Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History: The Politics of Playing in Toronto

By D.A. Hadfield

Within the last generation, Canadian drama, like other literary forms, has seen the emergence of works by women that re-vision the role of women in history. However, in order to write themselves into theatre history, women have had to negotiate a complex journey through both pages and stages, a network of public production that is highly politically charged at every turn. This book examines the strategies employed by seven feminist productions that have managed to achieve a canonic place in the recorded history of Canadian theatre. All of the plays under consideration here exist (or have existed) in at least one published script form.

However, Dorothy Hadfield’s purpose here is not to analyze these scripts for the definitive meaning of the narratives in these plays, nor is she trying to suggest how a reader or audience should inevitably read them. Instead, Hadfield is trying to account for how and why these scripts came to exist in published form, given the strong implicit connection between publication and a public assumption of good” or successful” theatre. In a system where textual visibility leads to opportunities for study, reproduction and validation for both play and playwright, the permanence of script publication can have real economic and ideological advantages. By analyzing publicity materials, photos, programs, reviews, box office and theatre records, it is possible to trace the process of creating a theatrical success,” as well as to assess what effect that critical verdict has on the shape of the script publications of these works. In effect, by placing the textual artifacts left behind by these performances in the context of their production and reception, in part through a carefully constructed ideological compatibility throughout the production process, it is possible to investigate how the politics of the theatrical process influences what we perceive as good” playwriting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Apr 2, 2007
• ISBN: 9780889229686

D.A. Hadfield

D.A. Hadfield teaches English, drama and theatre studies at the University of Guelph and St. Jerome’s University (Waterloo, Ontario). Her readings of theatre history consider critical and historical narratives in the context of the archival materials—the “textual residues” of performance—that are implicated in the systems of representation.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Women’s History: Pages and Stages

Exit: History

Performing Histories: Stage One

Performing Histories: Stage Two

Getting on with the Show

2. Producing Possibilities for Feminist Theatre

Developing Policy and Production in Canada

Beginning with the Word

Collective Creation

Who Could Do Such a Thing?

3. Dead Centre: Judith Thompson Takes on Shaw and Ibsen

Feminist Central?

The Court House Trials

Critical Verdicts

Inadmissible Evidence

Epilogue: Reviving Hedda Gabler

4. Sally into the Centre: Is Seeing Believing?

How Do You Spell Success?

Wanted: Single White Feminist

Re: Playing History

Playing With(out) Success

Trials and Verdicts at the Canadian Stage

Playing the Stakes

In-Credible Instruction

Reading History

5. Crossing Over, or, Reading Anger in the Margin

Reading Across Contexts

Writing the History of Mixed Blood: The Book of Jessica

In Search of Ceremony

Transforming Theatrical History

This Is (No Place) for You, Anna

Producing No Place on the Page

Reproducing No Place on Stage and Page

Of Supplements

6. Re: Visions of History

A Good Night for Feminist Theatre

Remainders

Works Cited

Index

Preface

Within the last generation, Canadian drama, like other literary forms, has seen the emergence of works by women that re-vision the role of women in history. However, the politics of theatre necessitates a very different experience for women who choose the dramatic over other literary forms. In order to write themselves into theatre history, women must negotiate a complex journey through pages and stages, a network of public production that is highly politically charged at every turn. This book examines the strategies employed on behalf of seven feminist productions that have managed to achieve a place in the recorded history of Canadian theatre.

All of the plays under consideration here exist (or have existed) in at least one published script form. However, I am not trying to analyze these scripts for the definitive meaning in these plays, nor am I trying to dictate how a reader or audience should inevitably read them. Instead, I am trying to account for how and why these scripts came to exist in a particular form, given the strong implicit connection between publication and the assumption of good or successful theatre. In a system where textual visibility leads to opportunities for study, reproduction, and validation for both play and playwright, the perseverance of script publication can have real economic and ideological advantages. By analyzing publicity materials, photos, programmes, reviews, and box office and theatre records, it is possible to trace the process of creating a theatrical success, as well as to assess what effect that critical verdict has on the shape of the script publications of these works. In effect, by placing the textual residues left behind by these productions in the context of production and reception, it is possible to investigate how the politics of the theatrical process influences the quality and the type of historiographical remainders.

