Time to Make Stock

The stockpot at work

I’ve been reading plays for ten weeks. Everything has been simmering together nicely, flavors getting to know each other, and the time has come for a pause. It’s time to strain this mess and see what we’ve got.

In reviewing and revising these blog posts, I find myself reflecting on the last ten weeks and how my current understanding of queer performance has changed since the beginning of the academic quarter. These ten weeks have been something of a wild ride, a crash course in “gay plays,” and I can see now that there are marked advantages to this approach. Of course the survey continues, a life-long project filled with slow reveals and nuance, but in the crash course, sometimes the trends and patterns feel particularly clear.

With this in mind, I am prepared to make a somewhat audacious claim: I feel more and more convinced that the future of queer theater is postmodern. Parody. Citation. Repetition. In the internet age, these may be the strongest tools we have.

These are the tools that I see playwrights like Joshua Conkel, Sybil O’Malley, and Brian Bauman wielding so powerfully. I hear them unashamedly suggesting that to tell the story of contemporary queerness is to tell not only a new story, one that we haven’t heard on stage before, but also to tell it in a new way.

I claimed in my first blog post that one fundamental function of queer theatre has traditionally been visibility. Visibility is no longer enough. It was easier to argue that it was in the 60s and 70s. Consider Lillian Hellman: in 1934 she couldn’t even use the word “lesbian” in The Children’s Hour, let alone stage a lesbian relationship. There was a time when The Boys in the Band, with all its anger and coded language and overt sexuality was simply incomprehensible.

Even in the 80s and 90s there was a sense of striving to “cross over,” to be visible not only to other queer folks for the sake of fostering community, but to be seen as mainstream, as normal. Think of Arnold’s desire for “normalcy,” for heteronormative domestic bliss in Torch Song Trilogy. He basically wants to be on Modern Family, but is 30 years too early.

A Modern Family: Mitchell, Cameron, and baby makes three...

What I hear these new playwrights suggesting is that maybe Modern Family is not enough. Not the story, and not the way it’s told. Realism has this uncanny way of naturalizing whatever it depicts. Perhaps we’ve heard this story so many times that we believe marriage and children and wealth are naturally, uncomplicatedly the only things worth desiring.

Maybe it’s time to start calling that into question. 

With talking chickens. And zombie brides. And pregnant-Catholic-schoolgirl-witches. Not just because they’re funny (although they are) but because they begin to reveal the very mechanisms of power, the subtle, day-to-day workings of systemic patriarchy and heteronormativity. These are the very mechanisms that a show like Modern Family seeks to normalize. Rather than a mere joke, a zombie bride is in fact a pop culture citation. It cites a thousand romantic comedies, and reality television shows, and works of "chick lit." It is also a parody of these sources. Perhaps most importantly, it is way of repeating a subtle hegemonic message, (that to be a bride is the ultimate goal of womanhood; that marriage is the ultimate goal of partnership; that to be a bride is to access a classical mode of female hysteria and madness; etc. etc. etc.) It is a way of un-coding the coded message; of repeating it until it is no longer subtle, but totally visible and rendered powerless, absurd, in visibility.

Here's to ten weeks of gay plays and here's to this soup we've been making. It smells fucking great.

In which The Second Wife shows her penis to Sybil O’Malley

Sibyl O’Malley is funny. 

I suspected this when I read her play Lamentations of the Pelvis, but I wasn't quite sure. On Wednesday, O’Malley Skyped with my theatre class from an airport, and confirmed my suspicions.

Lamentations is an odd little play. Characters are named things like The Spinster, The Magician, and The Little Drummer Boy. The production notes give few hints for what to make of all this. The set, we learn, is “a mixture of specific naturalism and flat symbolism” (1). What does this mean? And how are we to determine which set pieces are which? Should Spinster’s tower be a full-on Rapunzel deal, or should she be standing on a chair? The chicken that that Second Wife loves so dearly: is this a live chicken on stage? A styrofoam package of meat? Perhaps a rubber chicken?

