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.