi salutes, informs the thoughts of Anna as she sits in Todesrocheln’s waiting-room: ANNA: When I was a child, I could wait blissfully unaware for hours. I used to read signs and transpose letters, or count tiles in the floor. And in the days before I could read, I would make up stories about my hands – Mr. Left and Mr. Right. (Beat.) Mr. Left would provoke Mr. Right. Mr. Right would ignore it. The trouble would escalate, until my hands were battling each other to the death. (Beat. Anna demonstrates.) Then one of them would weep. Finally, they became friends again, and they’d dance…. (Vogel, 1996, p. 47) 4. Email interview, 5 May 2001. 5. In Under the Knife, those moments include the die-in monologue of the AIDS corpse (Skipitares, 1996, p. 114), and the ‘speaking back’ on speechless- ness in which Fanny Burney confides ‘[…but I could not utter a syllable’ (ibid., p. 103). 6. Vogel refers to the contingencies of theatrical presence at several points in her interview with Savran in The Playwright’s Voice. 7. Image- and narrative-construction are kept dialectically in view, and in ten- sion, in Anna Deavere Smith’s work. In the closing monologue of Fires in the Mirror, Carmel Cato (father of Gavin, whose death sparked the riots in Crown Heights) is looking for narratives, not images. He wants narratives to give him a direction. Smith’s work is indirect – it fractures directionality, making images out of narratives. Her subjects want to assert their orientation on events, but Smith dis-, re-, and reversibly orients them. 8. Vogel states that ‘Barthes’s Mythologies was a huge book for [her]’ (Savran, 1999, p. 269). 188 Notes 9. Vogel tussled with, and yielded to, 1992 director Anne Bogart and set designer Loy Arcenas, who wanted to change the bed to a sofa: Our greatest battle came in the tale of the sofa. I had written Baltimore Waltz with the image of a bed in my mind […] a bed that changed its function, like a good Russian formalist device should, in the same mag- ically estranging way that as children my brother and I transformed our beds into tents, houses and forests. […] Anne won the battle – but the sofa floated, became the Eiffel Tower, became the bed – in our articulation of difference, she won the argument, but I felt that somehow a bed floated on stage. (Dixon and Smith, 1995, p. 94) Vogel’s description of the ‘battle’ as ‘our articulation of difference’ is symp- tomatic of the entire process of staging The Baltimore Waltz, at the heart of which is a dialectic of interiority and dialogue, between realizing trauma and maintaining equilibrium.