Chapter one provides an overview of women’s place in history, and more specifically, Canadian dramatic history. By exposing the possibilities and ideologies inherent in the writing of historical narratives, it sketches out a methodology for selecting and reading the productions and their residual texts that appear in the subsequent chapters.

Chapter two presents a consideration of the process of new play development as it is practiced in Toronto, outlining some of the ideological, financial, and practical difficulties faced by women playwrights in getting their unique visions onto the theatrical stage. This chapter rehearses some of the strengths and weaknesses of script-based and collective theatre for feminist productions, as well as considers the possibilities afforded by the in-process alternative of workshopping plays.

Chapter three begins a series of chapters that examine specific productions in the context of the traditions and methodologies outlined in the first two chapters. Specifically, this chapter analyzes Judith Thompson’s experience directing a production of Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake (1991), and the historically unspeakable conditions that resulted in the disappearance of the script of her critically acclaimed adaptation of this Ibsen play from history. Since Thompson’s adaptation, despite the absence of a published text, has had a certain reproductive history, the chapter ends with a consideration of how the politics of historiography can be made to serve feminist theatre to some extent, although this possibility requires an extraordinary personal commitment on the part of the playwright.

Chapter four deals with three plays by Sally Clark, The Trial of Judith K. (Canadian Stage Company, 1989), Jehanne of the Witches (Tarragon Theatre, 1989), and Life Without Instruction (Theatre Plus Toronto, 1991). The disparity between Clark’s status in the record of feminist history and the controversies that surrounded the production and reception of these plays provides a fertile field for investigating how the politics of production and the politics of historiography affect historical narrative. Forging a connection between the relatively mainstream and commercial venues where these productions occurred and the very problematic nature of Clark’s presumed feminism at the height of the culture wars and political correctness debates also makes visible the dangers inherent in exploring the politics of gender construction too closely with audiences not in the mood for such experimentation.

Chapter five looks at two plays that were developed in the collective tradition, Jessica by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell, and This Is for You, Anna by The Anna Project. These plays offer the greatest challenge to traditional, literary-based modes of historiography, and the fact that they are represented to history through texts that reflect the same emphasis on intersubjective process as did their theatrical productions is a function of the reputation for success that resulted, in part, from a carefully constructed ideological compatibility throughout the production process.

The concluding chapter places the preceding six productions in the context of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (Canadian Stage, 1990). One of the most successful works in the history of feminist and Canadian theatre, MacDonald’s play shares common features with each of the other plays, and shows how astute actors and theatre companies can maximize the possibility of success by self-consciously creating a theatrical context that aligns the politics of production and audience. Finally, the concluding summary points out that any apparent feminist gains in mainstream theatre actually hide the extent to which Canadian theatre is still tenaciously resistant, both in working methods and at the box office, to any real challenges to a traditional, masculinist status quo.

Acknowledgements

In a thesis that seeks to problematize the relationship between public and private history and consider the political significance of everything, it is difficult to decide just how far my acknowledgements should extend. The research and writing of this book was undertaken while I was at the University of Western Ontario, and my first and most public debt of gratitude belongs there, where I received both financial and collegial support. Especially, I benefited greatly from the advice, expertise, and encouragement of Frank Davey, the first Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature. While the arguments, for better or worse, are mine, their public visibility owes a great deal to his commitment and his willingness to help this book negotiate its way through the networks of production that surround publication. Manina Jones was likewise helpful in providing astute critical commentary, especially on The Book of Jessica, an amazing work that many students encounter for the first time in her classes. Alison Lee was a wonderful source of feminist focus, as well as the perspective and humour that saw me through many days.

