Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
roles are too often subordinate. Men farm, mine, drift, revolt, organize co-operatives, while women worry, cook, marry, wait. Even though Guy Sprung’s revised version of Andras Tahn’s Paper Wheat, for example, attributes the first mention of a grain coop to a woman, the play ultimately celebrates the vision of Ed Partridge, the man who formalized the structure. Having the “uneducated farm wife” introduce the idea merely reinforces the status of the “co-op struggle . . . as a truly populist movement” (Filewod, Collective 106), rather than indicating any significant contributions made by the prairie wives. Women’s absence is even more notable in Chris Brookes’s Buchans: A Mining Town, where women come across as “ancillary characters” within the play created to help define and celebrate a “community.” Even their presence is important only as a signifier of their absence, as in the bunkhouse scene where “the miners’ forced separation from their families gives the bunkhouse scene its structure and pathos” (Filewod, Collective 136). Alan Filewod goes on to note that women “embellish the reality established by the men in the scene, but they have no individual presence” (Collective 136). Although the Theatre Passe Muraille troupe responsible for 1837 liberally cast across gender, Rick Salutin confesses that these cross-castings were the result of dramatic necessities, and admits that the collective “failed to find a centrality for women in 1837 terms” (Filewod, Collective 200). Pioneering experiments into collective creation, then, had no inherent link to the development of a feminist form of representation.
Nonetheless, collective creations do contain significant potential for a mode of representation that is particularly appropriate for many types of feminist performance, most notably in the way they dismantle logocentric authority. Filewod characterizes collective creations as “atextual; they repudiate the idea of a fixed, unchanging text which exists as a blueprint, as it were, for a performed interpretation” (Collective x). Ann Wilson, in fact, makes this dismantling of logocentric authority an imperative for feminist theatre practice: “To be deemed feminist it is not enough that a script deal with issues of concern to women nor that it subvert the formal conventions of linearity and closure. To be deemed feminist, a production should be born of a politically conscious theatre practice” (“Politics” 75). Anything less, she argues, is too vulnerable to appropriation by the dominant order, a concern echoed by Loren Kruger: “[T]he theatre institution can absorb individual female successes without in any way threatening the legitimacy of the masculinist and capitalist definition of that success” (50). Working collectively, a mode which “has become a hallmark of women artists” (Nightwood 49), allows a theatre group to develop a cooperative vision, one that enacts, in both process and performance, the type of negotiated, open-ended intersubjectivity that informs this type of feminist politics and practice.
Not surprisingly, developing this alternative practice has its price, artistically, economically, and historiographically. Ann-Marie MacDonald writes of the collective process for This Is for You, Anna: “Creating a show and a style from the ground up, collectively to boot, is one of the hardest things in the world to do.. . . In the end we really could not say which idea belonged to whom because any idea had been explored and transformed by each of us until it belonged to all of us” (Rudakoff and Much 133). While most survivors of the collective experience ultimately agree the process is worth the price, this process of transformation is often not a smooth one: the diaries of collective members—feminist and otherwise—are replete with stories of frustration, anger, exhaustion as they strive to create their vision, like the comments by This Is for You, Anna collective member Maureen White: “Collective work is slow, and when the responsibility for its direction is shared there are many frustrating days. Many days when our improvisations seemed to be going nowhere, I longed for a writer and director to come in and place me . . .” (The Anna Project, “Fragments” 173). Irreconcilable ideological differences pose a constant threat to the success, indeed survival, of a collective. Alan Filewod documents the eventual demise of the Newfoundland-based Mummers Troupe as a result of a different vision of collectivity between the actors in the company and company co-founders Chris Brookes and Lynn Lunde (Collective 116); Shelley Scott outlines the bitter legal dispute between the Midnight Hags’ collective and director Mary Ann Lambooy over “ownership” of Smoke Damage, a Nightwoodsponsored production based on an earlier collective creation called Burning Times (“Feminist” 165–73).
Artistic and economic issues further collude in the difficulty in obtaining funding for the development of these works. In a theatre industry that values product over process, it is often difficult to justify funding a production that explicitly reverses this structure. Frequently, collective members have worked with little or no compensation during the research phase of their projects, and percentages of box office receipts are not always forthcoming, especially for productions more concerned with reaching an “alternative” (i.e. not typically theatre-going) audience or presenting a radical or alternative political vision. Filewod attributes the relative decline in the popularity of collective creations to these financial realities: “Many of them [collective companies] no longer exist, . . . usually because they did not qualify for increases in public funding. Actors who a decade ago thought little of working for subsistence wages find as they grow older that they can no longer afford to work for non-Equity companies” (Collective 187). Ultimately, a collective creation can only develop as far as it can afford to go, and any company attempting to mount such a production must constantly negotiate the difficult relationship between artistic vision and economic necessity.
The aspect of collective creation that makes it most attractive to feminist productions, the challenge it offers to the hegemony of the scripted word and the singular authority of the playwright, simultaneously causes the greatest difficulty for attempts at historiographic preservation. As plays about the processes of discovery and representation, often tailored for unique audiences, these works do not often aspire to leaving behind a textual/literary trace of their existence. Lizbeth Goodman places this characteristic in the distinction between “drama” and “theatre,” the latter of which she sees as “active,” as opposed to the literariness of the dramatic term. In making this distinction, Goodman points out that “[t]he term ‘drama’ is often associated with a certain type of literary integrity which much feminist theatre does not necessarily aim to achieve” (9). Instead of re-presenting the completed script of female subjectivity on stage, collective works often foreground the process of subjectivity in construction, for both actors and audience. Strategically, they break down the distinction between the “personal” life of the performer and the “public” life of the performance, implicating both in the continuous process of connection and selfdiscovery. Such productions, in the tradition of social action theatre, may seek to achieve an immediate impact in the lives of their participants, an effect at odds with the common theatrical imperative that commodifies drama into the end product of a historical text.
In this sense, feminist collective theatre is radically political theatre, as “[p]olitical theatre, by its very definition, assumes that an examination of its subject can in some way affect the lives of its audience” (Filewod, Collective 79). Filewod, in his history of the development of collective creation in Canada, traces its roots to the type of “popular” political action theatre practiced by Augusto Boal. Like feminist engagements with historical narratives, Boal’s theory of theatre founds itself on explicitly anti-Aristotelian terms: “Boal begins his discussion with a critique of Aristotle, in whose Poetics he finds a recipe for a ‘very powerful purgative system, the objective of which was to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted, including the revolution, before it takes place.’ Boal blames Aristotle for the invention of a ‘coercive system’ of tragedy that saps individual initiative. He proposes instead a poetics in which the audience becomes the ‘transformers of the dramatic action’” (158). The strength of most feminist collective theatre lies in the connections it forges between performers and audience as they simultaneously engage in an event that exposes the fictionality of historically constructed subjectivities while offering alternative ways of seeing and constructing ourselves and our realities. Feminist theatre productions, unless specifically designed and targetted to a closed, predefined audience, can play to a house consisting of people in various positions along the feminist-sympathetic continuum. Theatre thus becomes less an aesthetic event and more explicitly an almost “therapeutic” experience, wherein