Drama Trauma

Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video and Art

Timothy Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136207808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In this engaging cross-disciplinary study, Timothy Murray examines the artistic struggle over traumatic fantasies of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Establishing a retrospective dialogue between past and present, stage and video, Drama Trauma links the impact of trauma on recent political projects in performance and video with the specters of difference haunting Shakespeare's plays.
The book provides close readings of cultural formations as diverse as Shakespearean drama, the Statue of Liberty, contemporary plays by women, African-American performance, and feminist interventions in video, performance and installation. The texts discussed include:
* installations by Mary Kelly and Dawn Dedeaux,
* plays by Ntozake Shange, Rochelle Owens, Adrienne Kennedy, Marsha Norman and Amiri Baraka
* performances by Robbie McCauley, Jordan, Orlan, and Carmelita Tropicana
* stage, film and video productions of King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and All's Well that Ends Well.

1

INTRODUCTION

Performing trauma: the scare of academic cool

I saw Romeo and Juliet with a friend of mine, and he was like, “Forget Shakespeare! This movie is so cool, you shouldn’t even mention him. It’ll keep people away.” And I want people to know this movie has nothing to do with anything scary or academic or boring.

Claire Danes

Claire Danes here refers to the surprise teenage film success of the 1996–97 season, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and fuliet (1996), directed by Baz Luhrmann and costarring herself and Leonardo DiCaprio. This film not only captured top honors at the American box office during its first weekend of release but did so without an overwhelming number of adult ticket holders. Danes is certainly correct in her assessment that Luhrmann’s fast-paced film, the first major remake of Romeo and Juliet since Zeffirelli’s 1968 classic, is anything but boring. Set in the excessive postcapitalist wasteland of Verona Beach (shot in Mexico City), this film of quick cuts and rock video inserts features a black Prince Escalus who roams through the air in a legion of fighter helicopters trying without success to keep a lid on the excessive violence and performative erotics of tough Generation-X street warriors. The boys in this hood speak dialogue in Shakespearean verse as they drop acid, cruise the avenues in sleek designer coupes, and revel in the pyrotechnic blasts of beautifully crafted automatic weapons. This is a culture of violent addiction whose virtual speed and commodity excess outpace the capacity of its warring capitalist patrons, Montague and Capulet, to control and dominate its libidinal productions. As a consequence, the split order of patriarchy is so overwhelmed by the unified drives of love and death that the two fathers perform little more at film’s end but the flaccid numbness of their confusion. The dialectical corollary is the angry, final speech of black Escalus who deprecates himself “for winking at your discords” (V.iii.294). This loud display of screaming rage assails the battered spectator with yet another example of the historical linkage of fascism and male hysteria.¹

Perhaps the sole exception to this picture’s libidinal overkill is provided by the televisual mechanism that strategically frames the diegesis in tabloid flashback: the numerous scenes of eroticism, violence, and death are rescripted for profitable broadcast by the television newsreader whose monotone reportage brilliantly opens and closes the film. Arrivals at the Capulets’ masquerade ball are greeted by live television announcers as we’ve come to expect from E and Entertainment Tonight on the evening of the Academy Awards. Similarly, the jump cut transitions and violent events at the outset of the film are accompanied by the interpellation of sounds familiar to viewers of Hard Copy and its lesser clones. Indeed, the carefully crafted competition between television and cinema, here underwritten by the hybrid media conglomerate, Twentieth Century Fox, might easily encourage the young spectators to forget Shakespeare for Murdoch – from whom Capulet and Montague could learn a few good lessons about empires, their nations, and their narrations (not to mention the economics of male hysteria). While traditional viewers of this cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare may bemoan the tackiness of such televisual inserts, readers of this book will hopefully come to appreciate their disorienting effects as exemplary of the “tele-visions” common to theatre, film, video, and installation art. That is, if Luhrmann’s televisual cuts do anything but pander to a young audience more accustomed to the visceral form of television than to the poetic structure of Shakespearean drama, they may be said to exemplify, much like Holbein’s anamorphosis, Vermeer’s camera obscura, or Shakespeare’s stained mirrors and floating daggers, the performative role of the apparatus and its theatrical exaggeration of the fluid referents of performance. In a fascinating way, televisual reference functions in Luhrmann’s film as the destabilizing mechanism of irony and hyperbole for which rhetoric and perspective were the playful engines on the Renaissance stage.

