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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.
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