The costumes, it turns out, should be “iconic” (1). Iconic spinster-wear, coming right up. I picture something high-necked and Victorian, but in the nineties career woman version of the play, this costume could just as easily be a shoulder-padded blazer and slacks. (Do NOT do a Google image search of the word spinster! It will only depress you! Diane Keaton is not a spinster, Google!)

This ambiguity that I am pointing to is perhaps most heightened in regards to gender and casting. Take the character of Second Wife, who announces to anyone who will listen that she “has a penis.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this upon first read. With each mention it takes on a more sense of humor, but I must admit that the first reveal is nothing short of confounding. Forgive me for quoting at length from the second scene of the play:

FIRST WIFE: How’s your penis, dear?

SECOND WIFE: Fine.

FIRST WIFE: Really?

SECOND WIFE: Yes.

FIRST WIFE: It’s not bruised?

SECOND WIFE: My penis?

FIRST WIFE: Yes.

SECOND WIFE: No.

FIRST WIFE: Shall I look at it?

SECOND WIFE: No, it’s fine.

FIRST WIFE: Let’s have a look.

SECOND WIFE: It’s my penis.

FIRST WIFE: I’m only trying to help.

(SECOND WIFE stands up and shows FIRST WIFE her penis)

FIRST WIFE: Oh.

SECOND WIFE: What?

FIRST WIFE: It’s not a bad penis.

SECOND WIFE: Is it any good?

FIRST WIFE: I can’t really say. Well. Goodbye!

Um. What?! My mind, of course, went immediately to Michel Foucault, as it often does. I thought, “oh, OK, I get it, this is a serious play! This is about the perverse implantation and the pathologizing of non-normative bodies, and about women enforcing patriarchy, the panopticon, self-policing, oh, and about Freudian psychoanalysis and penis envy made literal” and on and on…

As the production notes perhaps indicate, the play feels surreal, but also vaguely edgy, almost condemning or moralizing in a nightmarish fairy tale kind of way. And I assumed accordingly that this penis business was meant to be taken literally. Perhaps a comment on trans bodies in transition, or trans bodies not transitioning, or on making intersex bodies more visible. The opening production notes give no indication on casting preferences, which I also assumed to be some sort of intentional political move by the playwright, a gesture of radical inclusivity, if you will.

However, when I asked the airport-confined O’Malley about her intentions in terms of casting, the response was not what I expected.

I’m going to have to paraphrase, but she basically said that she wrote this play in response to a production at the university where she did her graduate work that “pissed her off.” It was apparently a version of Hamlet that featured a dozen Ophelias, each abusing herself in a more specific and horrible way than the last. O’Malley’s response to this was something along the lines of “maybe if she had had a penis she could have gotten some respect.”

This is what happens when you try to update Shakespeare?
(Bruce Sterling's update on the John Everett Millais painting)

So, according to the author’s intent, Second Wife’s penis is more or less a punchline. What would it take for you to respect me? A penis? Fine. Done. Moving on. Anyone seen my chicken?

Which is... funny.

Does this exclude “the penis” from fulfilling any of the other possibilities mentioned? Of course not. And this, of course, is what makes theatre truly radical. Multiplicity. And what makes the lack of specificity in the production notes legitimately, radically inclusive. Each production is a chance to enact a Foucaultian performance of O’Malley. Or a Freudian one, if one feels so inclined. Each production is a chance to experiment, to cast a different body in the role, with different parts, and to see just what becomes “specific naturalism” and what becomes “flat symbolism.” And amen for that.

Works Cited

O'Malley, Sibyl. Lamentations of the Pelvis. 2012. TS. Provided by playwright.

O'Malley, Sibyl. Personal Interview. 20 Nov 2013.

