Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary Transnational Contexts

Maria Anita Stefanelli

• Publisher: LED Edizioni Universitarie
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9788879160469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Acknowledgements — Preface by Maria Anita Stefanelli — 1. Making Visible. Theatrical Form as Metaphor: Marina Carr and Caryl Churchill by Cathy Leeney — 2. Obscene Transformations: Violence, Women and Theatre in Sarah Kane and Marina Carr by Melissa Sihra — 3. Can the Subaltern Dream? Epistemic Violence, Oneiric Awakenings and the Quest for Subjective Duality in Marina Carr's Marble - Interview with Marina Carr - Excerpt from Marble by Marina Carr by Valentina Rapetti — 4. "The house is a battlefield now": War of the Sexes and Domestic Violence in Van Badham's Kitchen and Warren Adler's The War of the Roses - Interview with Van Badham - Excerpt from Kitchen by Van Badham by Barbara Miceli — 5. Serial Killers, Serial Lovers: Raquel Almazan's La Paloma Prisoner - Interview with Raquel Almazan - Excerpt from La Paloma Prisoner by Raquel Almazan by Alessandro Clericuzio — 6. "To Put My Life Back into the Main Text": Re-Dressing History in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc by Carolyn Gage - Interview with Carolyn Gage - Excerpt from The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays by Carolyn Gage by Sabrina Vellucci — 7. Turning Muteness into Performance in Erin Shields' If We Were Birds - Interview with Erin Shields - Excerpt from If We Were Birds by Erin Shields by Maria Anita Stefanelli — 8. Afterword: Vocal and Verbal Assertiveness by Kate Burke — ContributorsAn extraordinary complexity characterizes the encounter between theatre, mythology, and human rights when gender-based violence is on the platform. Another encounter enhances the cross-disciplinary and transnational dynamics in this book: the one between the scholar and the playwright, who exchange views to pursue a theme demanding due attention at an emergence that needs being explored to be understood and combated, and finally turned into a priority action. Through the analysis of a repertoire of contemporary plays and performance practices from English-speaking countries, the contributors explore in detail the asymmetrical relations that exist between men and women, the crimes involved, and the ways in which the protagonists' minds work differently. The unconventional format adopted for the five central sections that follow two papers centered on Marina Carr's theatre in comparison with two noteworthy British playwrights', and that forerun the final stringent remarks about woman's (like man's) fundamental right to speak and need for words, offers not just single chapters, however provocative, on an aspect of the theme, but a tripartite session boasting a critical inquiry into the text, the playwright's response to criticism, and a sample of the author's creative expression. What emerges is a prismatic, complex, and visceral vision of the plays offered to the public for further elaboration and critique. Beside Carr, those involved are Raquel Almazan, Van Badham, Carolyn Gage and Erin Shields – all of them champions of today's feminist commitment to denounce, through their art, violence against women.

MAKING VISIBLE

Theatrical Form as Metaphor:
Marina Carr and Caryl Churchill

by Cathy Leeney

In this moment of feminism and post-feminism, one is conscious that women and men, globally, occupy vastly different realms of experience, different possibilities of becoming a person, and what that might mean. The contest for equal human rights for women and men is complicated in our contemporary moment by urgent issues of environment, economy and technology. As the planet toils under the weight of our demands as a species, inequalities between genders, classes and races occupy a shared context of profound changes in human expectations and behaviour caused by the impact of technology and the material prosperity of the favoured few. Gender and violence ground these situations of inequality while the relatively privileged struggle to understand and undo their entrapment in the power structures of globalization, information communication technology, and overweening materialism. Women and men are kept in place in a whirligig of consumption of both goods and information.

While playwrights Caryl Churchill and Marina Carr have written important work exploring women’s struggle, as Portia Coughlan puts it, ‘to enter the world and stay in it’ (255), and the price that is paid for such a chance, both women are also visionaries in our present time, creating theatre that captures a quality of experience that feels at once accurate, and yet surprising, sometimes shocking and destabilizing. This aspect of their work affirms them as key figures in contemporary theatre. Recent plays from both authors have certain elements that overlap, that draw their work into relation, not as a question of likeness, but in their ability to expose the unexamined assumptions that ground how we live, what hurts us, and what we long for. Both have, more recently, created plays that are coolly passionate, that are emotionally urgent and yet still a catalyst for reflection and recognition: Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) and Marina Carr’s Marble (2009).

I will argue that a crucial aspect of the meanings of the plays arises through their form, rather than through the more conventional categories of character and thematic dialogue, although in both cases character and narrative operate powerfully in support. In this sense both plays experiment with dramaturgy in order to disrupt audience expectations, to unpick easy judgements and strip away accretions of cliché. These experiments in form lead, in Heidegger’s word, to ‘deconcealing’ (38); theatrical transformation occurs at the level of the framework of the play, as opposed to at the level of an individual character or group.

