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Borrowing Another Voice Or the Cyrano Complex. Vocal Identity in Tina Howe’S Painting Churches and Its Translation Julie Vatain

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Borrowing Another Voice Or the Cyrano Complex. Vocal Identity in Tina Howe’S Painting Churches and Its Translation Julie Vatain Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex. Vocal identity in Tina Howe’s Painting Churches and its translation Julie Vatain To cite this version: Julie Vatain. Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex. Vocal identity in Tina Howe’s Painting Churches and its translation. Sillages Critiques, Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2013, 10.4000/sillagescritiques.3059. hal-03262498 HAL Id: hal-03262498 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03262498 Submitted on 16 Jun 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Sillages critiques 16 | 2013 Métamorphoses de la voix en scène Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex Vocal identity in Tina Howe’s Painting Churches and its translation Julie Vatain Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/3059 DOI: 10.4000/sillagescritiques.3059 ISSN: 1969-6302 Publisher Centre de recherche VALE Brought to you by Sorbonne Université Electronic reference Julie Vatain, “Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex”, Sillages critiques [Online], 16 | 2013, Online since 14 June 2013, connection on 16 June 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ sillagescritiques/3059 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.3059 This text was automatically generated on 16 June 2021. Sillages critiques est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex 1 Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex Vocal identity in Tina Howe’s Painting Churches and its translation Julie Vatain Introduction: the polyphony of Howe’s theatre 1 Throughout the dozens of full-length works and ten-minute plays she has composed since she was first inspired to write for the stage by the “detonating” language of Eugène Ionesco1, Tina Howe has penned dialogues for a remarkably large variety of voices, in a shifting array of styles, accents, and even languages. Her English scripts are frequently laced with French, German, Hebrew, or unspecified Eastern-European tongues.2 In terms of male characters, the voices in her works range from a four-year- old played by “a large hairy man” in Birth and After Birth (Howe, 2010, ix) to a four- hundred-year old, when Rembrandt pops in from the 17th century to visit his own exhibition at the Met in Rembrandt’s Gift. And as far as female characters are concerned, Howe’s stages feature everything from foul-mouthed little girls, such as Miranda in Coastal Disturbances, to artists and lovers of all ages, some of whom are directly borrowed from Ovid or Shakespeare: thus Daphne flees from Apollo on the New York subway in Skin Deep, and Ophelia bursts out gasping for air in the middle of a modern- day swimming pool in Water Music. In Pride’s Crossing the same female protagonist is given several voices at different stages of her life, whereas in Approaching Zanzibar, the parents and the children exchange voices as well as personalities for a scene.3 The voices in Tina Howe’s plays are in constant movement, forever breaking or erupting, whether into monologue, into song or scream, into nursery-rhyme or quoted verse. They are forever treading the line between chaos – that delight in cacophony inherited from the plays of Ionesco – and pure lyricism, which is most often framed by silence or music. 2 Tina Howe divides her early plays into those written with “bare-hands”, and those composed with “white gloves”, thus highlighting the difference between her most Sillages critiques, 16 | 2013 Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex 2 openly feminist and eccentric works, such as Birth and After Birth, and the ones with a more nostalgic, less unsettling setting in the eyes of New York audiences.4Painting Churches, a comedy in two acts which premiered in 1983 at the Second Stage theatre in NYC, belongs on the “white-gloved” side, but the aim of this article is to show that even in a wistful New England play featuring just three characters, there is a vibrant explosiveness of the voice ever bubbling just below the surface of the dialogue. The action is linear and clear: Painting Churches takes us into the living-room of an old Boston couple – formerly distinguished poet now turned slightly decrepit Gardner Church, and his socialite wife Fanny Church – who are in the process of moving out of the townhouse they can no longer afford. Their daughter Mags, a rising young painter in New York, joins them in order to help with the packing but more crucially, facing a long-awaited challenge, she comes to paint their portrait, thus proving her artistic abilities to her parents. The play progresses through elegy and farce as the objects pile up in – and spill out of – the boxes, and the tone alternates between violence as Mags flings painful memories at her mother, digging deeper and deeper into her childhood, poignancy as the father struggles with his senility under the realistic gaze of his wife, and tenderness as time runs out and moments of grace are achieved. 