Jerry Falwell and Tinky Winky take a trip to the chicken farm in MilkMilkLemonade

The sex of children and adolescents has become, since the eighteenth century, an important area of contention around which innumerable institutional devices and discursive strategies have been deployed...discourses that were interlocking, hierarchized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power relations. (1510)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol I

No one wants to talk about children’s sexuality. That’s how the story goes, anyway. For a society that is uncomfortable with this topic, we sure do seem to talk about it a lot. Mass anxiety over toddler beauty pageants as over-sexualizing children, the teen “sexting” craze, and the seemingly inexhaustible search for sexual inneuendo and symbolism in children’s media strike me as a few recent examples. (For an especially entertaining example, consider the National Report’s recent hoax headline: “Sesame Street’s Big Bird Comes Out as Transgender.” Just don’t read the comments.)

As Foucault and others have written, the extensive discourse on children’s sexuality seems to be an attempt at gaining control over something uncontrollable- human sexuality. Increased infrastructure since the eighteenth century in education, medicine, the law, religion, while sometimes successfully oppressive of sexuality, more often simply rearticulate the anxiety.

Joshua Conkel explores this set of concerns beautifully in his 2009 comedy MilkMilkLemonade. Equal parts coming of age story and PBSKids spoof, for whatever reason, it all takes place on a dwindling chicken farm. 

Conkel appears at first to skirt the taboo of writing about childhood sexuality, and queer sexuality at that, by making the children in his play into adults. Emory and Elliott the two eleven-year-olds in the play speak like adults. Despite their distinctly juvenile brand of cruelty and heightened emotion, they have a mature self-possession that exceeds that of the only adult character, Nanna.They seem to understand things about themselves that elude most people, of any age. (Take for example Emory’s finely developed sense of self-worth when he admits “I like acting like a girl...I really like being me” (37). Or Elliott’s tender admission that he must continue bullying Emory because otherwise people might suspect that he cares for him (38). This calm recognition of his own internalized homophobia would frankly be inconceivable to many adults.)

These are emotionally sophisticated roles that call for adult actors. This casting requirement has the added benefit of making the play funny. It’s funny to hear (an adult playing) a child say something like “I’m not afraid of your Nanna. If she tries anything I’ll punch her in her front butt” (19). For example.

Despite the adult actors, the subtext of childhood sexual socialization remains perfectly clear. Take the set, for instance. Stage directions indicate that the set “should look as if it were designed and built by second graders for their school play: slightly retarded looking, but charming just the same…[with] a lemon yellow sun that passes from sun up to sun down over the course of the play” (4). While the sun is necessary to mark the passing time, it also feels like a Teletubbies reference if ever there was one. I can practically hear the smiling sun baby giggling over the proceedings at the chicken farm:

I suspect that Conkel’s invocation of the Teletubbies is no accident. In the late 1990s, the show became a representative example of our nation’s anxiety over childhood sexuality and gender roles. In 1999, Jerry Falwell, former spokesman for the Moral Majority, denounced the show, claiming that the purple Teletubbie, Tinky Winky, was gay. His evidence, according to a 1999 BBC article: "He is purple - the gay-pride colour; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle - the gay-pride symbol." Right. Tinky Winky also carried a purse. Three strikes I guess. He went on to state, "As a Christian I feel that role modelling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children."

Nanna seems to be something of a stand-in for Falwell in the play. Early in the text she explains, “I think it was Jesus or God who said, ‘Thou shalt not lie with another man as with a woman. It is an abomination.’ Now, that’s in Leviticus. And that’s why fags are nasty” (9). Her comic inconsistency and faulty reasoning echo Falwell’s outrageous claim. Leviticus says “fags are nasty” in the same way that Tinky Winky, a pre-verbal plush creature models the “gay lifestyle.”

(The BBC’s response to the whole thing was pretty wonderful: "As far as we are concerned Tinky Winky is simply a sweet, technological baby with a magic bag." Indeed.)

The Lady in a Leotard, the show’s narrator and foley artist also contributes to the rhetoric of children’s television. She begins the play with an “awkward” rendition of the children’s song, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” She concludes the number, and launches into stilted child-speak: “Hooray. That was fun. That was a song about your body. This is my body here. Can you point to your body? Good work” (7). I can’t help but connect this moment to the crude children’s rhyme from which the show gets its name, “Milk Milk, Lemonade.” Urban Dictionary explains the song this way: “Milk Milk Lemonade: 1. The preamble and unofficial title to a joyous childhood rhyme. It goes: Milk, Milk, Lemonade, Push the Button, Fudge is Made. While saying this lovely poem, children point to the right side of their chest and then the left for the Milk part. For lemonade, they point to their genitals. "Push the button" calls for pushing ones belly button and then finishing it off by pointing to ones arse.”

