Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
works; the question remains what the price for such expression is or may continue to be.
NOTES
1. Indeed, the trend towards commissioning playwrights to adapt existing works rather than create new plays can be viewed as a result of the financial imperative in theatre that functions as “a certain creative ‘self-censorship’ imposed on writers and practitioners by the need to produce commercially viable plays” (Goodman 90).
2. Michael Devine, in his article, “Tarragon: Playwrights Talk Back,” argues that Tarragon has not, in fact, “earned” its reputation as “one of the most important new play development opportunities for promising young playwrights in Toronto, if not Canada” (13), a verdict almost unanimously supported in sidebar articles written by playwrights who had participated in various Tarragon Playwrights Units workshops. Citing problems attendant on Kareda’s position of absolute personal and artistic control of the process, and his potential conflict of interest in needing to encourage scripts appropriate for Tarragon productions, Devine outlines alternative processes of new play development being practiced in Montreal, Edmonton, and Vancouver. However, Devine is quick to point out that these alternative development processes, while useful for developing non-literary productions, have not garnered the type of funding that would allow them to rival Tarragon in reputation.
3. A letter from Toronto Free Theatre directors to TFT’s Preview Club members documents the reviewer-audience dynamic with respect to their previews of George F. Walker’s Power Plays. Martin Kinch and Judith Hendry explicitly lay the blame for the failure of Gossip and the potential failure of Filthy Rich on bad reviews:
It’s happened again. We’ve presented what we think is a fine, amusing production of an exciting new play by George F. Walker, and the critics of two Toronto papers have turned in a verdict that’s not very flattering.
We might be inclined to listen—if it hadn’t already happened like this before. Filthy Rich is a sequel to Gossip, a play we presented back in 1977. Gossip wasn’t very well attended—and we had to close it early. One of the reasons was the press coverage.. . .
What’s going on here? This time around, the critics can hardly ignore Walker’s growing international reputation. But they still refuse to pass the kind of verdict that might help give this play the long Toronto run it deserves.. . . We don’t quite understand the problem. But we do know that the attitude of the critics is going to keep a lot of people away from an entertaining and rewarding evening in the theatre.. . .
4. According to Filewod (Collective 116), it was in large part the frustration over having to reinvent the wheel with every production that led to the eventual dissolution of the Mummers Troupe in Newfoundland.
5. It must be remembered that the preference for collective work is by no means universal. Margaret Hollingsworth, a playwright of ardently feminist inclinations, supports the necessity of opportunities for women to work without entering a collective structure. Acknowledging that a woman-run theatre company is, by definition, “outside the system,” she expresses dissatisfaction with the lack of diversity in the margins: “[T]here is only one professional woman’s theatre in English Canada that I know of and its members, for reasons of mutual support and growth, have chosen to work mainly collectively. (Many women’s theatres have taken this route, and it leaves women who wish to develop their craft in some other way with few alternatives.)” (26)
3 Dead Centre: Judith Thompson Takes on Shaw and Ibsen
[Women] appear . . ., if they appear at all, as representatives of issues or types, with only a narrow history and virtually no power base. The feminist director is strategically placed to resist or comply with that world picture. She is the linchpin. Both positions, the one of compliance and the one of resistance, are highly politicized, although only the activity of resistance will get named as such.
—Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement
I never wanted to mess with Ibsen—not because he is a sacred cow but because I do adore the work—but I think that the translations have failed him miserably.
—Judith Thompson
Feminist Central?
As feminist theatre practitioners attempt to negotiate some place within theatre history, much debate has arisen over where exactly that place should be. As a politically-grounded theatrical strategy, intent on questioning the status quo of traditional representational practices, feminist theatre practically had to begin as an “alternate” or “marginal” theatre. Lizbeth Goodman goes so far as to argue that feminist theatre predicates a politic of alterity that makes it, of necessity, always alternative:
The alternate eventually becomes the mainstream as other “alternates” emerge. For the most part, however, feminist theatre is still largely “alternate.” Only a major structural change in all theatre could transfer feminist theatre as a genre into the mainstream, for the emphasis on collective and non-hierarchical ways of working which are intrinsic to feminist theatre mitigate against “mainstreaming.” (27)
However, Goodman’s argument is valid mainly for a particular type of feminist theatre, the collaborative or collective model that, as Hollingsworth points out, does not necessarily appeal to all theatre practitioners who identify themselves as feminists. There are, moreover, several valid arguments against working only in forms that deliberately segregate feminist theatre from the mainstream, as Patricia Schroeder points out. If feminists entrench themselves firmly in the theatrical margins, refusing to engage with the critical mainstream, there is a very tangible risk that “fewer feminist concerns will be dramatised, fewer audiences will be reached, and feminist playwrights, like the women they often depict, may be left unheard, speaking softly to themselves at the margins of our culture” (Schroeder, “Locked” 165). Alternate theatre tends to aim for, and draw, alternate audiences, people who most likely already sympathize with the need for social, political, and representational alternatives. At some point, preaching only to the choir becomes self-serving; feminist theatre must be able to reach a broader audience to make new converts. Moreover, deliberately seeking a place in the margins may, in fact, entrench more firmly the “legitimacy” of the theatre to which feminist theatre offers only an alternative. And then, too often, theatre that takes place in the margins doesn’t attract enough attention, and therefore doesn’t leave behind enough textual residue to create a sense of historical legitimacy and value. Added together, these arguments offer the possibility that the refusal to engage with the centre becomes as likely to perpetuate unequal power relations as help dismantle them.1
Perhaps twenty or thirty years of provisional visibility is enough. Even Case admits that there is value to having feminist theatre practitioners work in mainstream modes rather than assuming a situation where “if they work in traditional forms, they are not feminists (or feminine), and . . . their work is discounted because of their preference for those forms, rather than seen as marking an advance for women in the field by making their professional work visible” (Feminism 130). For feminism to pose a legitimate challenge to the representational status quo, it must first be seen and heard by those who would not go out of their way to encounter it, the very bourgeois audiences who make up and exist quite comfortably within the status quo. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women had become increasingly more visible as a politicized identity category. Perhaps the time was right for feminist theatre to make an appearance within the mainstream of Canadian theatrical production.
As Rina Fraticelli has pointed out, the women who will most easily find a place in the traditionally male-dominated mainstream theatrical institutions are those who are willing to work in familiar and convenient modes of production, those who could almost pass as “small, high-pitched, bumpy men” (Lushington 7). In theatre this translates to the type of work that Cynthia Zimmerman assumes in her introduction to Fair