While Danes’s film might be more playful than boring, it still has everything to do with what is scary and academic. What verges on the scary and, I dare say, even on the academic is how the film enters more or less into dialogue with Shakespeare’s script to represent celluloid specters of the hybrid economies of race and sexuality that have remained deeply traumatic to Shakespeare’s viewers over the ages. In a rather academic assessment of Romeo and Juliet, in Chapter Four, I discuss the sadomasochistic fright of the play’s deadly sex which is framed, as Juliet puts it, by the disturbing maxim, “My only love sprung from my only hate” (I.v.138),² the handle, I might add, which Twentieth Century Fox chose as the lead-in title of its official Romeo and Juliet World Wide Web site. The depth of Juliet’s love is equally disturbing to Danes who reveals that she undertook her part for the film while enveloped in the melancholic haze of a traumatic break-up (at about age sixteen): “I told Baz Luhrmann that I didn’t know how I was going to get through all of Juliet’s ecstatic speeches about being in love. I was hurting so much” (cited by Hobson 1996). As Louis B. Hobson of the Calgary Sun suggests, Danes’s young love affair and subsequent breakup positioned her right alongside Juliet as “the poster girl for teen angst and melancholy.” What makes the story of sexuality particularly traumatic in this film and elsewhere, I hope to show below, is how it displays to its teenage viewers and seasoned adult audience more than it reveals about its angst, incertitudes, and enigmas. Perhaps this is why, rather than weep at Romeo’s rather conventional suicide, the young girl sitting next to me caustically urged Juliet to pick up the gleaming pistol Romeo left behind to “go ahead and kill yourself already.”

This enigmatic trauma of sexuality is doubled with the scary mixture of race in Luhrmann’s film whose multicultural cast is both exceptionally performative and traditionally subservient, unusually assertive and ultimately dead. The supporting roles of Mercutio and Tybalt are played with stylistic flair by Harold Perrineau and John Leguizamo. Viewers are teased by the extravagant performance of the dreadlocked Perrineau who, poured into a tight costume of skimpy white drag, struts his black body in a dazzling performance of campy burlesque, one confusingly tantalizing to the young heterosexual audiences who fill the screen and theatres with cross-identificatory delight. This is a racialized performance whose sexual ambiguity and cinematic precedent are nothing but scary in the best and the worst terms. As for the best terms, a nonacademic friend couldn’t help but notice that this campy performance by Mercutio, shown to be relished by Romeo, marks the subsequent interactions between Romeo and Mercutio as exceptionally homoerotic ones. His observation receives literary support by Jonathan Goldberg who argues, in “Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs” (1994), that Mercutio signifies the imprint of the play’s sexual field in sodomy and forbidden desire.³ As for the worst terms, it is not evident from the film that the director has adequately contemplated, not to mention theorized, the political ramifications of his staging of the black Mercutio in drag. Thinking of Mercutio’s complicated straddling of white/black, queer/straight, high/low cultures, I cannot help but recall Jackie Goldsby’s constestatory questions about the analogical straddling of cultures in Paris is Burning: “when is borrowing not appropriation, and/or when does appropriation become co-optation?” (Goldsby 1993: 112). Similarly enigmatic is the exaggeratedly stylized, Chicano portrayal of Tybalt, played by the well-known performance artist Leguizamo who no doubt brings to Luhrmann’s screen the composite Latino specter of his previous appearances as the sensitive drag queen in To Wong Poo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) and the sadomasochistic sex offender in Whispers in the Dark (1992). Leguizamo’s own award-winning performance piece, Spic-O-Rama (1992), also could be said to lend a counter parodic phantom to Luhrmann’s film at numerous points, from Tybalt’s exaggerated machismo to the loud sitcom-like shouting of the Chicana nurse (played by the British actress, Miriam Margoyles) whose loud cries for “Whooooliet” echo throughout the Capulet mansion. Particularly symptomatic is how the film’s conflictual positioning of multicultural subject positions recasts the specificities of material and literary culture in the illusive and conflictual specters of race. Moreover, race is levelled out, in this context, in its broadest terms as the corporate fantasy of a televisual multination, one celebrated anew through the digitized cool of interactive webs and CD-Roms.⁴

What’s finally cool, so suggests the extensive, and almost immediate, World Wide Web reception of Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, is not only the film but its many allusions to the multimedia apparatuses that help to shape its representations in and out of the theatre: cinema, television, and digital spectacle. Whether discussed on E-online, on the Twentieth Century Fox website, or on the Romeo and Juliet link from Shakespeare’s Diary (a segment of the electronic soap opera, Hollywood 101) all of these media seem obsessed by the spectacular elements of representation, then and now: cross-dressing, teen sex and/or primal scenes, the death of Shakespeare’s authorship, and the commodity status of the Shakespearean text. Put another way, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has everything to do with what is scary in the most serious of academic senses: the spectacle’s traumatic mixture of subject matter, subjectivity, and the institutional and discursive devices of its ambivalent performativity.

This is what I gleaned in leaving the screening of Luhrmann’s film surrounded by dozens of boisterous teens who were clearly excited yet not totally convinced by their popular culture encounter with Shakespeare. I sensed that the extremely performative event of this screening had everything to do with my steadfast commitment to putting together a book that would foreground the cultural manifestations of trauma in its various theatrical guises in theory and in early modern and contemporary performance, television, video, and installation art. Something like the cultural hybridity and unfathomable energetics of this event lie behind my efforts to bring critical readings of Shakespeare into dialogue with feminist, lesbian, and African-American performance, to conflate the purposeful gaze of live theatre and installation with the distracted glance of television and video, to confront the confident materiality of cultural criticism with the haunting specters of psychoanalytic fantasy and the destabilizing theatricality of poststructural philosophy, and, finally, to dwell on the extent to which such passings backward and forward in history, from matter to simulacrum, within and between race and sexuality, give rise to a cultural excitation that is as enigmatic as it is sexual, as ambivalent as it is racial.

