Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
can be fixed. You’re not there to try and fix the life” (Cottreau, “Writing” 8). While this was very much a responsible stance for someone in Kareda’s position to take, it also circumscribed a particular type of theatre experience, one which drew a careful distinction between the private, personal life of the playwright and the public life of her play. Tarragon’s centring on the presence of the playwright-as-function results in the absence of the writer-as-individual, evacuating her personal-ity in the name of creating an artefact for public consumption.
Tarragon’s reputation for “success” in new play development offers an implicit endorsement for this logocentric model,2 in turn reinforcing the validity and prevalence of theatrical productions that venerate the primacy of the script. Script-based productions are also most congenial to history, since the “core” of the event is a document that can be easily published, preserved, and reproduced. A script that can be printed or distributed by either the playwright or the Playwright’s Union, preserved in an archive, or—better yet—published in an anthology, has a much greater chance of establishing its presence onstage through subsequent productions and/or in classrooms as the subject of academic inquiry. As Ric Knowles points out, “[t]heatre structures and modes of production shape what audiences experience, but it is the publication of scripts that dictates what is read and preserved and enters school curricula” (“Voices” 109). Plays based on a textual model have built-in easy historiographical access that makes them more visible to audiences beyond those who ever attended a particular theatrical event.
Moreover, plays identified as the work of “the author” create fewer difficulties for the actual processes of mounting a production run. When an author is relatively well-known or has a particular reputation, a marketing campaign can cash in on the celebrity cachet, even if the play is a new and unknown work. An ad can offer a short plot synopsis or other description of the “product” it is selling. Advertisements for plays also often feature short (favourable) quotes from reviews, either from the specific production being advertised (if the ads appear after the run has opened), or from previous productions or previous plays by the same playwright, with the implicit assurance for potential audience members that the production they will see is essentially the same—and will have the same merits—as the production to which the reviews refer.
Reviewing itself is a crucial factor in the production life of most plays, a concurrent and supplemental textual practice which can have serious economic ramifications for a particular production. Bad press can keep audiences away, forcing a theatre to cancel or curtail production runs.3 And the traditional processes of reviewing have been entrenched, not surprisingly, with the scripted production as a model, allowing critics to pass judgement based on how well a production serves to illuminate the meaning apparently innate in a particular text. “Because Canadian schools and universities usually classify drama as a genre of literature, most Canadian theatre critics have been nurtured as literary critics,” with the result that most mainstream critics “still doggedly insist that the performance event is best regarded as primarily an expression of a transcendent meaning—the script” (Leonard 6). The script, as a tangible text, can easily, even comfortably, be situated at the centre of a production by critics more used to reading texts than assessing performance practice. When the writer of the script already has a reputation as a playwright, so much the better: critics can demonstrate the scope and breadth of their knowledge by positioning a particular script within the already established “tradition” of a particular playwright’s work, and passing judgement on how well it “fits” there. In some cases, like Sally Clark’s Jehanne of the Witches, for example, the availability of a visible and discrete author allows critics to condemn a production without condemning the playwright. Given the reality that “theatre critics are working journalists whose primary responsibility is not to theatre as an artform, nor to criticism as a discipline, but to newspaper publishing as a business” (Leonard 10), it is hardly surprising that critics should take the path of least resistance and most “newsworthiness,” preferring scripts to “performance events.”
Even feminist playwrights who offer critics a script-based drama, however, must contend with the likelihood that the (non-feminist) reviewer will be unfamiliar with or unsympathetic to any departure from the Aristotelian dramatic principles that he has been taught. Banuta Rubess explains one of the most immediate problems that surfaces in the gender gap between theatre practitioners and critics:
Women often write in waves, repeated climaxes, collages. It’s true that often male critics will then complain about a lack of build or something. I hate to single out male critics, but the consistency is uncanny. I think my work, collective or solitary, has almost only received raves by women—understanding, perceptive assessments. Male critics have also liked my work at times.. . . But it’s the consistent understanding on the part of female reviewers that makes me believe there really is a difference. (Rudakoff and Much 68)
Joan MacLeod echoes Rubess’s discontent with the level of misunderstanding evident in reviews from male critics. Specifically, she recounts the frustration of having a generally positive review written by a male critic that “was such a bizarre interpretation of the play, and so incorrect, that we couldn’t use it to promote the show” (Rudakoff and Much 205). A good review can have real economic function within the network of theatrical production, but if it fails to connect with an understanding audience, it becomes useless in terms of this function. In this case, MacLeod identified the type of message she hoped to convey with her production, and would not risk endorsing an interpretation that would compromise the horizon of expectations her audience might bring to it.
While there are definitely benefits to be derived from the kind of script-based process practiced at Tarragon and other theatres working to Tarragon’s literary example, the advantages might not always outweigh the disadvantages. Easy historiographic visibility may carry with it a hefty price. For feminists committed to politicizing the personal, the Tarragon model offers no solution to the problem of lives left blank because of the way it maintains a strict separation between the author-function and the individual who writes. For feminists concerned with dismantling the monologic system authored and perpetuated by men, it offers no real challenge to the representational status quo. Even for feminists determined to validate women’s stories and experiences equally with those of men, there is the tremendous likelihood of miscomprehension by the literary critics whose own supplementary texts will characterize and qualify the play’s status in the historical record.
Collective Creation
For a playwright who wants to create a collective or non-logocentric piece, however, the difficulties for developing and producing a work can be even greater. To recall Margaret Hollingsworth: What artistic director in his right mind would take a chance on a production that would wreak havoc with his already tight rehearsal processes, where there’s barely enough time to “flesh out” a script, much less create one? Yet, for many of the feminists working in Canadian theatre, the collective model, and the way it addresses the politics of representation, is preferable to script-based play production.
It is important here to note that, while collective creation has become a useful tool for feminist theatre, it is not in itself an intrinsically or inherently feminist mode. Kate Lushington points out that the origins of Canadian collective creations lie as firmly within patriarchal ideology as other modes of theatrical representation:
Actors, especially women, have little or no control over the productions they help to create since, if they want to work, they must please someone, usually a man, who is in a position to hire them.. . . This is true even in the majority of collective creations with which Canadian theatre made its mark in the 1970s: a recurring motif is a cast of several men, and one woman who plays all the female characters. “A clever device,” crowed Western author Robert Kroetsch in a Globe and Mail interview, clearly delighted by Paul Thompson’s adaptation of his novel The Studhorse Man for the Toronto Theatre Festival in 1981. “A clever device in which one actress, Mary Vingoe, portrays the many facets of womanhood.” Oh, I get it; we’re all the same person, right? (6)
In fact, the most notable early experiments in collective creation typically consist of a cast where male roles outnumber