The philosopher of science Robert Crease has applied the concept of ‘performance’ to what he calls the theatre of scientific discovery. By doing so he connects science with theatre through the notion of performance: scientific experiment is a kind of performance. He defines scientific experiments as “unique events in the world undertaken for the purpose of allowing something to be seen. What comes to be seen is not something unique and peculiar to that event, but something that can also be seen in similar performances in other contexts …” (Crease 96). In relation to theatrical performance then, Crease’s idea emphasizes how the play as a structure, as an event viewed by the audience, uncovers something and allows it to be examined. By drawing this parallel between the artist and the scientist, Crease argues for a re-conception of what scientific enquiry is, but if we reverse the relationship, and link the procedures of experimentation in the sciences back into the arts through the idea of performance as an experimental method, Crease also offers us a refreshed aspect of theatrical performance. I would like to extend this reversal of his idea so that the qualities he finds common to the procedures of art and science are reflected back onto theatre art, to see how the theatre of scientific experiment illuminates (again) the play and its performance for audiences.

Crease defines performance as a presentation of an action, an action related to a representation (using a semiotic system, text, scenic space, scenography). It has the power “to coax into being something which has not previously appeared […] it is action at the limit of the already controlled and understood; it is risk”. The audience perhaps “recognises new phenomena in it” (100). Bert O. States observes that while scientists find experimental methods, artists find metaphors to test their ideas (23). Where the scientist employs laboratory equipment for experimentation, the maker of theatre uses the machinery of representation on stage and the metaphorical and metonymic relationships between representational elements to test and define. I am using States’s notion of metaphor in its broadest theatrical definition, to include metaphorical images in the language, as well as how actions and exchanges on stage may present a metaphorical image of social or emotional states of being.

Experiments and performances require observers and Crease comments on the role of the scientific audience: “properly preparing and viewing performances requires a detached attitude, one interested in seeing what is happening for its own sake rather than for some practical end”. Crease continues, saying that this detachment allows for “a deepened and enriched understanding of the world and our engagement with it” (96). So Crease suggests that, in the theatre, disengagement is valuable, creating perhaps a dynamic energy that counters empathy.

In Irish theatre tradition, W.B. Yeats was interested in how a theatre audience moves from emotional involvement, absorption, trance or empathy with the performance, to detachment, reflection, and meditation. Richard Kearney, following Ricoeur, talks about the same element, describing it as “aesthetic distance from which to view the events unfolding, thereby discerning ‘the hidden cause of things’”. Kearney notes how “this curious conflation of empathy and detachment produces in us […] the double vision necessary for a journey beyond the closed ego towards other possibilities of being” (12-13). I am emphasizing this idea of detachment as a way of considering the cool quality of the plays I will briefly discuss. The dramaturgies in both Marble and Love and Information collapse ends into means, as the structures of the plays work to disturb and interrupt audience empathy.

The philosopher’s approach integrates the audience, the receptive community, into the whole process, of performance, of transformation through creative perception, valuing a detached attitude in the proceedings, emphasizing how performance makes visible new phenomena (as opposed to reflecting ‘reality’ – a vexed, reductive and contentious function). The making visible also implies that the phenomena, although pre-existing, has been masked, inaccessible, or disguised. The paradox here is that the phenomenon made visible is at the same time immediately identified (“one recognizes the phenomenon for what it is” [Crease 110]) and yet new, a revelation, a disturbance and a ground for transformation.

The idea of metaphor as an experimental method for the theatre invites ways of understanding a play through its structure and images, rather than through narrative and character only. In vastly different ways, and employing vastly contrasting theatrical strategies, Carr and Churchill make visible phenomena of contemporary experience that, once exposed, are immediately identifiable and also a revelation. As audiences, the plays move us from recognition, empathy and emotional response, to estrangement, surprise and deep reflection.

Carr’s and Churchill’s work occupies the paradox mentioned earlier, of being, in performance, precisely of its immediate moment, while it carries forward the work of human enquiry into and understanding of its own condition, past connecting into present and future; past sundered from present and with future foreboding. The structural metaphor shared by both playwrights across these two plays is the conversation between two people. The dramatic space of the plays is different too – gone is the geographical space of earlier works like Carr’s The Mai (1994) or Portia Coughlan (1996), or Churchill’s Fen (1983) – it is replaced by conceptual space that’s shifting and tricky, a space rather than a place.

First performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in September 2012, Love and Information presents seven untitled sections, each one made up of a series of titled scenes; all except three of these are between two people¹. Each of the three exceptions involve only three people. In the Royal Court production, sixteen performers played more than one hundred characters. This long succession of short scenes seems to deal with aspects of information, how people deal with it, what it means, how it impacts on behaviour and relationship, how people manipulate it, ignore or resist it; how it helps and how it hurts. Each section might be said to focus its scenes as follows (these are my titles for each section):

1 – Craving Information; 2 – Information Kills; 3 – Lies and Illusions; 4 – Memory; 5 – What’s it Meant to Mean?; 6 – Failure to Respond; 7 - How Information Makes you Feel.

The structure of the proceedings is further destabilized by Churchill’s note that the conversations can be played in any order within each section, and furthermore, sections can be interrupted at any point by random scenes, which are given at the end of the script. These include optional scenes, but also a series of scenes called ‘Depression’ where a silent depressed person does not respond to questions or suggestions made by another. Churchill directs that the Depression scenes are ‘an essential part of the play’ (74).

Without assigning any character names, gender, or roles to the lines on the page, part of the pleasure of reading the text is in understanding the dialogues at once through the scene titles and the clarity of the writing alone. The author directs that the characters are different in every scene, except perhaps the Depression scenes. (Churchill 2)

The effect of these choices is that audience reliance on character as a source of empathy is impossible. Churchill replaces sustained character with discourse and situation that is sometimes funny, sometimes uplifting, sometimes painful, sometimes sinister; and as one section of scenes follows another, the conversations multiply in number while the mode of exchange repeats and repeats, reduced to individual encounters. The relentless series of one duologue after another stresses the ironic isolation within which the performers communicate so actively. The scenes with three voices take on a dialectical significance which is often negative. Examples are ‘Recluse’ in Section 3 in which two people are afraid to open the door to an intrusive journalist (26) or ‘Stone’ which is a duologue between two bullies who gang up to attack a third person (66).

Love and Information’s vast array of ideas, themes, conversations and persons runs the risk of appearing chaotic to the point of incoherence, although the multiple roles for each performer provide a theatrical counterpoint to the complex and sometimes aleatory elements at play, offering the audience an opportunity to enjoy the virtuosity of performance as a unifying factor. But how is the audience to understand a through line in this anti-structure as it shines light on the unseen connections between disparate experiences? States points out a sequence of dis-similarity, ‘inspired by Wittgen

stein’s theory of games’, (and adapted by Umberto Eco for another purpose) through this graphic form:

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From left to right, similarity features less and less, until, between far left and far right, no similarity is present. Yet, as States says, ‘there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between’. Thus, the structure of Love and Information, the tension between repetitious form (duologues occasionally interrupted by threesomes) and the ‘family resemblances’ between scenes and Sections, allows the audience to move fluently from ‘one manifestation of the phenomenon to another’ (States, 3). Churchill extends the metaphorical structure to reveal life reduced to individual interface, as against the counter-metaphor of excess and chaos experienced through the ubiquitous circulation of information mediated by technology.

The play materializes and makes visible contemporary embodied experience of information, its multiplicity, spin, sophistication, its capacity to inspire wonder, how mere humans try to manage it: how we need it, are addicted to it; overwhelmed by the quantity of it; seduced and enraptured, manipulated by it; hurt, damaged and endangered by it, lost in it; bewildered by it. The phenomenon, one may say, is not unfamiliar or new, but how it is currently experienced in the developed world and increasingly everywhere, is new. The increased quantity of information circulating, its intensity, the power of digital media to watch, listen, record, and possibly control every aspect of life, its function in the hands of the state, the massive imposition it makes on each life – this is new in a new context of the massive and potentially catastrophic success of our species; how do we deal with this as sentient emotional, social and physical beings? It is the way we live now and who can stay outside it?

Marina Carr’s Marble was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in Feb. 2009 (directed by Jeremy Herrin and designed by Robert Innes Hopkins). This play marks a new phase in Carr’s work, and yet as I try to identify the qualities of this phase, each aspect turns out to have been, in some form, already present before: the uneasy spaces of the earlier plays, part-realist, part-conceptual, the disturbance of theatrical form, wrought with such force as to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Making Visible. Theatrical Form as Metaphor: Marina Carr and Caryl Churchill
• 2. Obscene Transformations: Violence, Women and Theatre in Sarah Kane and Marina Carr
• 3. Can the Subaltern Dream? Epistemic Violence, Oneiric Awakenings and the Quest for Subjective Duality in Marina Carr’s Marble
• 4. “The house is a battlefield now”: War of the Sexes and Domestic Violence in Van Badham’s Kitchen and Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses
• 5. Serial Killers, Serial Lovers: Raquel Almazan’s La Paloma Prisoner
• 6. “To Put My Life Back into the Main Text”: Re-Dressing History in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc by Carolyn Gage
• 7. Turning Muteness into Performance in Erin Shields’ If We Were Birds
• 8. Afterword: Vocal and Verbal Assertiveness
• Contributors