Staging the Actress

STAGING THE ACTRESS: DRAMATIC CHARACTER AND THE PERFORMACE OF FEMALE IDENTITY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Melissa Lee Graduate Program in Theatre The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Lesley Ferris, Advisor Beth Kattelman Jennifer Schlueter Copyright by Melissa Lee 2014 ABSTRACT Since women first took to the professional stage, actresses have been objects of admiration and condemnation as well as desire and suspicion. Historically marginalized figures, actresses challenged notions of acceptable female behavior by, among other (more scandalous) things, earning their own income, cultivating celebrity, and being sexually autonomous. Performance entailed an economic transaction of money for services provided, inviting the sexual double meanings of female “entertainer” and “working” woman. Branding the actress a whore not only signaled her (perceived) sexual availability, but also that she was an unruly woman who lived beyond the pale. The history of the actress in the West is also complicated by the tradition of the all-male stage, which long prevented women from participating in their own dramatic representations and devalued their claim to artistry once they did. Theatrical representations of actresses necessarily engage with cultural perceptions of actresses, which historically have been paradoxical at best. In this dissertation I identify a sub-genre of drama that I call actress-plays, and using this bibliography of over 100 titles I chronicle and analyze the actress as a character type in the English-speaking theatre, arguing that dramatizations of the professional actress not only reflect (and fuel) a cultural fascination with actresses but also enact a counter- narrative to conventional constructions of femininity. Using the advent of the actress in ii the Restoration as a historical touchstone, this study weaves together theatre and women’s history, literary criticism, and cultural studies to analyze the ways in which staging the actress highlights and interrogates the complex and layered nature of gendered prejudice that has historically marginalized actresses and thwarted female progress. This dissertation features in-depth examinations of key actress-plays from different eras, including but not limited to J. Palgrave Simpson’s World and Stage (1859), Christopher St. John’s The First Actress (1911), Sophie Treadwell’s O Nightingale (1925), and April De Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures (1993). In this study I demonstrate how the actress character functions as a critical intervention, one that speaks from a necessarily marginalized position, performing and making visible female experience, while charting and questioning its own history of representation. The actress character represents a new and rich approach to history, women, and performance that underscores as well as enacts the importance of female self-expression and self-determination amid constantly evolving public images of women. iii For Sydney and her grandmother Ellen iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my advisor and mentor Lesley Ferris for her dedication, patience, and enthusiasm for this project. I would be lost without her example, not only as a scholar but as a woman in the theatre. I am truly indebted to her, and cannot thank her enough for her generosity and guidance. I also wish to thank Beth Kattelman for her keen eye, her unwavering moral support, and for many great laughs along the way. And last but not least, I would like to thank Jen Schlueter for answering the call and coming on board, for her critical insight, and for helping to get this project across the finish line. I would also like to acknowledge the support of my Columbus family. Thank yous go out to Vic Shonk for keeping me sane; to Jirye Lee for keeping me company; to Mina Choi who kept us all in line; and finally to Ian Bradford Ngongotaha Pugh who was often tasked with my care and feeding during this journey. And finally to the Lee men in my life—Zachary and Jacob who just plain make me very happy. v VITA 1984................................................................Oakland High School 1989................................................................B.A. Theatre, University of California Los Angeles 2007................................................................M.A. Drama, San Francisco State University 2007 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Theatre vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ...................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... v Vita ................................................................................................................................. vi Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Staging History and Professionalism .......................................................... 50 Chapter 3: Staging Contemporary Attitudes and Respectability ................................ 147 Chapter 4: Staging New World Values and Ambition ................................................ 192 Chapter 5: Conclusion ................................................................................................. 228 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 241 Appendix A: Selected Annotated Bibliography of Actress Plays ............................... 255 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION And it was a necessary condition of the successful hegemonic control of the theatre . that women’s work within the public space should be disguised, discounted or appropriated to male control; and therefore entertainment, embodied as female, became the Other of the “National Drama” of male genius. -Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History1 Scholarly consensus has identified the when and where of the event that forever changed the composition of the English stage: the inclusion of women performers in the public theatre. On 8 December 1660 the newly patented King’s Company headed by playwright-manager Thomas Killigrew performed William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello at Gibbons’s Tennis Court Theatre in Vere Street; and in this production the role of Desdemona was acted by a woman. What remains a mystery in this historiography is the who. The short list of women for the title of First English Actress includes Margaret Hughes and Anne Marshall.2 But it is likely we will never know definitively who was on the stage that December day. In the story of the actress it is perhaps telling that the identity of the woman who was the first to breach this hitherto exclusively male profession has been lost to us. All we do know with certainty is that she was there, physically present on the royally commissioned commercial stage, representing the 1 female gender not only though her performance of the fictional Desdemona, but by simply being herself, a bona fide member of the female sex. Lest our woman-performed Desdemona cheat her audience in the same manner that she is accused of deceiving her father and her husband to tragic consequences in the play, Thomas Jordan’s prologue to this historic production sets the record straight, titillating the audience with the appearance of a woman on a public stage by dispelling doubts as to her realness: I come, unknown to any of the rest To tell you news, I saw the lady drest; The woman playes today, mistake me not, No man in gown, or page in petticoat; A woman to my knowledge; yet I cann’t, (If I should dye) make affidavit on’t. Do you not twitter, gentlemen? 3 Because the female gender had so long been counterfeited on British stages, the prologue attempts to satisfy savvy theatre-going gentlemen that under the feminine costume there exists an actual biological woman as advertised. Even though the male speaker of the prologue assures his audience that he witnessed the actress dressing backstage, he issues a caveat, intimating that without experiencing the sexual act itself he is unwilling to swear to her genitalia, an innocent enough joke but one that is squarely at the expense of professional theatre women. Here, Jordan seems to be working against himself, for the prologue also takes up the question of female virtue, defending the actress while acknowledging that public opinion may be unfairly against her: “I know / You will be censuring, do’t fairly though; / ‘Tis possible a vertuous woman may / Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet play.”4 He goes so far as to point out that French theatre tradition 2 celebrates rather than condemns its actresses, suggesting that England should do the same. Jordan’s prologue also touts the advantages of women performers, pointing out how the convention of the male-actress creates “defective” women “so siz’d / You’d think they were some of the guard disguis’d; . With bone so large and nerve so incompliant, / When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.”5 The first English actresses may have saved the public from temperamentally

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