3 Autobiographical in many respects, Painting Churches is very much a play about identity, intimacy and self-expression, yet, paradoxically, its textual flesh appears obsessed with quoting external references. These quotes are either sonorous, as the father resonantly recites lines by Yeats, Dickinson or Dickey, and even the parrot manages the opening lines of Grey’s “Elegy,” or highly visual, since the Churches recreate everything from Grant Wood’s American Gothic to Michelangelo’s Creation while searching for the perfect pose. The question of representing and voicing one’s own identity, balancing idiosyncrasy with the references of a shared language and culture, prompts us to examine the issue of vocal identity or, to borrow a technical term, the idea of voiceprint. In its proper sense, the term “voiceprint” designates the spectrogram of a voice, a visual record where speech is analyzed with respect to duration, frequency and amplitude. But if we apply it to the theatre, figuratively, the notion becomes intensely complex, since the visual record of the playwright’s voice, the text, precedes the utterance: there is already a voiceprint before the voice of the actor speaks. In that case, whose voiceprint is left on the audience’s auditory memory at the end of the show? The question can be asked both acoustically, since each actor’s voice is trained and transformed to become the character’s, and metaphorically, since the creative voice of the dramatist itself is split into polyphony. A further way to look at this is also to study the evolution of the playwright’s voiceprint not only in the actors’ incarnations of the characters, but also in foreign-language performance. Through an analysis of Painting Churches, this article will therefore focus on the definition of voiceprint in the metamorphoses undergone by the voices in Tina Howe’s theatre, as well as in its translation. This will enable us to question the place and definition of the playwright’s voice, at once silenced and amplified, throughout these processes. Metamorphosing voices: the widening range 4 In some respects, the dialogue of Painting Churches could be termed perfectly realistic; or at least, as realistic as a fictional dialogue composed for the stage can be. Sillages critiques, 16 | 2013 Borrowing another voice or the Cyrano complex 3 Throughout the play, the spontaneity of the lines is crafted through the rhythmical insertion of exclamations, hesitations, impulsive swearwords and colorful idiomatic expressions. This is palpable from the very first scenes, as in the following example: FANNY: He’s as mad as a hatter and it’s getting worse every day! It’s this damned new book of his. He works on it round the clock. I’ve read some of it, and it doesn’t make one word of sense, it’s all at sixes and sevens… (I, 1. Howe, 1989, 141) The punctuation here materializes the expressivity of the voice high-pitching into exclamation or trailing off into suggestion, while the snatches of sayings foster a sense of recognition and familiarity between the characters and the audience. The time of the play is indicated as being “several years ago” (129) which also coherently explains the presence of old-world expressions and cultural references: a recurring instance of this being Gardner asking his daughter if she’d like something to “wet her whistle” around cocktail time while humming Al Jolson tunes (I, 2, 149). However, what proves to be more revealing than the realistic aspects of the dialogue is the way in which the voices regularly deviate from the expected register of fine Boston families, in order to achieve a much greater range. This includes replacing the articulate voice with animal sounds, when the stage directions indicate that Mags makes “happy grunting sounds” (I, 2, 145) or “tiny pointed-teeth nibbling sounds” (I, 3, 157). It also involves exchanging an educated adult voice for a childish one. The following quote exemplifies this as Fanny tries to help her helpless husband pack the disordered pages of his latest manuscript, turning the process into a noisy game of war which Gardner embraces with a crescendo of onomatopoeias: FANNY:(Kicks a carton over to him) Here, you use this one and I’ll start over here… (She starts dropping papers into a carton nearby) BOMBS AWAY!..
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