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Reading and Writing As Transformative Action in Maria Irene Fornes’ and Adrienne Kennedy’S Plays

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Reading and Writing As Transformative Action in Maria Irene Fornes’ and Adrienne Kennedy’S Plays READING AND WRITING AS TRANSFORMATIVE ACTION IN MARIA IRENE FORNES’ AND ADRIENNE KENNEDY’S PLAYS by Insoo Lee B.A. in English Literature, Seoul National University, 1995 B.F.A.in Playwriting, Korea National University of Arts, 2001 M.A. in Theatre Art, Miami University, Ohio, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Dietrich School of Arts and Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCE This dissertation was presented by Insoo Lee It was defended on April 16, 2012 and approved by Kathleen E. George, PhD, Professor Attilio Favorini, PhD, Professor Bruce McConachie, PhD, Professor Susan Z. Andrade, PhD, Associate Professor Dissertation Advisor: Kathleen E. George, PhD, Professor ii Copyright © by Insoo Lee 2012 iii READING AND WRITING AS TRANSFORMATIVE ACTION IN MARIA IRENE FORNES’ AND ADRIENNE KENNEDY’S PLAYS Insoo Lee, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 This dissertation examines Maria Irene Fornes’ and Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, focusing on the female characters’ act of reading and writing on stage. Usually, reading and writing on stage are considered to be passive and static, but in the two playwrights’ works, they are used as an effective plot device that moves the drama forward and as willful efforts by the female characters to develop their sense of identities. Furthermore, in contrast to the usual perception of reading and writing as intellectual processes, Fornes and Kennedy depict these acts as intensely physical and sensual. Julia Kristeva’s and Hélène Cixous’ poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of language and female sexuality, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of writing the body are the major theoretical framework within which I explore the two playwrights’ works. Since I treat the plays as meta-writing (writing about writing) I also use narrative theory to analyze the narrative structures of the plays, which the two dramatists use to reveal the nature of writing. I conclude that Fornes’ plays demonstrate that knowledge and the possibility to create oneself can only result from one’s earnest effort to merge language in one’s embodied experiences and vice versa. I also conclude that in Kennedy’s plays writing opens up a space in which the writer assumes many different identities simultaneously. In this space of writing, the writer uses her body as a medium through which she experiences the others’ identities. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 CRITICAL METHODOLOGY ......................................................................... 7 1.1.1 Feminist Poststructuralist Position ................................................................ 8 1.1.2 Écriture feminine ............................................................................................ 12 1.1.3 Narrative Theory ........................................................................................... 24 1.2 CHAPTER OUTLINES .................................................................................... 30 2.0 EMBODIED READING ............................................................................................ 34 2.1 READING IN FORNES’ PLAYS:ABINGDON SQUARE, MUD, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE .......................................................................................................... 42 2.1.1 Abingdon Square ............................................................................................ 46 2.1.2 Mud ................................................................................................................. 54 2.1.3 The Conduct of Life ........................................................................................ 62 2.2 KENNEDY’S A LESSON IN DEAD LANGUAGE: YOU SHOULD LEARN HOW TO READ AGAIN .................................................................................................. 68 3.0 DIARY ......................................................................................................................... 94 3.1 FORNES’ ABINGDON SQUARE: YOUR BODY, THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR .................................................................................................................... 98 v 3.2 KENNEDY’S JUNE AND JEAN IN CONCERT: MEMORY IN THE MAKING, HISTORY REWRITTEN ............................................................................ 131 4.0 AUTOBIOGRAPHY: GIVING BIRTH TO MYSELF ........................................ 174 4.1 FORNES’ SARITA: DO YOU KNOW YOUR NAME? ............................ 178 4.2 KENNEDY’S A MOVIE STAR HAS TO STAR IN BLACK AND WHITE . 208 5.0 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 247 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 255 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I thank my Mom and Dad for their steadfast faiths in me; my daughter who made me laugh and feel loved even though I was a lousy Mom during the past year or so; Ryan and Jen who read and edited my pages in spite of their busy schedules; my special one who supported me and was always there for me throughout the whole journey. My great respect and appreciation go to Kathleen E. George, my awesome advisor. Above of all, my thankful heart all belongs to Jesus Christ, my Savior and my Lord. vii 1.0 INTRODUCTION Maria Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy are playwrights who defy the traditional realistic drama’s conventions and structures. They are both the result of the tumultuous and revolutionary 60’s and its avant-garde theatre movements. Fornes is considered as one of the new playwrights of Off Off Broadway movement, along with Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude Van Italie. On August 25th in New York Times in 1968, Robert Brustein, Dean of the School of Drama at Yale University at the time, observed that these new playwrights, who represented “the radical development of the New Theater [coinciding] with unrest in our political life […] share a passion for experimentation, all are original, all possess an individualized vision, and few would have had quite the same freedom had they not found a home at the Open Theater, Café La Mama, Theatre Genesis, Judson Church or any other of the numerous theater hostels studded about the city” (D1). Based in Judson Church, Fornes started her career as playwright within the lively atmosphere of OOB movement: collaborating with directors and actors as a part of the process of playwriting, experimenting with ways to present human bodies for their phenomenological raw energies, attempting new dramatic structures and offering critical views of bourgeois life. Then, into the 70s, she became more attuned to women’s experiences within the society, concerned with women’s intellectual and spiritual development. Maria Irene Fornes has won 9 Obie Awards throughout her career in theatre. The Conduct of Life and Abingdon Square, her later 1 plays in the 1980s, which I examine in this dissertation, were awarded for “Best New American Play.” Another marker of the theatre of the 1960s is the Black Theater Movement. In 1969, Dan Isaac states in New York Times, “The Theater season of 1968-69 will long be remembered as that movement in American cultural history when Black Theater came of age” (D1). Since the focus of the Black Theatre Movement during the 1960s was on “performing works written by blacks primarily for blacks” (D1) with nationalistic purpose to empower collective black identity and aesthetics, Kennedy’s works, which foreground individuality in identity formation and her personal experience not only of race but also of gender and class, were less critically acclaimed within the Black Theatre than she deserved at the time. Even so, her debut play Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964 was acknowledged with Obie Award. The play was awarded for “the most distinguished play.” The importance of her plays within the Black Theater Movement has been revalued recently, especially within the venues of black female playwrights’ avant-garde dramas. Olga Barrios, in her essay “From Seeking One’s Voice to Uttering the Scream: The Pioneering Journey of African American Women Playwrights through the 1960s and 1970s,” maintains that Kennedy, along with Ntozake Shange, Aishah Rahman, and Alexis De Veaux, “[creates] a new dramatic language that abandons the traditional realistic style.” She states, “Kennedy is actually the pioneer in experimenting with an avant-garde theater which opened the door to new venues in creating theatrical concepts later developed by Shange, Rahman, and De Veaux […]” (Barrios 613). The recent reevaluation of her works led to the Signature Theater in New York naming Kennedy as playwright-in-residence for the September 1995 through May 1996 season. June and Jean in Concert, which premiered during this season, won Obie Award for Best New American Play. 2 Even though they are both the children of the changes in American theater during the 1960s, their plays have little in common. Their dramaturgical principles and styles are different. Fornes sets her characters in a relatively realistic space with visually impressionistic details here and there, and her dramatic events unfold linearly even though in a fragmented way. Kennedy, on the other hand, places her characters in a highly symbolical and psychological space, the inner stage of the main character’s mind, so to
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