© 2014 Zackary Ross
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© 2014 Zackary Ross CONSTELLATIONS OF SUFFERING: HISTORICAL TRAUMA IN THE THEATRICAL ADAPTATION OF GREEK TRAGEDY BY ZACKARY ROSS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre with a Minor in Cinema Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Assistant Professor Valleri Hohman, Chair Associate Professor Esther Kim Lee Associate Professor J.B. Capino Professor Alison Forsyth, Aberystwyth University ABSTRACT Grounded in the historiography of the field of trauma studies and a theoretical understanding of the role of adaptation within contemporary culture, this dissertation examines how the process of adapting the familiar narratives of ancient Greek tragedy creates opportunities for modern playwrights seeking to represent the horrific realities of historical, community-based traumas that are typically understood as unrepresentable within our culture. An in-depth analysis of three late twentieth and early twenty-first century adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy—Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth (1996), Yael Farber’s Molora (2008), and Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson’s Too Much Memory (2009)—reveals how the adapting authors engage with and adapt their source texts’ structural and aesthetic elements and utilize the basic framework of these ancient tales (Oedipus, The Oresteia, and Antigone) to represent three specific instances of historical trauma: the United States’ history of slavery, South Africa’s experience of apartheid, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror. While each of the three adaptations examined in this study engages with a specific moment of trauma, my analysis of these plays includes a discussion of how its source text has inspired various other adaptations that each respond to their historical moment in unique and significant ways. I argue that authors seeking to adapt these narratives are influenced not only by the “original” source material but also by these various other versions of the text and suggest that these works therefore belong within a large constellation of adaptations, an idea inspired by Adorno’s concept of the constellation image. As new adaptations immerge over time, they expand the scope and significance of the constellation and the narrative on which they are based, thereby creating new dramatic possibilities and relationships between the source text and the time in which it is adapted. ii To the brave artists and playwrights whose work engages with traumatic themes and to the audiences who provide the need. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. Words cannot express the gratitude I feel toward everyone here, but for now they will have to suffice. First, thank you to my committee members—Esther Kim Lee, J.B. Capino, and Alison Forsyth— for their continued interest and invaluable counsel throughout this process, and especially to Valleri Hohman, my advisor, whose encouragement early on first led me to consider trauma’s role in my study and whose guidance through my many drafts helped shape this work. In addition, I would like to thank you the faculty and staff of the Theatre Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign— especially J.W. Morrissette, Peter Davis, Regina Garcia, Tom Mitchell, and David Swinford—whose support over the past six years has been vital and who have made my time at UIUC a true pleasure. I would also like to acknowledge the various directors and theatres that helped me track down the production photographs that appear in this study and the photographers who graciously allowed me to include their work in these pages. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, thank you for saving me so many. The process of writing a dissertation, especially one about trauma, can be arduous. A special thank you to B.J. Gailey, Carrie Bunch, Abby Manekin, and all my friends and colleagues at UIUC who helped me endure this process. It has been a long journey but their friendship and support have carried me through. Thank you to my incredible parents for introducing me to the theatre some twenty-plus years ago and for supporting my decision to pursue it ever since; and thank you to my siblings—Jason, Alex, and Ari—for being right there with me, every step of the way. Without their encouragement, none of this ever would be possible. Finally, and most importantly, to my lovely wife and best friend Michelle: thank you for the past decade, the next decade, and all the ones that will follow. I’d be lost, if not for you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: CONCEPTIONS OF TRAUMA .................................................................................................... 21 CHAPTER 3: REPRESENTATION AND ADAPTATION ..................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER 4: THE DARKER FACE OF THE EARTH ........................................................................................... 86 CHAPTER 5: MOLORA ................................................................................................................................ 134 CHAPTER 6: TOO MUCH MEMORY ........................................................................................................... 186 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSIONS ....................................................................................................................... 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................................... 242 v CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. We come to see the stars arranged as constellations, and as constellations they orient us, they give us something to navigate by, both for travelling across the earth and for telling stories, these bears and scorpions and centaurs and seated queens with their appointed places and seasons. Imagine the lines drawn between stars as roads themselves, as routes for the imagination to travel. —Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (165) The twentieth century marks a period in our collective history where the boundaries that separate the local from the national and the global bleed together, our awareness of our place in this world is heightened, and our understanding of that place—our very faith—is shaken. The combined effects of two world wars, of the mass genocide of several cultures, of the ongoing tensions between economic stability and uncertainty, science and faith, the unyielding desire for progress despite the need for constancy, and the pervasive threat of terrorism—both foreign and domestic—all have created a crisis of identity on a global level. In Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images (2010), Allen Meek discusses this crisis of identity as the result of historical trauma; according to Meek, such a crisis results from events which “become signifiers of collective identity—for example: war, revolution, conquest, colonization, genocide, slavery and natural disaster” and which involve “unresolved ethical, philosophical or political issues” (32). Clearly, Meek’s concept is gravely influenced by the tragic events of the twentieth century—its wars, revolutions, and disasters—so much so that we might refer to this period as the traumatic twentieth century. In fact, trauma studies as a field formed, in part, in reaction to these large-scale, often global events, whose consequences could not be accounted for under the nineteenth century conception of trauma as defined by Freud and his colleagues which were only concerned with the individual response to traumatic events. As a result, scholars and mental health professionals developed a collective model of trauma which could account for the seemingly endless string of widespread tragedies plaguing this 1 era: including but not limited to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Chernobyl disaster, the first Gulf War, the genocide in Rwanda, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As would be expected, artists witnessing these catastrophic events began to reflect their concerns in their artistic products, flooding the culture with images which spoke to the social and political circumstances of the trauma they experienced. Trauma studies responded by developing notions about the significance of this work, resulting in an abundance of new scholarly theories that discuss the images produced by trauma in the media and in various modes of entertainment; many of these theories claimed that trauma could not accurately be represented due to the extremity of the circumstances which define traumatic events. Nevertheless, artists throughout the twentieth century have used their art as a means of representing trauma and have often turned to highly stylized, aesthetic means for depicting these events. In the theatre, this has resulted in a number of plays that take up trauma as a theme and explore the significance of psychological trauma through their structural and narrative components. The kinship between trauma and the theatre is unsurprising