I always thought it was “round the corner fudge is made,” but you get the point.

The disconnect between the two songs, both ways of teaching children to label and identify body parts, is striking. We tell kids not to talk about their bodies, their genitals in particular, and yet as Emory so astutely points out, “Everybody’s so obsessed with them” (38). Both Nanna and Elliott are constantly monitoring his body and the way he talks about his body, while simultaneously scolding him not to talk about it, to just keep his feelings to himself. Jerry Falwell’s obsession with markers of gayness reads in a similar way. He purports to silence or disrupt queer discourse, when in fact he is starting the conversation, inciting further discourse. Everybody's obsessed. Some approach this obsession with fear, others with chicken jokes. You choose.

Works Cited

Conkel, Joshua. MilkMilkLemonade. New York: Playscripts, Inc, 2010. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction.”The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1502-1520. Print. 

“Gay Tinky Winky Bad for Children.” BBC News 15 February 1999. Web.

They Shoot Lumberjacks, Don’t They: The Five Lesbian Brothers take on Reality

2013 print ad from SlimFast's new "Get What you Really Want" campaign

Speaking of radical intertextuality, this week I’ve been revisiting those wacky Five Lesbian Brothers of 90s NYC performance scene fame. I have become obsessed with one line from Peggy Phelan’s marvelous introduction to Four Plays by the Five Lesbian Brothers. It is a simple line, but powerful in its simplicity. She writes, “The Brothers are among the most adept practitioners of the three central tropes of postmodern art: parody, repetition and citation” (xv). Part of what I love about this claim is its audacity. To summarize all of “postmodern art” in these three words-- what bravery, especially when so many have pointed to the difficulty defining a postmodern theatre tradition. So what is postmodern about The Brothers, and what is not? And what is it about postmodernism that lends itself so well to feminist and queer performance?

To begin with, does this term refer to a historical, temporal period, or rather a set of stylistic conventions? Temporally, the demarcations of a postmodernism theatre tradition are shaky at best. Even works that are typically seen as masculinist high modernism, for example Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s 1957 play The Birthday Party have also been seen as transitional in their play at the boundaries of realism. This begins to get at a definition of postmodernism as a set of stylistic conventions. If modernism is understood as the height of realism, then postmodernism must be antirealism. Parody, repetition, citation all strike me as techniques for moving away from realism, for calling attention to the constructedness of narrative and social conventions.

Notable postmodern performance scholar Elinor Fuchs begins to get at why this antirealism is appealing to marginalized communities. She writes of postmodernism as “the collapse of boundaries-- between cultures, between sexes, between the arts, between disciplines, between genres, between criticism and art, performance and text, sign and signified, and on and on…”(170). Feminist and queer critics have recognized political utility in this concept as it suggests new strategies for revealing the mechanisms of power, denaturalizing categories of identity, and the collapse of stable, hierarchized gender categories. This feminist reading of postmodernism suggests that an ambivalent relationship to realism may also imply an ambivalent relationship to patriarchal structure

So, to the extent that postmodern theatre does indicate a move away from modernism and realism, slippery and unstable as these categories themselves may be, the question now becomes one of technique and degree. Do all postmodern dramatic texts approach antirealism in the same way? And what to make of an ambivalent, partial, or complicated relationship to realism, such as I see in The Brothers’ 1993 play, The Secretaries?

The Secretaries is a play about the secretaries at a lumber mill in Big Bone, Oregon who ritually torture and murder one lumberjack a month in conjunction with their synched menstrual cycle. They slap food out of each other’s mouths. They begin their monthly meetings with the following invocation: “Please help us to word process without error, to follow the SlimFast plan, and the make it through that time of the month together” (146). They sign vows of celibacy, but occasionally have sex with each other, (“It doesn’t count as sex if it’s two women, Patty. I can’t believe you didn’t know that”) (165). Sometimes they drink toner. It is not realism. So it’s postmodernism…?

