Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
this one—and accept “the challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing [which] is to re-mark the performative possibilities of writing itself ” (Phelan 148). Phelan describes this process as the “act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation” (148). By challenging the boundaries of historiographical practice, it must be possible to negotiate a strategy that helps connect women, works, and worlds, without merely (re)producing a more inclusive, but ultimately still monolithic, historical narrative. The texts may disappear into the gaps of their performance; the feminist conversation must not.
NOTES
1. Ric Knowles articulates a slightly different form of what is ultimately this same desire to experience the “reality” of a performance unmediated by historiographic textuality. In his attempt to challenge the hegemonic canonicity of “literary” drama, he suggests including live performances as a necessary part of (Canadian) drama courses. His response to the difficulties posed by historiographic textuality is to eschew the literary mode altogether, “to resist the textual, literary, and universalist biases inherent in the reading of published texts, by considering performances as texts and by taking advantage of opportunities presented by local productions,” (“Voices” 109) where students can presumably (arguably) “read” these performances without the mediating influence of other people’s texts. While this is a potentially useful strategy, it nonetheless maintains the definition of the genre firmly along the text/performance axis, without addressing the representational implications that will still attend the students’ constructions of the “text” of the live performance event.
2. Sometimes, the desire becomes less implicit. In the summer of 1997, The Edge Festival in Toronto premiered a play by Stephen Johnson called Juba, an artistic interpretation of this very impulse to access the “real” of a historical performance (or in this case, performer). Johnson, a tenured academic, admits he “wrote the play, based on my research into this particular figure.. . . It was all quite autobiographical—that is, the protagonist is a contemporary historian trying to get past the documents and to the figure. And failing. The more scholarly approaches have found their ways out in conference papers, and one publication.” Even Johnson’s own informed, scholarly approach to his research couldn’t entirely displace the desire to connect with a past unmediated by text.
3. It is important not to conflate the term “woman” with “feminist.” While I do not consider the two terms entirely interchangeable, they are often made to function as such in the texts that I have examined. Ideally, I would use the term “feminist” to refer to anyone (female or male) who deals self-consciously with issues surrounding the construction and interpellation of “women” at any historical moment, with a view to ending the arbitrary, gender-based subordination of women. In effect, especially in theatre, virtually any woman who achieves a significant historical visibility tends to be immediately labelled as “feminist,” no matter how unself-conscious or un-feminist her work and methods might be. Once attached, the “feminist” label also functions in public discourse to demarcate a certain mode of reading or to imply a certain function that the work may or may not satisfy.
4. Powell explains a loophole in British copyright law that allowed a playwright to “appropriat[e], without compensation or acknowledgement, the plot and characters, even the title of a successful work of fiction” (98). While this loophole could theoretically disadvantage male as well as female authors, women’s greater presence among the ranks of successful novelists, coupled with their relative lack of access to the possibility of theatrical production, effectively meant that this legal peculiarity had a much more deleterious effect on women.
2 Producing Possibilities for Feminist Theatre
Government agencies decide what to fund; corporations decide which projects to back; audience members decide which events to buy tickets for. How much exploration can the taxpayer, the patron, the paying public be expected to support?
—Kathleen Flaherty
Developing Policy and Production in Canada
Many of the challenges of new play development that confront feminist theatre practitioners today echo the difficulties encountered in the late 1960s in the quest to establish a “Canadian National” theatre, as Rina Fraticelli pointed out in her report The Status of Women in the Canadian Theatre. However, it is the differences, rather than the similarities, between the two emerging traditions that highlight how much higher the stakes are for a theatrical tradition that offers a challenge to the institutional status quo on the basis of gender, rather than on the basis of nationality or “culture.” Since Fraticelli’s original report was not publicized as part of the governmental policy statements on national culture, the analogy—which Kate Lushington argues would do much to alleviate a strident “fear of feminism” both within the theatrical institution and outside it—was buried along with it. Lushington summarizes:
After all, when incentives to encourage Canadian playwrights were introduced, no one called us “strident colonials and xenophobic separatists”; there was no widespread fear of offending the British by “too strong a nationalist stance”; no one suggested that we should stop sleeping with Americans. Nor did anyone label the Tarragon Theatre “a Canadian ghetto,” or worry that its playwrights would write only about awfully decent peace-keeping forces, beaver and moose. (10)
While the heady days of government arts and culture funding did much to encourage burgeoning Canadian playwrights and some experimental theatre companies and works, the majority of their efforts went into conventionally scripted plays based on traditional narrative structures (or into building the most impressive venues for housing a borrowed theatrical tradition). In fact, English-Canadian theatre in general offers few real production development alternatives to playwrights beyond the logocentric model, a tradition that is reinforced by the difficulties such alternatives offer the historiographical process. Since script-based theatre lends itself most readily to historical visibility, and historical visibility leads, remarkably easily, to an assumption of “quality” (i.e., it wouldn’t be in print if it weren’t good/successful/important, etc.), it is easy to see how quickly the accretion of texts creates the aura of merit for a playwright. This relationship between text and success has real economic ramifications for Canadian playwrights, working within the economically based business model assumed by most theatre boards, which are now often populated with and controlled by members of the business community to maximize the potential of corporate sponsorship for productions. Since “corporations usually restrict subsidy to safe, conservative commodities” (Wallace 144) the historiographical process of textual commodification is almost essential for a playwright to gain entry into the process of production and repetition that characterizes much artistic programming.
From a playwright’s perspective, being commissioned to create a work increases the odds of a “successful” production—one that might reach an audience and generate enough revenue to allow a playwright to live through the writing of another play—and enough textual residue to gain admission to the mutually reinforcing system of texts and merit. Therefore, the stakes for a playwright who prefers not to work within the logocentric model are even higher. Many playwrights and (academic) critics have pointed out that Canadian theatre is an ardently conservative institution, “not normally linked with the political, let alone artistic, avant-garde” (Lushington 6). When Urjo Kareda was dramaturg at the Stratford Festival, which receives more government funding than any other theatre company in Canada, he considered one of the most valuable aspects of his job his ability to “draw Canadian playwrights to the festival” (8). He lists the Canadians commissioned to adapt or create scripts for this most prominent company: John Murrell, Tom Cone, Larry Fineberg, Sheldon Rosen—an exclusively male coterie who have all, Kareda notes, gone on to enjoy national and international success in the wake of their Stratford tenures.
In order to be considered eligible or desirable to create a commissioned work, a playwright—especially