Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
narrative that rendered women historically absent. Contemporary feminist performance and feminist historiography share in common the ideology and practice that “[f ]eminists must attend not simply what is represented, but representation itself ” (Wilson, “Politics” 74). The politics of representation does not begin and end with the play presented on the stage, which is precisely why “[f ]eminist theatre historians are rarely satisfied with ‘recreative’ approaches” (Davis 65) to history and historiography. Instead, the “interplay of performance’s psychological, sociological, biological, and economic factors contributes to the challenge of recent historiography; feminists add the importance of the personal dimension of social activity to this list and insist on the political significance of everything” (Davis 65). Representations of women on stage and in the pages of history must remain sensitive to the fullest possible context that scripts them, to recognize that the definition of subjectivity is more process than product, and that the politics of representation is far-reaching.
And there’s the rub. In order to avoid reproducing the theatre of monolithic authority, feminist theatre artists explore strategies for breaking down the hegemonic framework of (re)presentation in every aspect of theatre, from the structure of producing units, to the social and economic context of the venue, to the nature of the performance event itself. Oftentimes, these strategic revisionings cause real difficulties for a historiographic methodology that still has not adequately equipped itself to represent them.
In her foundational work of Canadian feminist theatre historiography, Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada, Cynthia Zimmerman acknowledges the complexities that surround the historiographical survival of a production, which “depends on a whole network of people: those who suppressed or encouraged its coming to life in the first place, the collective of artists who then shaped and interpreted the work for the critical first production, and then those at the publishing end who determine what gets into print” (15). While she does outline the rationale surrounding the limits of her study (10–11), her assertion that in the complex network of public production faced by Canadian women playwrights, “to write the play is just the beginning” (15), betrays a bias towards traditional or classical theatre—and with it, the logocentric model of drama as defined on the text/performance axis—in the same logic that erased the tradition of “play-making” that Sue-Ellen Case has identified. For much feminist theatre, creating a performance may be more a function of play-making than play-writing, where to write the play is definitely not the beginning—in fact, it may not be part of the process at all.
The traditional theatrical model that Zimmerman invokes defines performance as “the translation of the script from the page to the stage,” in which “the script is placed at the centre of the theatrical performance and the other production elements come merely to serve its (re)presentation on stage” (Wilson, “Politics” 74). The script, in this model, becomes the ultimate arbiter of authority: “[T]his location of the script at the centre of performance accords it privilege and implies a hierarchical structure within theatrical practice. The playwright is author; his script—his word—is constituted as the authority to which the theatrical production must defer” (Wilson, “Politics” 74). The first difficulty this logocentric model presents for feminist theatre practice is implied in Wilson’s choice of the masculine pronoun to refer to the author—the script, the word, is most often male-authored. Margaret Hollingsworth describes the process by which women writing plays in the traditional, male, script-based mode failed to materialize: “[W]hile their works were not censored, they were suppressed—gently, insidiously suppressed” (21). She continues with an explicit analysis of the patriarchal ideology that discouraged both the development and the emergence of a women’s playwriting tradition:
It was not that men went out of their way to promote work by members of their own sex; it was just that they understood it better and therefore valued it higher; they shared the point of view and perspective of their fellows, they did not have to go out on a limb, or put themselves out greatly to know what the potential of the work might be.. . . Men were responsible for creating and nurturing the theatrical form, and for centuries they made sure the territory was not impinged upon by women. (21)
Not only have men had greater access to the materials of theatrical production, they also have the power to define “quality” in theatre, enabling them to create a closed system where feminist production becomes less and less a likely possibility. As Hollingsworth points out, in order to be produced in the Canadian theatrical establishment, a feminist playwright “will probably have written a historical drama which is almost entirely unthreatening, like The Fighting Days” (25).
This history of feminist playmaking, then, often becomes a matter of negotiation and choice, an immediately political activity where the feminist playwright must consider whether it is more important for her play to have immediate or enduring impact—whether she can afford to work in the non-traditional, nonlogocentric model reminiscent of social action theatre and risk being marginalized right off the pages of history, or whether she would be better served by creating a work that might “gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history” (Kristeva 447), and survive in the record of theatre history to educate a potentially wider range of audiences, removed in time and place from the original performance event. This book explores, in part, the possibility of doing both.
This study will examine the strategies employed on behalf of some contemporary Canadian feminist playwrights and productions that have managed to achieve a place in the recorded history of Canadian theatre. To undertake such a study, there must be a beginning, and the beginning is the words, or more precisely, the “texts”—literary and non-literary—that represent the residual effects of a past performance event. While these texts are designed to supplement the performance context of a theatrical transaction, in the aftermath of the performance, these supplements are required to stand in for a past and otherwise essentially unrecoverable event. The academic study of past theatrical productions can only be undertaken via texts; therefore, only plays that have made the transition from stage to some type of page offer an opportunity to read the history of women’s representation. Any such study must immediately acknowledge that certain types of dramatic production lend themselves more readily to such historiographic representation. The resulting analysis must reflect the negotiated dialectic between theatre and history, and how each is constantly challenging and redefining the boundaries of the other.
In order to circumscribe a manageable context within the potentially infinite network created by the acknowledgement of “the political significance of everything,” I have made several deliberate decisions on what to include. The plays I have chosen all begin with a thematic concern about women’s history and historiography, both literal and literary, allowing the layers of textual representation to reflect each other and resonate as the medium mirrors the message. The plays all originate with anglophone Canadian women playwrights, in productions geared mainly towards Toronto-area audiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This geographic choice, while perhaps predictable, is not intended to appear inevitable: it is by no means meant to endorse “Torontocentrism,” or to imply an acquiescence to any assumption of Toronto as the apex of Canadian cultural achievement or the only city with theatre worth considering. Instead, the real reasons for this choice are as pragmatic as they are historically significant. The first one involves the inevitable spectre of regionalism that attends any argument that attempts to take into account the politics of production in Canada. Whether “region” is defined in a traditional, geographical sense, or whether it is considered to be, as William Westfall argues, an entity created by the application of a particular set of abstract criteria (231), a region implies a particular demographic, culture, and audience. Whether a theatrical production responds to a sense of regionalism already defined or creates the region by constituting and addressing itself to a particular audience, the regional context will inevitably impinge on the full spectrum in the politics of production and reception. By concentrating on productions that were geared towards a single “region,” I hope to reduce as much as possible the variables that attend the constitution of an audience and a “theatrical community.”
The other, more insidious, reason is a direct implication of the availability of the residual texts alluded to earlier. From the perspective of a time and space removed from the original context of