Yes, but also maybe not... This play strikes me as similar to the Phelan line in its deceptive simplicity. It is a darkly humorous parody, yes, but also an astonishingly complex collage of references and relationships. Elizabeth Ashley for SlimFast commercials; Twin Peaks; 1980s feminist backlash flicks (think Fatal Attraction meets Working Girl); Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; tampon commercials; this play makes reference to everything that matters most!

Boiling beneath the surface of all this parody, repetition, and citation however, is something real. The relationships between the women which grow out of internalized sexism are nothing short of heartbreaking for their recognizabilty. These characters are psychologically motivated: Ashley’s intense need for approval; Patty’s visceral desire to belong; Susan’s paradoxical, maddening relationship to power. They feel, well, real. Even when they’re drinking toner. Perhaps especially when they’re drinking toner.

What The Brothers do so well then is to blur the boundaries between the absurd and the plausible, truth and falsity, realism and anitrealism. They reveal that realism is no more authentic or stable than anything, and furthermore that what we expect and demand of each other in real life is in fact as twisted as ritual lumberjack torture. (Well, maybe not quite, but close.) Repetition, citation, and parody, they point out, are in fact elements of all public life. We adopt and adapt our understandings of ourselves as gendered, sexual beings from SlimFast commercials, the movies, and the women at the office. The way the women of this play sacrifice the most basic things that make us human: health, happiness, sexual fulfillment and food in the name of enforcing and embodying the impossible demands of a patriarchal sex/gender system is frankly too close to reality for comfort.

What The Brothers remind me today is that sometimes you need to move just far enough from reality in order to hold up the mirror most effectively.

Works Cited

Angelos, Maureen, et al. The Five Lesbian Brothers/Four Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000. Print.

Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.

Hedwig Schmidt, I’d like you to meet my friend Anne Carson

I am a big fan of John Cameron Mitchell, and have a special love for his 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was important to me on a personal level as a teenager, a source of inspiration for my burgeoning sense of myself as a gender and performance scholar in college, and as I recently discovered, continues to be a source of fascination and discovery.

On my most recent view, I found myself drawn to a whole new set of concerns, certainly influenced my newly discovered obsession with experimental poet and translator of ancient Greek, the wonderfully weird Anne Carson. (To give you a sense of her: Notoriously private, one of Carson’s trademark moves is to reveal nothing about herself on her book covers, writing only “Anne Carson lives in Canada.” Which as it turns out, may or may not be true.) One of Carson’s obsessions that appears again and again in books of varying form and content is the paradoxical nature of eros: the perpetual reaching and never attaining of erotic desire, the pleasure and the pain inherent in this reaching.

While it may seem bizarre to bring an elusive Canadian poet and classics scholar into conversation with a 2001 musical about the recipient of a botched sex-change operation in Communist East Berlin, multiplicity, intertextuality, and anachronism are actually at the heart of both projects. For example, in Carson’s astounding work of translation, scholarship, and philosophical inquiry, Eros the Bittersweet, Carson traces Greek understandings of eros into ever widening circles, drawing on an ever-more inclusive cast of thinkers and writers ranging from Sappho to Kafka to Emily Dickinson.

Hedwig too crosses genres (musical, road film, love story, Bildungsroman, etc.) and also references an impressive array of artists and thinkers. Immanuel Kant, David Bowie, Jesus Christ, Aristophanes: they all have a home in this film. The epic is self-consciously at play. Elements of the hero’s journey narrative and Greek mythology collide with Christian iconography throughout the film.

When Hedwig first meets Tommy, who she believes is her missing half, the piece that if she could only “reach” and possess would complete her, he asks her if she has “accepted Jesus Christ as her lord and saviour.” She replies that she has not, but that she is a “fan of his work.” While on one level a simple punchline, the statement also reveals something important about the attitude of the film. Jesus is treated as a contemporary, whose “work” is as relevant and ongoing as any other. This is a Carsonian notion, the mingling and blurring of intertexts.

