Theatre!

Session Coordinator: Karlyn Crowley
St. Norbert College

Killing the Snake: Performing Subtexts in Terrance McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart

In staging a performance of Terrance McNally’s play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, the director is challenged with handling the “stop-action” monologues that represent the pivotal homophobic fears marked by gender role struggles within the characters. I would like to explore different performative choices that the director needs to make in order to choreograph these monologues into the mounting expose of repressed fears and desires that manifest themselves through the sexual power struggles between the characters. The seamless infusion of these monologues into the staging and performance of Lips Together, Teeth Apart is critical to exposing the latent desires and fears of the characters and on another level those of the audience. Furthermore, they are critical to informing the real-time power struggles that are central to the development of the play. Though Mark Turvin, in “Subtext as Dialogue,” has criticized McNally for “undermin[ing] rising action and conflict throughout the three Act evening” by using these internal stop-action monologues, the necessity of these moments serves as disaccorded reminders that the inner fears or desires are the performance of McNally’s subtext. In order to not “undermine the rising action” of the play, the director, in this regard, must make these poignant moments enhance the development of the conflict and not detract from the mounting tensions of the characters.

Kevin McSweeney
Illinois State University
kpmcswe@ilstu.edu

“I Have Taught Others All My Life, Now My Body Teaches Me about Cancer”: A Reading of Margaret Edson’s Wit

The stage is empty, bare, and almost inhuman. We are in a hospital room. Vivian Bearing, the protagonist in Margaret Edson’s play Wit, has been aggressively invaded by ovarian cancer. The stage is empty, and it parallels the baldness of the patient as well as the simplicity of her hospital gowns, now parts of who she has become: a stranger to her own body. Vivian is now completely dependent on the machines (IV poles and others) as well as chemically induced treatments [i.e., chemotherapy]

But who is Vivian? She is a teacher specialized in the 17 th century poetry, particularly in John Donne’s metaphysical poems (which will be discussed in my paper). All her life, Vivian has been practicing invasive, through knowledge, i.e., that kind of knowledge which opens the students’ mind to the complexities of our human nature. Now she has become a student in illness. As she says, “I am like a student and this is the final exam and I don’t know what to put down because I don’t understand the question and I am running out of time” (70). Not only does she have the feeling she is “running out of time,” but also that she is treated with coldness by the medical staff. Only Susan, her primary nurse, is there to support and comfort Vivian. The close relationship the two have is somehow one of midwife-pregnant woman. The only difference is that Vivian is pregnant with death, and, in her role of ‘midwife,’ Susan teaches Vivian how to less painfully step on the liminal threshold between being and non-being, life and death.

Thus, in this paper I explore the relation between case studies and individuals. As Leonardo Cassuto points out, “The case study relies on this continuing tension between the abstract (and general) and the concrete (and individual)” (123). Consequently, having been diagnosticated late in her life with ovarian cancer, the doctors propose to Vivian a very drastic treatment, of which they do not much, if anything at all. As Vivian sadly admits, “Shrinking in metastatic tumors has not been documented” (37). Therefore, incapable to still have control over her body, unable to teach her students the beauty and difficulty of Donne’s poems, Vivian performs one final role: that of a patient who has been isolated in a cold and mechanized environment [i.e., a hospital], practically forgotten by everybody. What is the pedagogy of medicine, and how is it performed onto our bodies? are just two of the questions this paper addresses. Put in another lexicon, is it true that no matter how many things we learn, and how many things we achieve during our short temporal existence, we remain unlearned and unprepared students when our bodies strike us with terminal diseases? What is Vivian’s final lesson, as she struggles with cancer and eventually passes away?

Catalina Florina Florescu
Purdue University
catalina@purdue.edu

Engendering Violence on the Stage: Toward an Ethics of Cruelty in Contemporary American Performance

This paper explores spectacles of extreme violence in contemporary performances by women, examining the ways in which bodily harm serves as both an indicator of and a response to the culture of late capitalism and globalization. By proposing an ethics of cruelty as a means of understanding these disturbing plays, this paper will serve as a forum for interrogating the relationship between violence, cruelty, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. This presentation will center on an investigation of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A, Five Lesbian Brothers' Secretaries, and Irene Fornes’ The Conduct of Life, identifying the ways in which political and economic forces construct representations of the body (politic), engendering violent (and violated) bodies as lucrative performance capital, but also as strategies of resistance.  I conclude by asking which type of violent representation is the most ethical, those which invoke Brecht’s theory of Verfremdung, which may result in secondary trauma on the audience, or those which seek a cathartic experience, which may bypass the criticism associated with audience alienation. 

Sara L. Warner
Cornell University
dr_sara_warner@yahoo.com

Performing Urban Renewal: The Spectacular Economy of Chicago Theatre

The urban geography of Chicago theatre has played a pivotal role in the postmodern reconstruction of the city. Through a reading of theatre buildings, dramatic texts, and theatrical productions, I argue that a mutually beneficial economic relationship between the theatre community and the City of Chicago has had a significant effect on both theatre production and the organization of urban space. My presentation focuses on the performance spaces and productions of two Chicago Theatres. The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre opened on Navy Pier, one of the city’s major entertainment districts, in 1999. Two years later, in 2001, the Goodman Theatre, which was founded in 1925 and is one of the oldest regional theatres in the United States, moved into a new theatre space in the Loop, Chicago’s business district. While the former works to anchor Chicago’s consumer landscape, the latter inject artistic activity into the financial core of the city. Both theatres have received substantial economic support from the city, and, in turn, they have contributed to Chicago’s spectacular urban renewal.

Aaron Krall
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
arkrall@uwm.edu