Canadian Feminist Women Directors: Using the Canon for Social Change
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CANADIAN FEMINIST WOMEN DIRECTORS: USING THE CANON FOR SOCIAL CHANGE by SARAH ALEXANDRA FERGUSON B.A. (Honours), The University of British Columbia, 1997 M.F.A., The University of Calgary, 1999 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Theatre) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) March 2008 © Sarah Alexandra Ferguson, 2008 Abstract This thesis explores how five Canadian women directors who define themselves as feminists have engaged with work from the traditional Western theatre canon. However, that world actually is created by the social expectations, cultural mores, and theatrical conventions of its time. Audiences have been indoctrinated to accept unquestioningly the value of these texts while the plays’ valorized status masks social constructs that are continually reinforced and surreptitiously naturalized through their repetition. At the crux of this thesis is the notion that while repetition is used as a tool for social instruction, it can also be used as a tool for social change. Therefore, I explore how the Canadian feminist women directors whom I have interviewed use the uniqueness of performance in different ways to challenge social structures within canonical texts. In the individual chapters, each director first shares her education, training, experience, and influences; then she articulates her own feminist perspective and discusses its impact on her career and work process; and finally she reflects on how she directed a text from the Western theatre canon and used the liminal space of performance to challenge the text’s embedded gender constructs. At the end of each chapter, I present the critical response I found for each production, including reviews, individual statements, and academic investigations, and assess the extent to which the director’s intent was understood by her audience and reviewers. In the final chapters, I examine each individual director’s interview responses in the context of the others’ and situate them within the spectrum of feminisms. In general, the directors used liminal space to expose gender as a construction and destabilize social ii expectations based on gender. However, what also emerged from these interviews is that while there is no broad consensus of what constitutes ‘feminist’ work, each director must temper her feminist perspectives if she wants access to the upper echelons of directing in Canada and the benefits that it entails. iii Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... iv List of Illustrations ....................................................................................................................v Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. vi Dedication .............................................................................................................................. vii Introduction................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE Katrina Dunn and Portia’s Secret Life ........................................................................24 CHAPTER TWO Kathleen Weiss and One Woman’s Power in Macbeth ..............................................58 CHAPTER THREE Hope McIntyre and the Social Construction and Destruction of Blanche ..................93 CHAPTER FOUR Micheline Chevrier and Chekhov’s Tension between Men and Women .................119 CHAPTER FIVE Jillian Keiley and the Music of Chekhov ..................................................................149 CHAPTER SIX: Adding It Up .............................................................................................172 Feminism....................................................................................................................175 Feminist Director? ....................................................................................................178 Work Opportunities ..................................................................................................184 Casting and Rehearsals .............................................................................................187 The Directors’ Approaches to a Canonical Text .......................................................194 CHAPTER SEVEN Conclusions ...............................................................................................................201 Works Cited ...........................................................................................................................208 Appendix I: Interview Questions...........................................................................................219 Appendix II: Consent Form ...................................................................................................221 Appendix III: BREB Certificate of Approval........................................................................224 iv List of Illustrations Illustration 1 Act IV, scene i of Bard on the Beach’s 2003 production of The Merchant of Venice. Photo: David Blue .............................................36 Illustration 2 Act III, scene ii of Bard on the Beach’s 2003 production of The Merchant of Venice. Photo: David Blue .............................................37 Illustration 3 Portia’s “secret society” dressed in gold, silver, and lead in Bard on the Beach’s 2003 production of The Merchant of Venice. Photo: David Blue......................................................................................41 Illustration 4 Portia’s entrance in Act I, scene ii of Bard on the Beach’s 2003 production of The Merchant of Venice. Photo: David Blue.......................47 Illustration 5 Portia after removing the confining dress in Act I, scene ii of Bard on the Beach’s 2003 production of The Merchant of Venice. Photo: David Blue......................................................................................47 Illustration 6 Patti Allen in Kate Weiss’s Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth...................................83 Illustration 7 Publicity photograph for Kate Weiss’s Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth. Patti Allen and Stephen Aberle..................................................................85 Illustration 8 Newspaper advertisement for A Streetcar Named Desire. Photo: Dian Flaterud................................................................................107 Illustration 9 Christine Brubaker and Peter Froehlich in Anton Chekhov’s The Proposal as part of Micheline Chevrier’s The Vaudevilles of Chekhov at the National Arts Centre.........................138 Illustration 10 Yanna McIntosh and Paul Rainville in Anton Chekhov’s The Bear as part of Micheline Chevrier’s The Vaudevilles of Chekhov at the National Arts Centre.........................139 Illustration 11 Artistic Fraud’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar ............................164 Illustration 12 Artistic Fraud’s production of The Cheat ................................................164 Illustration 13 Artistic Fraud’s production of The Chekhov Variations..........................167 v Acknowledgements I would like to thank the faculty and staff of the Department of Theatre for their support throughout this degree process. I wish Dr. Peter Loeffler was here to see this. He started me on the road and I will always be grateful. I would especially like to thank Dr. Errol Durbach whose sheer enjoyment of theatre has been an inspiration, and whose wonderful and warm character has been a haven. And most importantly, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Jerry Wasserman who challenged me every step of the way. Without his support, patience, and expertise, this thesis would never have come to pass. I would also like to thank the women interviewed in this thesis: Katrina Dunn, Kathleen Weiss, Hope McIntyre, Micheline Chevrier, and Jillian Keiley. Their interest in my research and the openness of their responses made this work possible. Thank you to Dr. Annie Smith for her belief in me and the talks at breakfast, and Dr. Barry Segal who has listened to me through the years. Special thanks go to my family – you put up with a lot! Finally, I would like to thank my daughter Kelsey Keller who never let me give up. vi Dedication For my children, my sisters, my family vii INTRODUCTION If a director doesn’t think through where she stands politically, she is likely to wind up serving the interests of a dominant ideology, whether she intends to or not. Donkin & Clement (6) In the summer of 1985, Canadian Theatre Review (CTR) released a special issue entitled “Feminism and the Canadian Theatre.” Lynn Fernie describes this title as “depressingly accurate” because “the substantial amount of theatre based on feminist analyses produced over the past decade has not been incorporated in any significant way into any level of the institution of Canadian theatre” (59). She feels that the use of the conjunction ‘and’ rather than the preposition ‘in’ places feminism outside and apart from Canadian theatre. In the summer of 2007, D.A. Hadfield’s book Re:Producing Women’s Dramatic History: The Politics of Playing in Toronto was published. In it she exposes the specific difficulties Canadian