In one song, “The Origin of Love” Thor, of Norse mythology is portrayed as conversing with Zeus. The pair are later joined by Osiris, Egyptian God of the Nile, and a green, multi-armed deity, likely  referred to only as “some Indian God.” This spirit of extreme inclusion, of the conflating of all faiths into one universal super faith is playfully handled in the film. “Origin of Love,” itself recounting a story told by Aristophanes in Plato’s symposium, suggests that the glue that binds these traditions is love, most specifically desire, the universal sense of a missing piece. Eros.

Still from Emily Hubley's animation sequence that accompanies "The Origin of Love"

Tommy Speck, so called “Jesus freak” becomes Tommy Gnosis, Greek word for knowledge. This reference to knowledge is self-consciously bouncing off of the story of Adam and Eve, which Tommy refers to again and again. The separation of Adam and Eve is in turn bounced off of Aristophanes and the notion that people were once two people in one:

Folks roamed the earth

Like big rolling kegs.

They had two sets of arms.

They had two sets of legs.

They had two faces peering

Out of one giant head

As Carson points out in Eros, even Aristophanes is being referential here, metaphorical even. She translates his Greek this way: "Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being-- sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one-- and each pursues a neverending search for the symbolon of himself" (75). She goes on to explain that symbolon, from which we get the English word symbol, referred in the ancient world to "one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning" (75). 

The knucklebone strikes me as a metaphor that would move Hedwig for its sheer brutality, its acknowledgment of the blood and guts and body parts that come into play when we desire. And the unraveling layers of text and reference illustrated in this single song strike me as a delightful puzzle of just the sort that Carson tends to appreciate. This may be a friendship made in heaven.

Works Cited

Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Print.


Mitchell, John Cameron, dir. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. New Line Cinema, 2001. Film. 2 Nov 2013.

Gender Acts and Gender Lies in "I Am My Own Wife"

Among the resonant assertions of ''I Am My Own Wife'' is that lives themselves are narratives, and that the perspective, sympathy and reliability of the narrator are crucial to our understanding of them. In other words, to endure the world, people may lie about themselves or to themselves, and the lies are as important as the truth.
-Bruce Weber, THEATER REVIEW; Inventing Her Life As She Goes Along, Published: December 4, 2003

I find this comment from Bruce Weber’s 2004 New York Times review of Doug Wright’s “I am My Own Wife” particularly intriguing. As a biographical play about a transvestite, Wright’s one man show already calls to mind Judith Butler inspired ideas about the performativity of socially constructed gender identities. As a play deeply concerned with questions of credibility, authenticity, and lying as a means of survival, the play raises similar, although perhaps more materially grounded questions.


I have only begun to puzzle out the relationship between “the lies” that constitute gender, and “the lies” that allow Charlotte to survive in her (male) body, through both the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Berlin. What can be said of the connection between lives as narrative, as Weber puts it, and gender as narratives, as Butler gestures towards?


First, a refresher. In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler’s hallmark piece of queer performance theory, she reminds us that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). This phrase, “stylized repetition of acts” seems especially important in the context of this play.

Jefferson Mays as Charlotte

Charlotte constructs her identity as a woman through repetition of such stylized acts and tokens, most notably her trademark pearls. Her charming and unruffled demeanor also suggest the easy grace of femininity, for example in her reply to Wright’s initial query of her, in which she merely replies: “Dear Mr. Wright, Yes. Perhaps it is possible for you to make a play. Maybe you will visit Berlin after Christmas. Sincerely, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf” (14). She is routinely described as charming and enchanting, suggesting her authentic relationship to femininity as a stable identity. As Butler puts it, the “tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production” (522). Charlotte is suitably credible, and thus acceptable, comfortable even.


Butler goes on to point out that gender acts only make sense in relation to other acts, it is infact the pattern that is most important for constructing a gender identity, that and historical maintenance. Gender after all, is an “historical situation rather than a natural fact” (520).