Further afield, Ann Wilson at the University of Guelph was extremely generous in suggestions and advice right from the earliest stages of the ideas and proposals that eventually became this book; for that, and for her ongoing encouragement and friendship, I am most grateful. Also, I owe a great deal to the staff of Archival and Special Collections in the McLaughlin Library at the University of Guelph, without whose helpfulness this research would have been impossible. Their in-depth knowledge of the holdings in what is now called the L.W. Conolly Theatre Archives alerted me to materials I might otherwise not have found, and their patience as they brought out file after file for my perusal was remarkable. Then there is L.W. Conolly himself, who first introduced me to the possibilities of theatre archives when I was a graduate student at Guelph; like a Gustav manuscript, his influence ghosts every page.

Judith Thompson, Sally Clark, and Stephen Johnson were very accommodating in responding to my questions about their productions, and Ric Knowles generously shared both his thoughts and a manuscript version of what eventually became The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning, a book that will profoundly influence materialist readings of theatre for years to come. For these conversations, and for their permission to quote from the unpublished records of them, I extend my sincere thanks.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am very grateful for this financial support. In addition, I am grateful to the ASPP readers who offered valuable insights and made numerous helpful suggestions for revision.

On what must be called a most private note, I owe perhaps my greatest debt of gratitude to my family, without whose accommodation, encouragement, and support this book could not exist. My children, Victoria, Brandon, and Cameron, from birth have shared their mother with feminists, theorists, and playwrights they have never met, and I truly hope their world will be bigger because of it. My husband, Blair, absorbed many personal and practical costs throughout the process, and provided invaluable critical challenges to my readings of how power circulates in society, and between women and men. Together, we continue to negotiate balance in theory and practice.

1

Women’s History: Pages and Stages

Is that me, this no-body that is dressed up, wrapped in veils, carefully kept distant, pushed to the side of History and change, nullified, kept out of the way, on the edge of the stage . . . ?

—Hélène Cixous

Exit: History

History has not always been with us. It was apparently born about 430 B.C.E., and it has a father, Herodotus of Halicarnassus. When Cicero proclaimed Herodotus the father of history, he inaugurated a tradition of historiography that defined the correct form and function of written history as a published record that offers the possibility of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done (Herodotus 6). History is properly the story of great men, and their great deeds and military actions. There is no mother of history, and women apparently have no real place here.

When Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White popularized the notion of history as a particular species of teleologically and ideologically inflected narrative, they opened a gap between the reality of things past and their remembrance, but sutured it by invoking a narrative tradition dating back to another one of the Great White Fathers of critical theory, Aristotle. Aristotle himself clearly differentiates between the writing of history and the work of the poet as a difference in subject, not mode, of discourse. The work of Herodotus, claims Aristotle, might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it (30). The difference in subject matter is what makes poetry a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular (30). While Aristotle further differentiates narrative from other modes of discourse, he models his definition and analysis of narrative on the compositional elements of tragic drama. Among those elements, plot stands out as absolutely central to the successful achievement of both narrative and tragedy. Moreover, Aristotle is quite particular about what constitutes the perfect subject for a tragic plot: [A] man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous, a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families (33). The exclusion of women in Aristotle’s definition here is not incidental. In Book XV, he reveals why women should be excluded from the central role in a tragedy: Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless.. . . There is a type of manly valour; but valour in a woman, or unscrupulous cleverness, is inappropriate (36). Such profoundly masculinist assumptions nonetheless provide the foundation upon which the Western narrative tradition has been built, to the point that it can justifiably be written that subordination and exclusion of women is endemic to narrative (Diamond, Refusing 94), including the narratives that make up history.

