Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
voyeuristic spectators and become instead active participants in the process of the play.
One of the crucial factors of audience participation lies in the (non-)assumed gender of the spectator, and the challenges offered to the whole idea of the representation of gender. In dismantling “the traditional dramatic canon [which] has assumed a male or malebiased spectatorship which called itself ‘universal,’” feminist theatre must not merely replace Him with a universal female spectator, but instead take care that it “offers the possibility of a female spectatorship which does not call itself universal, does not subsume the male spectator, but rather allows for differences of perspective” (Goodman 223). In a feminist collective production, the emphasis on co-production with the audience virtually guarantees that the multiplicity of perspectives will be sustained. By respecting the role of audience members who are actively engaged in the process of the performance instead of merely consuming a completed text, a production must remain open to the different perspectives audience members will bring to a specific performance, perspectives that will be influenced, in large part, by race, class, and gender: “In the theatre,. . . the audience must redirect its own gaze, with ‘directions’ or cues provided by the director, but cues which originate from a shared sense of the performances’ overall dynamic. In the theatre, the spectator is not only the critic, but also an actor—a person who actively engages in the dynamic of performance by directing her or his own gaze, and interpreting accordingly” (Goodman 224).
Real difficulties can arise when the critic refuses to accept the role of actor. As Lushington has already pointed out, male critics have an uncanny track record of responding unsympathetically to feminist productions, which might challenge a critic’s traditional, masculinist assumptions about quality drama. However, Lushington’s observations notwithstanding, it is inadvisable to accept such a simplistic, biologically determined division among critics. Just as there is no guarantee that every woman working in the male-dominated theatrical institution is productively concerned with feminist issues, the gender of the critic likewise offers no absolute guarantee of sympathy or exploratory spirit from a reviewer. The problem might more specifically be located in the horizon of expectations that reviewers trained to appreciate a specific artistic and theatrical ideology bring with them to performances, a critical framework that can be influenced positively or negatively by the critics’ preconceptions of a theatre company’s ideological positioning. Gina Mallet remains one of the most dearly hated theatre critics Toronto has ever known, for her acerbic pronouncements on specific productions (especially her reputation for panning new Canadian work) as well as specific colleagues, and the unflaggingly elitist stance she adopted in her articulation of the artistic principles a “good” critic must apply in the business of reviewing. Mallet’s adamantly New Critical stance “renders her (or anyone operating from these assumptions) virtually incapable of discussing theatre which doesn’t aspire to the standards of ‘high art,’” (Wilson, “Deadpan” 16). Ideological incompatibility between reviewer and performance can leave history with the impression that the production was “bad,” further fuel for those who would insist that nothing has hampered the development of feminist theatre more than a pure and simple lack of quality.
Even critics who are willing to tolerate or accept a feminist aesthetic are not proof against a tendency towards orthodoxy and containment. In the same way that hegemonic culture negotiates the neutralization of resistance, being able to “define” feminist theatre allows critics to develop the “standards” to which feminist theatre should appropriately aspire. As Ann-Marie MacDonald says, “In 1989 critics come to the theatre prepared to see patriarchy challenged. ‘Fine,’ they say, ‘we can handle that. In fact, we are on your side.’ Then they say, ‘Well what is this? What are you saying? Isn’t it a feminist play and if it’s a feminist play shouldn’t it be like that?’” (Rudakoff and Much 141)
What matters about these productions is not the dramatic text but the performance dynamic they enact, the process that moves towards an elision of the difference between actors and audience, recasting all those present in the co-creative role. The problem with the emphasis on a performance dynamic, as I have already argued, is its ephemerality. Irreducible into text, no amount of academic alchemy can hope to recreate it. And, without traces of residual textuality, these productions become difficult to recall, impossible to study, and useless for developing any feasible argumentation for the need and efficacy of a feminist tradition of theatre (which is to say, an argument that will carry weight with the production companies and funding bodies that perpetuate the conservative makeup of the Canadian theatrical industry). Without such a tradition, it becomes too easy to continue to ghettoize feminist theatre, to dismiss it as a marginal gadfly to mainstream, “real” theatre, dismissing along with it the challenges it presents to the hegemonic ideology of representation, and the alternative ways of seeing it embodies. Writing in 1986, Micheline Wandor warns: “[I]t is worth bearing in mind that similar explosions of radicalism from women have faded in the past, and that means that the struggle to ensure the presence of women’s theatrical voices will be continually felt. Feminism is still necessary; there is no such thing as ‘post-feminism’” (193). A tradition built on impermanence risks not lasting long enough to effect any permanent or ongoing change. Feminist theatre, defined as a process of resistance to the mastery of patriarchal culture, must risk miscomprehension over and over again in the public arena of reviews in order to avoid becoming merely a commodity within this very system of mastery. Reviewers may try to place themselves within a post-feminist context; feminist theatre, as Micheline Wandor warns, cannot.
Who Could Do Such a Thing?
The answer to Margaret Hollingsworth’s question posed above is, no artistic director in his right mind would probably ever undertake to develop such a work. The response for many feminists, as Lizbeth Goodman points out, has been a “do it yourself” approach to theatre. Feminists have learned by necessity that “[i]f your politics are not being represented on stage, make your own theatre, or write and speak about the need for your kind of feminism, your kind of staged representation; don’t expect anyone to do it for you; make it yourself ” (4). When the “do it yourself” approach extends to the creation of new theatre companies for presenting feminist work, feminist principles once again frequently give rise to a specific type of administrative practice: “It comes as no surprise . . . that many women eager for expression and the emotional fulfillment which comes from shaping a work in its totality, have departed the mainstream to strike out solo or to form new companies. It also follows that these same pioneers, fed up with artistic structures that simply emulate or propagate male values, would explore the development of new forms” (Friedlander, “Feminist” 52). Frequently, at least initially, these companies choose a collective administrative structure to reflect a commitment to non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian development contexts.
For Nancy Cullen, one of the founding members of the Calgary collective Maenad, the movement towards collective company structures reflects societal traditions that have historically discouraged women from wielding power: “[T]here’s also something specifically female about it . . . I’m not saying that men can’t work this way, it’s just that women’s concepts of power are different. We train each other to take power, how to share power” (Stone-Blackburn 32). In confronting the masculinist structures that have kept women from the more stable or better paying positions in theatres, most feminist theatre practitioners have come to the realization that “[f ]eminism is not just a matter of doing non-sexist plays or replacing the boys at the top by girls” (Lushington 11). Power is not the exclusive privilege of the artistic director or the person “at the top” in these companies, but something to which all members of the company have equal access.
However, the determination to resist putting one single individual “in charge” has serious artistic and material ramifications for a theatre company. In theory, a collective must be willing to honour each new member’s ideas and contributions, even if those same ideas have already been tried unsuccessfully in the past: “[E]ach time you get a new person, you have to start inventing the wheel again” (Stone-Blackburn 32).4 Nightwood Theatre—which first began as a collective, evolved into a feminist collective, and currently runs as a feminist non-collective theatre company—has from its earliest days