The question then becomes one of identifying those acts which break the pattern. Butler writes, “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (520). The acts that seem to break Charlotte’s gender patterning of her body seem to overlap with those that break the pattern of her story as historical martyr, or hero, of representing what Wright perceives as a secret history of queer integrity and perseverance. Acts that would be associated with spying, or deception, seem to me gendered in the same way that wearing pearls, or penmanship “full of curlicues and frippery” are (Wright 37).


That her public villainization, her recasting from hero to traitor coincides with the breaking of her repetition of stylized gender acts strikes me as significant. Note, for example, Charlotte’s attempt to reestablish her gender patterning as Wright confronts her about Kirschner. Avoiding Wright’s questioning, she pulls out an artifact as she is wont to do, an old sweater with antique brass buttons. “These hands have laid mortar and brick; they have carved walnut. But for Alfred, they learned to knit. (Beat.) It is beautiful, yes?” (37-8). To Charlotte, the break from the pattern, the expression of agency and survival that allowed her to survive, but put her dear friend in jail, is a disturbing break in the pattern that must be forgotten. The only way to go on living is to reestablish her stylized repetition of gender acts.


Perhaps the public, in the world of the play and indeed in the audience of the playhouse, are willing to accept Charlotte as a woman so long as she acts like one, actively working to maintain the authenticity of her relationship to femininity. When there is a break in the act, rendering it less than credible, we are no longer comfortable. This ambivalent relationship to credibility, both in the narrative of Charlotte’s life, and in the narrative of her gender, continue to shape contemporary understandings of this individual, and indeed this play in important ways. And furthermore, if we accept Butler's claim that "gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions," than for each of us, to endure in the world in a gendered body is truly a matter of lying, or at the very least, acting (527).

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. ““Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

          and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40. 4 (Dec, 1988): 519-531. Print.


Weber, Bruce. “THEATER REVIEW; Inventing Her Life As She Goes Along.” Review of I

         Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Dir. Moises Kaufman. New York Times 04

         December 2003: Web.


Wright, Doug. I Am My Own Wife. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc, 2005. Print.

A Hair Monologue

In the spirit of exploring why the personal narrative seems to be a privileged genre of performance among marginalized groups, I present for your consideration something completely different from what has thus far been presented on Dramaturgette...

What follows is an early college-era attempt at a personal narrative monologue. It is probably painfully obvious that I was, at the time of writing, acquiring a BA in gender and women’s studies and theater. Other insight into 20 year-old-me would include my deep admiration forTim Miller (see post #1) (queer performance artist extraordinaire who writes autobiographical work, one of the NEA 4, etc.) and my growing distrust of The Vagina Monologues (celebrated cultural feminist nonfiction play by Eve Ensler, constructed of interviews with women discussing the links between their bodies and their identities as women…)

In addition to considering the allure of this genre, be it political or therapeutic, I also find myself considering the role of self-reflection in the personal narrative. Is there something about telling our own stories that forces us to grapple, to attempt to make sense of that which was incomprehensible in the moment? And furthermore, is there something about returning to these stories at different times in our lives that is necessarily revelatory, perhaps not only for ourselves, but others as well? In a word, I believe the answer is yes. Cultural and historical distance, personal growth, the political economy of remembering… these all shape our understanding of the past, and perhaps most importantly, the present.

And with that all-too-brief introduction, I present you with the horribly embarrassing: A Hair Monologue.

If my life were a performance, and as it turns out it is, or so Judith Butler keeps telling me, I know what the central plot question would be. Like Hamlet and his epic indecisiveness, I too have my own unanswerable query:



“To be hairy, or not to be hairy: That, is the question.” 



This is my soliloquy. The crux of this dramatic conflict is, like most good theatre, quite simple: I am ashamed when I shave my legs, because I’m supposed to be a feminist, and I am ashamed when I don’t, because I am supposed to be feminine. This is that same shit that drove Ophelia mad- trying to sort out all the conflicting expectations of the world. Maybe I should just get me to a nunnery and call it a day. I’ve even got my own cast of characters weighing in with their opinions, completely and inexplicably invested in the status of my body hair; my own personal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trying to “glean what afflicts me,” if you will. 



