Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Contexts Edited by Maria Anita Stefanelli Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html ISSN 2281-9290 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 Copyright © 2016 Via Cervignano 4 - 20137 Milano www.lededizioni.com - www.ledonline.it - E-mail: [email protected] I diritti di riproduzione, memorizzazione e archiviazione elettronica, pubblicazione con qualsiasi mezzo analogico o digitale (comprese le copie fotostatiche, i supporti digitali e l’inserimento in banche dati) e i diritti di traduzione e di adattamento totale o parziale sono riservati per tutti i paesi. Le fotocopie per uso personale del lettore possono essere effettuate nei limiti del 15% di ciascun volume/fascicolo di periodico dietro pagamento alla SIAE del compenso previsto dall’art. 68, commi 4 e 5, della legge 22 aprile 1941 n. 633. Le riproduzioni effettuate per finalità di carattere professionale, economico o commerciale o comunque per uso diverso da quello personale possono essere effettuate a seguito di specifica autorizzazione rilasciata da: AIDRO, Corso di Porta Romana n. 108 - 20122 Milano E-mail [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> sito web www.aidro.org <http://www.aidro.org/> Cover image: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1623-1625). Detroit Institute of Art; oil on canvas. Stampa: Andersen Spa Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html CONTENTS Acknowledgements 7 Preface 9 by Maria Anita Stefanelli 1. Making Visible. Theatrical Form as Metaphor: Marina Carr 15 and Caryl Churchill by Cathy Leeney 2. Obscene Transformations: Violence, Women and Theatre in 27 Sarah Kane and Marina Carr by Melissa Sihra 3. Can the Subaltern Dream? Epistemic Violence, Oneiric 41 Awakenings and the Quest for Subjective Duality in Marina Carr’s Marble Interview with Marina Carr 62 Excerpt from Marble by Marina Carr 69 by Valentina Rapetti 4. “The house is a battlefield now”: War of the Sexes and 77 Domestic Violence in Van Badham’s Kitchen and Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses Interview with Van Badham 92 Excerpt from Kitchen by Van Badham 97 by Barbara Miceli 5. Serial Killers, Serial Lovers: Raquel Almazan’s La Paloma 101 Prisoner Interview with Raquel Almazan 113 Excerpt from La Paloma Prisoner by Raquel Almazan 124 by Alessandro Clericuzio 5 Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html Contents 6. “To Put My Life Back into the Main Text”: Re-Dressing 129 History in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc by Carolyn Gage Interview with Carolyn Gage 142 Excerpt from The Second Coming of Joan of Arc 146 and Selected Plays by Carolyn Gage by Sabrina Vellucci 7. Turning Muteness into Performance in Erin Shields’ If We 149 Were Birds Interview with Erin Shields 172 Excerpt from If We Were Birds by Erin Shields 178 by Maria Anita Stefanelli 8. Afterword: Vocal and Verbal Assertiveness 187 by Kate Burke Contributors 193 6 Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html Acknowledgements My warm thanks go to Ms Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Head of the European Art Department at the Detroit Institute of Art, for generously allowing me to reproduce Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (oil on canvas; 1623- 1625). I am also grateful to all the playwrights who granted their per- mission to publish passages from their work in this book. Thanks to Marina, who, by speaking up first when we met at Roma Tre for a Colloquium in 2014, established the informal style that would characterize our subsequent contacts. Thanks to Van, who recounted a personal experience when discussing a specific incident on the theme of the conference. Thanks to Raquel’s very personal, almost ritualistic style of language that prompted Edward Albee to tell her, “Your ear is splendid, characters speak without a false note, you sure can write”. Thanks to Carolyn, whose passion induced even the lesser inclined members of the audience to honor her cause. Thanks to Erin, whom I recently saw at her lovely new home in Montréal, and who let me in on her latest plans, as well as responding enthusiasti- cally to my own suggestion for a new project. Thanks to my friend Kate, who knew the right way to round off a two-day theatrical marathon – with a collective warm embrace. Thanks also go to Valentina for keeping up the contacts with our playwrights and scholars from abroad, and who joined with Cathy, Melissa, Barbara, Alessandro, Sabrina, and myself to turn our thoughts on the theme of violence in the theater into a book: my thanks to all. 7 Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html PREFACE Spectacular Violence The cover of this book shows Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes in which Judith is portrayed having just decapitated Holofernes and about to flee the crime scene with her maid/accomplice. Various visual artists had tackled this subject before Gentileschi: it can be found in the illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it was also a favored theme of many later great artists. Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Michelangelo, Titian, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Vasari, and Veronese all portrayed Judith. Caravaggio, whose red drapes above the grisly scene provide a theatrical cue for Genti- leschi’s later version, also portrayed this archetypal Biblical female warrior being assisted by her maid, hinting at the women’s sisterly alliance in thwarting a man’s violence and latent savagery. Other artists have represented the scene, from Rubens, Goya and Doré, whose engraving of Judith and Holofernes brings us to Victorian times, to Klimt and von Stuck in the last century. These variations on the episode all evidence the artists’ concern to measure up to their predecessors and, indeed, to their own selves. While staging one or more of the many possible worlds generat- ed by our culture, artists grappling with such elemental expressions of violence can lead us to spaces yet undiscovered. This was their goal, and it is a goal shared by the scholars who contributed to this book. Our purpose was to explore and critique the works of our chosen playwrights in the hope that more space might be made avail- able to readers, spectators, and lovers of theatre for them to acknow- ledge the performance of the feminine in the spectacle of violence across nations. This is how the episode is narrated in the Book of Judith: 9 Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Context - Milano, LED, 2016 ISBN 978-88-7916-795-6 - http://www.ledonline.it/ledonline/795-performing-gender-violence.html Preface Judith fell upon her face, and put ashes upon her head, and uncovered the sackcloth wherewith she was clothed; and about the time that the incense of that evening was offered in Jerusalem in the house of the Lord. Judith cried with a loud voice, and said, O Lord God of my father Simeon, to whom thou gavest a sword to take vengeance of the strangers, who loosened the girdle of a maid to defile her, and discovered the thigh to her shame, and polluted her virginity to her reproach; for thou saidst, It shall not be so; and yet they did so (Judith 9:1-2). 1 In the words of Robin Gallaher Branch, Judith is a “formidable literary character”, whose status can be ascribed to her long genea- logy. In the Bible she invokes God before resolving to kill Holofernes (the chief captain of Nabuchodonosor who has Bethulia under siege) so that the city and its people can be saved. She recalls the offense and the humiliation suffered by Jacob’s daughter Dinah, raped by Schachem, a stranger from a different tribe, and her brothers’ subsequent vengeance through tricking its rulers, with whom they made a pact. Judith’s plan of action is shaped by her courage, vigor, energy, masculine strength, forcefulness, and cold bloodedness – all elements that enhance her devout and compassionate, but also proud, shrewd, and imperturbable character. Fully armed with these attributes, she exploits her natural beauty and uses her female powers of seduction. She visits Holofernes in his tent, and effortlessly reduces him to a brute, senseless and insensible creature before embarking on her plan, which she executes with two blows from his own sword. She then leaves with her maid, who hides the head in a food sack, so that they can get away from the Assyrians unnoticed. The research of Elizabeth S. Cohen, published in a special edition of The Sixteenth Century Journal devoted to “Gender in Early Modern Europe” 2, offers a thorough historical interpretation of the ———————— 1 Judith 9:1-2. The ‘Book of Judith’ is part of the Apocrypha, namely a selection of books which were published in the original 1611 King James Bible, but removed in 1885. The Book is regarded as non-canonical in the Jewish faith. Considered ‘deuterocanonical’ because it entered the canon later, it is part of the Catholic Bible (Old Testament) and is thus seen as God-inspired.