While Ricoeur and White were not concerned with exploring or even questioning these masculinist assumptions about narrative, the reframing of history into historical narrative has opened a postmodern space where the ideological investments in history writing can be usefully questioned. The gaps that postmodern reframing make visible have encouraged the writing of something different from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it: . . . [W]e now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much sung few, and I might add, of women as well as men (Hutcheon 66). Linda Hutcheon’s inclusion of women’s history here as almost an afterthought represents one of the crucial distinctions between postmodernism, which largely ignores issues of gender in its dismantling of hegemonic representation and authority, and feminism, where the gender of representation and the representation of gender form central concerns. In a separate chapter, Postmodernism and Feminisms, Hutcheon summarizes the result of the intersection of these two cultural enterprises: It radicalized the postmodern sense of difference and de-naturalized the traditional historiographic separation of the private and the public—and the personal and the political . . . (142). If, as most feminists argue, the personal is indeed the political, then history can no longer afford to ignore the private sphere, the space into which women have traditionally been interpellated, the (no) place from whence our history has (not) happened.

Many feminist theoreticians have quickly taken advantage of this space (not incidentally, first opened and legitimized by men) to expose and de-naturalize the privileged position men have assumed in traditional narrative forms in general, and particularly in historical narratives. Sue-Ellen Case (Classic 318–20) examines the historical context that authorized the Aristotelian tradition as the separation of life into public and private spheres, where male citizens of the Greek city-states enjoyed commerce in the public marketplace, while women were confined to the domestic space, where their household and social transactions were not deemed the stuff of History. Entrenching women behind the walls of the home did not stem from a realization that women were naturally more suited to cooking and overseeing the quotidian monotony of household management than men. Both Case, writing about ancient Greece, and Phyllis Rackin, writing about Renaissance England, locate the need to control access to and by women in the same anxiety over patriarchal lineage that had real economic ramifications in both societies. In ancient Greece, the right of citizenship, with its attendant privileges of status, land ownership, and, especially, participation in the democratic process, was conferred primarily through patriarchal inheritance. Likewise in Renaissance England, the continuation of property and privilege depended on legitimate patrilineal heritage. Analyzing why women in Shakespeare’s history plays are often figured as attempting to subvert the legitimate authority of the patriarchal historical record, Rackin writes:

In every important sense, chronicle history was not simply written without women: it was also written against them. Patriarchal history is designed to construct a verbal substitute for the visible connection between a mother and her children, to authenticate the relationships between fathers and sons and to suppress and supplant the role of the mother.. . . In the world of history, women are inevitably alien representatives of the unarticulated residue that eludes the men’s historiographic texts and threatens their historical myths. (215, 221)

The maternal role of women must disappear from historical record, not because it is intrinsically superfluous, but because it represents an excess in the history of who begat whom, the site that must be repressed for fear that it cannot, ultimately, be unequivocally controlled.

The issue of control of women resurfaces in Judith Lowder Newton’s analysis of the rationalizations offered in nineteenth century texts—by female as well as male authors—for maintaining middle-class women’s place in the private sphere of the home. The literature she summarizes demarcates a distinction between the political power of men and the immense influence that women properly wield in the domestic sphere:

This valorization of women’s influence, it should be clear, was aimed at devaluing actions and capacities which we can only call other forms of power, and, in this way, the peddling of women’s influence, in a sort of ideological marketplace, functioned to sustain unequal power relations between middle-class women and middle-class men. Having influence, in fact, . . . meant doing without self-definition, achievement, and control, meant relinquishing power for effacement of the self in love and sacrifice.. . . (767)

Trading active power of achievement for the more passive power of influence is no bargain for these women. They paid the price for this interpellation on both contemporary and historical fronts: first, its cost in terms of their own autonomy and agency, and subsequently, by their effective removal from the History of great men and great deeds.

Julia Kristeva sets up a similar distinction between men and women in terms of subjectivity. Her description of female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition also offers an explanation for women’s effacement from History. According to Kristeva, the feminine subject is incompatible with a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history (446). From the diverse theoretical realms of materialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis (to summarize but a few here), the analyses of why women have not taken place in History have laid the foundation for the construction of the histories in which women can, and do, appear.