Take the character of my former employer, who carefully monitored the length of my armpit hair. Working as his nanny in the summertime, he was known to frequently pepper dialogue about the swimming pool schedule and bedtimes, with questions like:


“Did you boys know you have the cutest babysitter?” and 
“Do you have a boyfriend? Do you date a lot of older men?” 


One day, sitting in the front seat of his car, the boys tucked safely in the back, he leaned over, and inches from my sunburned face demanded: 


“Can I ask you a personal question?” 


As if saying no had even stopped him. Everyone was silent, waiting. 


“Why did you shave your armpits?”


If this had been a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical I would have slapped him across the face and done a tap dance on the hood of the car. 




This was not that play. It was social realism meant to make the audience squirm. The truth was I didn’t know why I had shaved my armpits for the first time in months, but it certainly wasn‘t so this fucker would notice. Who knows? I mean, as Hamlet, I’m constantly deliberating; this shave was just an arbitrary plot point along the way to the denouement.

It was August. I mumbled something about sweat management, ashamed to be held accountable for my body in such a direct way. There was no escape. Not then, trapped in that car, with the boys’ embarrassed silence, and not ever. Every morning when I get dressed I know that if my hair, or lack of hair is visible, that I might at any moment be required to justify it to the world.



Not all characters are so direct in their confrontations.


For comic relief, I like to throw in frequent interludes of the generic “women on the street who visibly find my leg hair disgusting“ routine. It’s an audience favorite that integrates elements of mime and physical comedy. The scene always plays the same: I’m strutting down the street in my favorite dress, enjoying the sunshine, whistling a tune, feeling lovely. Two women walking the other direction pass me, only to perform a classic double-take, erupting into gasps and giggles:


“Oh. My. God. Did you SEE her LEGS?!”


Sometimes I laugh at them, and feel superior, maybe walk a little taller, playing the part of some hairy supermodel. But inevitably, I feel a twinge of panic in my gut, the inner monologue kicks in: “Is everyone looking? Are they right? Why am I putting myself through this?”



Did I mention that my play is avant-garde? Occasionally it features the odd Kafka-esque dream sequence. I’m on trial, standing before the judge. She is superhuman, enormous, I can not see her face. Leafing through my file, she coolly remarks:


“It says here that you secretly purchased a depilatory over the internet in 2005. Do you deny the charge?”


I spin around, frantically searching the teeming crowd of onlookers for my lawyer. Finding I am alone, I squeak:


“But I’m a Jew. Certainly the law makes allowances for–”


She cuts me off: “The law makes no allowances. It also says here that you have not shaved your armpits since August 2007. Your boss reported you. Do you deny the charge?”


The spotlight is making me dizzy. Confused and pleading, I try calling out 
“End Scene!” but the curtain remains drawn. 


Someone from the audience cries “Off with her Hair!” 


Another screams “No! Down with the man!”


“Silence!” bellows the judge, pounding her gavel. “I hereby sentence you to a low budget, off-off-Broadway production of your life as a Senecan tragedy. Take her away!”


The cast of The Vagina Monologues cheer: “Take her away! We don’t want her anymore!” 


The chorus of attractive heterosexual sailors from South Pacific concur: “She can wash us men right out of her gross, hippy leg hair!”




This cues the strobe lights and smoke machine, and to the cacophony of booing, I disappear through the trap door, never to be seen again.



Pretty edgy huh?



Clearly, this lifelong performance doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre. As the main character I’m pretty boring, and my development doesn’t follow a graceful arc, it happens in fits and spurts, usually followed by regression. I am no closer to knowing whether to be hairy or not to be hairy than I was when I was sixteen. But, if there is one thing I have learned it’s that sometimes to get closer to the truth, you need to put down the script and improvise. I only hope that in my version, Ophelia doesn’t have to go mad.

(Cringe. )