Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
left behind. In order for those texts to be made historically and critically visible, they must first be available for study. In this respect, Toronto has benefited greatly from what amounts to a rather prosaic coincidence with profound historiographical implications: its proximity to the University of Guelph, which began in the 1980s to situate itself as the epicentre of archival holdings and research on Ontario theatre companies. Leonard Conolly, a theatre historian, scholar, and one-time chair of the drama department at Guelph, recalls how the University’s first major theatre archive acquisition—the Shaw Festival archives—came about “more by chance than design.” Quickly envisioning the potential, Conolly subsequently made it a personal mission to accumulate as much archival material as possible from theatres and deposit it at the University of Guelph. Although not necessarily the specific focus of his interest, Toronto theatres quickly came to make up a significant portion of the collections because the high cost of arts space in Toronto and the impermanence of many theatre companies in their venues made it impractical and often undesirable to store archival materials onsite. These collections could usually be acquired for the cost of a rental van and a short trip along the highway from Guelph to Toronto. Built on Conolly’s enthusiasm for preserving theatrical history, the L. W. Conolly Theatre Archives (as they are now known) make a vast wealth of textual residues readily available to researchers, thereby rendering a swath of productions historically visible. The focus on Toronto-area productions in this book, quite simply, takes advantage of this availability. However, contrary to the classical historical assumptions that history preserves the records of our greatest achievements, the historical survival of these production records does not necessarily mean that these productions were intrinsically more exemplary or noteworthy than others that exist only in the historical echoes of vague remembrances, or have disappeared altogether from history. To be sure, I think these are all significant productions, but any self-conscious historical inquiry should be honest enough to acknowledge history’s dirty little secret: even if those production residues were not necessarily archived because of their historical significance, they have certainly become historically significant because they were archived.
This same practicality is partially the basis for the choice of time period for the productions under consideration: they all occurred during this period of focused archival acquisition. However, focusing on feminist productions in the late 1980s and early 1990s also goes beyond the vagaries of temporal coincidence. As Robert Wallace has pointed out, the mid-1980s represented a period of “gentrification” (102) in Toronto theatre, where the energetic “alternative” theatres that had emerged in the previous decade moved towards an establishment status with the acquisition of property and the relatively reliable support of the audiences they had cultivated. It represents, then, a period when theatres whose ideas had seemed marginal, perhaps even antithetical, to the pursuit of a homogenous nationalism were exploring the possibility of being acknowledged and validated. And a public that could accept—or at least entertain—the possibility that the construction of nationalism might be a multivalent process could be open to seeing the same thing about the construction of gender. Like the gaps and spaces in historical narrative made visible by postmodernism, the mainstreaming of the alternate theatres made visible the gaps and spaces in identity politics, spaces that feminist theatre practitioners, like feminist historians, were poised to exploit.
As useful as the alternate theatre movement might have been for opening the possibility of identity interrogation, the parallels between alternative theatre and feminist theatre in Toronto resonate in less optimistic ways as well. As Wallace documents, the movement towards establishment status for the “Toronto Four” alternates (Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto Free Theatre) was accompanied by
a shift in their priorities: once governed by primarily political (read: nationalistic) and aesthetic concerns, these theatres now became equally, if not more, preoccupied with financial survival.. . . No longer marginal in the city’s cultural industry—if only by virtue of their operating budgets—the “Toronto Four” began to pursue methods of operation, development, production and promotion that brought them closer in style and structure to Canada’s regional theatres than ever before. (103)
Having moved from the margins into (or at least towards) the centre, these theatres became more visible and financially viable, but at the expense of their ability or willingness to challenge and encourage questioning of the politics of the system of which they were now firmly part. The feminist theatre productions examined in this book echo this trajectory: while the most recent production, Judith Thompson’s “successful” 1991 Hedda Gabler at the Shaw Festival, might imply that feminism has finally taken a place in mainstream theatre, the historiographical gaps and silences resonate with the intense resistance that Thompson encountered by refusing to make theatre the way the patriarchal hierarchy of the Shaw Festival wanted her to. The subsequent resurrection of Thompson’s adaptation and its re-entry into history might offer a small glimmer of optimism for a feminist future, but it is not coincidental that the production and those open to embracing its interpretive politics and possibilities have moved back into the margins. For Sally Clark, the attempts to attach a “feminist” label to what were often essentially mainstream commercial ventures resulted in plays that were neither feminist in their politics nor successful in their box office, but facilitated their script publication and the possibility of remaining in a form that made them productive sites of feminist inquiry. Only the earliest productions considered here, those that found a better ideological compatibility between theatre company and audiences in more marginal spaces, created a synergy that led not only to a “successful” intersubjective theatrical experience, but also to a productive form of remaining that admirably challenged the logocentricity and linearity of traditional historiography. Unlike the historical narrative surrounding Thompson’s Hedda Gabler, which modestly tries to cover its gaps, Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell’s The Book of Jessica and the texts surrounding The Anna Project’s This Is for You, Anna prefer to expose theirs, disrupting their historical presences with reminders of their absent performance dynamics.
Getting on with the Show
In the same way that the choice of productions under consideration here should not necessarily be seen as an endorsement of their historically transcendent quality, it is important to clarify the use to which these archival materials will be put. My goal is emphatically not to reconstruct the “reality” of a specific production, but to examine how that performance has been translated into historiographical record, and how it is represented by the textual residues (literary and otherwise) it has left behind. This methodology recognizes “theatre as a comprehensive social phenomenon . . . an industry selling marketable commodities, or a machine producing and reproducing public meanings” (Pistotnik 684), particularly the meanings that have been scripted by and around women. In keeping with the process-oriented thrust of feminist practice, I will not ask “how a text is ‘translated’ into a performance, or what a stage production was really like, . . . [or] engage text or performance as if they existed in some kind of given and fixed form” (Pistotnik 684). Instead of reproducing a study of drama along the text/performance axis, I hope instead to consider “a whole set of issues and their mutual relations, such as patronage, the choice of repertoire, audiences, advertising, rehearsals, as well as the influence of other discursive practices (e.g., legal, educational) upon the theatre and its operating rules” (Pistotnik 684). Pistotnik’s proposal for a methodology of theatre historiography provides a blueprint for a process that moves beyond the hermeneutic imperative of creating a coherent artefact of text translated into performance and towards a consideration of the network that constitutes the representation of women on stage and page.
Any type of theatre production, even a radical feminist work seeking to forge an immediate, communal bond, defines itself as some type of a transaction between actors and audience; therefore, the theatre company that initiates the transaction assumes critical importance in mounting a production. It is important to note that a “theatre company” is not synonymous with a “theatre.” While some companies may have their own proprietary venues, much feminist theatre is not tied to a (sense of ) place, but situates itself in the interaction between those present—performers and audience members—at a particular theatrical event. This is especially true