Central to the construction of these histories is a consideration of the terms of representation endemic to any type of historical narrative. The politics of representation impacts upon feminist histories both in terms of constructing and of authorizing or validating historical narratives. Any attempt to consider history must first acknowledge the unrecoverability of unmediated past experience, the inevitability that historical narrative can only represent the past: We only have access to the past today through its traces—its documents, the testimony of witnesses, and other archival material. In other words, we only have representations of the past from which to construct our narratives or explanations (Hutcheon 58). With the past available only through already constructed texts, the issue of who controls the construction of these representational texts becomes one of crucial importance. Moreover, the circulation of historical representations is far from neutral. Hutcheon, echoing Foucault, points out that [w]e cannot avoid representation. We can try to avoid fixing our notion of it and assuming it to be transhistorical and transcultural. We can also study how representation legitimizes and privileges certain kinds of knowledge—including certain kinds of historical knowledge (54). Previously, History privileged knowledge of public characters and events, while relegating women to the domain of the private, a distinction that is now being dismantled in favour of a sense of history that acknowledges the contributions of genders, as well as cultures, races, classes, and other positional categories previously rendered invisible. Such a radical revisioning of history creates a particularly engaging moment for the ‘post’ of going back, to bring to centre stage the gaps and omissions of History’s performance calendar (Bennett, Performing 153).

Performing Histories: Stage One

The history of performative theatre, like feminist history, like the actual event of a theatre performance, is inextricably implicated in and by the politics of representation. Any study of (past) performance must immediately confront issues of textual representation (not just the literary, but visual and aural texts as well) in the very materials by which the study is made possible. Performance, by its very definition, is an ephemeral phenomenon, a transaction that occurs in a specific place and time and passes immediately into memory—and, sometimes, into the textual residues through which we attempt to capture or record it. It is only through this residual textuality that past performances become a matter of public record, making any attempt to study them at least as much about the politics of representation as it is about recovering any particular performance event. The focus, in effect, must be less on history and more on historiography, less on the event, and more on how that event is recorded and constructed for subsequent reading audiences.

Theatre historians in general have been relatively slow to recognize and accept the implications of mediated textuality for the study of past performance, a result of the traditional—and contemporary—scholarly construction of dramatic genre along a text / performance axis. The traditional definition of the genre divides the experience of drama into two separate modalities: either as a system of graphical notations written down or printed, or as an action realized in a particular space and at a particular time (Pistotnik 677) and the study of drama into two different camps, where one is based on the belief that drama is literature awaiting performance, the other is related to theories which emphasize the importance of the performance aspect (Pistotnik 677–78). Recent theories of dramatic scholarship have actually exacerbated the problem by stressing the importance of performance in terms that reinforce its essential difference from the text: "[P]erformance is all that which is not text" (Pistotnik 679). Using this definition gave rise to a study of past performance based on

the archaeology of theatrical forms and the assessment of how they have been used to serve the needs of the dramatic text on stage. Its methodology began and has remained within the tradition of nineteenth-century positivism: the empirical gathering of facts and evidence is followed by presentations of material which aim to establish what really happened. While this sort of unquestioned bid for objectivity is considered stage history’s main virtue, value judgements and the stage historian’s explicit personal comments are expected to be minimal, or, in some views, avoided if possible. (Pistotnik 681–82)

Even though the academic theory of performance historiography has, in the main, responded to the types of suggestions Pistotnik makes to focus on and problematize established notions of ‘facts,’ ‘objectivity,’ terminology, and the writing of stage history (683) and pay attention to the gaps which a stage historian cannot ignore by pretending that his or her descriptions represent stage reality (683), this performance-based scholarship merely inverts the hierarchy, while reinforcing the binary terms on which it is based. The text/performance axis remains intact, and with it the assumption that a dramatic text is ‘incomplete’ unless it reaches the stage (Pistotnik 678). This assumption resonates through the writing of even criticially astute contemporary theatre historiographers, whose theories are sometimes haunted by the implicit desire to evoke the reality of an original performance event.¹ Again, current academic practice sometimes colludes with this implicit desire to erase the effects of historiography and get back to history: Aston (33) supports the methodology proposed by Stokes, Booth, and Bassnett for recovering the reality of past performances through a visual reconstruction based on cues offered by set and costume designs, promptbooks, and rehearsal copies—materials not traditionally taken into account in the standard scholarship of theatre history. Widening the range of texts that can and should be considered sometimes fuels the implicit hope that if we can only gather enough texts, we can somehow transcend the textual to rematerialize the real.²