My hope is that this book is not boring but still both scary and academic, hopefully even cool. Cool, at least, in the sense evoked by Jean Laplanché in writing of a new sense of sublimation, one conjoined with traumatophilia:

You have to think of sublimation in a less transformational and so-called mathematical way than Freud thought of it, which is of inhibited and desexualised drives and so on. We must try to think of sublimation as new sexuality; it is something new, maybe coming from the message, from the work itself. It is a kind of new excitation, new trauma coming from the sublimated activity itself, and through this new trauma comes new energy. I try to connect the idea of sublimation with the idea of research or trauma, and I coined the idea of traumatophilia.

(Laplanche 1992a: 32)

Traumatophilia is a strangely appropriate term for the critical project of this book. Its many chapters on seemingly disparate performative materials from stage, television, video, and museum examine the tangential folds of materiality and affect in a less transformational and so-called mathematical way by theatricalizing those complex textures and resonant spaces comprising the enigmatic discourses of race and sexuality. In this sense of traumatophilia, it conjoins the idea of research and trauma, it blends the sense of what’s scary and academic.⁵

FORGET SHAKESPEARE?

“Forget Shakespeare! This movie is so cool, you shouldn’t even mention him. It’ll keep people away.” Were we to believe the teenage friend of Claire Danes, the traumatic antithesis to “cool” is Shakespeare, or the memory of his proper name. Of course, it is the wish to forget the proper name and the attendant obscurity of its reading, the desire to efface the tag of identity with all of its historical and cultural baggage, that Shakespeare formulates so elegantly in Romeo and Juliet:

By a name

I know not how to tell thee who I am.

My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,

Because it is an enemy to thee;

Had I it written, I would tear the word.

(II.ii.53–57)

One name that is frequently so torn on the sadomasochistic stage of hate and love is that of Shakespeare himself. Even the director, Luhrmann, feels compelled to confess that “I hated Shakespeare when I was a kid ... I was like, ‘this is impenetrable”’ (cited by Slotek 1996). When the name is hateful for its obscurity, it often represents the kind of self-centered empowerment of authorship so frequently identified with Shakespeare. Think of something like Peter Greenaway’s “cross-identification” between Prospero, Gielgud, and Shakespeare in Prospero’s Books, the kind of composite of literary identity whose buttress of ontological authority and cultural privilege sustains the most sophisticated pedagogies in English literature and theatre.⁶ At other times, the name is truly hateful to the Other, “to thee,” as the symbolic carrier of the civilizing tradition whose global cultural supremacy has left nary a native shell uncooked. What remains complicated is how successfully the promulgation as well as the seduction of this cultural machinery named Shakespeare has been interiorized with deep ambivalence, in love and hate, as a consequential part of the subjects wishing so desperately to reject it. This proper name Shakespeare, the signifier of so much more than a folio of 1623, has been assumed as natural dress or false masquerade by even its most radically distant bearers, to the extent that the symbolic name becomes culturally requisite to the ambivalent host, yet “hateful to myself.”⁷

So lies the fluid frontier of drama trauma traversed by the experimental pioneer of contemporary African-American letters and performance, Ntozake Shange. In a long and telling autobiographical passage, Shange dwells on her ambivalent relation to the Black and Latin Shakespeare Company’s 1980 production of Coriolanus:

i had & still grapple with the idea of classics in the lives & arts of third world people, we have so much to do, so much to unearth abt our varied realities/ on what grounds do we spend our talents, hundreds of thousands of dollars, unknown quantities of time, to recreate experiences that are not our own? does a colonial relationship to a culture/ in this case Anglo-Saxon imperialism/ produce a symbiotic relationship or a parasitic one? if we perform the classics/ giving our culture some leeway in an adaptation/ which is the parasite? why aren’t the talents & perspectives of contemporary third world artists touted in the same grand fashion successful revivals of dead white artists are? all these things bothered me during the second act of Coriolanus but not so much that i wazn’t moved to tears simply by the overwhelming power of the company/ i loved looking at them/ hearing them, i waz thoroughly committed to seeing more black, latin & asian artists addressing issues of the world, one thing that doing classics allows us/ that is such a relief/ is to do an evening of dialogue without having to restrict ourselves to the pains and myopia of racism in America, the power of white folks as we know it poses no boundaries in Coriolanus or Julius Caesar, they are not in it and hold no power – what escapism, the failure of the black & latin Shakespeare company is directly related to the actual power of white folks &...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING TRAUMA: THE SCARE OF ACADEMIC COOL
• Part I Sounding silence in Shakespeare
• Part II Writing women’s vision
• Part III Color adjustments
• Part IV Televisual fear
• Bibliography
• Index