Table Of ContentABSTRACT
Title of Dissertation: PLAYING AT LIVES: LIFE WRITING AND
CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DRAMA
Ryan Matthew Claycomb, Doctor of Philosophy, 2003
Dissertation directed by: Professor Brian Richardson
Department of English
Amidst the trends of confessional narratives and theories of gender
performativity that took root in the 90s, the feminist maxim “the personal is political”
is no longer sufficient to account for the complexities of women’s lives transformed
into life-stories and live performances. Given the push to recover silenced women,
and the more complex discourse that governs both feminist art and criticism, it is not
surprising that feminist life-writing has found many of its richest realizations in
performance. On the feminist stage, history, narrative, bodies, voice, identity and
community all converge in three related dramatic forms that we can group under the
heading of “life-writing”: autobiographical performance, biographical plays and
staged oral histories.
In this study, I take a look at these forms and argue that each one offers both
theoretical obstacles and political possibilities to the feminist playwrights and
performers who use them. By placing narratives of real lives within the context of
performance, these artists point out the degree to which gender, identity, and history
are socially constructed performances and are subject to the manipulations of power.
And by highlighting the gender biases embedded in these performative notions, they
are then able to revise and reconstruct them within a new framework, one that resists
hegemonic power and acknowledges difference.
In three chapters, I examine how feminist playwrights and performers use
body, voice, community and history to create potent rhetoric out of women’s life
narratives. In the chapter on autobiographical performance, I argue that narratives of
the self in performance deconstruct notions of selfhood as a way of avoiding
essentialism and establishing female agency. At the same time, however, these
narratives rely on historical referentiality and an essentialism of the self to reinforce
their efficacy. The chapter on biographical drama asserts that feminist playwrights
respond to the imperative to reclaim lost feminist lives, but must do so in ways that
subvert the objectifying impulses of life writing. Finally, the oral history chapter
shows that the communal subjectivity established in these plays generates feminist
notions of community in its performance, even as it advocates for such community
among its audiences.
PLAYING AT LIVES:
LIFE WRITING AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DRAMA
By
Ryan Matthew Claycomb
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2003
Advisory Committee:
Professor Brian Richardson, Chair
Professor Jackson Bryer
Professor Susan Leonardi
Professor Laura Rosenthal
Professor Catherine Schuler
©Copyright by
Ryan M. Claycomb
2003
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Performative Lives, Performed Selves:
Autobiography in Feminist Performance 18
The Feminist Appeal of Autobiographical Narrative 24
Deconstructing the Unmediated Body as Object 30
The Performativity of the Self 37
The Performative Self and the Performative Community 53
Histories of the Self as Public Histories 59
Chapter 2: Reclaiming the Exemplary Life:
Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama 81
Issues and Obstacles 84
Motives and Strategies 93
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomiesa s Staged Biography 111
Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus:
Implicating the Present by Interrogating the Past 118
Helene Cixous’ Portrait of Dora: The Subject Acts Out 125
April De Angelis’ Playhouse Creatures:
Women’s Theatre as History / Women’s History as Theatre 137
Conclusion 150
Chapter 3: (Ch)oral History: Docudrama and the Communal Subject 154
Oral History as Feminist Form 159
Oral History and Community 163
Oral History and the Communal Subject 174
Oral History as History 181
Caveats: The Hegemony of “We” 185
Oral History as Feminist Drama 195
Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues: Essentializing Community 196
Susan Snyder’s Size Matters: The Writing on the Stall 211
Conclusion 223
Conclusion: Performing Authorship, Performing Lives 225
Works Cited: 236
ii
Introduction
In the summer of 1998, Jennifer Ambrosino, Producing Director for The
Theatre Conspiracy (TTC)—a Washington, D.C. feminist theatre company for which
I served as literary manager in the late 1990s—joked that she was tired of directing
plays about real people—that she wanted a little fiction in her life. And no wonder.
She was at that point directing a staged reading of Allison Pruitt’s The Trial of Susan
B. Anthony for the Source Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C., had just finished
with TTC’s run of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomie s(a life of fín -de-siècle
iconoclast Isabelle Eberhardt), and had helmed Lynn Kaufman’s Shooting Simone
(about Simone de Beauvoir) the season before. And I had experienced the same
phenomenon. As coordinator for TTC’s Emerging Women Playwrights Series that
summer, I read over 50 scripts from around the country, and of these, at least 15 were
biographically oriented. One of them, Jamie Pachino’s Theodora: An Unauthorized
Biography, became one of our featured readings for the series. That made four
biographies in two years between Jennifer and myself, which doesn’t count Studio
Theatre’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, the Source Festival’s Soulmates:
The Passion of Petra Kelly, by Nancie Carraway, or Horizons Theater’s partially
improvised In Good Company, which featured several historically prominent women,
all produced in the Washington DC area within the span of a couple of years in the
late 1990s.
At around the same time, the Spring of 1998 to be exact, feminist performance
artist Karen Finley stood at the steps of the Supreme Court and told the world that she
felt that Senator Jesse Helms had been sexually harassing her through his political
1
attacks on her and the other artists now known as the “NEA Four.” When the
Supreme Court verdict against the artists came down that summer, Finley interrupted
her autobiographical show Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman to hold a press
conference, a blurring of the lines of life writing and life, of making history and of
history-making. Finley’s co-plaintiff in the case, Holly Hughes, would go on to
perform her account of the trial two years later in her show, Preaching to the
Perverted. And finally, only a few months after Finley’s incendiary Supreme Court
statements, and a few stops up the metro, Eve Ensler brought her wildly popular oral
history play The Vagina Monologues to a highly successful run at the Studio Theatre.
