Praxis (E-Journal, Villanova University)
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Built for Motherhood or Built for Sex: Locating the True "Womanhood" in Sarah Treem\u27s The How and The Why
Get PDFThe movement of feminism and women\u27s perceived role in social discourse and the world is in constant flux. With her play The How and the Why, Sarah Treem seeks to explore not only this fluctuation, but the changing semiotics of female power and prowess through two scientists, who are estranged mother and daughter. The feminist and psychological theory of Kristeva provides an ideal window into this examination of mind and body. The play\u27s focus on the purpose and importance of the female body, as well as the role which motherhood plays in the feminine experience, the work lends itself to analysis through the work of Kirsteva. The biological and sociological construction of the female and the female body will also be investigated through the work of Margrit Shildrick. The complex discourse between the two women in the play challenges the vocabulary which surrounds women\u27s bodies, age defined roles, and expectations. The additional examination of the writings of Cixous and Butler will illuminate the power of language and the vital nature of reshaping conversation through the shifting of language\u27s meanings, signifiers and subjects. In this paper I hope to prove that the play serves as a testing realm for the merits and short comings of first and second generation feminism, and the meaning of womanhood ascribed to each by society and the changing ideals of the movement
Blacks on Stage: Are We Still Replicating Stereotypes from the Legacy of Minstrelsy
Get PDFThis is an analysis of early African American Theater (AAT) and the origins of stereotyping the performance of blackness in the larger history of American Theater canon known as minstrelsy. In such an analysis of AAT, there are several questions to consider. At its impetus, through to its hey day and then its demise, was minstrelsy the manifestation of cultural domination; or, the celebration of an authentic peoples’ culture? The stigma of Blackface was one of the stylized symbols of both minstrelsy and blackness that became calcified in the cultural consciousness of America. In these performances of race, “blackface” was used by white entertainers to demystify, clown and degrade “blackness”. I contend that both forms of American minstrelsy—early whites in blackface and then later, African Americans, themselves, (forced to don burnt cork to gain entre to the American stage) were, simply, an example of early American cultural imperialism. Minstrelsy, as the first American Musical theater, became the process through which a people’s authentic artistic production was co-opted and comodified for poplar consumption in a capitalistic marketplace—in this case fastening black culture to racist uses. While White blackface minstrelsy was as much “administered and determined” for racist uses in popular culture, it was continuously created and reinvigorated by authentic black contributions to its repertoire of music, song and dance, (Lott, 6) “Minstrelsy was an arena in which the efficient expropriation of the cultural commodity “blackness” occurred.” (Lott, 6
Elizabeth LeCompte in Rehearsal: An Intern\u27s Perspective
Get PDFDuring a six month internship (from May to November 2009) with the experimental theatre company the Wooster Group, I had the opportunity to sit through rehearsals and document what I saw while the company developed their production of Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré. This experience offered me the unique position to compare what I had learned about Elizabeth LeCompte in the library (through such writers as David Savran and Andrew Quick) with what I saw in the flesh.When LeCompte arrived on my first day, she started rehearsals with three pieces of inspiration: first, a film clip of an actor in Farewell My Concubine whose performance she mocked for poor precision; second, a Ben Brantley review criticizing JoAnne Akalaitis’s The Bacchae for lacking “teeth;” and third, a line from Alexander Star’s appreciation of recently deceased literary critic Richard Poirier, which says, “the most powerful works of literature offer ‘a fairly direct access to pleasure’ but become ‘on longer acquaintance, rather strange and imponderable.’” These pieces of inspiration mark what I discovered to be three distinct qualities of LeCompte’s personality in rehearsal: precision, teeth, and the imponderable. I offer here an inside perspective of LeCompte in rehearsal as she collaborates with her company, sifting through the challenges inherent in Williams’s play, to demonstrate how LeCompte works, not only as a director, but a artist subject to the pressures and restraints of a not-for-profit company in the heart of New York City
The Dramaturgy of Ontological Verticality in the Wooster Group’s Theatre: Fragments of Memory in Search of a Whole
Get PDFoai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/781My paper examines The Wooster Group’s India and After (America) (1979), A Personal History of the American Theatre (1980), L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…) (1984), and Brace Up! (1991) with a focus on the intersection between reading these works for theoretical analysis and experiencing them as live events as a spectator. These works exemplify The Wooster Group’s aesthetic through its unconventional approach to history and classic texts, its commitment to questioning the nature of theatrical form, and the portrayal of its self-reflection. India and A Personal History utilize Spalding Gray’s memory for use in spontaneity on stage, breaking the barrier between past and present and, through direct audience participation, that between performer and audience. In L.S.D., LeCompte challenges the presence and value of classical texts, and the theatrical representation of race, gender, and class in contemporary performance. Brace Up!‘s theme of loss alienates form from content, character from actor, and process from result, deepening the audience’s perception of the possibilities of theatrical representation. Scholarship on these works has revealed the theoretical implication underscoring LeCompte’s creation process, which continues to The Wooster Group’s recent works such as La Didone (2009) and Vieux Carré (2011). What is unique about the scholarship is that, even for a reader who has not encountered these works on stage, the scholarship has served as an additional layer of potential openness rather than as a meaning-assignment. For the multiple ontological layers that arise out of the Wooster Group’s performance and the criticism around it, I term the Group’s dramaturgy “vertical dramaturgy,” and argue that Spalding Gray’s India and After (America) and A Personal History of the American Theatre, and the Wooster Group’s L.S.D. (…Just the High Points …), and Brace Up! create a performance text that reaches over to the critical and, further, to the imaginative level.  
Watching the Boa Constrictor Uncoil: Sexual Desire and The Emperor Jones
Get PDFIn the spring of 2006, the Wooster Group re-staged its 1998 production of The Emperor Jones at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The re-staging largely retained its original elements, most notably in the embodiment of the title role of Brutus Jones by Kate Valk, a forty-nine year-old white woman, who performed the show in blackface. The implications of casting a white woman in the role of a “tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded Negro of middle age” will serve as the main inquiry of this paper. I hope to argue that the decision to cast Valk as Jones did more than, as Hilton Als suggests, “[equate] the female with the black outsider.” Instead, by reading Charles Gilpin’s performance of Jones in the 1920s alongside Valk’s, I will argue that Valk’s destabilizing presence as a white woman in drag and blackface undermined the sexually charged, essentialized, and fetishized responses of white audiences to Gilpin’s black body. After all, at the end of the play Valk’s costume appeared intact, while Gilpin’s psychological journey stripped him both mentally and physically, forcing him to sport a bathrobe during the curtain call to cover his naked body
E PLURIBUS UNUM: A Study in Multi-Character Solo Performance in the Documentary Drama
Get PDFThe United States of America has adopted as its official motto, “e pluribus unum,” a Latin concept translating to “from many, one.” This refers to the multitude of cultures and immigrants that come together in our country. Two American documentary theatre pieces of the recent past have embraced this concept of “e pluribus unum” by giving us a documentary solo performance in which the sole performer takes on dozens of personalities in a single show, with the lines between characters blurred and fluid. In a documentary drama, the level of difficulty for the performer is raised. Most, if not all, of the characters in these documentary theatre pieces are real people, some of whom are still living. Portraying not just one real person but a whole cast of them presents challenges, especially to a performer who has had limited contact with the subjects being portrayed. How can one portray twenty-plus personalities in a manner that is simultaneously convincing, accurate, and theatrical? In Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities, Anna Deavere Smith has shown us how, as has Jefferson Mays in Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, albeit in very different way