Performance Anxiety: Masculine Failure in Sam Shepard’s One-Act Plays

Over the past forty years, no American playwright has created drama that probes the insecurity attending modern American masculinity as consistently as Sam Shepard. A decade before he created the fathers, sons, and brothers who populate his full-length “family plays” of the 1970s and 1980s, Shepard wrote nearly twenty anti-realistic, one-act plays while living and working in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. While these early Shepard one-acts rarely concern the roles males play within a family, masculine anxiety runs through them like a fault line.

Shepard was a leading figure on the Off-Off Broadway theater circuit. Like his fellow Off-Off playwrights, Shepard wrote plays as a challenge to the commercial drama that ran uptown, a brand of flaccid psychological realism that aimed at soothing rather than challenging its bourgeois audience. Shepard’s edgy Off-Off one-acts eschewed plot and realistic characterization in favor of cool detachment, self-referentiality, and meta-theatricality. Shepard, who traded heavily on his own rugged masculinity, created one-act plays that were heavily invested in a conservative masculine ethos. But the young playwright leaned heavily on formal developments arising out of Off-Off’s emerging gay theater scene. The resulting crisis of masculinity renders the plays unstable while charging them with an undeniable energy.

Steven Canaday
Anne Arundel Community College
sbcanaday@comcast

Henry Green's Event Horizon

Aaron Jaffe examines the structural, political, and gender logic of "the horizon" as a regulative visual metaphorics in Henry Green's experimental late modernist novels and his memoir Pack My Bag. Perry Anderson describes the perception of a revolutionary horizon—the "imaginative proximity of social revolution"—as one of the essential drivers of modernist aesthetics. Foretasted in movements for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and various socialist and anarchist causes, the previsionary appearance of transformative political change closing distance, and yet just out of view, provided a generative specular field for modernism's relentless aesthetic innovations. Reading the ineffable obliquity of Green's narrative horizons side by side the politically ineffable obliquity proposed by George Dangerfield's Strange Death of Liberal England, Jaffe proposes to disclose the gender implications of this metaphor, by historicizing its applications to events in interwar Europe and re-temporalize its "suspension of perception" in reference to other masculine techniques of modern vision.

Aaron Jaffe
University of Louisville
a0jaff02@gwise.louisville.edu

Modernism, Masculinity and (Gendered) Vision: W.B. Yeats’s and Augusta Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan

At first glance, W.B. Yeats’s and Augusta Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) would appear to represent a decidedly uncomplicated form of patriarchal nationalist melodrama. As a number of critics have argued, the play aims to promote militant insurrection against British rule by equating the play’s eponymous heroine with the nation, offering an “old hag” who is reborn as a beautiful “queen” through the blood sacrifice of a revolutionary young man. Such readings, however, ignore a series of gender-based tensions that haunt the play as dramatic performance: the disjunction between Gregory’s (proto-feminist) emphasis on peasant realism and Yeats’s interest in modernist symbolic drama; the impact of Inghinidhe na hEireann, a feminist organization that sponsored the play’s initial staging; and the significance of Maud Gonne, the well-known female nationalist activist, in the title role of Cathleen. In this talk, I wish to demonstrate how these tensions are at once exposed and elided, marked and unmarked on the spectacle of the female body, as the play struggles (and ultimately fails) to consolidate Irish masculine identity around the visible performance of the woman as nation.

Robert Doggett
SUNY College at Potsdam
doggettrm@potsdam.edu

Masculinity and Murder in Postwar Los Angeles: Reading Raymond Chandler, John Gregory Dunne, James Ellroy, and the Black Dahlia Mystery

This paper explores how the meaning and fate of the 1947 the “Black Dahlia” murder has been shaped and reshaped through noir vision. I first consider Raymond Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia, a film noir which appeared the year prior to the murder. It provided the source for the victim’s nickname, and, most significantly, structured the noir vision that guided future interpretations of the murder—or, rather—the misogynistic misinterpretations that would shape the “myth noir” of the black dahlia. I then turn to two more recent narratives that take the black dahlia murder as their explicit or implied subject, John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions (1978) and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia (1987). While neither of these novels wrest the murder free from myth, each seeks to deepen our sense of the time and place of the murder and the myth. For both Dunne and Ellroy, the black dahlia murder is a kind of artifact of a buried history of postwar Los Angeles, a history that each shows to be steeped in the male rage and masculine anxiety.

Matthew Elliot
Gettysburg College
melliot@gettysburg.edu