Jason Sherman, ed. Solo Badir, Patricia
Theatre research in Canada,
01/1995, Letnik:
16, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Jason Sherman's anthology of monodrama is an important collection because it commits to print and therefore to history an important form of theatrical production in Canada. In a climate where budget ...cuts are eating away at the fabric of alternative theatre, one increasingly viable way to continue producing has always been to stage a one-person show. Moreover, acting solo has become a medium through which performers and playwrights can act up against the clamour of the mega-musical and of mainstream repertory theatre by recharging the stage with an intimacy that has the potential to be captivating and disruptive.
Both during her life and after her death, Marjorie Pickthall was praised for her earnest spirituality, her fervent patriotism, her moral sincerity, and her love of nature and of all its simple ...creatures. Pickthall's novels, short stories, and poems, published between 1903 and 1925, were heralded for their "delicate lyricism" and for their satisfying contemplation of a world that knows "no villain, no absolute evil." As Diana M.A. Relke has argued, the acknowledgement of all of Pickthall's feminine virtues "assured her immediate survival as a practising woman poet," and furthermore won her "recognition as the foremost poet of her generation." Pickthall herself, very much aware of the place she occupied in the Canadian literary landscape, understood the degree to which her success was predicated upon existing models of the writing woman.
This article analyses the performer/spectator dynamic present in the text and performance of some Canadian one-woman plays, and considers the re-positioning of the female as subject and the possible ...construction of an ideal female spectator. The article looks at both English- and French-language monologues in an attempt to understand the effects of cultural difference on performer/spectator relationships, focusing on Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit, Marie Savard's Bien A moi, Sharon Pollack's Getting it Straight, Pamela Boyd's Inside Out, Beverly Simon's Preparing, and Janet Feindel's A Particular Class of Women.
This article analyses the performer/spectator dynamic present in the text and performance of some Canadian one-woman plays, and considers the re-positioning of the female as subject and the possible ...construction of an ideal female spectator. The article looks at both English- and French-language monologues in an attempt to understand the effects of cultural difference on performer/spectator relationships, focusing on Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit, Marie Savard's Bien A moi, Sharon Pollack's Getting it Straight, Pamela Boyd's Inside Out, Beverly Simon's Preparing, and Janet Feindel's A Particular Class of Women.
Ariane Balizet also draws attention to the ways in which the blazon destabilizes the notion of male authority as whole and complete when it is used to anatomize the male rather than the female body: ..."By staging this potential for violence," she argues, "early modern drama challenges the violence encoded in models of domestic order . .. by forcing the audience to consider the messy material consequences of ideologies built upon rhetorical dismemberment" (108). Like Staging the Blazon, Stevens's work is avowedly materialist as her research fixates on the actor's exposed and vulnerable body while also rigorously locating that body in an early modern context in which "paint's milieu is the skin, the very blushing, quivering, and melting exterior where early modern subjects visibly experienced their somatic precariousness" (9). ...the ending restores true whiteness, but "the temporary assumption of a racialized identity does, however, allow the aristocratic white woman the means to construct herself as a spectacular-but not, crucially, as a revelatory subject" (109). Stevens begins her reading of this text by noting the provocative association between ashes and blackface, and she wraps up by observing that far from dismantling the illusion of stage gender . . . the sudden revelation of the 'Maid' under the guised of 'Moor' distracts attention from the fact that the maid is a tricked-out boy whose red and whites, when next we see 'her,' will be similarly materially produced: as a body's body is washed white, audiences see one system of cosmetic significations yield to another, the triumphantly restored and reinvigorated red and white of artificial stage femininity presented, by contrast to the temporary black 'guise', as real, natural and authentic.
