Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
two presents a consideration of the process of new play development as it is practiced in Toronto, outlining some of the ideological, financial, and practical difficulties faced by women playwrights in getting their unique visions onto the theatrical stage. This chapter rehearses some of the strengths and weaknesses of script-based and collective theatre for feminist productions, as well as considers the possibilities afforded by the “in-process” alternative of workshopping plays.
Chapter three begins a series of chapters that examine specific productions in the context of the traditions and methodologies outlined in the first two chapters. Specifically, this chapter analyzes Judith Thompson’s experience directing a production of Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake (1991), and the historically unspeakable conditions that resulted in the disappearance of the script of her critically acclaimed adaptation of this Ibsen play from history. Since Thompson’s adaptation, despite the absence of a published text, has had a certain reproductive history, the chapter ends with a consideration of how the politics of historiography can be made to serve feminist theatre to some extent, although this possibility requires an extraordinary personal commitment on the part of the playwright.
Chapter four deals with three plays by Sally Clark, The Trial of Judith K. (Canadian Stage Company, 1989), Jehanne of the Witches (Tarragon Theatre, 1989), and Life Without Instruction (Theatre Plus Toronto, 1991). The disparity between Clark’s status in the record of feminist history and the controversies that surrounded the production and reception of these plays provides a fertile field for investigating how the politics of production and the politics of historiography affect historical narrative. Forging a connection between the relatively mainstream and commercial venues where these productions occurred and the very problematic nature of Clark’s presumed “feminism” at the height of the culture wars and political correctness debates also makes visible the dangers inherent in exploring the politics of gender construction too closely with audiences not in the mood for such experimentation.
Chapter five looks at two plays that were developed in the collective tradition, Jessica by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell, and This Is for You, Anna by The Anna Project. These plays offer the greatest challenge to traditional, literary-based modes of historiography, and the fact that they are represented to history through texts that reflect the same emphasis on intersubjective process as did their theatrical productions is a function of the reputation for “success” that resulted, in part, from a carefully constructed ideological compatibility throughout the production process.
The concluding chapter places the preceding six productions in the context of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (Canadian Stage, 1990). One of the most successful works in the history of feminist and Canadian theatre, MacDonald’s play shares common features with each of the other plays, and shows how astute actors and theatre companies can maximize the possibility of “success” by self-consciously creating a theatrical context that aligns the politics of production and audience. Finally, the concluding summary points out that any apparent feminist gains in mainstream theatre actually hide the extent to which Canadian theatre is still tenaciously resistant, both in working methods and at the box office, to any real challenges to a traditional, masculinist status quo.
Acknowledgements
In a thesis that seeks to problematize the relationship between “public” and “private” history and consider the “political significance of everything,” it is difficult to decide just how far my acknowledgements should extend. The research and writing of this book was undertaken while I was at the University of Western Ontario, and my first and most “public” debt of gratitude belongs there, where I received both financial and collegial support. Especially, I benefited greatly from the advice, expertise, and encouragement of Frank Davey, the first Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature. While the arguments, for better or worse, are mine, their public visibility owes a great deal to his commitment and his willingness to help this book negotiate its way through the networks of production that surround publication. Manina Jones was likewise helpful in providing astute critical commentary, especially on The Book of Jessica, an amazing work that many students encounter for the first time in her classes. Alison Lee was a wonderful source of feminist focus, as well as the perspective and humour that saw me through many days.
Further afield, Ann Wilson at the University of Guelph was extremely generous in suggestions and advice right from the earliest stages of the ideas and proposals that eventually became this book; for that, and for her ongoing encouragement and friendship, I am most grateful. Also, I owe a great deal to the staff of Archival and Special Collections in the McLaughlin Library at the University of Guelph, without whose helpfulness this research would have been impossible. Their in-depth knowledge of the holdings in what is now called the L.W. Conolly Theatre Archives alerted me to materials I might otherwise not have found, and their patience as they brought out file after file for my perusal was remarkable. Then there is L.W. Conolly himself, who first introduced me to the possibilities of theatre archives when I was a graduate student at Guelph; like a Gustav manuscript, his influence ghosts every page.
Judith Thompson, Sally Clark, and Stephen Johnson were very accommodating in responding to my questions about their productions, and Ric Knowles generously shared both his thoughts and a manuscript version of what eventually became The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning, a book that will profoundly influence materialist readings of theatre for years to come. For these conversations, and for their permission to quote from the unpublished records of them, I extend my sincere thanks.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am very grateful for this financial support. In addition, I am grateful to the ASPP readers who offered valuable insights and made numerous helpful suggestions for revision.
On what must be called a most “private” note, I owe perhaps my greatest debt of gratitude to my family, without whose accommodation, encouragement, and support this book could not exist. My children, Victoria, Brandon, and Cameron, from birth have shared their mother with feminists, theorists, and playwrights they have never met, and I truly hope their world will be bigger because of it. My husband, Blair, absorbed many personal and practical costs throughout the process, and provided invaluable critical challenges to my readings of how power circulates in society, and between women and men. Together, we continue to negotiate balance in theory and practice.
1 Women’s History: Pages and Stages
Is that me, this no-body that is dressed up, wrapped in veils, carefully kept distant, pushed to the side of History and change, nullified, kept out of the way, on the edge of the stage . . . ?
—Hélène Cixous
Exit: History
“History” has not always been with us. It was apparently born about 430 B.C.E., and it has a father, Herodotus of Halicarnassus. When Cicero proclaimed Herodotus the “father of history,” he inaugurated a tradition of historiography that defined the correct form and function of written history as a published record that offers the possibility of “preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done” (Herodotus 6). History is properly the story of great men, and their great deeds and military actions. There is no mother of history, and women apparently have no real place here.
When Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White popularized the notion of history as a particular species of teleologically and ideologically inflected narrative, they opened a gap between the reality of things past and their remembrance, but sutured it by invoking a narrative tradition dating back to another one of the Great White Fathers of critical theory, Aristotle. Aristotle himself clearly differentiates between the writing of history and the