What these events, all concentrated in a short span in the late 1990s, tell us is
that theatrical events that draw their material from the lives of real women have been
very near the center of feminist theatrical practice, if not near the center of dramatic
production itself, over the last few decades. This observation speaks to a more firmly
established space for feminist ideology on the contemporary stage, and furthermore to
the influence of the 1970s feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” But amidst the
growing trend of confessional narratives and theories of gender performativity that
took root in the 90s, this old feminist maxim is no longer entirely sufficient to account
for the complexities of women’s lives transformed into life-stories and live
performances. Given the push to recover silenced women, and the more complex
discourse that governs both feminist art and criticism, it is not surprising that feminist
life writing has found many of its richest realizations in performance. On the feminist
stage, history, narrative, bodies, voice, identity and community all converge in three
2
related dramatic forms that we can group under the heading of “life writing”:
autobiographical performance, biographical plays and staged oral histories.
In this study, I take a look at these forms and argue that each one offers both
theoretical obstacles and political possibilities to the feminist playwrights and
performers who use them. By placing narratives of real lives within the context of
performance, these artists point out the degree to which gender, identity, and history
are socially constructed performances and are subject to the manipulations of power.
And by highlighting the gender biases embedded in these performative notions, they
are then able to revise and reconstruct them within a new framework, one that resists
hegemonic power and acknowledges difference.
Before embarking on a long project on life writing in feminist drama, we must
first recognize that these foundational terms—drama, feminist, and life writing—are
unstable and that they require some definition from the outset. Let us first begin with
“drama.” I, like many others who navigate the murky waters between English,
Theatre, and now Performance Studies programs, recognize that the boundaries
between drama, theatre and performance are neither fixed nor uncontested. The
traditional distinction between “drama” and “theatre” is made between a written play
and its live realization in the theatrical space, and the traditional distinction between
“theatre” and “performance” suggests, as Marvin Carlson puts it, that performance (or
performance art) breaks down the notion of an “other” that “traditional theatre has
regarded . . . as a character in a dramatic action embodied . . . by an actor” (Carlson,
Performance 6). Instead, performance artists “do not base their work upon characters
previously created by other artists, but upon their own bodies, their own
3
autobiographies, their own experiences in a culture or in the world, made
performative by their consciousness of them and the process of displaying them for
an audience” (6). Carlson’s definition seems to set performance art and drama (via
traditional theatre) at odds with one another. However, any consideration of life-
narratives in performance must acknowledge that the autobiographical component of
much performance art makes the assumption of such a distinction between drama and
performance troubling. Therefore, allow me to broaden our working definition of
1
drama to merely a narrative written for the purpose of performance. In this way,
drama includes not only the traditional plays that we will examine in the biography
chapter here, but also the self-narratives of feminist performance artists in the
autobiography chapter, and the blend of self and other we see in the oral history plays
of my final chapter.
While arriving at a broader definition of drama here is a fairly simple
endeavor, defining feminist drama is a more complex issue. Definitions set out by
theorists and critics of the last 25 years range from the hopelessly broad to the
maddeningly restrictive. Elaine Aston, in her Introduction to Feminism and Theatre,
surveys the range of these definitions, from the useless “anything about women,” to
more specific ones like those of Lizbeth Goodman. Goodman, for example, opens
her study of contemporary feminist theatres by suggesting that feminist theatre is a
“political theatre oriented toward change, produced by women with feminist
concerns” (1). She elaborates on the component of “political change,” though, by
1
I acknowledge that there is drama that is anti-narrative in form, such as the later work of Samuel
Beckett, just as there is dramatic narrative that is not designed for performance, such as Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound or the Circe chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. These boundaries of dramatic
representation, however, are not ones tested by the works considered in this study.
4
differentiating between “women’s theatre” and feminist theatre. Here she follows
Susan Bassnet, who defines feminist theatre through seven specific political goals:
“equal pay; equal education and job opportunities; free 24-hour nurseries; free
contraception and abortion on demand; financial and legal independence; an end to
discrimination against lesbians and a woman’s right to define her own sexuality;
freedom from violence and sexual coercion” (Bassnet-McGuire 447).
I find Bassnet’s definition (which, published almost twenty years ago, reflects
the specific concerns of the second-wave Women’s Movement) overly restrictive, and
instead prefer Janet Brown’s more recent, broader, yet still instructive, definition.
Brown defines feminist drama by its “commitment to telling the stories of silenced
and marginalized women, celebrating women’s community and sense of connection
through group protagonists, and expressing the moral concerns and societal criticism
that arise from women’s experience” (Brown, “Feminist Theory” 155). While
Brown’s third goal encompasses Bassnet’s definition, her first and second axes touch
on concerns that are undoubtedly feminist, but are less connected to immediate,
concrete political action. Instead, they focus on some of the larger representational
concerns of feminist artists and scholars. Ultimately, though, we must consider a
definition of feminist theatre that encompasses both a multiplicity of feminisms and a
continuum of rhetorical emphasis on those ideologies. For example, while we may
examine April DeAngelis’ Playhouse Creatures (Chapter 2) within the context of
Bassnet’s seven demands, Anna Deavere Smith’s performances (Chapter 3) are far
more concerned with racial politics than gender politics. Nonetheless, Smith’s formal
structures accord the same space to female voices as male voices—an implicit
5