Such academic alchemy is, alas, ultimately destined to fail. As long as drama continues to be figured along the terms of the text/performance axis, especially with performance as the privileged term, theatre historiographers will continue to be confronted with the quandary presented when acknowledgement of this centrality is coupled with the absence of the historical event’s performance dynamic (Mullaly 39). According to Tracy Davis, this absent performance dynamic has serious implications for feminist theatre histories:

If it were possible to ‘score’ a theatrical performance the way music is scored, and to account for all the components of stage expression . . . the experience of reading the mise-en-scène would be the same experience as being in the audience. But this is not possible, for however complete the score is, it is only a partial rendering of a real and immediate experience. Inseparable from the mise-en-scène (and essential to the reality/unreality of a performance) are the elaborate encodings of gender. As something that is readable according to social conventions, gender is infinitely subject to redefinition. (73)

The performance dynamic, in other words, owes its absence to the same social construction that has kept women from taking historical place; coming to terms with the politics of representation in theatre historiography means coming to terms with the politics of representation as they have affected women.

In specific theatrical terms, the representation of women on stage has belonged as firmly within patriarchal ideology as it has off stage, based originally on the same separation between the public and private spheres. In the Greek and Renaissance eras of classical theatre, the public status of the stage meant that women’s roles were represented by male actors in what Sue-Ellen Case has termed classic drag: This practice reveals the fictionality of the patriarchy’s representation of the gender. Classical plays and theatrical conventions can now be regarded as allies in the project of suppressing real women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production (Case, Feminism 7). The history on which theatre has been built, like the tradition that constructed narrative, has developed at the expense of women’s presence, by defining the stage as a site where real women could not take place. By the time female actors did appear in the flesh, their roles had already been structured and codified in/by their absence. Constructed as Other in the male-centred system of theatrical representation, the female actor steps into the role of cultural courtesan for the fulfillment of male desire, she also becomes an ‘Other’ to herself.. . . There is no real woman under the requirements of costume, make-up and body language (Case, Feminism 120–21). Even when they appear corporeally on stage, Case argues, the spectre of Woman evacuates the presence of their bodies into the absence of their representation.

Furthermore, as Gay Gibson Cima documents, at the historical moment when women threatened to become dramatically visible, the male-dominated theatrical institution changed its historiographic rules, making sure men remained centre stage. The advent of the modern theatre and the decline of the actor-manager tradition in the nineteenth century opened unprecedented opportunities for women. Buoyed by plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, which offered central, unconventional roles for female actors, women gained more prominence in the theatre; some, like Janet Achurch, Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eleanora Duse, and Ellen Terry, attained a remarkable degree of autonomy and control in the shaping and running of theatre companies. In the eighteenth century, actors such as David Garrick and Charles Macklin who achieved similar prominence had entire performance traditions named after them. In the late nineteenth century, however, theatre history undergoes a shift in attributing performance agency from actors to playwrights. Instead of a Terry style, theatre history gives us Ibsen actors: the genderless professionals who animated the characters of the brilliant, modern—and male—playwright. This shift towards the primacy of the playwright and his vision continues to haunt theatre today.

Performing Histories: Stage Two

To begin redressing this absence, feminists³ have begun to write the gaps in the stages of a History that has excluded women. These historical (re)visions must address the traditional separation between public and private spaces and render visible a female tradition in both drama and theatre that has been publicly erased. Tracy Davis articulates a mandate for feminist theatre historians that begins by problematizing the boundaries